The Brewers Played To Type This Offseason

This offseason, I’ve taken high-level looks at the offseason decisions made by the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox. It’s been a popular series, so today, I’m going to use the same framework to offer a holistic evaluation of the Brewers. As a refresher, here’s how I’ve been thinking about the exercise:

“How should we evaluate a front office, particularly in the offseason when we don’t have games to look at? I’ve never been able to arrive at a single framework. That’s only logical. If there were one simple tool we could use to evaluate the sport, baseball wouldn’t be as interesting to us as it is. The metrics we use to evaluate teams, and even players, are mere abstractions. The goal of baseball – winning games, or winning the World Series in a broad sense – can be achieved in a ton of different ways. We measure a select few of those in most of our attempts at estimating value, or at figuring out who “won” or “lost” a given transaction. So today, I thought I’d try something a little bit different.”

I won’t be offering a single grade. Instead, I’m going to assess the decisions that Matt Arnold and the Brewers made across three axes. The first is Coherence of Strategy. If you make a win-now trade, but then head into the season with a gaping hole on your roster, that’s not a coherent approach. It’s never quite that simple in the real world, but good teams make sets of decisions that work toward the same overarching goal.

Next, Liquidity and Optionality. One thing we know for sure about baseball is that the future rarely looks the way we expect it to in the present. Preserving the ability to change directions based on new information is important. Why do teams treat players who have no minor league options remaining so callously? It’s because that lack of optionality really stings. Why do teams generally prefer high-dollar, short-term contracts over lengthy pacts? It’s because you don’t know how good that guy is going to be in year six, and you certainly don’t know how good your team will be or whether you’ll have another player for the same position. All else equal, decisions that reduce future optionality are bad because they limit a team’s ability to make the right move in the future. One note here: Optionality isn’t the same as not having any long contracts. Long contracts to key players actually improve flexibility, because “have a few stars” is a key part of building a championship team. Not having a star under contract when you need one is as much of a problem as having too many aging veterans, and I’ll consider both versions of flexibility here.

Finally, maximizing the Championship Probability Distribution. We like to talk about teams as chasing wins, but that’s not exactly what’s going on. Teams are chasing the likelihood of winning a World Series, or some close proxy of that. That’s correlated with wins, but it’s not exactly the same. Building a team that outperforms opponents on the strength of its 15th to 26th best players being far superior to their counterparts on other clubs might help in the dog days of August, when everyone’s playing their depth guys and cobbling together a rotation, but that won’t fly in October. Likewise, high-variance players with decent backup options don’t show up as overly valuable in a point estimate of WAR, but they absolutely matter. Teams are both trying to get to the playoffs as often as possible and perform as well as they can once they get there. That’s not an easy thing to quantify, but we can at least give it a shot.

The Brewers came into this offseason looking to keep the ball rolling. They’ve been one of the most successful teams in the majors this decade, and 2025 was perhaps their best season yet. They set a franchise record for regular season wins en route to the top seed in the NL and the best record in baseball. They advanced to the NLCS, where they ran into the cold weight of reality, also known as the Los Angeles Dodgers. But in Milwaukee, nothing’s ever nailed down, and the team looks pretty different in 2026 than it did at the tail end of 2025.

There’s one ever-present problem in Milwaukee: how to keep the talent flowing without spending too much money. The Brewers consistently run payrolls between $115 million and $135 million. They spent in that range in 2025, and plan to do so again in 2026. That means that they had a limited free agency budget this winter, and instead had to primarily operate in the trade market as a means of changing course.

Their first and largest decision on the monetary front came at the very start of November, when Milwaukee extended a qualifying offer to long-time ace Brandon Woodruff. Woodruff was coming off an abbreviated season, and he’d only pitched 130 innings total in the past three. He looked much-diminished in his 12 starts in 2025. The results were there, but he was down about three ticks velo-wise, and all of his secondary pitches had poor stuff grades and noticeably worse velocity and shape. In other words, there were reasons for optimism, but the under-the-hood data suggested that some caution was warranted.

I think that the Brewers hoped Woodruff would decline the qualifying offer. That would get them draft pick compensation, likely a pick between the second and third rounds based on Woodruff’s market. That’s real value: The slot value of those picks hovers around $1.25 million, which can be used to bulk up the overall draft bonus pool for the purposes of going over-slot elsewhere, in addition to the value of the actual player you take with the pick. Teams value these picks in the neighborhood of $5 million, based on my estimation of recent trades involving them.

