Cubs Have More Money, Brewers Play Much Better Moneyball

The Brewers are on the cusp of moving on to the World Series, where they’ll be favored to win for the first time in club history. As painful as that will be for Cubs fans, it shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, the Cubs have been staring at the Brewers’ backside for years now despite routinely outspending their division rivals by tens of millions in payroll. Milwaukee has won the NL Central four years in a row and five of the last six, and they’ve never spent more than $146 million to do it.

That was this year, by the way, so spending more money is a good thing when combined with the right plan.

The last time the Cubs had a payroll that low was 2021, when they spent $144 million to finish 20 games below .500 after selling off their World Series roster for parts. Prying Craig Counsell from his hometown organization with what was the largest managerial contract ever at the time wasn’t enough to change the trends. If anything, the gap has widened. The Cubs finished nine games back of the Crew in Counsell’s last year north of the Cheddar curtain; they finished 10 back in 2024, five back last year, and 14 back this year.

There’s an argument to be made that the Brewers’ success is all attributable to Pat Murphy, who was the bench coach before assuming the helm following Counsell’s departure, and I won’t fight you if you make it. But what’s far more important to the disparate performances of these rival organizations is how well the Brewers have played moneyball. That term has been misused in all sorts of ways, like when A-Rod indicated that it simply means spending more money, so let’s look at that first.

Moneyball isn’t just about how much a team spends on payroll; it’s about how that organization identifies and exploits market inefficiencies. It’s about finding new leverage points, which could even mean recycling or revamping old concepts that may have fallen by the wayside. The Brewers have mastered that approach, what with necessity being the mother of ingenuity and all. Meanwhile, the Cubs remain overly conservative — even though they’ve introduced slightly more risk lately — despite having the wherewithal to spend through mistakes.

More important than identifying a leverage point is constantly analyzing to refine and shift as the rest of the market corrects. The A’s famously found that, among other things, on-base percentage is far more important to offensive success than just batting average. The league caught up. When Theo Epstein and the other hotshots in Boston’s front office realized that they could throw more money at big overslot draft bonuses, the league countered by placing stricter limits on draft pools.

Jed Hoyer was part of that cadre of phenoms who broke a curse in Boston, then he rejoined Epstein in Chicago to do more of the same. They were able to be a little reckless with money in the early going, but that eventually caught up with them as limitations prevented runs at Bryce Harper and others. Epstein left early, in part because he knew what was coming with another rebuild, and with it went the gunslinger mentality. Hoyer is a good dude with a great deal of knowledge, but he also seems like a small-town sheriff under the mayor’s thumb.

But none of that explains how the Brewers have managed to become the best team in baseball despite a counterintuitive offensive approach. They hit fewer home runs than all but one team while pulling the ball less and hitting it on the ground more than any other team. Yet they scored more runs than any team other than the Cubs, who pulled the ball and hit it in the air more than almost every team.

Some will tell you it’s because the Brewers — and also the Rays and Guardians — win because they eschew analytics and just play the game the right way. That’s the height of ignorance. Those teams play the game the right way because they lean so heavily on analytics. It just so happens that many small-ball concepts being employed by the Brewers work well as a result of being novel.

The Brewers are probably among the top 10 teams in MLB when it comes to their R&D department (data scientists, software engineers, biomechanists, etc.), according to research by Amrit Vignesh. The Cubs are probably somewhere in the middle, though exact numbers aren’t publicly available. That means more minds seeking out more ways to find incremental value in all the nooks and crannies.

Eno Sarris provided an exhaustive look at this topic in a free article over at The Athletic, so I highly recommend digging into that for more specifics. The short story is that the Brewers were early adopters along a number of tech and data fronts, which has led to their emphasis on pitch framing, catcher defense in general, and pitch design. They have embraced short players in an age of bigger seeming better, and they also let the ball travel for an all-fields hitting approach when most modern emphasis is on pulling the ball in the air.

It’s worth noting that the Cubs (71.3″) were actually shorter than the Brewers (71.48) this year, but that’s mostly due to Alex Bregman. In all seriousness, though, the Brewers have clearly been able to unlock something to a much greater degree than the Cubs. Physics tells us that bigger players should throw the ball and swing the bat faster, but the Brewers were fifth in average bat speed (72.6 mph) and second in fastball velocity (96.0 mph). The Cubs were 27th in bat speed (71.3 mph) and 30th in FB velo (93.6 mph).

The Dodgers (71.2 mph) and Guardians (70.5 mph) were both below the Cubs in terms of bat speed, so I’m not trying to make that one metric a litmus test. Rather, it’s that the Brewers excelled in areas despite their apparent handicaps, which tells us that they are either extremely lucky or incredibly good at identifying and developing the right players. Hey, haven’t we all been complaining for a while now about how the Cubs don’t seem to be very good on the development front?

It’s said that if you do all the little things right, there won’t be any big things to worry about. The Brewers do all the little things right. The Cubs, on the other hand, have spent years going back to the drawing board after getting it not quite right. And that’s what is most maddening, because everything says they should be magnitudes better than the Brewers due to their deeper pool of resources. Maybe the problem is that they don’t have the same urgency.

Or perhaps it’s a lack of patience, which is understandable given their status as a marquee franchise in a big market. The Brewers have stayed the course, while it feels as though Hoyer and the Cubs keep getting distracted by new concepts and philosophies every 2-3 years. Simply put, the Brewers are just a much better organization from top to bottom right now. That could change over the next few years, and I sure as hell hope it does, but the Cubs have a lot of work to do to make it happen.