A giant banner hangs on the facade of American Family Field, featuring an array of Brewers players and a two-word slogan:
“Magic Brew”
It was a clever play on words, not just because of the team’s name, or the Halloween vibes in October, or the supernatural run the Brewers went this season on to claim the best record in the majors.
Zoom out, and it’s clear that Brewers have tapped into some small-market sorcery. And in the battle for the National League Central, the Cubs are caught in a murky middle ground.
They have refused to flex their large-market might. But they also aren’t as efficient as Milwaukee, and are left out of the revenue-sharing and international bonus pool benefits reserved for small markets.
The result: The Brewers won the division title this season for the third straight year – their fifth in eight years. The Cubs’ only division crown in that span came in the shortened 2020 season.
This all should have been much easier for the Cubs. But without committing to one track, their thorny path through the playoffs — which included a three-game battle against the Padres in the wild-card round and a climb after falling behind 0-2 in the NLDS — were wholly predictable.
“The Cubs have been picked to win the division for how many years in a row?” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said before Game 4 of the NLDS. “Nobody has really believed that we were going to be great. It’s been a dogfight every time we play them; it’s great.”
The Cubs’ projected 2025 player payroll is expected to land somewhere between ninth and 11th in the majors, based on calculations by Fangraphs, Cot’s Contracts and Spotrac. The Brewers are sitting around No. 22 or 23.
“I think we’re past that right now,” Counsell said, when asked at the beginning of the NLDS whether the pressure was on the Cubs for their market size or the Brewers for their division title. “It’s gotten so small, man. You do your job, you’ve got one game, and it’s everything to win it. And if you don’t, you walk away really disappointed. … There’s no outside noise right now.”
This year, Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer and his front office group at least leveraged their middle-ground status to build a 92-win team, with clean books down the line and prospect capital still intact. But that didn’t mean much for their postseason position after the Brewers’ performance.
The Cubs still had to get through the wild-card round before taking on a well-rested Brewers team in the NLDS.
After rolling over in the first two games on the road, the Cubs were on the ropes as the series moved to Wrigley Field. But, invigorated by the return home, they turned this series into a dog fight too.
Both games kept the crowd on its feet with early action from the Cubs offense, some gutsy pitching performances, and a team that clearly wasn’t ready to go down so easily. On Thursday, the Cubs even figured out how to add on late in the game.
But it didn’t have to be this hard.
Imagine a series with their roles flipped: a fresh Cubs team hosting the first two games of the NLDS, with a bye giving them an array of options as they mapped out their pitching plan…
But enough dwelling on what-ifs for now. Back to reality.
It might seem natural to next point to the trade deadline, when the Cubs held onto their top prospects and didn’t land a frontline starter.
“The asking price, we felt like, was something that we couldn’t do to the future,” Hoyer said at the time.
For a better example of the Cubs’ middle-of-the pack status, however, let’s journey back to spring training, when the organization fell flat in its pursuit of veteran third baseman Alex Bregman.
“I was really thankful to Tom and Todd and Laura [Ricketts],” Hoyer said in the immediate aftermath. “I spent a lot of time talking about the pursuit of him, and they were willing to sort of green-light us pushing our budget.”
Even with an expanded budget, the Cubs’ offer (four years, $115 million) fell well short of the other teams in the race, hamstrung by chairman Tom Ricketts’ aversion to deferred money.
So, not only could the Cubs not push the bottom-line dollar amount, they couldn’t even get creative with contract structure to put together a more competitive offer.
Back down the what-if rabbit hole. On the one hand, Bregman missed about seven weeks with a strained quad. On the other, he still put together an All-Star season.
Who knows what kind of beyond-face-value impact he would have had in the Cubs, between providing a soft landing for rookie Matt Shaw and familiarity for former Astros teammate Kyle Tucker.
The broader point is that the Cubs should have been able to back their pitch to Bregman with an enticing financial package, instead of internally haggling over budget.
This came after the Cubs made dramatic cuts to their pro scouting department, committing to a model and video-forward approach for the upper levels. When considering budget, the Cubs don’t separate player payroll from other baseball operations costs.
The upheaval turned heads around the industry. Large-market behemoths like the Dodgers and Yankees invest heavily in their scouting departments. On the other side of the spectrum, the small-market Rays are known for operating one of the more robust scouting operations in baseball.
The Cubs went in a different direction – straddling two incongruent approaches to team-building.
In that position, they’re left waiting for the Brewers to fall, counting on time to be the antidote to Milwaukee’s magic brew.
