Pop quiz, hotshot: Which Major League Baseball team has spent the most days in first place during the course of the 2014 season?
Here’s a hint: Check the picture up top.
Yep, it’s the Milwaukee Brewers, who surprisingly sat atop the National League Central with at least a share of the lead from April 5 until Sept. 1.
That amounts to 159 total days in which the Brewers led their division. The same Brewers who have since imploded to the point where they’ve gone from longtime leader to out of the playoffs entirely if the season ended Tuesday.
As that table shows, Milwaukee (74-70) isn’t the only former division front-runner that has fallen out of first. The Detroit Tigers and Oakland Athletics also have hit hard times, but the Brewers are in much worse shape going forward.
For one thing, the NL Central once again features three teams pushing and shoving against each other to get to October. After the St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds became the first trio to make it to the playoffs from the same division in 2013, the Cardinals and Pirates are both in the thick of things—and ahead of Milwaukee—again this year.
That only makes the Brewers’ path more challenging.
Secondly, well, there’s this rather discouraging tidbit from the club’s play-by-play man Joe Block:
Note that Block’s tweet came from Sept. 5, at which point Milwaukee actually was in postseason position. Obviously, that’s no longer the case, which goes to show just how bad things have gotten.
It’s gotten so bad that the players called a closed-door team meeting Sunday, as Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writes:
A sloppily played 9-1 loss to St Louis at Miller Park left manager Ron Roenicke disappointed and the players apparently alarmed enough to finally talk it over. The Brewers have lost 14 of 17 games to go from first place in the NL Central to third place and also out of the two wild-card spots.
“You know what, a sense of urgency is something that we need to get ahold of, as a team, as a unit,” said Jonathan Lucroy. “Something like that kind of wakes you up. We got punched in the mouth today. It’s about time we woke up from our little trance we’ve been in and get moving forward.”
If the meeting had an impact, it hasn’t happened yet: Milwaukee dropped Monday’s game to the Miami Marlins, 6-4, to extend what has been a season-altering poor stretch.
What has gone so, so wrong for the Brewers after everything was going so, so right for much of the season?
For starters, there’s that brutal nine-game losing streak from Aug. 26 through Sept. 4, during which they lost the final two games (and the series) to the lowly San Diego Padres and were swept in another three-game set by the Chicago Cubs, who remain in last place in the Central.
When the Brewers finally won, beating the rival—and now NL Central-leading—Cardinals last Friday, Sept. 5, they stopped the bleeding only temporarily. The Cards took the final two games and the series to put Milwaukee a season-high five games back.
The nine-game skid got most of the attention, but it was really only the nadir of a stretch in which Milwaukee has lost 15 of its last 18 games since Aug. 20, dropping them now six behind St. Louis in the Central and 1.5 in back of the Pirates for the second wild-card spot.
In that time, the Brewers have been outscored by a tally of—get this—111 to 56. In other words, they have been giving up twice as many runs as they’ve scored for nearly three full weeks.
With things that bad, the Brewers were lucky to win the three games they have.
That also goes to show that the team has been struggling in just about every facet of the game lately.
The once-potent offense, sparked by Carlos Gomez, pushed by Ryan Braun, Aramis Ramirez and Lucroy, and propped up by Khris Davis and Scooter Gennett, has fizzled. While Gomez spent a week nursing his way through a sprained wrist, Braun has been battling his own various ailments.
But no one on the team has hit much over the past month, as the club ranks in the bottom half in the sport in everything from runs scored to batting average to on-base percentage.
On the pitching side, the rotation that was so consistent for four-plus months has been anything but. Kyle Lohse (8.20 ERA in his past four starts), Wily Peralta (7.20) and Yovani Gallardo (5.95) have fallen off. Matt Garza made it back from an oblique injury that cost him a month—only to put up a three-inning, six-run stinker his first time out. Top prospect Jimmy Nelson hasn’t provided a lift either, with a 4.81 ERA since being inserted into the five-man rotation midseason.
If not for Mike Fiers, who has been a revelation since being brought back up in early August, things would be (gasp) even uglier.
Even the bullpen has been shaky, too, after being among the best in the game early on. Each of closer Francisco Rodriguez (2.58 ERA versus 4.02 ERA) and key left-handers Will Smith (3.09 versus 6.48) and Zach Duke (1.18 versus 5.65) have pitched significantly worse in the second half than they did in the first.
Make no mistake—there’s talent on the Brewers, and that could be enough to get themselves up off the floor and back to the playoffs for the first time since 2011.
What they don’t have, however, is much in the way of depth. The organization’s minor league system is among the worst in baseball, having rated as either the worst or second-worst in all of baseball entering 2014 by each of Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus and ESPN (subscription required).
Beyond that, rather than bring in some reinforcements, general manager Doug Melvin chose to stand pat at the trade deadline, aside from the minor move to acquire veteran outfielder Gerardo Parra. Then again, perhaps Melvin would have done more had he not been hamstrung by a lack of coveted prospects.
The Brewers, however, are not done, even if it’s felt like it as they’ve gone 21-27 since the All-Star break. On the contrary, they’re still very much in the hunt, but each loss carries more weight and more impact at this stage because of how the season has been spiraling.
Given the Cardinals’ six-game lead in the Central and how poorly Milwaukee has been playing, it’s just about impossible to see a scenario where the Brewers regain first place with only three weeks left. The focus, then, has to be on the more reachable wild card.
If they fall short there too once the season is over, it’ll be amazing to think the Brewers spent the longest amount of time in first place in all of baseball—159 days and no longer counting—but that, in the end, it wasn’t long enough.
Statistics are accurate as of Sept. 8 and come from MLB.com, Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs.com, except where otherwise noted.
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