In 1999, at the height of baseball’s home run obsession, Nike ran a commercial in which Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine, two of the best pitchers who ever lived, grew so jealous of all the attention Mark McGwire got for hitting baseballs into orbit that they hit the weight room and tried to become sluggers themselves. The punchline, delivered with a shrug that became a permanent piece of baseball vocabulary, was that none of their Cy Young Awards mattered, because chicks dig the long ball.

It was a joke. The whole bit was that Maddux and Glavine were Hall of Famers who couldn’t hit, mocking a culture that had decided power was the only thing worth watching. A quarter century later the line still gets quoted, and it still describes how a lot of baseball gets discussed, including, every single July, the Milwaukee Brewers.

Because every July, like clockwork, the same sentence gets written about Milwaukee. They need a bat. A real one. A guy who hits the ball over the fence instead of poking it through the right side and sprinting to second. The trade deadline approaches, the analysts line up, and the verdict is unanimous: this offense is missing something, and the something is power.

The Brewers mostly ignore this. They go lead their division anyway. And the cycle repeats, because the complaint never quite dies, because it is never quite wrong.

Here is the strange part. Both sides are correct. The pundits are right that the Brewers don’t hit home runs. The Brewers are right that it doesn’t matter. The only thing anyone is missing is that they’re answering two completely different questions, and the answers point in opposite directions.

So let’s separate the questions, because the gap between them is one of the more honest things in baseball.

The same story, every year

This isn’t a 2025 story. It’s the only story the Brewers tell.

Start with the recent ledger. Milwaukee has won the NL Central in 2021, 2023, 2024, and 2025, four division titles in five years, and reached the playoffs in six of the last seven seasons, all of it on one of the smallest budgets in the sport. (How a team this cheap keeps churning out aces and 90-win seasons is a story in itself, and one we told here.) That is a remarkable run of regular-season excellence. It is also a graveyard of Octobers. The 95-win 2021 club lost the Division Series to the Braves. The 92-win 2023 club got swept out of the Wild Card round by Arizona. The 93-win 2024 club lost a winner-take-all game at home to the Mets. The 2025 club posted the best record in all of baseball, finally won a playoff series, then got swept by the Dodgers in the NLCS. Great regular season, early exit. Great regular season, early exit. Over and over, with the precision of a metronome.

Zoom out further and it only sharpens. The Brewers have been to the World Series exactly once, in 1982, and have never won it. Their all-time postseason record is 25-38. This is a franchise that is very, very good at the six-month part of baseball and has spent four decades being not good enough at the one-month part. The manager, Pat Murphy, put it about as plainly as anyone can: the organization deserves credit for making the postseason year after year on a tiny budget, but it keeps failing to crack the code once it gets there.

If all of that sounds familiar, it should, because the same story is unfolding again in 2026.

The Brewers are scoring 5.1 runs per game. Fourth in all of baseball, behind only the Nationals, the Pirates, and the Dodgers, and a full six-tenths of a run clear of the league average of 4.4. The premise doesn’t just survive into the new season, it gets stronger. This is now a three-year trend: 4.8 runs per game in 2024 (sixth in baseball), 5.0 in 2025 (third), 5.1 so far in 2026 (fourth), and the gap over league average has widened every step of the way, from four-tenths of a run to half a run to six-tenths. The “good offense” isn’t a one-year fluke. It’s a stable identity, and it’s getting stronger.

Brewers runs per game vs the league

The offense isn’t slipping — the gap over average has widened three years running

The dashed line is the MLB average each season. The Brewers’ edge grew from +0.4 to +0.5 to +0.6 runs a game.

Fig. 1 Milwaukee runs per game, 2024–2026, with league-average baseline and MLB rank. A stable, strengthening identity, not a one-year spike.

Here’s the part that makes it the same story and not just a good one. The Brewers are fourth in baseball in runs and 27th in home runs. They’re scoring six-tenths of a run above average while hitting a quarter-homer per game below it. The three teams ahead of them in scoring, the Nationals, Pirates, and Dodgers, get there at least partly by mashing. The Brewers get there the hard way: put the ball in play, run, and string hits together rather than waiting for the three-run homer. They are, right now, the quietest top-four offense in baseball, scoring like a juggernaut and slugging like a team you’d expect to be fighting for a wild card. Another excellent regular season is being built, the same way they always build them, and the same questions about October are already forming.

Runs scored / game — 2026

Milwaukee runs with the leaders — 4th of 30, and +0.6 over the league average

Nationals5.19

Pirates5.16

Dodgers5.07

Brewers5.05

·øLeague average4.45

Fig. 2 Milwaukee is scoring with the best offenses in baseball — fourth in runs per game, and well clear of the league average. The paradox is what they hit next.

