The 2025 Milwaukee Brewers are one step away from representing the National League in this year’s World Series.
From a wagering standpoint, the Dodgers are a sizable favorite – minus $215 – to oust the Brewers. That means you must wager $215 to clear a $100 profit if LA takes the series.
If you think the Brewers have a series upset in them, you can grab the Crew at +185. That means you have to wager $185 to clear a $100 profit if Milwaukee wins.
Of course there’s another way to cast the Brewers as heavy underdogs.
Just look at the payroll sizes for 2025:
– Dodgers, $350 million and No. 1 in MLB.
– Brewers, $121.7 million, ranking 22nd among the 30 MLB teams. The only teams that invested less in payroll than the Brewers this season were the Reds, Nationals, Guardians, Rays, Pirates, A’s, White Sox and Marlins.
The Brewers had a lower payroll than the Cardinals ($131.1 million) this season. That fact always makes me laugh because of the large percentage of Cards fans who think the answer to any STL shortfall is to spend more and more and more.
Sure. I guess that’s why the Cardinals have outspent the Brewers by $362 million in payroll since 2017, only to get repeatedly humiliated by the team from the smallest market in the majors.
I think the Dodgers will prevail for a few reasons in this intriguing NLCS matchup, and I’ll get to that later. But it would be silly to count the Brewers out based on the payroll gap.
The Brewers, who led the majors in regular-season wins, have enjoyed a more successful season than the following big-payroll teams:
Mets, $342 million
Yankees, $305 m
Phillies, $290 m
Astros, $233 m
Rangers, $226 m
Braves, $219 m
Padres, $217 m
Cubs, $212 m
Angels, $207 m
Red Sox, $200 m
D-backs, $179 m
Giants, $178 m
Of the 12 teams that qualified for the 2025 postseason, only the Reds and Guardians funded their payrolls with less money than the Brewers.
The Brewers just bounced the division-rival Cubs from the playoffs in a tense division-round series. In case you’re wondering, the Cubs have outspent the Brewers by $560 million in payroll since 2018.
And here’s another count: number of appearances in the NLCS over that time?
Brewers 2, Cubs 0.
So Spare me the lame David vs. Goliath cliche to describe this Brewers vs. Dodgers matchup.
The Brewers and Dodgers have the two smartest front-office operations in the majors. The Dodgers have the luxury of backing up their brainpower with massive spending power. And sure, that should make a difference … but not always.
The Brewers are a unique team that can beat opponents in many different ways. The Crew isn’t starving. This isn’t the Manager Pat Murphy School for Poor and Scruffy Ballplayers. Well, maybe the scruffy part is correct.
The Brewers have forced their way into the postseason seven times in the last eight seasons. They rank 4th in the majors with a .562 winning percentage since 2017, with only the Dodgers, Astros and Yankees doing better over the last nine campaigns.
The Crew has competed in 27 postseason games since 2018, a total topped by only eight major-league teams. But all they hear is the usual stuff about how small-market teams can’t win a World Series. It’s more about performance than payroll, but the only way the Brewers can hush everyone up is by beating the Dodgers this time around. These small vs. extra-large markets clashed in the 2018 NLCS, with Los Angeles winning it with a 5-1 victory in Game 7.
So there were plenty of celebratory liquids in the home-team clubhouse Saturday night after the Brewers put down the Cubs in the winner-take-all Game 5 in Milwaukee. There were many exhales as well.
“We needed to get over this hump, because it was more like an albatross, the old ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ (poem) or something like that,” Milwaukee owner Mark Attanasio told The Athletic. “Look, the goal has been to get to the World Series. We’ve only been there once [1982.]
“I’m so tired of reading that we’ve never won a World Series. But to win a World Series, you’ve got to get to the World Series. And to get to the World Series, we’ve got to get through this next series.”
OK, who wins this thing?
A couple of preliminaries:
* Going back to late last season, the Brewers have won eight consecutive regular-season games from the Dodgers. That includes a 6-0 season-series sweep this year. I don’t think that matters much because regular-season ball has nothing to do with postseason ball. And in winning all six games against LA this season, the Brewers took advantage of a Dodger roster that was missing several important players in the six games.
* I like knowing that both of these teams were exceptional in games against opponents with winning records: Dodgers 48-37, Brewers 46-38. Again, I downgrade the importance of regular-season results but having two teams that do their best against the best gives me a little extra to look forward to.
* Yeah I know that Dave Roberts gets to manage a team that’s lavishly funded by ownership, but that only adds pressure, and Roberts has handled the pressure. As the LA skipper, Roberts is 16-6 in the last two postseasons and 61-45 overall during the postseason.
Let’s move on …
1. We can frame the offensive battle as “boom” ball vs. “small” ball and leave it at that. But I’ll add a little more substance. The Brewers have a wonderfully diversified offense with aggressive speed to pressure the defense, a fantastic stolen-base element, strong contact skills, a high on-base percentage, plus a superb .280 batting average with runners in scoring position. The Crew ranked in the top 10 in the majors for sac bunts and sac flies. They led the majors with a two-out batting average of .255, and had the fourth best two-strike average. On and on. How valuable is their base running?
This: 162 steals, most infield hits in the majors, fourth in the majors in productive outs, the fifth lowest total of men lost on the bases, and no team scored from second base on a single more than the Brewers did. This season 33 percent of the Brewers’ total base runners came around to score; that’s the finest rate in the majors.
