When the Brewers Grounded and Pounded the White Sox

Just over a year ago, the Brewers made the best kind of baseball history: weird baseball history. On May 31, 2024, they hosted the White Sox in Milwaukee, shellacking them 12-5. That part wasn’t weird. It’s hard to imagine anything less weird than the 2024 White Sox losing a baseball game (unless it’s the 2025 Rockies losing a baseball game). The weird part was how the Brewers beat the White Sox. They put up 23 hits, and 16 of those hits came on groundballs. That’s the most groundball base hits ever recorded since the pitch tracking era began in 2008. Would you like to see them all? Of course you would.

That’s what a record looks like. Groundball after groundball finding the various nooks and crannies that made the 2024 White Sox defense so similar to an English muffin. We’ve been waiting until this game’s anniversary to write about it. According to Baseball Savant, since 2008, only one other team has surpassed 12 groundball base hits in a single game. The White Sox tallied 15 against the Tigers on September 14, 2017. And that’s it. That’s the only team that came within three groundball hits of Milwaukee. First, let’s talk about how the Brewers pulled off this feat of worm-burning ingenuity.

As with any record, a fair bit of luck was involved. Balls took crazy hops off the mound and the first base bag. The Brewers hit a perfectly placed chopper and sent a ball hugging the third base line on a check swing. They wouldn’t have broken the record if any one of those balls had bounced another way. But as the saying goes, luck is the residue of design, and there was plenty of design involved here too.

For starters, the 2024 Brewers offense was designed to rack up low-launch-angle hits. They featured young speed-over-power guys like Brice Turang, Sal Frelick, and Joey Ortiz, and the team led the league by a mile with 19.7 baserunning runs above average. Even the Brewers’ power hitters aren’t power lifters. We’ve been writing about Christian Yelich’s launch angle pretty much since he appeared in the big leagues, and the Brewers have largely let him do his low-altitude thing. Since 2021, 109 players have taken at least 2,000 plate appearances. Yelich’s 3.3-degree launch angle is the lowest. Catcher William Contreras’ 5.7-degree mark is third lowest.

In 2024, the Brewers were great at reaching base on choppers, and they were great at hitting the ball right back up the middle. They had the fourth-highest groundball rate and the third-lowest launch angle in the league. Even though a high walk rate and moderate strikeout rate meant they ranked 20th in balls in play, they still led the league with 511 groundball hits. Because they loved low line drives too, they also led the league with 715 base hits that traveled less than 201 feet. During the game in question, Yelich led the way with four groundball hits, including two doubles. Contreras and Turang were behind him with three, and Blake Perkins chipped in two. All of this is to say that it makes a whole lot of sense that the Brewers were the ones to set this particular record.

On the other side of the field, the White Sox defense was designed to give up base hits. Their -87 defensive runs saved were the worst in baseball in 2024, and the 13th worst since Sports Info Solutions started calculating the stat in 2002. Over the course of the whole season, the infield wasn’t necessarily the main culprit, running a -12 DRS that ranked sixth worst in the game. But on the day in question, they fielded one of their worst defensive infields. Chicago’s four infielders from that day combined for -11 DRS at their respective positions, even though none of them spent so much as half a season at those positions.

The one thing that wasn’t stacked in favor of groundballs was the pitching. Almost-submariner Tim Hill’s whole game is based around inducing grounders, but he threw just one third of an inning, during which he allowed two groundball hits. (As you’ll see later, the one out that he got was a groundball that just barely missed going for a hit.) Starter Erick Fedde and reliever Michael Soroka both ran middle-of-the-pack groundball rates in 2024. The delightful John Brebbia somehow allowed four groundball hits in a third of an inning. That would be bonkers enough on its own, but two of them were on high fastballs. Over the course of the season, Brebbia ran a 30% groundball rate, which ranked 462nd out of the 474 pitchers with at least 30 innings pitched! This was truly an improbably sequence. Jared Shuster, who ranked 412, allowed the final hit. Turns out the Brewers could turn any pitcher into a groundball pitcher.

So here’s the obvious question: On May 31 of last year, the Brewers notched the most groundball hits of the pitch tracking era. But did they notch the most groundball hits of all time? The easy answer is maybe. The slightly less easy answer is probably not. The answer that’s just a bit easier than that is that we’ll never be sure. All of these answers are true, but we can still do some investigating.