So this is the right moment to ask the question the Brewers have been forcing for years. Can you win this way? Let’s take the two halves of it in turn, because the answer changes completely depending on which month you’re asking about.

The summer answer: power is overrated

Start with what the Brewers actually are, because the premise has to survive contact with the numbers before any of this means anything.

In 2025 they scored 5.0 runs per game, third in baseball, while finishing 25th in home runs with the highest ground-ball rate in the league, by a wide margin. The two facts sat next to each other and refused to resolve: a top-three offense that almost never hit the ball over the fence. Instead they walked, they slapped singles through the infield, and they ran, finishing among the top five teams in baseball in stolen bases. This is an offense that moved runners ninety feet at a time, on the ground and on the basepaths, and dared you to stop it. And in 2026, scoring even more, they’re doing it the same way.

It works. In 2025 the Brewers won 97 games, the best record in baseball, and a third straight division title. Their run differential told the same story the standings did: 806 runs scored, 634 allowed, a Pythagorean record of 99-63 that says the 97 wins weren’t a fluke of timing but the honest output of a genuinely elite team. Their manager described the offensive approach plainly after one loss where the other team just hit homers off his relievers: the healthy version of this lineup isn’t built around slugging, so it relies on the slow assemblage of single runs. That is not a confession. Over 162 games, it’s a strategy that finished third in scoring, and is currently running fourth.

Here’s the part fans get most wrong, and it’s worth slowing down for. A contact-and-speed offense is not boom-or-bust. It’s the opposite. Home runs are streaky by nature. A power team goes three games without one and looks broken, then hits five in a night and looks unstoppable. Singles, walks, and steals don’t do that. They show up at roughly the same rate every night, which means an offense built on them is steadier than one built on the long ball, not shakier.

The Brewers are the proof. Pull every team’s longest streak of consecutive games scoring three runs or fewer across 2025, and Milwaukee ranks last in baseball. Dead last. The least likely team in the sport to string together a run of rough nights. They had cold games, of course. Everyone does, and Milwaukee had a genuinely quiet fortnight in May and a bad week in September. But those nights scattered across the calendar instead of clustering into the prolonged slump the fan keeps bracing for. The bad games never found each other. That’s what an offense without a home-run dependency looks like: a high floor, a modest ceiling, and very few extended droughts.

So the summer answer is clear, and it cuts against the pundits. Over a full season, how you score barely matters. Run-scoring is run-scoring, and the Brewers manufacture plenty of it, year after year. They’ve proven you can finish in the top four in baseball without a single fearsome power bat, and proven it while being the most slump-resistant offense in the league. If the season ended in September, the right response to “the Brewers need a power hitter” would be a shrug and a scoreboard.

The season does not end in September. It never has, which is the whole problem.

The October answer: power is the point

Every year the Brewers reach the playoffs, and every year the offense that carried them for six months goes quiet at the worst possible time. In 2025 they got swept by the Dodgers in the NLCS. The same crowd that had spent July saying they need a bat spent October saying told you so. And before that it was the Mets, and the Diamondbacks, and the Braves, the same ending wearing different uniforms.

And here is the cruelest part, the detail that turns this from a story about a flawed roster into something sharper. The Brewers are not some lopsided team that bashes its way to October and gets exposed. They had the one thing that’s supposed to win in the postseason. The 2025 staff led the way all year, anchored by a rookie phenom, Jacob Misiorowski, who threw triple digits, became an All-Star after just five major league starts (the fewest in history before earning the honor), and opened his career with 11 no-hit innings, the first pitcher to do that since 1961. A team built on pitching and run prevention is the textbook October model. The Brewers had the hard part. And the offense sank them anyway.

This time, the data is on the pundits’ side. Not for the reason they usually give, but for a reason that turns out to be deeper.

October is a different game, and it’s different in a way you can measure. Over the last two decades, playoff teams averaged 4.9 runs per game in the regular season and 4.2 in the postseason. That’s a 16% drop, and it holds steady across the most recent decade and the last four years, so it isn’t a fluke of one cold autumn. The cause is simple and unavoidable: there is no bad pitching in the playoffs. You stop seeing the back of the rotation and the soft underbelly of the bullpen. Every inning, it’s somebody’s best arm. Runs get scarce because the easy runs disappear.

Where the easy runs go in October

Playoff teams, regular season vs postseason runs per game · two decades

4.9

Regular
season

−16%runs per game · holds across
the decade and last 4 years

4.2

Post
season

There is no bad pitching in the playoffs. Every inning, it’s somebody’s best arm — the easy runs disappear.

Fig. 3 The same teams score 16% fewer runs once the calendar turns, because the soft innings vanish. Scarcity is what makes the home run gain value.

Now think about what scarcity does to the value of a home run.

