2027 ZiPS Projections: Milwaukee Brewers

For the 23rd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the first team up is the Milwaukee Brewers.

Batters

There’s nothing in projectionating as humbling as projecting the Milwaukee Brewers, the team that has apparently spent the last six years perfecting the ability to outperform forecasts. Even with my attempts to be as aggressive as possible with constructing depth charts, and ZiPS coming in as the most optimistic projection system on the Brew Crew, it still managed to underestimate the Brewers by more than a dozen wins in 2026. I do take solace in the fact that it doesn’t seem like any of the other 29 teams in baseball, including the Rays, have figured out how to do this with such regularity, and the brainpower of a 50-person analytics staff easily outpowers mine.

On the Milwaukee offense, nobody stands outs as an MVP candidate, but by the same token, there are a lot of really good players, and only one or two actual holes in the starting lineup. In last season’s ZiPS rundown, I said the Brewers looked a lot like one of those peak 2010s Cardinals teams in their depth and balance, and nothing that happened in 2026 disabused me of that notion.

Most of the lineup returns in 2027, with the obvious exceptions of any possible trades, and only Jake Bauers and Gary Sánchez hitting free agency. Bauers may very well be back on a one-year qualifying offer — I’d counsel him to do so if I were his agent — and while Sánchez was certainly a nice-to-have, the Brewers declined their side of the mutual option and seem likely to either pick up another cheap veteran or just roll with Jeferson Quero. There’s some real value for working Quero in at the major league level (assuming his shoulder is OK) with William Contreras scheduled to reach free agency after 2027. It’s also quite possible that Bo Naylor ends up in this spot; he was pretty awful in 2026, but Naylor’s also the type of underperforming veteran-ish player that the Brewers seem to do very well with.

Brice Turang and Jackson Chourio are obvious All-Star candidates, and a good season from Garrett Mitchell or Cooper Pratt puts them into that conversation. ZiPS likes Luis Lara’s breakout potential, and thinks he’s better than he was in his debut. ZiPS doesn’t like Jesús Made as immediately as Steamer does, but still seems him having a 40-WAR type of career. On the lesser prospect stuff, ZiPS sees the Brewers as having very good farm depth, and while none of Luke Adams, Andrew Fischer, Jett Williams, or Josh Adamczewski get big projections, they all project to have situational value and should be good emergency options.

ZiPS sees first base as the biggest offseason need for the lineup. DH, too, but I doubt Christian Yelich is going anywhere. Andrew Vaughn had a .306/.390/.444 line in 2026, but ZiPS also thinks his BABIP was about 60 points above what his Statcast data suggested it would be, and he doesn’t have a history of overperforming what ZiPS thinks about his BABIP.

Pitchers

Having Jacob Misiorowski at the top of the rotation is a great way to start off your pitching staff, and he certainly goes into 2027 as a leading Cy Young candidate (and the likely 2026 winner). I still have this horror-movie image of him throwing a fastball 104 mph while his arm travels 95 mph and lands in front of the catcher in a grisly scene, but that hasn’t happened yet. I’m sorry, pitchers scare me more than any Halloween-themed movie.

ZiPS sees the rest of the rotation as good, but rather unexciting. Logan Henderson, Robert Gasser, and Kyle Harrison all project as league-average or better starters, with their relatively low WARs coming down to rather low innings totals. ZiPS is aware of Quinn Priester’s thoracic outlet issues, so it gives him a pretty big hit in the projections, but if he’s not comfortably back, Shane Drohan, Tyson Hardin, and Coleman Crow all have projections that are better than most teams’ sixth starters. This does feel like a rotation that would benefit from someone to eat some innings in the middle of the rotation, like Kevin Gausman. Maybe the Brewers can fix Zac Gallen.

The projections see some depth work to do in the bullpen. Like Steamer, ZiPS really likes the top three of Trevor Megill, Aaron Ashby, and Abner Uribe, and it is moderately a fan of DL Hall and Chad Patrick. The Brewers may be able to populate the rest of the bullpen with some of the starter candidates that don’t make the rotation, such as Drohan or Crow, but a value add or two in the bullpen in free agency would be welcomed.

There’s a lot of winter to go, as in all of it, but ZiPS has no problem seeing the Brewers as the NL Central favorites right now. It still prefers the Cubs’ lineup, but the Cubs have a lot of pitching stuff to figure out, and in quick preliminary runs with current rosters, ZiPS generally has the Brewers somewhere around 90 wins and as a moderate NL Central favorite. Which means they’ll win 109 games or something in 2027.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Charts playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2027 due to injury, and players who were released in 2026. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a post-industrial, Gregorian-chant, bubblegum-Reggaeton band that only performs at rural zoning board meetings, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.18.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on Bluesky. This last is, however, not an actual requirement.