The pitching staff has hit a rough stretch, sure, but the club has hardly reverted to some terrible performance level. In fact, even through a dreadful 7-9 July record thus far, the Brewers pitchers remain better than average for the season (assessed against their National League / Miller Park environment).

You’ve almost seen it all in 2018, everything except for your beloved Brewers’ ability to coordinate their very best baseball. But that’s life; life is nothing but a series of unending problems with distribution, and the Brewers’ current issues revolve around one absolutely nasty stretch of eight games in which their worst offense and pitching performances coordinated.

The Brewers are a very good team. They just are. Sorry about that, those are the facts. Averaging Daily Pythagorean records (expected records based on the club’s Runs Scored and Runs Allowed), the Brewers average nearly 85 wins on the season (with a standard deviation of approximately 11.1). That’s good enough, but regular Baseball Prospectus Milwaukee readers will know that that average expected win total is dragged down by atrocious April baseball. In fact, luckily for Brewers fans, their favorite club’s run differentials are skewed data, for even though the club is averaging 85 expected wins on the season, the Brewers’ median expected wins are 89, with a mode of 90 expected wins. Say it again, the Brewers are a very good baseball team. In fact, that’s a contending team, even.

If you don’t think 89 or 90 wins are good enough, that’s quite all right, as the Brewers are rather frequently expected to win 91, 92, and 93 games in 2018 thus far.

That series in Pittsburgh was atrocious, there’s no getting around that. The series in Miami was very bad, as well. Yet, luckily the Brewers had also soundly beaten Atlanta in a four game series (23 RS / 14 RA), they swept Minnesota (11 RS / 7 RA), and they played nearly geometrical .500 baseball in the seven series prior to these proceedings (78 RS / 73 RA). If you don’t believe that the Brewers deserve to have a rough week every now and then, especially not on the back end of an injury-riddled 21-game-stretch-in-20-days, I certainly hope you march into your boss’s office and request that they throw out the good stuff the next time you get assessed during a bad week.

The trouble with a baseball season is that it’s an extremely long affair, so long that there is every opportunity for every team, from top to bottom in the league, to show all of their warts. And show them thoroughly. In fact, this is probably not the worst stretch of baseball you’ve seen from the Brewers in 2018, if you’re a regular fan. This might not have been the worst stretch of baseball we see yet! Compare Milwaukee’s recent series outcomes in Pittsburgh and Miami with other choice series:

That’s a lot of very bad baseball outcomes, but ironically many outcomes on the field balanced with relatively solid underlying production. What is perhaps special about the Pittsburgh series is that it’s one of the few times all year that the results on the field really matched the underlying performance; it was simply bad baseball. But, it’s bad baseball from a fundamentally good baseball club, perhaps correcting some other distributional injustices that occurred early in the season. For example, from April 4 through April 18, the Brewers posted a relatively respectable 6-8 record despite underlying performance of 38 RS / 57 RA. That’s a 4-10 club that just gained two additional wins during a stretch of relatively hideous baseball.

By now, a theme should be apparent for these Brewers: they are a club that is facing distributional oddities throughout the year. They’re a good baseball club that has played extended stretches of ugly ball at times, while also unleashing an elite bullpen, exceptional fielding, and a strong starting pitching rotation (probably thanks to the fielding) to weather the offense’s cold snaps.

The offense, overall, looks rough, but it has been coming around in fits and starts, and steadily reaching more capable run production levels.

What every sour fan who has mentioned that the Brewers are merely a .500 team since the end of May has forgotten, however, is that there is plenty of good in this seeming pile of mediocre baseball, too.

From May 26 onward, Milwaukee is indeed a .500 baseball team, but one with underlying performance metrics that one would expect to play a bit higher. Perhaps most importantly, the diverging bats and arms reversed those trends over the last 46 games, instead producing at approximately the same better than average level. For all the awful distributional outcomes that this team has witnessed over those 46 games, the club itself is in phenomenal underlying position in terms of their production. Now, it is time for the club to get healthy, rest most of the pitching staff over the All-Star Break, make some key upgrades (perhaps recalling Orlando Arcia from Triple-A Colorado Springs, and shifting Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff into the rotation). There are certainly concerns that the club can resolve, but these amount much more to standard in-season fine-tuning acquisitions than sea change, roster shifting developments.

It’s a shame that so many Brewers fans are writing off this bizarre club, expecting this Pittsburgh series to be the end of the competitive stretch for the team. For in fact, this last road trip was a blip within the team’s excellent improvement over the last half of the season, but a team that has hardly seen any just outcomes on the diamond, for all their improvements. If you’re inclined to argue that this club is done, their actual performance suggests that they were just getting starting recently, and that they have yet to see their efforts pay dividends.

These Brewers are a very good baseball club.

Since it was so much fun last year, the Daily Pythagorean feature remains a constant on BPMilwaukee Twitter. However, this year the results generate much less excitement, simply because I think this year’s Brewers fans have much higher expectations for the club.

Even after a major correction game (!!!), the #Brewers (33-20) still over play their run differential by three wins (30-23). Milwaukee is on pace for approximately 90 wins (-15 RS / +107 RA).

