TODAY’S SPORTSTAT — Cubs, Cardinals have Brewers’ number
By JERRY TAPP
After being swept by the Chicago Cubs in a four-game series lastt weekend, we have to ask:
Are the Cubs the Brewers “kryptonite”?
In fact, if we add the St. Louis Cardinals to the discussion, you can make a good case that if the Brew Crew wants to make a serious charge at a playoff spot this season, they better figure out a way to beat these two division opponents.
Let’s go back to 2016. Since then, the Brewers are 38-52 against the Cubs and Cardinals, a winning percentage of .422. From the 2016 season through games of April 29, 2018, the Brewers are 18-28 versus the Cubs (.391 winning percentage) and 20-24 (.455) versus the Cards.
Compare that to all other teams since 2016: The Brewers are 137-126 (.521) against all other MLB teams other than the Cubs and Cards. That’s a difference of about 100 percentage points (99 to be exact) … .422 versus the Cubs and Cards and .521 against all other teams.
This season is no different. MLB standings show the Brewers at 16-13. Ten of their 13 losses this year have come to the Cubs or Cards (1-7 versus the Cubs, 3-3 versus the Cards). That’s 4-10 versus the Cubs and Cards (.286 winning percentage) and 12-3 (.800) versus the rest of the league.
Any way you look at it, it’s a disturbing trend that the Brewers will need to figure out if they hope to challenge for a post-season spot in 2018.
Follow Jerry on Twitter @StatsonTapp
Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.