Can You Win A World Series On Infield Grounders?

The Brewers' 28th out.

Days 67 & 145 Of The 2025 MLB Season
The Brewers have allowed the fourth fewest runs per game this year. I believe in this: It’s a good staff, a great defense, and an organization that has consistently kept runs off the board over the course of many years and many roster changes. If the Brewers had an average offense to go with that staff/defense, their run differential would suggest a 93-win team, which is what they won last year.

They’re actually on a 103-win pace, with a matching 103-win run differential, because they have scored more runs than any team in baseball. I’ve been skeptical of the Brewers this summer, refusing to upgrade them from the 93-win team that exists in my head to the 103ish-win team that’s steamrolling into the postseason. The reason is that I don’t believe in their offense, which I can subdivide into two reasons:

1. Many of their hitters who are hitting well haven’t previously hit very well, so for now I expect many of them to regress.

2. Their underlying metrics, by which I mean batted ball data, don’t suggest a modern offensive juggernaut.

By runs per game, the Brewers have the best offense in baseball.

By wOBA, they’re eighth. Somehow their collection of hits, walks, strikeouts, etc., are producing more runs than they should be. (This usually means a team is hitting unusually well with runners on base, as the Brewers are.)

By xwOBA, they’re 23rd. Somehow, their batted balls are producing way more hits than balls hit like that usually do. They’re second-to-last in the league in exit velocity, third from the bottom in launch angle, last in barrel percentage. They just don’t hit the ball the way good offenses generally have.

So that’s why I’ve been skeptical, but I’m wrong about things all the time and I haven’t looked all that closely at what’s going on. So to provide the strongest possible argument in the Brewers’ favor, let’s ask the question: What do the Brewers do?

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On June 1, the 67th day of the season, Jackson Chourio led off the game with a slow chopper to third base. It wasn’t all that hard of a play, but Chourio is fast and Edmundo Sosa’s throw tailed into him. The Brewers began the game with a single + error.

In the second inning, Joey Ortiz grounded a ball into the hole at shortstop. Trea Turner extended for it but it kicked off his glove and into left field for a hit.

In the third inning, Chourio grounded a ball a step or two to Turner’s right. Turner didn’t exactly dawdle but he didn’t exactly rush, either, and Chourio simply beat the throw to first for another single.

In the fifth inning, Ortiz hit a ball down the third-base line. It glanced off the third baseman’s glove and into the outfield for a double.

Later that inning, Chourio batted with runners at the corners and one out. He chopped it to the third baseman, who took the out at second base but with no chance of doubling up Fast Chourio. A run scored.

In the seventh, with two on and one out, Chourio again chopped to the third baseman, who again tried for an around-the-horn double play. Chourio beat the throw to first, extending the inning and moving the tying run to third.

The next batter, William Contreras, hit an easy grounder to shortstop Turner, who booted it. Contreras was safe, the Brewers tied the game,

and the next batter drove the go-ahead runs home with a double.

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Other than a strikeout, there’s not really anything a hitter can do that’s worse than hitting a groundball at an infielder. Grounders in general are fairly low reward, but grounders that the infielder gets to are almost always an out, often two outs, they frequently fail even to advance the runner and they never ever ever go over the fence.

This is true for the Brewers, too. Most of their groundballs to infielders produce outs. But there are exceptions, and the Brewers produce more of these exceptions than any other team. If you want to know what the Brewers do, it’s pick up stray baserunners on grounders hit to infielders. They are:

• First in the majors in infield hits

• (First in the majors in bunt hits, which are included in the infield hits)

• Second in the majors (in a good way) in GIDP percentage

• Second in the majors in reaching on errors

Andy McCullough, on our podcast at the Athletic, recently said something to the effect of “the Brewers show you can win a lot of games if you make the other team get 28 outs,” i.e. by turning an out per game into a scratch hit or an error. But a) an extra out per game has to be an exaggeration, right, it’s probably more like one every five games or something? and b) how much value is even in that scratch hit? It’s not a three-run bomb, after all.