In a five-run environment, a solo homer is one of many ways to score, and not an especially efficient one. In a four-run environment against an ace who won’t let you string three hits together, a solo homer is sometimes the only way to score. It needs no rally. It needs no sequencing. It doesn’t care that the guy on the mound is untouchable with runners on. It is one swing and a guaranteed run, and when the guaranteed run is the only run available, it stops being a luxury and becomes the entire offense.

This is exactly the thing the Brewers don’t have, and haven’t had recently.

Their whole approach depends on the part of run-scoring that October takes away first: walks, steals, and stringing hits together against pitchers specifically deployed to keep that from happening. Walk, single, steal, productive out, run. It’s a beautiful chain, and elite postseason pitching is built to break it at the first link. A stolen base means nothing if nobody can drive the runner in. A leadoff walk dies on the bases against an ace who bears down with traffic. When the Brewers can’t manufacture, they have no fallback, because the fallback is the home run and they keep finishing near the bottom of the league in it. The sweeps and the winner-take-all losses weren’t bad luck visiting a good team four different times. They were the predictable collision between a high-floor, low-ceiling offense and a format that pays only for ceiling.

In October, the long ball isn’t one strategy among several. It’s the one that survives contact with great pitching.

The league has been quietly telling us this for years. Each postseason, a higher share of runs is scored via the home run than during the regular season, because as scoring contracts, the guaranteed run becomes more valuable, not less. Year after year, the team that out-homers its opponent in a given playoff game wins the overwhelming majority of the time. The numbers move around season to season, but the direction never does. In October, the long ball isn’t one strategy among several. It’s the one that survives contact with great pitching.

And look at who actually finishes the job. Every one of the last five World Series champions ranked in the top four in baseball in home runs during the regular season: the 2021 Braves (third), the 2022 Astros (fourth), the 2023 Rangers (tied third), the 2024 Dodgers (third), and the 2025 Dodgers (second). Five champions, five top-four power offenses, no exceptions. These are not contact teams that scrapped their way to a title. They are loaded sluggers who could win the manufactured-run game when they had to and still had the one swing in their back pocket when they couldn’t. That is the profile that wins in October: an offense that can do it the Brewers’ way and the other way too.

The last five champions could all mash

Regular-season home-run rank of each World Series winner · every one top four

Five champions, five top-four power offenses, no exceptions. The profile that wins in October can do it both ways.

Fig. 4 Each recent champion’s regular-season home-run rank (of 30). The trophy keeps going to teams that finish near the top of the league in power.

There’s a small, perfect twist buried in that list. In 2022, the champion Astros ranked fourth in home runs. The team that ranked third that year, one spot ahead of the eventual champion, was the Brewers, who didn’t even reach the playoffs. Milwaukee has occasionally had the power and lacked the team. Now they have the team and lack the power. Either way, the trophy goes somewhere else. The Brewers can only score one way, and it’s the way that stops working first.

So here’s a prediction, and it’s the kind we’ll happily be held to. If the last five Octobers are any guide, the 2026 World Series champion will come from the top of the league in power, not the top of the league in runs. As of now, the teams hitting the most home runs per game are the Yankees, White Sox, Astros, Nationals, and Dodgers, in that order. Not all of them will be standing in late October, and the champion won’t necessarily be the one at the very top of the list, the last two winners ranked second and fourth, not first. But the winner will almost certainly come from this neighborhood of the sport, the teams that can put a run on the board with one swing when the pitching turns perfect. The Brewers, fourth in baseball in runs scored, are not in that neighborhood. They are not even close. They will keep winning games all summer, and when the calendar turns, the trophy will go to a team that does the thing they have decided they don’t need to do.

2026 home runs per game — the contenders’ neighborhood

League leaders in home runs, the league average, and where Milwaukee sits

The Brewers hit 0.88 a game — a quarter-homer below average and a half-homer behind the leaders. Fourth in runs, nowhere near the power.

Fig. 5 Home runs per game in 2026. The teams that win in October live at the top of this chart; Milwaukee lives at the bottom.

The honest landing

So does history support a punchless offense in the playoffs? No. It specifically punishes one, and the Brewers are the cleanest, longest-running evidence we have. Power is overrated in the summer and underrated in the fall, and the Brewers are caught on both sides of that line at once. A contact offense is the steadier way to win 95 games and the more fragile way to win 11 in October. The high floor that grinds out a six-month season is built from exactly the run-scoring that vanishes when the pitching gets perfect, which is why the thing that makes them one of baseball’s best regular-season teams every year is the same thing that sends them home early every year. There is no version of this roster that is great at both, because the two skills are in genuine tension.