— BP Milwaukee (@BPMilwaukee) May 27, 2018

Last year, it was genuinely exciting to see the surprise rag-tag chumps challenge the National League, and it was joyful to see that the club was pretty much on target for a true 84-85 win pace throughout the season (which they eventually cashed in, and more). This year, there might be a bit more dread in the Daily Pythagorean: an elite pitching staff indeed leads the club, but a month of brutally cold bats (like, truly worst in the league offensive style), coupled with a team that must win every close game in order to succeed (often due to razor’s edge RS / RA margins) means that this team has much worse average performances than the 2017 Brewers.

Basically, the purpose of constructing a Daily Pythagorean W-L model is to analyze variance across the course of 162 game seasons. While analysts frequently use run differentials to present a general status update of ballclubs, upgrading that analysis to a daily metric allows one to average club’s run differential across the course of 162 games. The benefit of this model is that one can also construct an internal Standard Deviation, which is one potential metric for capturing internal variance of a ballclub. By constructing Daily Pythagorean assessments of multiple teams, one can come to understand how variance occurs across different baseball teams (I did this with an assessment of Playoff teams and contenders in the expanded Wild Card era). Thus one can indeed compare point-in-time RS / RA and W-L and use run differential expectations to gauge a team’s “true potential” at a glance, but by averaging results over the course of an entire season, one can also come to understand the general trends of a ballclub. This involves actual W-L, actual RS / RA record, average W-L, and average RS / RA record, as well as the standard deviation for any metric that reflects an average measurement.

Fully one third of the way through 2018, this Brewers team is completely different than last year’s club despite many surface similarities:

• First and foremost, the 2018 Brewers are thoroughly out playing their underlying run differential, while the 2017 Brewers under performed throughout the vast majority of the season. In 2017, the Brewers under played their run differential for 91 games, and matched it for seven games; by contrast, the 2018 Brewers have over played their run differential throughout the entire season thus far. In fact, the 2018 Brewers have not once matched their Pythagorean W-L (thus far).

• Through 53 games, the 2017 Brewers actually produced a better than average offense, with a typical +11 RS mark for the first 53 games; by contrast, the pitching was average through the first third (+1 RA). However, those marks completely changed by the end of the season, as the bats fell to -17 RS while the pitching surged to become one of the best staffs in the NL. These year-end figures are following suit in 2018 thus far, with the club averaging -11 RS and +13 RA through 53 games. Thus, it is worth looking at the run differential switch that occurred in 2017 (fully materializing around Game 114) and questioning the overall path of the 2018 bats and arms.

• Perhaps most importantly, the 2017 Brewers exhibited astonishingly low variance. In fact, their run differential Standard Deviation was lower than every 2017 playoff contender except for the Cubs. The 2017 Brewers were exactly who they were: With a window of 80-to-90 wins averaged throughout the season, there was a very clear idea of where the 2017 Brewers would land. This is decidedly not the case in 2018, where the Brewers are averaging an 80 win run differential with a huge standard deviation (12 wins). This is a large standard deviation even for early season analysis (for example, only the 2017 Dodgers and 2017 Twins exhibited higher early season variance). Basically, the Brewers could be a 68-win club, or they could be a 92-win club, given their average underlying elements.

Let’s look at this in detail, for I gather that many fans will not be happy thinking about a 68-win 2018 Brewers club at this point. But, it fits the balance of the club’s characteristics: Milwaukee is using an elite bullpen to dominate close games, but it’s not difficult to imagine a very good bullpen losing a few more close games after a struggling offense fails to pick up a blown lead. This scenario does not even require the Brewers relievers to be bad; it just requires the distribution of outcomes to spin in a different direction than those witnessed thus far (which is an exceptional 14-5 record in one-run games). The club could simply face close-game fatigue, as they are currently on pace to play 57 one-run games. Should that success switch around, and the Brewers bats go quiet for another month, and the pitching staff is unable to continually walk the line of exceptional run prevention, it’s quite easy to see an extended cold stretch emerging (recall that this is the offense that was Twenty Three runs below average after their first 37 games; so, these last 17 games have been cathartic if uncharacteristic, and those underlying traits remain). Yet even a 24-30 record in one-run games would be rather mundane, if potentially devastating to playoff odds.

At the same time, a 92-win 2018 Brewers team seems downright reasonable given that the Milwaukee Nine are systematically yielding ground balls into an excellent defense, and now the bats are coming around to boot. In fact, this was one particular scenario I outlined while discussing Runs Prevented rankings approximately 10 days ago. In fact, a 92-win season would be close to the club’s Pythagorean pace entering Sunday, and that pace following Sunday’s win. The club features a legitimately exceptional bullpen even after one accounts for potential regression from some of the top percentile performances. What is difficult to discern is that the elements are the same as the 68-win Brewers, it’s simply that their distribution is different. So, as expected in many cases, the 2018 Brewers will continue to be a team that lives and dies by the margins of the roster; this is a team without aces, and arguably even a team without a club-defining offensive superstar, but one that succeeds because the depth of those characteristics exhibit quality across each and every roster spot (which has included 19 position players and 22 pitchers already, among the highest totals in the NL).

Unlike last year, the Daily Pythagorean exercise offers significantly more doubt for the potential futures of the Brewers. Last year, the Brewers were about as “true” as one could like a team to be, and they steadily played out their course. This year, the Brewers are rocketing to a thrilling start, albeit one with substantially more variance underlying their course. The players are familiar, the roles are set, but the outcome hangs in the balance: the next question remains whether Milwaukee can simply continue to out play their run differential and render this whole debate moot, and the last question is whether GM David Stearns will make midseason acquisitions that strengthen the club.