Taking a look at the Brewers’ top candidates to win major awards in 2025 Kyle Lobner March 25, 2025 One of the most successful eras in Milwaukee Brewers history has, as you might expect, coincided with a significant run of notable individual performances. Since the 2018 season, the Brewers have had a National League Most Valuable Player (Christian Yelich), a Cy Young Award winner (Corbin Burnes), a Rookie of the Year (Devin Williams), a Manager of the Year (Pat Murphy), an Executive of the Year (Matt Arnold) and no less than five Relievers of the Year (Devin Williams twice, Josh Hader three times). The Brewers have won at least one of the aforementioned awards in six of the last seven seasons. Therefore, as a new season gets underway this week it’s reasonable to wonder which awards they’ll chase in 2025. Here are some options, from most to perhaps least likely: National League MVP While the Brewers have built much of their recent success on pitching and defense, their position player corps appears most likely to take home a major award this season. One player even opens the season as an odds-on candidate to be among the National League’s top talents: After a breakout 2023 season and an even better 2024 campaign, FanGraphs’ ZiPS projections have William Contreras as the eighth best player in the National League entering 2025. Contreras is, however, not alone among Brewers candidates to have an MVP-caliber season. Jackson Chourio’s debut season in 2024 put him on a trajectory alongside 19 players who went on to make the Hall of Fame. It’s not a given that Chourio will continue to follow a linear path to superstardom, but if he continues to take steps forward as he did in the second half of last season, then it’s certainly a possibility he will be among the NL’s top talents. And, of course, the Brewers already have one former NL MVP on their roster. Christian Yelich won the award in 2018 and may have done so again in 2019 if he hadn’t suffered a September knee injury. Yelich is 33 this season and only one player older than 30 has won the MVP in the last 20 years, but he was well on his way to his best offensive season since 2019 before back surgery ended his season early a year ago. The biggest challenge for a Brewer MVP candidate, however, might be an extremely star-studded field. With Shohei Ohtani expected to pitch again this season and Juan Soto, Francisco Lindor, Mookie Betts and Ronald Acuna Jr. all also in the National League, it would take a truly remarkable season (probably both for the player and the team) for a Brewer to be in this conversation. Manager of the Year In the 42 year history of the Manager of the Year Award, there have been just two repeat winners (Bobby Cox of the Braves in 2004-05 and Kevin Cash of the Rays in 2020-21). That fact alone makes it relatively unlikely that Pat Murphy, who won the award last year, will win it again in 2025. In fact, since Cox’s second win in 2005, the voters have selected someone different to win the award in the NL in each of the last 20 seasons. It stands to reason that someone can’t typically be the skipper of a surprise success team two years in a row, but it’s possible Murphy could be the exception to that rule. While the Brewers have been a contending team more often than not for most of a decade now, they’ve established much more of a “plucky overachiever” reputation than “juggernaut.” If they win 93 games and sit atop the NL Central again this season despite losing Willy Adames and Devin Williams, then Murphy probably deserves consideration for a second year on that throne. Reliever of the Year While there have been other awards for the game’s top relievers, the Trevor Hoffman NL Reliever of the Year Award has only been given out since 2014 and a Brewer has won five of the first 11 of them. With Devin Williams and Josh Hader no longer in the organization, however, a new player would have to take a big step forward to be in the conversation for being his league’s best bullpen arm. The top candidate to do so, of course, is returning closer Trevor Megill. Megill recorded 21 saves while Devin Williams was out last season and his traditional numbers suggest he can be one of the game’s best closers, as he gets plenty of strikeouts and limits walks. The advanced numbers offer an even greater cause for optimism: Megill was 2024’s top Brewer in Stuff+, a metric designed to evaluate pitch quality independent of other factors. Megill’s 122 mark in Stuff+ was tied for the 11th best in all of baseball. The Brewers do have a few other internal candidates to step forward if Megill needs to step back, with Joel Payamps, Elvis Peguero and perhaps Nick Mears (whose Stuff+ number also was better than his results in 2024) among the most likely to get the opportunity. All that being said, for someone to have a legitimate shot to be the league’s best reliever, they probably need to spend the whole season atop a team’s