Brewers' Remaining Strength of Schedule

We're all excited about the potential for a top-5 pick in next year's draft, so on a lark I decided to take a look at the remaining opponents for the Brewers. There are 21 series yet to be played, against 14 different opponents. Most of those are familiar faces - NL Central foes like the Cubs, Cardinals, Reds, and Pirates, so that should give you a pretty good sense of how things are going to go in the second half.

But we here at Brew Crew Ball like to be thorough, so what you'll see below is a color-coded table assigning a difficulty to each team based upon its win total this season. Let me anticipate the objection: straight wins are not necessarily an accurate reflection of talent. I'll concede the point. But that's what we're going to use, because it's quick and dirty and seems to pretty well correlate with our gut sense of who's good and who's not.

The lowest-win team (Astros) have 33 wins, and the highest-win team (Red Sox) have 58. That breaks down into about a 5-win range for each level (it doesn't quite even out, so I threw an extra win in the most difficult level). And as a gamer, I couldn't pass on the opportunity to assign difficulty labels based on Diablo III.

Now that you've got the scale down, here's how the Brewers remaining schedule looks:

Things start off easy enough for the Brewers, with some cupcake matches against the Marlins and Cubs. But once mid-August rolls around, they're in a world of misery. We're talking nine circles of hell, with numerous series against the Cardinals, Reds, Pirates, and a series against Atlanta thrown in for good measure. August and September are not going to be pretty.

All told, the Brewers have 68 games remaining. Of those 68 games, nearly half (33) are against some of the most difficult opponents in baseball; all but three of those are against opponents with at least 53 wins. There are 10 "Inferno"-level series against just one "Easy" series. Nearly 68% of the team's remaining games come against opponents with at least 43 wins, and it's arguable that some of those teams - particularly the Angels and Giants - will be more dangerous than their rank suggests.

Those chances of a top pick are looking pretty good after all.