The Inverted 2014 Brewers are the real 2012 Brewers

If the Brewers take 2 out of 3 this weekend in their final home series of 2014 against the Cubs, they will finish 83-79. That number may have stuck in your head, as it is the exact same record the Brewers had back in 2012. You know, the year they were under .500 until September 11th, sold at the trade deadline by sending Zack Greinke to LA, and rode a hot stretch in August and September to the fringes of the Wild Card race. Here's how those two teams stack up in terms of running win totals over the course of the year, assuming the 2014 squad wins 2 games this weekend.*

We can make it a bit more depressing by inverting the wins in 2014 and pretending the Brewers had played this season in reverse. It becomes pretty hard to distinguish it from the 2012 campaign.

There are actually a lot of similarities to the 2012 Brewers and the 2014 Brewers, which I may give some further attention in a future "what went wrong?" post. One interesting difference is that in 2012, Mike Fiers came out of nowhere to solidify the rotation and help the Brewers make a late-season push towards a wild card spot. In 2014, Mike Fiers came out of nowhere to give us something interesting to watch between 3 up, 3 down offensive innings every 5 days.

* Possibly a bad assumption

** Graphing package credit to R