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.

Players who had a six-year period when they led MLB in both OBP & SLG

I had bases.chat, the AI program created by SABR member Ted Ingram, find all of the data in the table below. Then I verified the data using Stathead from Baseball Reference. The search covered the years 1901-2025.

Yesterday's post listed all the players with both 400+ HRs and a .400+ OBP. Mike Trout was one of the fourteen players. I also noticed that he led all of MLB in both OBP & SLG over the years 2014-2019.

So I wanted to find out how many different players had done this. There are 12 different guys in the table below. For most guys, I show just their first six-year period when they did it. 

Most of the batters had overlapping stretches. Wagner, for example, also did it from 1904-1909 and 1905-1910. That gives him three periods, as shown in the last column. If a player is listed more than once, that means he had at least two non-overlapping six-year periods. Ruth did it over the years 1915-1920 and then did it from 1921-1926 and then from 1927-1932. 

To qualify, a batter needed 1,800+ ABs for any six-year period. 

Player	From	To	OBP	SLG	Periods
Honus Wagner	1903	1908	0.417	0.510	3
Ty Cobb	1906	1911	0.413	0.511	8
Joe Jackson	1908	1913	0.455	0.565	1
Ty Cobb	1912	1917	0.461	0.531	8
Babe Ruth	1915	1920	0.452	0.652	15
Babe Ruth	1921	1926	0.495	0.730	15
Babe Ruth	1927	1932	0.477	0.713	15
Ted Williams	1939	1944	0.481	0.642	17
Ted Williams	1945	1950	0.490	0.643	17
Ted Williams	1951	1956	0.487	0.632	17
Mickey Mantle	1957	1962	0.445	0.601	2
Willie McCovey	1965	1970	0.405	0.578	2
Frank Thomas	1989	1994	0.449	0.590	2
Barry Bonds	1997	2002	0.472	0.589	7
Barry Bonds	2003	2008	0.521	0.671	7
Albert Pujols	2004	2009	0.435	0.636	3
Mike Trout	2014	2019	0.425	0.597	4
Aaron Judge	2020	2025	0.423	0.645	1