"Bites of the Apple" (2024)

Every sports team has a bunch of fans, every fan has their own ideas about how the team is managed, and most of these fans are relatively casual with very little understanding of how teams make decisions. Most dumb fan ideas are exaggerated kneejerk comments primarily expressed because complaining is cathartic, and aren’t taken seriously by anyone at all, often not even by the person who came up with it.

There is currently one especially dumb fan idea regarding the Milwaukee Brewers that just won’t die. In fact, it seems to be getting worse, and there are some online communities where this appears to be the prevailing outlook on 2024: “The Brewers are going to enter a full rebuild, and this is the right thing to do.”

Craig Counsell’s shock move to Chicago, and even more recent news that the team is “open to trading any player on their roster”, have sent this belief further into prominence. Burnes and Adames enter their final year under contract, and Woodruff will miss most/all of 2024 after surgery on his throwing shoulder (and then see his contract expire as well), so there’s definitely a level of urgency in 2024 that had not been present in years prior. That said, there are some *really, really big* reasons a full rebuild is highly unlikely, and why they should be expected to at least attempt to compete in 2024.

First and foremost: the Brewers explicitly want “bites of the apple”. The phrase has been repeated and mocked to death since its initial declaration following the infamous Josh Hader trade at the 2022 deadline, yet fans and reporters alike have largely seemed to forget it entirely while they speculate about the upcoming season. Or, alternatively, they never understood what it meant in the first place. It’s not a hollow, meaningless excuse to cut salary. It’s a real philosophy! Let’s review.

The Brewers’ desire to maximize their “bites of the apple” refers to a primary goal making the playoffs as many times as possible. They believe that qualifying is good enough, and going “all-in” with huge one-year contracts and big-name rentals risks the stability of the roster and the ability to compete in the immediate future. In 2022, they were labeled “sellers” when they traded Josh Hader for a package including prospects and Taylor Rogers. The hope was to replace Hader with at-the-time effective relievers Matt Bush and Taylor Rogers, while adding prospects who would hopefully contribute at the big-league level within a year or two. They could (in theory) make the 2022 playoffs anyways, while adding players who would provide more value in their entire pre-arb/arbitration periods than Hader would in the 8 months remaining on his contract. And while 2022 obviously did not proceed as planned for Milwaukee, the principles behind the Hader move were fairly sound and were reinforced by what happened the 2022 and 2023 playoffs.

The main principle is simple: Winning the World Series is really, really hard. Going “all-in” does not guarantee a great regular season, and a great regular season (at least in recent years) has not coincided with drastically increased odds of going all the way. To win the title, a team must win 3 or 4 series in a row against the best teams in baseball. But even before that, they must qualify for the postseason in the first place – something that, for anyone besides the Dodgers or Astros, is hardly a foregone conclusion. Since the expansion to 12 teams, 3 of the last 4 World Series participants did not clinch a postseason berth until the final series of the season. Teams with record-setting salaries like the 2023 Mets routinely fail to qualify, and these Mets won just 75 games after selling at the deadline. A team like the Milwaukee Brewers surely knows not to take qualification for granted, as they missed the postseason 25 consecutive times from 1983-2007, only qualified twice from 1983-2016, and again failed to qualify by the slimmest of margins in 2022 (for the first time in 5 years) after leading the NL Central for over 4 months.

The 2019 Nationals went all the way after trailing for 7.5 innings in their winner-take-all Wild Card game against you-know-who. The 2020 Rays, MLB’s other notable “bites of the apple” franchise, made their first World Series in their current window. The 2021 Braves won 88 games in the regular season, saw their arguable best player Ronald Acuna Jr. tear his ACL in July, and then stormed their way to a World Series victory. The 2022 Phillies won 87 games, finished just 1.0 game above the struggling Brewers, then advanced 3 times and even took a 2-1 lead before falling in the World Series. Then, of course, the 2023 Diamondbacks were an 84-win team, easily the worst record in the postseason, and they swept their way through TWO division winners. Then they won the decisive games 6 and 7 of the NLCS in “Red October” Philadelphia, confirming a third consecutive World Series featuring a sub-90-win team.

Despite their own early playoff exits, the Brewers are no doubt encouraged by the success of wild card teams in the postseason. The notion of “serious contenders” for the World Series is an outdated myth. No amount of investment gives a team more than a 50% chance (if even) to qualify for the World Series, and teams with lower salaries and talent levels have been increasingly likely to advance through the playoff bracket – to the extent where there is serious, mainstream discussion of the playoffs being re-formatted again, due to the perceived advantage of playing in a wild-card series. For a team unlikely to ever crack the top-10 in team salary (provided no massive changes regarding team spending incentives), this is all excellent news. They do not need to put together a lineup packed with big names and all-stars. They (in theory) just need to qualify, and from there, have as good a chance as anyone.

It is true that the Brewers are 1-8 in their last 4 playoff appearances, despite two division championships. Their playoff struggles are a topic that also deserves an in-depth look, but for the sake of staying on-topic: Yes, they’ve been disappointing. Yes, it would have been nice to have an extra big bat available off the bench, which they could have obtained by going “all-in”. But also, quite literally every single loss has been a close game. Every single exit was preceded by at least one all-star injury in September or October. 9 games spread across 5 years is a very, very small sample size and I do not believe it to indicate any sort of inherent flaw with the Brewers’ roster creation, or management, or whatever the theory holds.

The Dodgers are 1-8 in their last 9 playoff games, too. In 2022 they had a Pythagorean W/L of 116-46, yet saw their season end at the hands of a 4-game NLDS loss against the Padres, a team they absolutely dominated 14-5 in the regular season, and who had a run differential nearly identical to the 2022 Brewers (+45 and +43, respectively). The Brewers know they are not doomed to be immediately eliminated unless they cross some salary threshold, and that their odds of advancing in the next series they play in will be roughly 50/50, just like most playoff series. Something would have to go horribly, catastrophically wrong to result in a massive change in mindset here, and a single-digit quantity of sporadic close losses against World Series-caliber teams just isn’t all that world-shakingly horrible. They were sad and premature (besides 2020), yes. But they were not damning of the entire competitive philosophy.

So that’s what “bites of the apple” means. The official 2022 statement itself confirmed their desire to “ensure that the future of the Milwaukee Brewers remains bright while not compromising our desire and expectation to win today.” The team is not fundamentally opposed to trading good players on good teams, which it did with Hader and definitely is considering doing with Corbin Burnes. But it wants to be a playoff-caliber team as many times as possible. If they make the playoffs one year, they will almost certainly believe themselves capable of making it the next, and the idea that a team that won its division by 9 games would immediately turn away from their notorious “bites of the apple” approach in favor of constructing a team geared to be “all-in” in, say, 2026, because a couple key guys’ contracts end soon and the next season is therefore a bust already… is nonsense. It doesn’t make financial sense, it doesn’t make sense with regards to their likelihood of eventually taking home a title, and I would be absolutely shocked if the 2023-24 offseason contains any sort of serious indication that the team does not plan to compete for the 2024 playoffs.

Part 2 of 3, a more in-depth look at why it wouldn’t make sense for this specific Brewers squad to enter a rebuilding period, is coming soon.