These other successful Brewers teams endured losing stretches; the good news is that they're easy to forget
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Most baseball fans acknowledge that even the most successful teams are prone to losing skids at some point in the season, often stretches that get forgotten based on what happens at season's end. The current Brewers, who lost a sixth straight game on Thursday and really needed a remarkable ninth-inning rally to avoid nine straight losses, probably fit the bill.
Despite the rough patch, the Brewers headed out on a three-city road trip nursing a half-game lead in the National League Central and still possessing a pitching staff that most acknowledge can keep the team in any game, albeit a pitching staff with some injury concerns.
Consider this a round of therapy, looking at when other top Brewers teams had to weather some mid-season storms.
2021: Six straight losses from May 2-7
Last year's Brewers team, which wound up with a healthy advantage for the NL Central title and won 95 games, started out 17-10, including rallying for three runs in the bottom of the 11th to shock the Los Angeles Dodgers in walk-off fashion, 6-5, on May 1. It's yet another parallel between this year's team and last year's, because things went sideways from there.
It started with a 16-4 drilling at the hands of L.A. to close a homestand, then a four-game sweep in Philadelphia in which the Brewers lost three one-run games and then dropped the finale, 2-0. The Brewers lost in Miami to kick off a three-game series, 6-1, to fall to 17-16 before winning the next two against the Marlins.
It was the start of a stretch when Milwaukee lost 13 of 17, though fortunes turned when the Brewers acquired shortstop Willy Adames from the Tampa Bay Rays. Milwaukee won its first three games with Adames on the roster and 17 of the first 21.
2019: 8 of 10 from June 11-21
The 2019 wild-card qualifier never lost more than five games in a row, but it did suffer eight losses in 10 games, and 10 losses in 14 games for that matter.
The Brewers started the skid June 11, going in with a 38-28 record. By the time the rough patch was over, Milwaukee had stumbled to 42-38, though the Brewers remained just one game out of first (they'd started the skid up a half-game).
The rough patch coincided with the decision to send Keston Hiura back to the minor leagues despite a strong start to his rookie year; he was back by the end of June and continued mashing. What made it worse was that the Brewers were playing some of the lower-tier teams in baseball: the San Francisco Giants (Milwaukee went 1-2), San Diego Padres (0-3), Cincinnati Reds (2-2) and Seattle Mariners (1-2) all finished the year well below .500. The skid ended with a loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the last-place finisher in the NL Central, before Milwaukee bounced back for three straight wins. But then the Brewers lost another eight of 10, also against the Reds, Pirates and Giants.
In all, that's a stretch of 10-19 against some of the league's bottom teams. Milwaukee bottomed out at 57-56 by Aug. 4 but stayed above .500 before exploding in September. With new rules on roster construction, it's understandable why Brewers fans wouldn't be banking on a late-season surge again.
2018: Seven straight from July 11-20
The 2018 season will be fondly remembered as the year the Brewers got within one win of the World Series, but a brutal finish to the first half of the season might still live on in collective memory.
Milwaukee lost six straight — including every chapter of a rare five-game series in Pittsburgh — before the all-star break, then dropped the first game back at home against the Dodgers before breaking the skid. In all, it was a stretch of nine losses in 11 games and 10 in 13.
The seven straight losses began with a walk-off setback against Miami in 12 innings, a loss that dropped Milwaukee to 55-38. It was the second walk-off loss in the series (two days earlier, the Marlins won in the 10th), but things really went south in Pittsburgh.
The Brewers lost four games in three days (including a Saturday doubleheader), and the kicker came Sunday, when the Brewers lost a 5-3 lead in the ninth but reclaimed control on a Brett Phillips RBI single in the 10th. But in a Pittsburgh downpour that made gripping and fielding challenging, the Pirates mounted a two-out rally, with a double by Josh Bell scoring the tying and winning runs for the walk-off win.
2011: Seven straight from May 1-6
The Brewers endured an ugly stretch early in a season that would become known for an NL Central Division title, the first division crown since 1982.
Milwaukee lost seven straight (and 10 of 13) mostly during a miserable three-city road trip to Houston, Atlanta and St. Louis.
Former Brewers outfielder Jason Bourgeois burned his old team with a walk-off single for the Astros in the ninth to kick off the losing slide, and the Brewers dropped all four in Atlanta (including a doubleheader). Over a window of nine games, the Brewers scored just 12 runs, falling to 14-20 on the year.
But the Brewers bounced back in a big way. Over the team's next six games, Milwaukee plated 40 runs. Milwaukee ended May with a 30-25 record, kept it rolling in June and really took off at the end of July and into August. The Brewers finished with a record 96 wins.
2008: Six straight from May 2-8
The first playoff-qualifying Brewers team since 1982 also had a rough May, including six straight losses during stops in Houston and Miami and a run of 11 losses in 15 games.
By the end of it, the Brewers were lodged at 17-19, and the malaise deepened to 20-24 before the Brewers righted the ship. Milwaukee finished with 90 wins, qualifying for the playoffs thanks to a run of six wins in the final seven games of the season.
1987: 12 straight from May 3-19
This wasn't a playoff team, but it's easy to forget that "Team Streak" finished with 91 wins and would have been a playoff team in the American League under the current format (and the last one, too).
The gold standard for losing streaks in Brewers lore was made all the more memorable because Milwaukee opened the season with a historic 13-game winning streak. The losses included a stretch of five games in which Milwaukee plated just six runs total, and all told Milwaukee scratched across 25 runs in the 12 games — and eight came in one game. But the Brewers were still 20-15 at the end of the swoon and never fell below .500. By August, the losing skid was basically a footnote as Paul Molitor went on a 39-game hitting streak and Teddy Higuera followed up with a 32-inning scoreless streak.
1982: A slow start and near-disaster finish
Most scholars of Brewers baseball remember the lone team to reach the World Series labored to a slow start, under .500 near the end of May and still at .500 as late as June 9. The Brewers replaced manager Buck Rodgers with Harvey Kuenn, a move that seemed to be the spark the Brewers needed en route to a 95-win season. The club never lost more than five in a row, though the four straight losses in September — including an unforgettable three straight against Baltimore in a span of 24 hours — nearly put the whole season in jeopardy.
JR Radcliffe can be reached at (262) 361-9141 or jradcliffe@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JRRadcliffe.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Other Milwaukee Brewers winning teams have endured losing stretches
