One stat paints troubling Cubs' NL Central picture compared to Brewers in playoff race

For the fourth consecutive year, the Chicago Cubs are trying to make a serious playoff push. And for the fourth straight season, they're looking right up at the Milwaukee Brewers in the NL Central.

After owning the division in the back half of the 2010s, the North Siders have ceded the throne to the Crew, who have won the Central in four of the past five campaigns and have made the postseason seven times in eight years. The hierarchy hasn't changed in 2026, with the Cubs lingering somewhere between four and seven games behind the Brewers for the division lead for most of the summer.

Though it's hardly the only stat that reveals the reasoning behind that gap, it's impossible not to look at their difference in run differential as strong evidence for the disparity in quality between these two contenders.

Cubs lag behind Brewers in run differential for one all-too obvious reason

As always, run differential requires a disclaimer. Teams outperform it every year, and there are a number of contemporary examples where one sneaks into October despite running a negative differential between runs scored and runs allowed. Heck, the Brewers' number this year (+163, the best in baseball) is pretty inflated from a recent 22-0 beatdown they laid on the Seattle Mariners.

But if you need a reason to care about this mercurial stat, just take a look at the recent history of the NL Central. In each of the past two seasons, the Brewers easily led the division in run differential and wound up running away with the title. The same also holds true for four of the past five seasons.

Of course, the one time it didn't was in 2023, when the Cubs' run differential was +15 better than Milwaukee's, despite the fact that the former missed the playoffs and the latter won the division. As I said, the stat isn't a flawless indicator of quality.

But it's also telling that the 2026 Cubs' run differential of +98 (easily the fourth-best mark in the NL) is well shy of where the Brewers are at, despite the fact that they've actually outscored their division rivals 665 to 648 on the season. That is, naturally, because the Crew have an elite pitching staff that has only surrendered 485 runs all year, the second-best mark in the sport.

On the other hand, the Cubs have given up 567 runs, which ranks right in the middle of the pack. Yes, they've been crushed by injuries as much as any other team in the league, but they also have a historically good defense which has kept a gaudy amount of runs off the board. They simply don't have the talent to match up to the Jacob Misiorowski-led gang on the mound.

Thankfully, run differential isn't how divisions are decided, and the Cubs will have a prime opportunity to wrestle control away from their biggest rival soon enough; the two teams will play seven times in 10 days at the beginning of September, in a stretch that will almost certainly dictate the regular season fate of the National League Central.

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