Qualifying offers are usually a mere formality – Kyle Tucker netted the Cubs a draft pick, but he was never going to accept his QO — but Woodruff’s market was uncertain. Market estimates were all over the place, anywhere from pillow deals to three years at a premium rate; I projected a contract of roughly equivalent value to a QO. It’s notable to me that I had Woodruff ranked as the 34th-best free agent of the winter, and everyone else who got a QO was in the top 20. I think that the Brewers reached a little here. Generally, players with profiles like Woodruff’s don’t receive a QO because they might take it. He did just that, and I think that was a wise decision for him. It moves him from well off to set for life, and given his extensive injury history, a one-year contract in the hand is preferable to a two-year deal in the bush.

Woodruff’s contract changes the shape of Milwaukee’s payroll considerably. That $22 million isn’t a ton in a vacuum, but that’s one sixth of the team’s payroll. Christian Yelich is the only other Brewer making eight figures in 2026. The depth chart is built around the idea that they’ll mostly carry players who haven’t yet become eligible for free agency, or who have signed extensions that keep costs down.

When Woodruff returned on a big one-year deal, a few things changed instantly. First, the Brewers sat free agency out. I’m barely exaggerating. They signed exactly three other players to major league contracts: Akil Baddoo (one year, $1.25 million), Gary Sánchez (one year, $1.75 million), and Luis Rengifo (one year, $3.5 million). We’re projecting those guys for a combined 1.4 WAR, mostly from Rengifo. In other words, Woodruff crowded out the kinds of opportunistic deals the Brewers historically leave room for – think Jose Quintana, Rhys Hoskins, Wade Miley, or even Yasmani Grandal.

Even then, it seems clear the Brewers weren’t entirely comfortable with their payroll, or at least weren’t comfortable with the way the roster looked with Woodruff in the fold. They traded away Woodruff’s long-term running mate, Freddy Peralta, with one year left before free agency, overhauling the starting rotation.

I wouldn’t categorize this as a salary dump, even though it cleared salary. The Brewers are always looking to trade players before their last year of free agency. They seem especially interested in doing so with pitchers, and I think that makes sense given the returns they’re consistently able to command. I liked the Corbin Burnes trade for them. I liked the Josh Hader trade for them. I liked the Devin Williams trade for them. In each case, they were able to turn short-term team control of premium pitching into longer-term team control spread across a variety of players.

The Peralta trade was another entry in this time-honored tradition. By adding Jett Williams and Brandon Sproat, the Brewers increased their infield and rotation depth for the foreseeable future. Both are Top 100 prospects, both potential future difference-makers. They even both fit into Milwaukee’s preferred archetypes. The Brewers consistently lean into speed and athleticism on the offensive side of the ball. I think that’s for two reasons. First, it seems to come a bit more cheaply than offensive success, whether we’re talking arbitration salaries, free agency contracts, or trade value. Second, they’re very good at identifying it. Every year, Milwaukee seems to have a new crop of fast little dudes who play like more than the sum of their parts. I don’t need to have access to their internal systems to get the sense that they know how to separate the wheat from the chaff in this very particular field.

Sproat is athletic and has a huge arsenal, honestly too big for his own good. That’s another Milwaukee specialty: figuring out what to do with pitchers who have a variety of skills but who haven’t yet figured out the best way to turn those skills into success. He looks likely to start the year in Triple-A, but the Brewers tend to use their minor league pitchers extensively to fill out an entire season of starts, and he’ll figure into the big league mix this year short of injury. And even if neither he nor Williams starts the year in the majors, they can both contribute to the big league club in 2026. The downgrade from Peralta is meaningful, but would it shock you if those two out-WAR’ed him this year? Peralta’s great, but he’s not a capital-A ace, and climbing the team control ladder is hugely valuable when you operate like the Brewers.

These moves represent a coherent strategy. You don’t have to agree with it – Milwaukee sends its best pitchers out of town frequently, often to the dismay of Brewers fans – but it’s certainly intentional and well thought out. I think it basically comes down to maximizing the Liquidity and Optionality factor. There’s a generally agreed-upon valuation rule across the majors: stars are more valuable per win than role players. The Brewers consistently take the other side of this view by sending their stars out for role players.

When you consider their budgetary restrictions, I’m 100% on board. They aren’t competing on the same financial playing field as the teams they’re trying to beat, so they can’t adopt the same valuation principles. Depth is less costly than star power? Cool, give Milwaukee some of that cheap depth then. Sure, the math doesn’t quite work at the very high end, but while other small-budget teams leave huge holes in their rosters, the Brewers project for 2.5 or more WAR at six different positions. Compare that to three for the Reds, four for the Guardians, and three for the Royals. The Brewers see value in a high floor, and given the economic structure of baseball and their own monetary restrictions, I think they’re going about it the right way.