pecking order, and for the Brewers, that’s Megill. Executive of the Year Many of the same caveats presented above in Murphy’s Manager of the Year entry also apply to Matt Arnold, who won Executive of the Year last season. No one has ever repeated as Executive of the Year (in fact, no one has won it twice since the award was established in 2018). Arnold also has to compete with a larger pool of contenders here, as this award is MLB-wide and not league specific. Arnold’s moves this offseason also haven’t been as high profile as the ones the Brewers made a year ago. The case for him to win the award in 2024 was largely “he traded Corbin Burnes and his team still won 93 games” and, with all due respect to Devin Williams, this winter’s top trade was not on that seismic level. For Arnold to repeat his award-winning season, the Brewers would either need to be involved in some significant moves during the season or significantly outperform last year’s already impressive results. Comeback Player of the Year The Brewers do have some candidates to “re-emerge on the baseball field during a given season,” which was the criteria MLB established for this award when they developed it as an official honor in 2005 (the league does not recognize the version The Sporting News has been giving out since 1965). No Brewer has ever won the league-sanctioned version of the award, although former Brewers Casey McGehee and Prince Fielder both won it after leaving Milwaukee. Back in January, Adam McCalvy of MLB.com identified Christian Yelich as a candidate to win this award in 2025, highlighting a possible significant difference in health for the former MVP after his 2024 back surgery. As noted above, however, Yelich was already well on his way back from a productive standpoint before his season ended early in 2024. Depending on how much longer he needs to complete the final stages of his recovery, it’s possible Brandon Woodruff could also emerge as an option. Woodruff hasn’t pitched in an MLB game since September 2023, but appeared in games this spring as part of his recovery from shoulder surgery. If he returns soon and can carry either the depth or quality of performance he’s provided in past years, then he might be one of baseball’s top re-emerging talents. Rookie of the Year While young players have been and continue to be a big part of the Brewers’ potential for success, at the moment they’re somewhat light on players who might make the jump from the minors to the majors early in the 2025 season. The Brewers did have rookies they’re excited about in camp this spring, but at a bare minimum they don’t seem likely to spend a full season in the majors. Infielder Caleb Durbin came over in the aforementioned Devin Williams trade and appeared likely to get an opportunity to play third base, but has since been returned to the minors. Jacob Misiorowski also got a long look this spring, but his blazing fastball wasn’t enough to overshadow his control challenges (five walks in 7 2/3 innings). At the moment, the Brewers’ breakout star of the spring has been infielder Vinny Capra, who seems to have performed his way into an opportunity to play at the MLB level. Capra has appeared in just 20 MLB games across his previous organizations, but he’s accumulated enough time on MLB rosters in his previous stops to be ineligible for the award. Cy Young While the Brewers’ reputation as a repeat contender has largely been built on pitching and defense, since trading Corbin Burnes they’ve gotten there much more so with depth than individual star-level performances. Thirteen pitchers appeared on at least one Cy Young ballot in the NL in 2024 (where voters rank their top five pitchers) but none were Brewers, the first time that had happened since 2019. By FanGraphs’ version of WAR, the Brewers’ top pitcher last season was Freddy Peralta, finishing 27th in the NL. This winter’s transactions did net the Brewers a new candidate to pursue this award, but he’s likely a long shot: The aforementioned ZiPS projections have Nestor Cortes entering the season as the NL’s 20th best pitcher, projected for 2.7 WAR. Freddy Peralta is not far behind at 25th and 2.4. The Dodgers and Phillies combine to have eight pitchers ranked above the top Brewer on that list. Not unlike the MVP discussion above, the Brewers’ odds of winning a Cy Young Award are highly influenced by some of the incandescent pitching talent in their league. Over the weekend, MLB.com collected 59 expert votes on potential award winners this season and said former #1 overall pick, 2024 NL All Star starter and Rookie of the Year Paul Skenes “almost feels inevitable” to win the award after posting a 1.96 ERA in 23 starts in his debut season in 2024. Even if he doesn’t extend that performance across a full season, however, he also shares a league with Zack Wheeler of the Phillies, new Diamondback Corbin Burnes and Logan Webb of the Giants, among others.
