The Brewers are NL Central champs because they tried this offseason

The Brewers defeated the Cubs for the National League Central title, and if you were watching all season, it wasn’t that big of a surprise. Both teams were talented. Both teams put a lot of effort into the construction of the teams that played a 163rd game in the 2018 season. It turns out the very good team beat the very good team, which is the eternal theme of October.

If you take a big-picture view, of course, this makes no sense. The Brewers should not beat the Cubs. Not if you’re into narratives and easy, streamlined predictions.

The Cubs are a neo-behemoth. The Brewers play in baseball’s smallest TV market, smaller than Raleigh, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, and Columbus.

The Cubs were already ascendent when the Brewers threw up their hands and replaced their GM, and then they won a danged World Series.

The Cubs are a mess of first-round success stories, and the Brewers haven’t had a first-round pick star with them since Ryan Braun, who is now an elder statesman.

None of this makes sense, but the deeper you go, the weirder it gets. Consider the starting pitchers for Game 163. The Cubs were starting Jose Quintana, the Big Prize, the co-co-co-ace the Cubs snatched up for the low, low price of one of the best prospects in the minor leagues. He was the kind of pitcher the Cubs were supposed to have. They already had a stable of excellent starters, but they added another one that everyone wanted, just because. He was an available pitcher for bullies. The Cubs were bullies.

Jhoulys Chacin was not the Big Prize. He was on the Padres last year, and he did fine, but he didn’t attract a lot of attention in the collusion-sterity offseason, in which everyone pretended like they didn’t need starting pitchers.

Anyone could have had Chacin this offseason. Just a handful of teams could have afforded Quintana when he was on the market. It isn’t just a haves/have-nots situation when it comes to money; it’s about opportunity and cost certainty. It’s about one team having the luxury of a big-market safety net and the other team knowing they had no margin for error.

The difference is that once the Brewers patched up the rotation with duct tape and felt, they pretended like they were bullies. They jabbed a pin into the corkboard and said, here. Here’s our window. They were just about the only team this offseason to do that. They traded for a possible star (Christian Yelich) and ended up with an MVP (holy crap, Christian Yelich). They signed a premium free agent that cost them a draft pick (Lorenzo Cain), when most teams treated those free agents like lepers.

It would have been very, very easy for the Brewers to do all sorts of different things that would have made sense. Lance Lynn and Alex Cobb for the rotation, with Brett Phillips and Domingo Santana holding down the outfield? Why wouldn’t you go with that plan? Seems reasonable and practical for a cost-conscious team. Now that’s how a small-market team goes for it.

Except the Brewers had a different plan, and it involved turning their money and prospects into outfielders, their outfielders and prospects into relievers, and their remaining prospects into whatever they needed. Because they were bullies now. Even if it was a hard sell to convince anyone that they were bullies on the same level as the Cubs, they needed to move. They didn’t know when they would have another Eric Thames or Travis Shaw or, heck, Ryan Braun again. They correctly identified their window and went for it.

Think about everything that had to fall in place for the Brewers, though.

Think about what it took for the Brewers to get Travis Shaw: It took another rich team getting a free agent (Pablo Sandoval) with their vast resources, then deciding that Shaw was expendable because of that move.

Think about what it took for them to get Thames: It took other rich teams not even bothering with a questionable free agent because they could afford the real free agents.

Think about all of the labor machinations it took to make Cain available at a discount. Rich owners put barricades in place to prevent players like him from making the money their predecessors earned. That allowed a small-market team to sneak in when they decided it was time to spend, draft picks be damned.

Think about what it took for the Brewers to get Yelich. It took a weirdo team with one of the all-time greatest outfields to decide, nah, that’s not something that can help us in the future, which allowed the Brewers to swoop in on an MVP.

Think about what it took for the Mets to decide that Carlos Gomez was broken, which allowed the Brewers to deal with the Astros instead, coming away with Josh Hader and Joakim Soria (the latter, indirectly). It also allowed the Brewers to come away with a key game-163 double from Domingo Santana, if you want to get granular.

Every danged player on the Brewers is a marvelous what-if to ponder, more so than most teams, even. Up and down the roster, there is someone who could have been anywhere else, if not for the providence and derring-do that allowed the front office to sniff out Jesús Aguilar, Junior Guerra, and others.

This is all the kind of stuff that can happen. The Brewers weren’t supposed to be here, but they adjusted and re-adjusted to different skips and hops along the way. It’s not just that they rallied back from the depths of baseball hell, it’s that they did it so quickly, so unexpectedly, so flexibly. Look at this post from three years ago, in which I argued that new GM David Stearns was a good sign for a beleaguered franchise.

That’s the position Stearns is in. He’s inheriting an organization that can be in the postseason in two or three years. The first step is to not screw everything up. The second step is to build around what’s left over.

Oh, man. For 2015, this is absolutely prescient. I will pat myself on the back for this. Show me the reasoning for that argument:

they’re getting encouraging results from Jimmy Nelson and Taylor Jungmann

wait, that’s not why ...

The 2015 draft added outfielder Trent Clark, off to an excellent start in rookie ball (.309/.422/.442 with 20 steals), University of Virginia lefty Nathan Kirby and hard-throwing Cal Poly Pomona right-hander Cody Ponce

That’s not ... that’s not why the 2018 Brewers are here?

No, it’s not why the 2018 Brewers are here. They’re here because there’s value in forcing yourself through an open window, in taking a flawed roster and trying to grout over the imperfections. This offseason was a race to the bottom for a lot of teams, with only a handful deciding that this was their time. Most of those teams were rich teams.

The Brewers were not a rich team. They still aren’t. But they’re National League Central Champions, with something like a 1/8th chance at their first-ever World Series title. They attacked the offseason like few others, and they’ve toppled a giant.

Just note that I reserve the right to delete this column after the Cubs sweep the Brewers in the NLDS, which absolutely could happen. This isn’t over yet, and the odds are good that the small-sample goblins of the postseason will still drag the Brewers down into the depths.

Still, it’s inspiring that the Brewers are here. Not everyone tried this offseason. Not everyone would have tried last offseason. Not everyone would have looked for creative openings first and worried about draft picks and rebuilding second. The Brewers did.

For tonight, before the start of the real postseason, we definitely should. No matter what happens over the next month, the Brewers have advanced to the big boy postseason. And it’s because they tried, which is something we used to take for granted.

They tried, and now they’re a step closer to the NLCS, a pennant, or a championship. The Brewers thought, I don’t know, let’s get better and see what happens? What happened is they won their division.

That’s probably something we should celebrate and encourage.