Sports Info Solutions has its own batted ball data that predates Statcast and PITCHf/x. Mark Simon, editorial content operations lead at SIS, was able to look at the years 2004 to 2007, and he confirmed that no team was credited with more than 12 groundball hits in a single game over that period. We’ve added three more years of data, so we can now say that the Brewers’ record stretches back through the last 22 seasons, or 17.6% of modern baseball history. After that, we venture into guesswork and probability.

A bunch of historical factors are working against Milwaukee’s chances at holding an all-time record. The further back you go back, the more likely a game like this seems. Baseball has been trending toward more strikeouts, more power, and higher launch angles since the time of Babe Ruth. If you go back to 1910, when there were lots more balls in play, with more of those being grounders, and when the fielding was worse, getting 16 groundball hits doesn’t sound all that impossible.

Then again, the ball used to be softer, the grass used to be longer, and generally speaking, the players weren’t as fantastically yoked as they are today. All of this would result in slower groundballs, giving fielders more time to get to them. Although league-wide BABIP has been trending down since the highs of the mid-1990s, it’s still higher than it’s been at any time since the early 1940s. As Mike Petriello reminded us recently, the best way to rack up groundball hits is to blast the ball through the infield as hard as Aaron Judge does. Maybe it’s not that much harder to put a ball through the infield now than it was way back when.

In the history of the pitch tracking era, 46.9% of singles and 33.5% of all hits have been grounders. Obviously, one game is a tiny sample size in which anything can happen, but according to those percentages, an average team would need to notch 30 singles or 48 total hits in order to end up with 16 groundball hits. No team has ever come close to reaching either total in a nine-inning game. Playing the Blue Jays on August 28, 1992, the Brewers set the record for most singles in a nine-inning game with 26. They also tied the 1901 New York Giants with 31 total hits. The internet contains three sets of highlights from that game, and they combine to show 13 of the team’s hits. They’re in the video below. Only three of those 13 hits were groundballs, meaning that in order to even tie the 2024 Brewers, 13 of the remaining 18 hits would have to have been hit on the ground. There’s just no way that happened.

Keep in mind, that’s the most hits ever recorded in a nine-inning game, and it was played on fast turf, and we can still say with near certainty that it didn’t even come close to having 16 groundball hits. We can also say that for certain about other recent games that featured tons of hits. On July 22, 2022, the Blue Jays tied for fifth all time with 29 hits against the Red Sox in a 28-5 win. Only nine of their 29 hits were grounders. On June 24, 2023, the Angels had 28 hits against the Rockies, with eight of them on grounders. Clearly, it’s not just that a team needs a lot of hits. In all, 24 teams have reached 25 hits in one game during the pitch tracking era, and none of them have matched the Brewers.

The Brewers needed just 23 hits to get their 16 groundball hits, but as we’ve established, they were a special team, designed to hit a lot of grounders and to beat them out for hits. They hit 30 total groundballs in the game, a feat that’s happened just 13 times since 2008. Presumably that kind of team was much more common in earlier, less-powerful versions of the game, so the best we can do is to use the Stathead database to see how many games would have at least given a team a chance at 16 groundball hits.

Since 1901, 350 teams have put up at least 23 hits in a nine-inning game. Because we know nobody has matched the Brewers since 2004, we can eliminate those years, reducing our list of 23-hit games to just 269. If we further reduce our list by mandating that at least 14 of the hits came on singles – the same as the Brewers had against the White Sox, since extra-base hits are much more likely to come on fly balls and line drives – the list gets shortened to 239. In modern baseball history, there have been 239 games in which it seems conceivable that a team could’ve done what the Brewers did. That’s the closest we’ll get to an answer, but before we go, there’s one more thing you need to see.

Actually, there are four more things you need to see. Take a look at these plays, all of which took place during the Brewers’ possibly historic game on May 31.

That’s right, all four of these groundballs were a razor’s-width from ending up as base hits too. Three of them bounced off somebody’s glove before being picked up and turned into an out! This is how close the Brewers came.

These four outs could have easily ended up as four more groundball base hits, which would have given the Brewers four more outs to play with, which could have given them the chance to rack up even more groundball base hits. We’ll never know for certain whether the pitch tracking era record the Brewers hold is actually an all-time record. But whatever record they hold, they definitely earned it.