By Frederic J. Frommer
The Tampa Bay Rays and Milwaukee Brewers, who meet in the World Series starting Friday night in Milwaukee, defied modern baseball orthodoxy this year by embracing a small-ball approach to manufacture runs like it was the 1980s.
Perhaps fittingly for two against-the-grain teams, this World Series pits franchises that have never won a title — the first time that’s happened since 1980, when the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Kansas City Royals.
For years, baseball teams have chased the holy grail of home runs, believing that was the most efficient way to score. Along the way, they ditched old-school tactics such as stolen bases and sacrifice bunts as passé.
The Brewers and Rays, by contrast, embraced them. The Rays led the American League with 164 stolen bases (tied for second in all of baseball, behind the Washington Nationals). The Brewers were close behind with 162, fifth-best overall.
Tampa Bay outfielder Chandler Simpson — whose batting line of .306 with no homers seems right out of the 1985 speedy St. Louis Cardinals lineup — led the AL with 46 stolen bases, one of five Rays players with double figures in steals. The Brewers had seven players in that category, led by third baseman David Hamilton’s 30 swipes.
And both teams excelled at what many thought had gone the way of the complete game: sacrifice bunts. The Rays led MLB with 45; the Brewers were fifth with 37.
Milwaukee and Tampa Bay were tied for tops in batting average (.258) and finished first and fifth in on-base percentage (.341 and .326, respectively). They both played solid defense.
But when it came to homers, both teams employed a relatively low-power attack. The Brewers were last in the National League in homers with 154, and the Rays were fifth-lowest in the American League with 169, although Junior Caminero certainly supplied plenty of thump for Tampa with 42 homers.
“Home runs come and they’ll help you win games,” Brewers second baseman Brice Turang said on the eve of the playoffs. “And so do stolen bases. So do walks, playing defense. All that matters as well.”
The Brewers also bucked the homer-happy formula of the franchise’s only pennant-winning team, 44 years ago.
Back in 1982 — so long ago that they were in a different league and the Rays didn’t exist yet — a Brewers team nicknamed “Harvey’s Wallbangers” smashed their way to the American League pennant with an MLB-best 216 homers — 30 more than any other team. The ’82 Brewers, led by manager Harvey Kuenn, featured sluggers such as Gorman Thomas, who hit 39 homers, Ben Oglivie (34), Cecil Cooper (32), MVP Robin Yount (29), and Ted Simmons (23).
Essentially, those ’82 Brewers were built for today’s game, using home runs to fuel their MLB-best 95 wins. Ironically, they finally found their match in the slap-hitting Cardinals, who hit 67 homers, last in baseball. In fact, the Cards’ leading home-run hitter, George Hendrick, went deep just 19 times — which would have tied for sixth on the Brewers.
But St. Louis, which won the World Series in seven games, made up for that lack of high-power voltage with electricity on the basepaths, stealing an NL-best 200 bases and topping the league with 52 triples with a style known as “Whiteyball” — also named for their manager, Whitey Herzog. The strategy was to use Busch Stadium’s artificial turf and spacious outfield gaps to manufacture runs while relying on talented (and often speedy) defenders such as Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, Keith Hernandez, and Tommy Herr to hold down the opposing team’s offense.
You can almost call this year’s Brewers, who used a similar strategy, a tribute band to the ’82 Cardinals. Is it any wonder that the Brewers’ home ballpark plays the ‘80s Bruce Springsteen hit, “Glory Days,” after victories?
Even as Milwaukee found a new power gear in its National League Championship Series sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers, hitting seven homers in four games, the Brewers used a small-ball attack in several key moments.
In the opening game, for example, they took a decisive 2-1 lead in the fifth inning, thanks to a leadoff walk, a sacrifice bunt, and a single. Then in the next game, Jake Bauers — who led the Brewers with 26 homers, which would have been fifth-best on the ’82 team — coaxed a 12-pitch, seven-minute walk against LA ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The next batter, Christian Yelich, followed with a go-ahead single. The Brewers went on to win 7-4.
In Game 3, Bauers had the same approach, this time outlasting Blake Snell through 11 pitches, capped by a home run. Although it ended in a long ball, Bauers’s patient strategy represented Milwaukee’s season-long process of grinding out at-bats. On Fox’s postgame show, analysts Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz both marveled about those plate appearances.
“We’re in awe,” a smitten A-Rod told Bauers, adding that his 12-pitch walk and 11-pitch homer were “two of the greatest at-bats we’ve all ever seen.” (Bauers would go on to win the NLCS MVP.)
Later in the show, Rodriguez praised the Brewers for a disciplined approach (they had baseball’s lowest chase rate of balls outside the strike zone), and noted they had the lowest launch angle of any team this season — another buzzword in today’s power-obsessed game
“You don’t have people trying to launch home runs,” he said approvingly.
The Rays used a pair of homers, by Caminero and Yandy Díaz, to put away the Cleveland Guardians in the decisive sixth game of the American League Championship Series. But the Rays hit just two other homers over the first five games, relying on a multifaceted attack over the series that included nine doubles, a triple, and eight stolen bases in eight attempts.
“They got here by winning 98 games in the regular season thanks to excellent pitching, strong defense and a group of unselfish hitters with a knack for bunting and playing fundamental baseball,” observed Associated Press sportswriter Rob Maaddi after the Rays claimed their third pennant.
Their previous trips to the World Series are of more recent vintage than the Brewers: 2008, when they lost the Phillies, and 2020, when they fell to the Dodgers.
One of these teams will end a championship drought. But no matter who loses, this season proves that while some “dig the long ball,” small ball can win a team a World Series title.
Frederic J. Frommer, a sports and politics historian who has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic and other national publications, is working on a book, Right On! How Money and Mayhem Revolutionized Baseball in the ‘70s.
