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One projection system sees the Brewers as a .500 team. What gives?
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- One projection system sees the Brewers as a .500 team. What gives?
The Milwaukee Brewers won a franchise-record 97 games last year and return a large group of the players who made that happen. But one prominent preseason projection system projects them as a distant second-place finisher in the National League Central this year … and barely above the Pittsburgh Pirates for second place.
Baseball Prospectus modeling director Jonathan Judge, the driving force behind the site's annual PECOTA rankings, stopped by the Journal Sentinel's Microbrew podcast to discuss why the system seemed to have relatively low regard for the 2026 Brewers .
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As of Feb. 23, the Brewers were projected to win 80.2 games, well behind the Chicago Cubs (90.6) for first place in the division and only slightly ahead of third place … Pittsburgh … at 79.9. That's hardly a ringing endorsement.
The Brewers, of course, are used to this, making the 2025 preseason projections a rallying cry during their run to a division title and NL Championship Series appearance. In 2025, PECOTA − which stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm − foresaw 81 wins for the Brewers; they won 97. In 2024, PECOTA foresaw 79 wins and a third-place finish, but the Brewers won 93 and won the division. In 2023, PECOTA was closer, giving the Brewers 88 wins; they won 92. In an outlier 2022, the Brewers were projected to win 93 games but finished with 86.
Still, PECOTA often boasts a high degree of accuracy for most teams. So what's the deal with the Brewers, a team that seems to routinely outplay PECOTA rankings?
It should be noted that another prediction system, ZiPS (produced by Fangraphs) sees the Brewers winning 86 games in 2026, one game back of the Cubs (87) but well ahead of the Cincinnati Reds (78), St. Louis Cardinals (77) and Pirates (74).
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Here's what Judge had to say about PECOTA's evaluation (interview edited for clarity).
Is there a characteristic or two about the Brewers that makes it harder for PECOTA to evaluate them?
Judge : "Who they've become is a team with a really deep farm system. It's very difficult, frankly, even to project who will be playing for them by June, much less by September.
"When you have a good farm system, you have two advantages. No. 1, you now have a number of options and No. 2, you don't owe anybody anything. Unlike, say, the Phillies , who had to play Nick Castellanos for a couple years because they spent $100 million of the owner's money on him. The one saving grace of being a small market is you don't have this sunk cost fallacy that the bigger markets are often stuck with. They have to play players long after they should. The Brewers just cheerfully ... move you around, platoon you, and that has made them very challenging [to forecast].
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"Getting a handle on the minor league players has been a bit frustrating because they don't share all of the [Statcast-type] data they have on those players. We still aren't getting all of it, but at least we're getting some of it for AAA or high A. But Double A, which is a huge level … we get very little data other than the raw results. If somebody in the minor leagues who's showing a unique trend in terms of how hard they're swinging or how good they are at laying off certain pitches, we don't really see a lot of that. That's one of those things that's hopefully going to be remedied. But it's a combination of having so many options to switch out that it's extremely difficult to keep track of who's going to play for them. And if someone has been showing something in the minors over the last month or two, it's a lot harder for us to pick that up than if they've been in the majors."
Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy (49) talks with Milwaukee Brewers pitching prospect Ryan Birchard during spring training workouts Tuesday, February 17, 2026, at American Family Fields of Phoenix in Phoenix, Arizona.
The Brewers just won 97 games, ran away with the division and bring a ton of guys back. Why are the Cubs seen by PECOTA as the heavy division favorite?
Judge: "Fundamentally, the Brewers are just a lot less impressive on paper than the Cubs are, and not much more impressive than the Pirates are. We all know that they will almost certainly find a way to make it interesting, and maybe more than that, but Pat Murphy has a much harder job to do this year than Craig Counsell does. Much more difficult. Credit to him if he does it, but he's not being dealt the same deck of cards.
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"Right now, we estimate the the Brewers have exactly one player that we're pretty confident is going to be worth three wins [in wins above replacement], and that's William Contreras . Will there probably be at least one or two others? Yes. There will probably also be one or two people that we're projecting worth a win or two that will be worth nothing or less, because that happens, too.
"Compare that to the Cubs, for whom we have [several three-win players]: Nico Hoerner , Alex Bregman (3½ wins), Ian Happ (3½ wins), Seiya Suzuki . Pete Crow-Armstrong , just under 3 wins. Right there, you already have about five, on average, extra wins coming out of the lineup because the Cubs don't really have black holes at any position, and at some positions they have extremely-not-black holes. It's position after position where there isn't going to be anybody who picks the Brewers option at those positions.
Judge pointed to center field and third base as two major question marks in the Brewers' lineup in terms of offensive production, and even first base to a degree, at least compared to the Cubs' option at first base of Michael Busch.
" Jackson Chourio vs. Ian Happ, who would you pick there? I'm sure Brewers would say Chourio, 'He's going to have a five-win season this year.' And he should; it's in him. But Ian Happ is worth three to four wins every single year, that's what he does. The problem is that [the Brewers] are going to have to go through the couch cushions again to find a lot of those runs.
