On Monday, the Milwaukee Brewers defeated the Seattle Mariners for their 11th straight victory. During this still-active streak, the Brewers twice swept the defending-champion Los Angeles Dodgers, widely regarded as the best team in the league, and came from from four games back to take sole possession of the National League Central lead. Given those accomplishments, I got to wondering where this current Brewers streak stacks up in team history.
There are eight streaks of at least 10 wins in the history of this franchise. The most famous, by far, is the one that started the 1987 season. The Brewers won their first 13 games in 1987, and the 12th of those is one of the most famous games the Brewers have ever played. That’s the “Easter Sunday” game, in which Milwaukee entered the bottom of the ninth trailing 4-1 but tied the game on a Rob Deer three-run homer and, with two outs, won it on a Dale Sveum walk-off homer.
If you’re willing to do some funky accounting, that streak actually stretches back into the 1986 season, in which the Brewers won their last three games. So, that 16-game stretch from the end of the 1986 season into the first two weeks of the 1987 season is not only the most famous winning streak in team history, it’s also the longest by a significant margin — no other Brewer win streak has exceeded 11 games (which is, of course, of note to Milwaukee residents, given the free burgers that come with a 12-game streak).
Besides the 1986-87 one and the current one, there is one other 11-game streak and five 10-gamers. The other streak of 11 games occurred in late June and early July of the 2021 season, when Milwaukee took advantage of a soft spot in their schedule. The Brewers won the last two games of a road series in Arizona before sweeping a pair of three-game series at home against the Rockies and Cubs and winning three on the road in Pittsburgh. Those teams were all bad: the Pirates and Diamondbacks both lost over 100 games, and the Cubs and Rockies were low-70s win teams (though the Cubs were in good position at the time, which I’ll talk more about later).
I won’t go deep on the 10-game streaks, but here they are, quickly, in reverse chronological order:
Milwaukee went on a run in late August of 2003, a surprising feat for a team that finished the season at 68-94 and in last place in the NL Central. But after three solid wins against an 86-win Phillies team, the other seven came against fellow woebegone NL Central teams, the Pirates and Reds.
About a year after the Easter streak, the 1988 Brewers won 10 in a row. That included three against the defending-champion Twins (who won 91 games in 1988) and five over an 84-win Royals team. Like the 1987 squad (who went 91-71), that was a good Brewers team at 87-75; they just didn’t have the juice to get into what was still only a four-team postseason.
The Brewers wrapped 10 wins around the All-Star Game in 1979. This was definitely a case of beating up on lesser teams: the 95-win Brewers won five against Cleveland, who finished one game over .500 but second-to-last in the American League East, and four against a miserably bad Blue Jays team, who were in just their third year of existence and didn’t lose fewer than 100 games until their fourth.
The 1978 Brewers won 10 in a row in the first half of June, a streak that included two sweeps of doubleheaders. These games all came against basement-dwelling division rivals as well; six against those hapless Blue Jays, two on the road against a solid Detroit team that finished fourth in the division but with a respectable 86-76 record, and two on the road in Cleveland (who finished 69-90).
The first Brewer win streak of 10 games came almost exactly five years prior to the second one, from June 8 to June 18, 1973. In this one, a mediocre Brewers team took advantage of similarly mediocre teams from the AL’s other division, the West, with consecutive sweeps of the Angels, Twins, and White Sox. Those three teams all won between 77 and 81 games and finished third, fourth, and fifth in the division. The last win came against a good Red Sox team, who ended the streak the following day.
So which of these is the most impressive?
As far as stakes, none of these happened at a crucial juncture in the season — the only late-season streak here was the late-August one by a bad team far out of the playoff picture in 2003.
The 2021 streak has the best argument here. On June 21, the Brewers lost to Arizona and were tied with the Cubs for first in the NL Central, 3.5 games up on the Cardinals. By the time the Brewers had won 11 in a row, Milwaukee had an eight-game lead in the NL Central; in those 13 days in which the Brewers were 11-0, the Cubs had gone 2-8 (the wins being the first two of those games). Chicago ended up losing 11 in a row between June 25 and July 6 and dropped to fourth in the division for good by the end of July. Milwaukee, meanwhile, used their winning streak to open a lead that was comfortable for the rest of the season; their lead in the division didn’t drop below four games again the rest of the way, and they spent almost all of September leading the division by double-digit games.
The 2021 streak was also the most “dominant.” In those 11 wins, the Brewers averaged 7.6 runs per game and outscored their opponents 84-28, an average of 5.1 runs per game. Of all of the other 10-game streaks in their history, none (including 2025) ever averaged a run differential higher than 3.6 per game. The 7.6 runs per game they scored during the streak are the highest of any streak by 0.8 runs, and the 2.5 they allowed was barely bested only by the 2.4 runs per game allowed during the 1979 and 2025 streaks.
So, in that sense, the 2021 streak was not only the most important in terms of season standings but also the most dominant. No other streak, however, meets the “degree of difficulty” threshold that the 2025 team’s streak does. Yes, the streak started with a win over the Marlins — who, for what it’s worth, had just wrapped up an eight-game win streak of their own — and the series between the two Dodgers sweeps was against the lowly Nationals. But the Dodgers are a juggernaut and the reigning champions, no matter how many of their players are injured or how many of their future Hall of Famers are stuck in slumps. The latest game, on Monday, was over a Seattle team that is very much vying for a postseason spot.
There’s also the fact that the 2025 Brewers roster is considerably less impressive, from a purely-on-paper standpoint, than the 2021 team, which boasted a Cy Young winner in Corbin Burnes, a fully healthy and in-his-prime Brandon Woodruff, and the one-two punch of Josh Hader and Devin Williams as the best back-end of a bullpen in the league. It’s true that the lineup that season was a little strange (no position player had more than 3.6 bWAR and I will be impressed if you could name both of the Brewers’ top two hitters by OPS+ —Willy Adames is easy… the second one? I’ll tell you at the end), but the pitching staff was truly elite.
We’ll wait and see if the 2025 streak propels the Brewers in the same type of way that the 2021 one did. In some ways, it already has—on July 6, when the streak started, the Brewers were four back, and at the end of play on July 21, with losses by the Cubs and Tigers, the Brewers were not only a game up in the division but they were the sole owners of the league’s best record. It will be interesting to see if the streak gives them a surge that continues to the end of the season and another division crown or not, but from a “stakes” perspective, it seems on par with the 2021 streak (and a month later in the season).
While the 1987 streak is (understandably) the most famous of the bunch, I’d right now say that the 2021 streak is the most “impressive,” but the 2025 streak is right there with it. Tonight they’ll try to extend the streak to 12.
(The 2021 Brewer who was second in OPS+? Avisaíl García.)