These stray baserunners can’t be worth all that much. I thought. Wrongly.

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The Brewers have hit 1,353 balls to infielders this year, excluding pop-ups. (And, just to reiterate for clarity: Excluding the clean singles that go through the infield untouched.) Those batted balls to infielders have a cumulative win probability added of -16.2. They’re bad! They’ve cost the Brewers lots of wins, relative to the other ways the hitters could have hit the ball.

But relative to other teams’ grounders to infielders, the Brewers’ grounders to infielders have been fantastic. Leaguewide, the win probability added of the average ball hit to an infielder this year is about -.0175 per ball in play. If the Brewers’ grounders to infielders produced that average effect, they’d have -23.4 WPA on those balls.

They have, in other words, outperformed their groundballs hit to infielders—balls xwOBA hates—by seven wins, according to WPA. Seven wins, at this point in the season, is the difference between a 94-win pace and a 103-win pace.

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Are such large gains possible solely from bad contact? Well,

• The Brewers have 60 more infield hits than the average team (and about 25 more than the second place team).

• They have hit into 22 fewer double plays than the average team, given their opportunities.

• They have reached on nine more errors than the average team.

If you just turn those 60 “extra” infield hits into outs, the Brewers’ batting average drops from .259 (the league’s best) to .244 (the league’s average). Their OBP goes from .333 (best) to .318 (average).

That doesn’t even consider the extra errors, or the runners beating out the double play, which combine with the hits to take about 91 outs of the board. (Andy’s one-per-game estimate really wasn’t that far off!) Using linear weights, we find that avoiding those 91 outs doesn’t quite account for the entire difference between the Brewers’ offense (645 runs) and a league-average one (555), but awfully close to it.

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It remains a question of whether this supports or diminishes the Brewers’ claim to being “real.” So many of these infield hits and errors turn on tiny margins, tiny bits of fortune that aren’t obviously attributable to any obvious Brewer talent. You wouldn’t say that William Contreras cracked some secret Playing the Game the Right Way mode when he hit an routine grounder right to Trea Turner on June 1st; he just got lucky. This might not be something the Brewers can count on repeating throughout three rounds of the postseason, particularly if we assume that playoff teams will be better than average on defense and play with more urgency than regular-season defenses do.

But the Brewers are, in fact, a fast offensive team. Collectively they have the best home-to-first times in the league, and the second-best overall sprint speed. And in an increasingly no-hustle league, there might be room for a team to stand out simply by running hard most of the time. And besides sending fast runners to the plate (to make infield hits, etc), the Brewers usually have fast runners on the bases, making it even harder for the defense to turn double plays and get force outs.

The Brewers’ tendency and ability to beat the defense to the next base shows up elsewhere:

• They’re fourth in B-Ref’s “bases taken” (on passed balls, wild pitches, fly balls, etc.)

• They’re second in the league going first-to-third on singles, and lead the league scoring from second on singles.

• And yet despite this aggressive baserunning they’re only third in outs on the bases.

Going first to third is a different skill than reaching on an E-6, but there’s a lot of overlap: the ability to run fast, to always run hard, to put pressure on the defense. It expands our understanding of the Brewers to know these skills show up over and over and across different circumstances.

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As I write this, on Day 145 of the season, the Brewers are playing the Cubs. The biggest hits of the game, by WPA, are homers by Brice Turang and Caleb Durbin. But the third-biggest hit is this little tapper by Joey Ortiz, down the first base line:

It’s a single, it’s an error, it breaks the game open. Two innings later, Ortiz up again with the bases loaded, will hit a groundball to the second baseman. The Cub defender fields it, he twirls, he throws, and guess what happens. It’s easy to guess! Ortiz beats the throw for an infield hit and an RBI. This really is what the Brewers do:

Programming Note: I skipped Day 66 for now but I’ll be circling back to it this week.

Previously: Days 63, 64 & 65 Of The 2025 MLB Season