It is often pointed out that the Brewers have below-average power as a team and ranked 22nd in regular-season homers. But their power is ambush power. It is sneaky power. It is timely power.
Here’s what I mean: This season 15 Milwaukee home runs tied the game, 47 home runs put the Brewers in the lead, and four were walk-off winners.
The Dodgers led the NL in slugging percentage and home runs – hitting 104 more than the Brewers. With such substantial power, the Brewers needed an average of only 1.68 hits per run scored, which was the lowest amount in the NL.
The Brewers have to work much harder, and excel in multiple ways, to score enough runs to overcome LA’s power advantage.
But I believe this NLCS will come down to pitching, and let me break it down as Starters vs. Relievers. And then I’ll throw in two additional points about each team’s offense.
1. The Dodgers have the clear edge in starting pitching. A rotation plagued by regular-season injuries is healthy … not to mention vicious and deep. LA will start Blake Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in the first two games, and have Shohei Ohtani and Tyler Glasnow ready to start the middle games at Dodger Stadium. And then Roberts can come back with another round of Snell followed by Yamamoto.
Defying a recent trend, the Dodgers have gone starter-heavy so far in these playoffs, using a traditional starter in 48 of LA’s 56 postseason innings this month. In six playoff starts so far, Yamamoto, Glasnow, Snell and Ohtani have combined for a 2.02 ERA and a 36.2 percent strikeout rate with one home run allowed in 141 batters faced.
Milwaukee’s starting pitching is sketchy this postseason. Freddy Peralta started two games against the Cubs (one of poor quality) and Quinn Priester also got knocked around by Chicago. Manager Murphy is doing the modern thing by using relievers as starters, and starters as relievers, and the roles are constantly evolving. And I’m good with that. Makes it fun. And I appreciate creative managing. I don’t need any paint-by-numbers BS to make me happy.
I like this awesome take from the baseball analyst Joe Sheehan:
“The Brewers have gone to the extreme of all but eliminating starting pitchers. Freddy Peralta is the one, and everyone else is like a modern retail employee, given limited hours and pay and asked to work whatever awkward shifts the team needs him to work.”
Milwaukee’s “starters” had an 8.31 ERA in the five games against the Cubs. But Murphy’s bullpen wrangling produced a 1.20 ERA in 30 innings, so we’ll see him pulling all of the strings, and spinning all the wheels.
2. Is the Dodgers bullpen a problem? Well, it looks like it. To me the most fascinating aspect of postseason baseball is watching managers completely free themselves from the old-school starter-reliever plot they use during the regular season. There’s more urgency in postseason ball, and managers have adjusted accordingly.
But Dave Roberts has two reasons to let his starters go deep in games: (A) they’re excellent, and (B) the relievers have lost trust. Over the final month of the regular season the LA bullpen ranked 25th with a 4.90 ERA, had the worst walk rate in the majors, and ranked 29th out of 30 bullpens in Win Probability Added. Their bullpen ERA in the Philadelphia NLDS was a hideous 5.79. Their walk rate was a hideous 15.6 percent. Their strikeout rate was a woeful 17.7 percent.
Roberts had one solution: pitch one of his extra starters, Roki Sasaki, as much as possible. Because of extra days off slotted in the NLDS schedule, Roberts could run Sasaki out there as much as he wanted to, and Sasaki thrashed the Phillies: 5 and ⅓ shutout innings, one hit, no walks and five strikeouts. The other Dodgers used in relief were splattered by 13 earned runs in 15 innings. With the way the NL playoff schedule has played out, the Dodgers haven’t had to play a game on consecutive days. If this NLCS goes seven games, the Dodgers will play back-to-back games three times. That could make it extra difficult for the managers to maneuver their pitching around as much as they’d like. And it could impact Sasaki, who has little experience in the more demanding relief role.
3. I would throw this in: is the Dodgers offense going full blast? Blitzing the Reds in the wild-card round was easy, and Ohtani and Freddie Freeman used the Cincinnati pitchers for batting practice. The Phillies were more challenging, holding the Dodgers to a .199 average, .280 OBP and .277 slug in four games. And in theory, Murphy has three lefty relievers to pinpoint matchups against left-handed hitters Ohtani and Freddie Freeman.
4. Sorry to be redundant, but don’t underestimate Milwaukee’s offense. I defer to a more knowledgeable authority in Joe Sheehan. Here’s his opinion:
“The Brewers are very, very deep. They have no one on the team who was a replacement-level player this year, and every player has some role you can see them filling.
“The Brewers’ parts fit together. They draw walks, putting their good baserunners on, and they make contact, moving them around. They are not a power-hitting club, but they can beat you with the long ball; they won two of their three games against the Cubs by scoring all their runs on homers. Because of their depth, there aren’t many exploitable pockets for Roberts to play matchups, though the way he’s running the pen right now, that may not be as big a factor.”
OK, let’s wrap this up.
I like the Brewers to win the NLCS in seven games, so I’m gonna feel silly if the Dodgers win it. But capturing back-to-back pennants isn’t easy; it’s only happened three times since the mid 1990s.
Thanks for reading …
–Bernie
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him weekdays on the “Gashouse Gang” or “Redbird Rush Hour” on KMOX, and Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast on the Cardinals with his longtime pal Will Leitch. Bernie joins Katie Woo on the “Cardinal Territory” video-podcast each week, and you can catch a weekly “reunion” segment here at STL Sports with Bernie’s appearance on the Randy Karraker Show every Friday morning at 10:30 am.