After years of falling short in the postseason, Milwaukee had all of the capital needed to acquire the sport’s best pitcher on a two-month rental. Inexplicably, they chose not to.
I’d like to start this off by saying that as a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, a relatively inactive trade deadline from the Milwaukee Brewers is about all I could ever ask for – perhaps leaving the door open for the Cubs to still chase down the Brewers for the NL Central crown.
In many ways, this felt like the year the Brewers simply have to go for it. After three decades dominated by futility that were only interrupted by an NLCS trip in 2011, Milwaukee has been one of the most consistent clubs across MLB for the last decade.
Since falling one game short of the World Series in 2018, the Brewers have only missed the postseason on one occasion – in 2022 – serving as the class of the NL Central in the 2020’s.
While the Brewers have posted at least 92 wins in each of the past three seasons, that regular season success has yet to translate into anything sustained once October rolls around. Milwaukee was upset at the hands of the Arizona Diamondbacks in a two-game NL Wild Card Round sweep in 2023 before getting their hearts shattered by Pete Alonso and the New York Mets the following season in the same round.
In 2025, it began to look like the Brewers were finally exorcising their October demons, holding off a comeback from the Cubs in the NLDS to defeat their archrivals in five games, earning their first bid to the NLCS since their 2018 seven-game heartbreaker to the Dodgers.
Unlike the back-and-forth series fans were treated to in 2018, the Brewers were absolutely boatraced by the Dodgers in last year’s NLCS, with Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto dominating a suddenly shell-shocked Milwaukee lineup that was eventually swept.
With the Dodgers only strengthened and still standing in the Brewers’ way to their first World Series berth as members of the National League, it would have only made sense for Milwaukee to pull out all of the stops and go for it in 2026.
First of all, I do want to make it clear that this deadline wasn’t the most catastrophic failure possible for the Brewers. They’re a first-place team that made multiple additions, shoring up a bullpen that has shown weaknesses at times.
The team sacrificed some of its prospect capital in making a trade with the divison rival St. Louis Cardinals for starter Dustin May and reliever JoJo Romero, while the Brewers also got together with the Colorado Rockies to acquire reliever Antonio Senzatela, a lifelong Rockie who has launched a second act in his career after converting from a starter to a reliever.
Even with those trades, the Brewers still maintain an elite farm system, ranked fourth across all of MLB even after this year’s deadline deals. So why did this team hold back, especially in a seller’s market when the top prize ended up with the Dodgers, the team the Brewers couldn’t afford to see get any better?
This is a question I can’t really come up with an answer to – especially in a deadline that saw the Cubs be more active despite having one of the lowest-ranked farm systems in all of baseball. It’s fair to believe that only teams with elite farms and top prospects to offer could have landed Skubal – something the Brewers could have and should have done with their wealth of top prospects, which includes shortstop Jesús Made, widely regarded as a top-five prospect in the sport.
Even putting the Brewers’ plethora of young talent aside, the biggest reason to go for it all this year is simply the results the fans and the rest of the league are seeing on the field. Led by phenom Jacob Misiorowski, the Brewers have perhaps the most unhittable pitcher in baseball right now – a young flamethrower who is routinely touching 103-104 mph during his starts, providing the kind of velocity that has literally never been seen from a starting pitcher in the radar gun era.
Through 21 starts in 2026, Misiorowski is leading all of MLB with the following stats:
- 1.63 ERA
- 195 strikeouts
- 257 ERA+
- 2.05 FIP
- 0.732 WHIP
- 4.5 Hits per 9 innings
- 13.8 strikeouts per 9 innings
- 6.72 strikeout-to-walk ratio
In addition to being a virtual shoo-in for this year’s NL Cy Young Award, Misiorowski has been dominant to an extent that invokes memories of turn of the century Pedro Martinez, a pitcher that appears to truly be on a different echelon than the rest of the league.
At 24 years old, it’s misguided and even irresponsible to rely on Misiorowski being a mainstay in the Brewers rotation for years to come while expecting this level of dominance. Just simply considering the fact that we’ve never seen a starter before him continually throw north of 103 mph, it is ill-advised to assume that he will be healthy enough to contribute at this level in future seasons.
Which makes the decision to not put everything on the table for a two-time reigning Cy Young Award winner all the more of an asinine decision.
The Brewers have reached the point in their current trajectory where there are no longer any season successes that don’t end in a World Series title. Sure, getting to the Fall Classic for the first time since 1982 would be a massive deal – but for a team that has won its division in four of the past five seasons and is poised to do it again this year, the opportunities to made gradual progress in postseason runs have come and gone. Whatever has worked for this team from April through September has stopped working in October.
There’s no guarantee that trading for Tarik Skubal would have equaled a World Series ring for Milwaukee, whose other weaknesses include an MLB-worst 101 home runs from their offense. But there’s no question that Skubal and Misiorowski would have formed the most dangerous 1-2 punch in a playoff rotation since Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole shared ace duties for the Houston Astros in 2018-19 – all while preventing Skubal from further strengthening the team that is already favored to win it all in the Dodgers.
There’s a chance none of this ends up mattering, as injuries and unexpected breakouts can change the course of how the final two months of the season will play out. But the Brewers had their best opportunity yet to seize the market’s top target and make themselves the team to beat in the National League.
Despite being the franchise that made the best trade deadline deal of my lifetime, the Brewers came up short of what they needed to do at this year’s trade deadline – and now have to overcome a more formidable Dodgers team to get where they have yet to go in this era.
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