Want proof that the Brewers understand relative valuation? They traded Isaac Collins to the Royals for a pittance. Collins is a perfect example of the Milwaukee archetype. He’s undersized, quick, and makes a ton of contact. He plays good defense and runs the bases well. He finished fourth in NL Rookie of the Year voting and posted 2.6 WAR. Sounds valuable! And yet he and Nick Mears, a serviceable reliever making only $1.9 million in 2026, both went to Kansas City in exchange for reliever Angel Zerpa.

It’s likely that the Brewers think that they can coax a bit more out of Zerpa than he’s displayed thus far. Still, you can see what Milwaukee was doing here. Collins played a valuable role for them in 2025, but he isn’t one of their three best outfielders. He isn’t one of their five best outfielders, really: Jackson Chourio, Sal Frelick, and Garrett Mitchell are their top choices, Yelich generally DHs but mans left field occasionally, and Blake Perkins is a capable defensive super-sub who can platoon with Mitchell in center. Collins was surplus, and the Brewers don’t really do accidental surplus, so they set out to convert him into something they needed more.

If they truly thought that Collins, and players of his ilk, were being massively undervalued by the league, they likely would have held out for a better deal. They don’t appear to think that, though. They know that trading away defense-and-baserunning types doesn’t fetch much, but what, they were going to keep him because they disagree with the way baseball teams value production? It feels weird to trade away a contributor, even a 28-year-old with below-average power, for a middle reliever. But they did it, and I think they were right to do so. Depth is great if you’re going to use it. The minute Milwaukee didn’t think they were going to, they cashed that depth in for pitching. Trade for enough pitching, and you might be able to trade one of those pitchers for yet more cheap, controllable hitters in the future. It’s a virtuous cycle, at least in theory.

There’s one trade I can’t quite line up given all of this. In their last deal of the winter, Milwaukee sent Caleb Durbin, Andruw Monasterio, Anthony Seigler, and a Comp Round B pick to the Red Sox. In exchange, they got Kyle Harrison, Shane Drohan, and David Hamilton. Given that Durbin finished third in NL Rookie of the Year voting, a spot ahead of Collins, you might think it’s the same kind of trade. But unlike Collins, Durbin wasn’t buried on Milwaukee’s depth chart. He was atop the third base pecking order, in fact, and Monasterio was right behind him.

I can make this make sense only one way: I think the Brewers think they were selling high on Durbin. He was a fringy prospect when the Brewers acquired him a year ago. He was awesome in 2025, no doubt. But the kind of success he enjoyed isn’t guaranteed to continue. Guys with his profile – bottom-tier bat speed, top-tier contact, low chase and swing rates – tend to have diminishing returns. David Fletcher is the first one I remember from my time as an analyst, so I think of this archetype as Fletcher-y hitters, but there’s no shortage of examples. They might also have an outlier view of one of the guys they got back from Boston, because both Drohan and Harrison have interesting profiles.

This trade ate into the Brewers’ Championship Probability Distribution for 2026. I don’t think you can argue otherwise. Maybe Durbin has a higher-than-optimal chance of busting. Maybe his ceiling is lower than you’d think for a guy who posted 2.6 WAR as a rookie (this one is almost certainly true; it’s why the Brewers can acquire guys like Durbin at reasonable rates). But he’s still a lot better than the alternative, and the pitching reinforcements they acquired in this deal aren’t high-likelihood difference-makers in 2026.

As best as I can see it, though, the Brewers are trying to play two separate games in their transactions. They’re trying to win as many games as possible, obviously. They’re also trying to buy low and sell high. Some of that is structural – the market will give up a lot of role players for a year of elite pitching, so they partake in that trade regularly. Some of that, though, is idiosyncratic: The Brewers trade for guys they think will improve and trade away guys they think will decline.

The Durbin trade doesn’t fit the mold of a regular Brewers trade, namely a few years of a star for a lot of years of a prospect. It also doesn’t fit their most consistent secondary tendency, namely trading away surplus for someone they like. That means that it probably comes down to an idiosyncratic view of someone in the trade. My money’s on Durbin, though I’m also very interested in Drohan, and Harrison has the prospect pedigree to suggest that there might be something interesting in there still.

The cost of taking this view is high. Rengifo has the inside track on the third base job now. He just got finished batting .238/.287/.335 en route to an exactly replacement level season, and he’s 29. Even if he works out, he’s on a one-year deal. The Brewers have created a hole in their roster, in other words – very strange for the team that emphasizes a high floor in most of their transactions.

