A banner hangs outside the Brewers' ballpark in Milwaukee. It shows five players. Together they're paid less than the Dodgers' No. 8 hitter. The banner says “Win Our Way.” Their way, by Wednesday's paper, had them up 2-0 on the two-time defending champions in the National League Championship Series. Jared Diamond explains it in the Journal's Sports pages.
Baseball today is about power. Teams preach two rules. Pull the ball, and get it in the air. Balls hit that way produced a .538 average and a 1.207 slugging percentage this season. Slugging is a measure of extra-base power. The Brewers do the opposite. They hit grounders more than anyone and pull the ball less than anyone. Only one team hit fewer homers. They still finished second in runs. The last club to land in the top three in runs and the bottom three in homers was the 1960 White Sox. Every World Series winner this decade ranked top five in home runs.
Here's how they score instead. They don't swing. Milwaukee had the highest walk rate in the majors and the lowest swing rate of any team since 2019. Their .258 average and .341 on-base percentage were the best in baseball. The general manager, Matt Arnold, calls the plan “drag pitchers to hell.” Monday night showed it. Jake Bauers fought Yoshinobu Yamamoto for 12 pitches, fouled off six in a row, and walked to load the bases. Christian Yelich singled in two runs. Yamamoto was out after 2⅔ innings. The Brewers won 7-4.
Touching the bases
Manager Pat Murphy is 67. He doesn't like the word hitting. He talks about offense, and offense, he says, “is touching those bases.” The club even has a fourth coach with the title offense and strategy coordinator. Baserunning, hustle, a ground ball to the right side. The Brewers scored 155 runs this season on plays that weren't hits, the most in the majors. They also led the majors in wins. Thursday's and Friday's papers carry the series forward, and Part 2 of this edition picks it up there.
Our read
This is Investments and Risk (IN04), with a Behavioral lesson. The home run is the hot stock, the big bet, the thing everyone talks about at the game. The walk is the paycheck contribution. It's boring. Nobody films it. Milwaukee's season says the boring plays add up to the most runs when you take them every single at-bat. It also says the team with the smallest budget can lead the league if it stops trying to play like the richest one. Five of their players together cost less than one Dodger, and they're up two games.
Your 401(k) is the walk. Each paycheck's contribution is one base touched. This week, open the 401(k) app and look at two settings. The contribution percentage, and whether the automatic yearly increase is switched on. Most plans have the switch. A lot of people never flip it. Then check how much of the balance sits in one swing-for-the-fences fund or your own company's stock. If that slice is big, you're playing the Dodgers' game on a Brewers payroll. Touching the bases every two weeks is what gets you to October. You pack the umbrella in September, when the sky is still blue.