What explains the Brewers scoring this year?

They were 2nd in the NL in runs per game with 5.14. Yet they were last in HRs with 154 (the league average was 188). Their SLG was .403 while the league average was .405. But they did lead the NL in OBP with .341 (the league average was .321). All data is from Baseball Reference and Stathead.

Given their OBP & SLG, how many runs per game would we expect them to score? To answer that I ran a regression of all teams from 2021-2025 with runs per game as the dependent variable and OBP & SLG as the explanatory variables.

R/G = 14.67*OBP + 10.8*SLG - 4.53

Plugging in the Brewers numbers (.314 OBP * .403 SLG) gets us 4.82 runs per game, 0.32 below their 5.14.

But the Brewers hit much better with runners on base than they did with the bases empty. Their OPS with runners on was .789. Win no runners on it was just .703. That is probably an unusually big difference. For all of MLB it was .742/.701. So Brewers differential of .086 was more than double what was the norm this year, .041. 

I ran another regression on the same data as before with runs per game as the dependent variable and OBP & SLG as the explanatory variables but this time OBP & SLG were broken down by situations with no runners on (NONE) and runners on (ROB). 

R/G = 4.42*NONEOBP + 5.12*NONESLG + 11.14*ROBOBP + 5.89*ROBSLG - 4.90 

This table shows the Brewers numbers this year

RobOBP	RobSLG	NoneOBP	NoneSLG
0.356	0.433	0.326	0.376

Plugging this data into the previous equation gets us 4.98 runs per game. This only off by 0.16 which is just half of the previous differential. So simply breaking down their performance by runners on and no runners on explains half of their differential.

One stat that amplifies this and would probably shrink the differential even more is HR% (HR/PA). The NL average HR% with no runners on was 3.14% this year. With runners on it actually went down to 2.95%. But the Brewers went up from 2.14% with no runners on to 2.77% with runners on.

With HRs, you are guaranteed runs. Hit a HR with a man on first base and you have two runs. Hit a double and maybe you only have runners on 2nd and 3rd but not necessarily any runs. So HRs tell us something above what SLG alone might tell us.

Another thing the Brewers were very good at was not hitting into DPs. They had the lowest percent in the NL this year at 7.7%. The league average was 9.0%. In 589 DP opportunities, the Brewers save 7.65 DPs. If DPs have a run value of -.44, This is another 3.37 runs saved for the Brewers (or .021 per game). That explains about 13% of the remaining gap.

So hitting well with runners on base and avoiding DPs might explain why the Brewers score more runs than expected based on OBP & SLG alone. 

The Brewers also had the highest OBP this year with the bases loaded, .383. The Angels were next with .367. They also had the highest batting average with the bases loaded, .354, The Twins were 2nd with .323.  Doing that well with the bases loaded will probably add some extra runs.