If you add up everything they did, in fact, it’s hard to believe this team will be better than last year. They’ve lost real talent — Peralta, Collins, and Durbin were among their most valuable players in 2025 — and they haven’t backfilled much of that shortfall, either. Rengifo has the best projection among the players they added this winter, and while a full year of peak Woodruff would make their rotation look better, that doesn’t feel like a particularly likely outcome; the diminished stuff is a very bad sign, as is the injury history.

But that’s just what the Brewers do. Sure, the on-field team got worse this winter. It seems to always get worse. They make up for it by stuffing their minor league rosters like a Thanksgiving turkey and getting tons of contributions from youngsters making the major league minimum. We think they have one of the best farm systems in the game. Some of those guys will make a difference in the big leagues this year, though it’s too soon to say which ones.

Milwaukee chose to take on risk in a few places this winter. The most obvious one was the rotation, which has plenty of unknowns heading into the year. That’s generally their plan, though. Jacob Misiorowski will be on the big league roster all season. Woodruff won’t be starting the season on the IL. The first 11 starters on their depth chart are interesting, and the Brewers aren’t shy about trying unconventional looks in the major leagues or starting guys with five-and-dive level stamina, so there are probably even more possible contributors than I’m counting. I thought the backfill behind Peralta was the strongest part of the offseason for the Brew Crew — which is another part of why I like the Woodruff decision less.

The Brewers also played to maximize roster flexibility. Durbin was the obvious starter at third base, which left them obvious starters at second (Brice Turang), third, and short (Joey Ortiz). But they also want to bring up some minor leaguers to keep the line moving, and as we’ve already covered, the outfield is crowded. Williams can play the middle infield. So can a few of their top prospects, even if you leave out the guys who aren’t likely to debut this year. Jesús Made, one of the top prospects in baseball, will probably merit a middle infield spot next season.

Likewise, moving Collins leaves more room for their existing players. Moving Peralta – and keeping Woodruff for only one year – means that every pitcher they develop will have a clear path to the rotation. The Brewers project better in 2027 and beyond because of the trades they made this offseason. Maybe that’s because they feel pretty good about winning the NL Central this year anyway. I certainly think they have the inside track; sure, they added some holes, but they’re starting from a high baseline.

To close things out with my three-axis framework, I think that the Brewers sacrificed some Championship Probability Distribution in 2026 in an attempt to push it higher in future years. Their full organization looks better than it did to me last year, even if the major league team isn’t quite as fearsome. I also like how they left spots for breakouts in the infield, outfield, and on the mound because of the way they moved on from good-but-not great players.

I’m also a big fan of their moves from a Liquidity and Optionality standpoint. Clearing the decks without taking a big step back is tricky, but I think they accomplished it. The roster is more flexible now than it was a year ago because of the added years of team control they snagged back at the top of their farm system. The Brewers only ever have room for two or so big long-term contracts, and right now, that’s Chourio and Yelich. For them, optionality is all about having a flexible team around their tentpoles, and they clearly stuck to that.

That leaves Coherence of Strategy, and I’m going to cop out slightly here. The problem I have in evaluating the Brewers is that I don’t have access to their systems. I don’t think they could make their model work if they weren’t doing an incredible job of talent evaluation behind the scenes. And with that knowledge in hand, I have to look at all of their trades through that lens. Only a year ago, they were trading for Durbin, and I loved it. Now they’re trading him away for pitching prospects who don’t seem to move the needle at first glance. I can make this make sense if I credit the Brewers with a spectacular talent evaluation system, but you have to be really sure of yourself to trade for a guy, see him succeed beyond your wildest imagination, and then trade him away for a middling return almost immediately.

If you credit the Brewers with the talent evaluation skill, though, everything clicks a bit more. I liked the roster implications of the moves they made, just not the exact players going out and coming back. But if I’m wrong about that part, their decisions look a lot better. I’d just say that they’re putting a lot of pressure on their own evaluations here. If they’re wrong about how competitive the NL Central is, they gave up a lot of talent and made the race harder than they had to. If they’re wrong about Rengifo (or Ortiz, really), they traded away too much infield depth and now need to count on some teenagers to rescue them. No one in the National League is better than the Brewers at moves like this, but I think they put themselves in a slightly risky situation anyway, so sure were they of their evaluation skills.

Lastly, I still don’t like extending a QO to Woodruff. It’s possible that I’m reading this wrong, that they hoped Woodruff would take the deal and just wanted him on the team. But if that’s the case, I think they’re making an error. It’s hardly a disaster of a move, but it felt really out of step both with Woodruff’s position in the free agency class and Milwaukee’s behavior around payroll. I’m absolutely positive that they would have preferred he turn down the offer, but making the decision to extend it to him in the first place felt like a misstep to me. They had a solid offseason, but I’m still down on it compared to the high standards I hold the Brewers front office to in light of their recent success.