The Brewers’ latest stumble with runners in scoring position doesn’t look like a season-long collapse. It looks like a team pressing at the wrong time.
Milwaukee still owns an .800 OPS with runners in scoring position this year, which ranks third in baseball. That’s not the profile of an offense that has forgotten how to hit in key spots.
It’s more the picture of a club that has hit a rough patch, and a nasty one at that. Before last Monday, the Brewers were still sitting at an .842 OPS in those situations in June.
Then came one ugly week.
“We're just going through a rough stretch of it,” Christian Yelich said. “We've been really good at it at times. Right now, we're in one of those times where we're really bad at it, but we'll come through on the other side of it, and I think we'll start getting back to normal.”
The results since the start of the Cincinnati series have been brutal. Brewers hitters have gone just .118/.216/.230 with runners in scoring position over that span. Milwaukee still went 4-2 during the stretch, but the lack of clutch contact showed up at the worst possible moments, including Sunday’s 4-3 loss to the Cubs that cost them a three-game series.
The problem isn’t just bad luck. The at-bats themselves have gotten worse. Jason Lane, Milwaukee’s offense and strategy coordinator, pointed to hitters trying to do too much.
“Sometimes guys maybe try to do too much, and that's where we try to preach you've got to take what the game gives you,” Lane said postgame on Sunday. “And that might be taking pitches and handing it to the next guy.
But there weren't too many mistakes in those situations, from what I saw. Just, we offered at some pitches on the edges that got a couple ground balls, a pop-up, and a strikeout in those situations.”
The Statcast numbers back that up. Since June 22, the Brewers have chased more pitches outside the zone with runners in scoring position, and they’ve also seen their contact quality crater on the pitches they should be able to handle. The table in the source lays out the shift: chase rates are up, contact rates are down, and the result is more strikeouts and more weak contact.
That’s only part of the issue, though. Milwaukee has also been missing on in-zone pitches and getting underneath the ball more often. That’s how you end up with pop-ups and strikeouts in spots where one clean swing can change an inning.
The bigger concern is what’s happening on the hittable pitches. According to Statcast, the Brewers have actually been more on time in the heart of the zone, but not in a good way.
They’re cheating to pitches they think they need to punish, trying to force damage instead of staying controlled. That’s pulling hitters off the ball and leaving them with less bat to work with.
In plain terms, the pressure is showing.
“Trying harder and wanting it more isn't going to make it happen,” Yelich said. “Obviously, you want to get the job done.
Everybody wants to get the job done. There's no right answer for how to do that.
It's just, oftentimes, you've got to slow that down and try to focus.”
Sunday offered plenty of examples. In the third inning, with runners on first and third and one out, Jackson Chourio and Brice Turang both struck out to strand the runners. Chourio chased a high fastball for strike three, while Turang expanded the zone on two fastballs during the at-bat.
The fourth inning brought more missed chances after Andrew Vaughn’s leadoff triple. Jake Bauers rolled over a 2-1 changeup on the outside corner, Gary Sánchez popped up a curveball up and in, and Sal Frelick followed with a 100-mph groundout. By then, the damage was done and the inning had gone cold.
Then came the ninth. With runners on first and second, Cooper Pratt and Joey Ortiz chased multiple high fastballs and shut down what could have become a walk-off rally. Instead, the Cubs scored three times against Joel Kuhnel in the top of the 10th, and Milwaukee came up short in the bottom half.
It was too much wasted traffic in one game, and it fit the pattern that has emerged over the past week.
“You feel like you kind of left one out there today, but it is what it is,” Yelich said. “Part of the season, and you've just got to keep grinding through it.”
The Brewers’ track record says they should straighten this out. But for this lineup, which doesn’t have the kind of overwhelming in-game power that lets hitters sell out for damage on every pitch, the answer is usually simpler: slow down, wait for a better pitch, and trust the approach.
“Maybe we could have waited for a better pitch, but that's the battle of driving in runs,” Lane said. “It's the hardest thing to do at the plate sometimes, and it's where your discipline has to show up, and we didn't do a great job of that today.”
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