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"A very large number of their runs [last year] came from other teams committing errors. It is staggering. ... The Brewers were not a slow team, but it's not like that they're nine speedsters racing up and down unlike anyone has ever seen. They just had this sort of pressure cooker that they created that was great, but that's not something that usually repeats itself very often. We do specifically credit players who generate infield-error base hits because that's a skill that requires you to be fast and hit the ball on the ground a little more. But there's no way we're going to say you're going to get another free seven wins from people deciding not to throw to first today. That's just not what major leaguers usually do.
"If you look at slug (slugging percentage in 2025), it was not good. They were 5 or 6% below average. They had no business scoring that many runs under any traditional measure of good baseball hitting. Not saying they didn't create a good condition for it, or that they don't deserve some credit for it. This is a copycat league and people are going to notice when you do something like that, and they're going to think about it over the offseason and try to adjust."
Honing in on one example, Brice Turang is projected to be worth 1.8 wins, which feels pretty low for an elite defender that hit like Turang did last year. What gives?
Judge: "What's helpful here is to compare him to Nico Hoerner (of the Cubs). I think a lot of people would say that's not a bad comp, both defensive wizards, both a little more hit [tool] than power. We project Nico Hoerner to be over a three-win player, and we project Turang to be a 1.8 player. Now why would that be? If anything, Turang's been showing more power lately.
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"Turang in 2023 had an abysmal season [offensively]. In that 2023 season, Turang was .218/.285/.300 [batting average, on-base percentage, slugging]. A .585 OPS [on-base plus slugging], 450 [plate appearances] of that. There's simply no way that a projection system is going to forget that and [it's going to] say there's at least a 20% likelihood that's still you.
"The next year [2024] was better: .254/.316/.349, .665 OPS. OK, we can live with this. We called him a three-win player, that's pretty good. Last year was even better: .288/.359/.435, 10% above average and we thought his defense was still pretty good but not as good as '24.
"What you have is a trend where he was quite good last year, below average but tolerable given his defense [in 2024] and absolutely unplayable [in 2023]. Let me compare that to Nico Hoerner … for the last five years straight, he has pretty much been .285/.350/low .400s. So we have this track record of somebody who has an extraordinarily high batting average, a very solid OBP and is doing a mixture of doubles and homers that you can take to the bank.
"Would I be remotely shocked if Brice Turang is a five-win player this year? I would not. PECOTA is still doing a better job forecasting a batter's performance for the rest of the year by the time we get to July to August than their season-to-date performance has done. The reason [for that accuracy] is we have a memory and don't give people a whole bunch of credit for the last couple months of the year. Track record just matters a lot. ... Right now, we're still dreaming on a lot of these guys to do better. Which in many cases they absolutely will, but they haven't done it yet. That's just the difference between this roster and the Cubs."
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The Brewers value defense so highly. Is it possible ranking systems can't get their arms around how the Brewers are winning games with great gloves all around the diamond?
Judge: "I would like to think we can evaluate defense, but the reality is, we tend to see defenders as largely average unless they are particularly bad or particularly good. So we see defense as largely kind of canceling itself out for the most part, with the Brewers being better than the Cubs, better than the Pirates, but not necessarily by a whole lot. I would say there's almost certainly a tendency to undervalue that a bit, but again, you're only one or two injuries away from this pitching staff to get BABIP'd to death [with light hits that would have been outs under full-strength circumstances].
"We certainly recognize they're better [at defense] than anyone else, but we're also less likely to credit the extremes of it and instead see defense as something that's generally positive, average or generally negative. With baserunning or defense, if you manage to excel and keep the right people healthy, that's definitely a way a team can grab a couple extra wins [compared to projection]."
What about someone like Quinn Priester , who doesn't have a strong track record but clicked in Milwaukee? Perhaps it's an organizational fit or change to the tool set. Does PECOTA account for that?
Priester is projected by PECOTA to have a 4.60 earned run average this year.
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"We do tend to assume that players will be who they were and are on some sort of trend line. If the Brewers take a player and [make them a different player], I wouldn't say we take that into account. We try to take into account pitch quality and things of that nature.
"With Priester ... if I'm going to pretend that '23 and '24 don't matter at all and you're a completely different guy, then yeah, I can look at only last year and say, this guy's a 3.50 ERA, quality pitcher. But we just don't do that because that's a bet you're just not going to win most of the time. That's what we're trying to do, on average, to be correct.
"The entire pitching staff, to some extent, is a problem [to evaluate]. The Cubs have a lot of guys I would not take from an upside standpoint over the Brewers, but they've been doing this for a while. The fact that the Brewers have more starters [as options], that's going to help them, because they're going to figure out which of the two or three are really 'on' this year and assign all the pitching performances to that person. I'm sure we're gong to have some pleasant surprises. But what have you done for me historically? It's a bunch of 1-to-2 win, comfortably above replacement level pitchers, but no stars. They've just got so many moving parts who haven't done anything in the past or, frankly, were just bad in the past. If they continue to turn it around, then you're going to see the projections in '27 start to give them credit."
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: One projection system sees the Brewers as a .500 team. What gives?