There’s a larger lesson hiding in here, and it’s one we keep running into. The playoffs are not a continuation of the regular season. They are a different sport played by the same teams, where variance rules, runs are scarce, and the math of how you score quietly inverts. A model that’s perfectly calibrated for 162 games can be the wrong tool for 7. The Brewers are a roster-level version of the same truth, repeated for half a decade: optimized beautifully for one and structurally exposed in the other.

None of which means Milwaukee should panic and mortgage the farm for a slugger every July. They’re a very good baseball team that’s very good at the thing that wins most of the games on the schedule, and they’re proving it again right now in 2026. It just means that when October arrives and the offense goes quiet against somebody’s ace, nobody should act surprised. That isn’t the Brewers failing to be themselves. That’s the Brewers being exactly themselves, in the one month where being themselves has never been enough.

Maddux and Glavine were kidding, of course. They knew better than anyone that you win in October with pitching, that the chicks swooning over the long ball were missing the quieter, harder skill. But they had the emphasis exactly backward for the one month that decides everything. In the playoffs, when the pitching is perfect on both sides and the runs dry up, it really does come down to who hits the ball over the fence. Chicks dig the long ball. So does October.

The bottom line

Watch the numbers. They’ve been telling both halves of this story for years.

Sources

2026 Brewers team scoring (5.05 R/G, fourth in baseball, league leaders, league average) and 2026 home-run rank (27th, 0.88 HR/G vs 1.13 league average), plus the multi-year runs-per-game trend (4.80 R/G / 6th in 2024, 4.98 / 3rd in 2025, 5.05 / 4th in 2026): BBMI internal game-level data and MLB team-stats trackers, 2026 season to date.
2025 Milwaukee Brewers team scoring (4.98 R/G, rank, league average), longest consecutive low-scoring streak, and the next-game-after-slump analysis (N=452, 42.3% vs 42.1%): BBMI internal 2025 game-level dataset.
2025 Brewers run differential and Pythagorean record (806 RS, 634 RA, 99-63): Baseball-Reference, 2025 Milwaukee Brewers team page.
Multi-year postseason history (NL Central titles in 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025; six playoff berths in seven years; NLDS loss to Atlanta in 2021, Wild Card sweep by Arizona in 2023, winner-take-all loss to the Mets in 2024, NLCS sweep by the Dodgers in 2025; lone 1982 World Series appearance; 25-38 all-time postseason record): Wikipedia, “Milwaukee Brewers” and “List of Milwaukee Brewers seasons”; MLB.com, “Brewers lose NL Wild Card Game 3 2024” (including the Pat Murphy quote on six-of-seven postseason appearances).
Brewers 25th in home runs, highest ground-ball rate, and manager comments on the lineup not being built around slugging: Brewer Fanatic, “Brewers Staying Afloat Without Their Best Power Bats, But Runs Aren’t Coming Easily.”
Brewers’ best-in-baseball 97-win 2025 season and NLCS sweep by the Dodgers despite a lack of consistent home run power: Belly Up Sports, “More Home Run Power Could Come Internally For The Brewers.”
Jacob Misiorowski 2025: triple-digit velocity, All-Star selection after five MLB starts (fewest in history before the honor), and the first pitcher since 1961 with 11 no-hit innings to start a career: Wikipedia, “Jacob Misiorowski,” compiled from MLB and Baseball-Reference game data.
Last five World Series champions’ regular-season home-run ranks (2021 Braves third with 239; 2022 Astros fourth with 214, with the Brewers third that year at 219 and out of the playoffs; 2023 Rangers tied third with 233; 2024 Dodgers third with 233; 2025 Dodgers second with 244): StatMuse and ESPN team stats by season.
2026 home-run-per-game leaders to date (Yankees 1.46, White Sox 1.35, Astros 1.34, Nationals 1.32, Dodgers 1.31): BBMI internal data and MLB team-stats trackers, 2026 season to date.
Regular-season vs. postseason run-scoring drop (4.94 to 4.17 R/G, a 16% reduction, driven by facing only top pitching): FanGraphs, “A Quick Review of How Playoff Offense Has Worked.”
Home runs gaining value in the lower-scoring postseason environment, and the team that out-homers its opponent winning the large majority of playoff games: MLB.com, “Homers are still the key to winning in playoffs”; CBS Sports, “Home runs are leading slugging teams to victory in the postseason, not small ball and bunts.”
“Chicks dig the long ball” origin (Nike, debuted May 2, 1999, starring Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, Mark McGwire, and Heather Locklear): Yahoo Sports, “Iconic Sports Commercials: Chicks Dig The Long Ball”; FanBuzz, “‘Chicks Dig The Long Ball’ Remains Baseball’s Best Commercial.”

Chicks Dig the Long Ball. The Brewers Don’t. Both Things Are Fine, Until October.