A fallacy we see every single year without exception is fans, analysts, and reporters going on their soapboxes to say the Yankees should be more like whatever team ended their season.

It happened with the Blue Jays in 2025, and with the Rays this year. Both teams made more contact, used platoons to create advantages everywhere, and deployed speed when needed. On paper, you might think that these approaches are worth replicating.

As such, the Yankees openly tried to copy the Blue Jays' hyper-platoon system, with Aaron Boone even admitting to asking John Schneider about it in the offseason. As we now know, just as the Blue Jays completely imploded, the Yankees' offense regressed by heavily relying on a volatile strategy.

With the Rays, it wouldn't be surprising if their type of baseball looked more like it did in the postseason, boasting the worst offensive postseason of any pennant winner ever, than it did en route to 98 wins in the regular season next year. They're not a team to copy.

The Brewers, who captivated baseball with their style of play, show a much more sustainable product.

While several aspects of the Yankees' organization don't need to be tweaked, particularly their pitching development, here are a few things they can learn from the 2026 World Series champions.

Lineup balance

While all of baseball billed a Rays-Brewers World Series as a symbol of the past with two teams that just slap the ball around, that's not entirely true.

Really, it shows what it looks like when an extreme example of contact reliance meets a perfectly balanced lineup that can both make contact when needed and hit the long ball.

Did the Brewers finish second-to-last in home runs in the regular season? Yes, but you can explain this in the sense that they don't have any hulking sluggers. Teams at the top of the home run leaderboard had guys like Ben Rice, Yordan Alvarez, James Wood, Munetaka Murakami, and Pete Crow-Armstrong.

The Brewers' leading home run hitter was Jake Bauers with 26, one of the lowest on any team, but that doesn't mean they swing a bunch of wet noodles. Jackson Chourio hit 25, Brice Turang hit 21, and William Contreras hit 18, despite battling injuries.

Those guys, along with several others, showed up with their power in October. In 13 playoff games, they hit 13 home runs. Only the Dodgers, whom they swept, matched that pace among the teams that made the LCS. The Rays hit eight home runs in 14 games. The ability to do damage has to exist.

While they don't strike out much as a team, they aren't completely strikeout-averse to a fault like the Rays. As we saw in the World Series, Tampa's persistence in putting bat to ball, no matter how softly hit, saw them get diced up by guys like Jacob Misiorowski, who's extremely hard to square up.

As for the Brewers, out of the10 players who accrued at least 300 plate appearances in 2026, five of them had below-average strikeout rates: Garrett Mitchell (31.5%), Christian Yelich (27%), Bauers (27%), Turang (25.1%), and Chourio (23.4%). They complement it with some great contact bats, but they have guys who whiff a lot.

The trend of those high-strikeout players? They're all productive. While Yelich is a shell of himself and was reduced to a glorified platoon bat at times, the other four were All-Star-caliber hitters in the sense that Rice, Aaron Judge, and Giancarlo Stanton (when he's healthy) are.

Hitters like them, and a healthy Austin Wells and 2025 Jazz Chisholm Jr., would've fit in on this team. Hitters like Ryan McMahon, 2026 Chisholm, and Spencer Jones wouldn't have.

That distinction is the biggest difference between these teams. The Brewers do not employ unproductive free swingers. If you're going to strike out, you have to do damage consistently. Not counting Yelich, the highest strikeout rate among their below-average hitters is David Hamilton at 22.2%, who does a lot of damage with his speed when he makes contact.

This is an approach worth replicating. The Yankees can use their spending power to build a formidable top five or six hitters who can mash with strikeout risk, while also filling the bottom of the lineup with guys who can make contact and use their speed to help the team in other ways.

As crazy as it sounds, would Anthony Volpe stick out like a sore thumb as the No. 9 hitter on the Brewers? Or George Lombard Jr.? Or Wells? Maybe Wells, since he strikes out a bunch and doesn't have tremendous upside, but guys who make enough contact to provide value with their speed and defense at the bottom of the order are something the Brewers would do.

The Yankees should explore all avenues to improve next season and shouldn't focus solely on the Brewers' roster construction. They should consider filling out their bench and bottom of the order with players like these. Joey Ortiz, Sal Frelick, and David Hamilton aren't stars, but they contributed just enough.

Player buy-in and development

When a team that goes through a proper rebuild wins a title, fans often point to their developmental success and wonder why their team can't do that.

In some regards, it's reasonable, but for a lot of semi-recent champions (2016 Cubs, 2017 and 2022 Astros, 2023 Rangers), they benefitted from a prolonged bottoming-out phase that allowed them to accrue countless high draft picks.

Such a thing is not available for the Yankees, who will pick outside the top 30 for the third straight year in 2027 because of their spending and haven't picked higher than No. 15 in 33 years due to their sustained success.

The Brewers, however, are not a team that relies on the blue chippers realizing their natural-born talent.

This team hasn't lost more than 76 games in a full season since 2016. Any fruits of that labor are long gone. Sure, as a small-market team, they have inherent draft and international signing advantages due to competitive balance measures in the CBA. But they don't have overtly better picks than the Yankees.

Instead, they're incredible at player development. Jacob Misiorowski was a second-round pick. Logan Henderson was a fourth-round pick, along with Aaron Ashby, in 2018. Cooper Pratt was a sixth-round pick. They signed Abner Uribe for $85,000. They signed Chourio for $1.9 million.

While some of their picks, like Mitchell and Frelick, were obtained with selections not available to the Yankees, all these guys were able to be drafted or signed. Player identification and development were crucial to their success.

Their savvy wheeling and dealing got guys like Hamilton, Contreras, Bauers, Trevor Megill, and more. They found guys with traits and developed them. Bauers himself was a Yankee in 2023 and actually rebuilt some of his major-league viability here after initially signing on a minor-league deal in the summer of 2022. But the Brewers helped him find something in 2026.

In the end, the most important thing here might be full-team buy-in.

Some people are weirdly conflating the Brewers' approach with anti-analytics, but you can argue that no team uses more data than they do. It's them, the Rays, and the Dodgers who are the pinnacle of using data to find diamonds in the rough, identify market inefficiencies, and build strong rosters.

The Brewers do this because everyone is bought in on both sides of the ball. They dive into the numbers and try to make these players the best version of themselves instead of shoehorning them into something. That's what makes them so dangerously balanced.

The Yankees have this with their pitching ecosystem under Matt Blake and Sam Briend. They're one of the best in the sport at finding inexpensive, productive relievers by identifying traits and bettering them.

On the hitting side, it's becoming more and more evident that there is incredible pushback on trying to use more data and analytics with position players. Several reporters have suggested and implied that players like Aaron Judge, McMahon, and Grisham are much less open to new-age numbers that help other teams thrive than guys like Ben Rice and Lombard.

That divide between old school and new school is what makes the offense as volatile as it is. The Brewers might have an old-school, no-nonsense manager in Pat Murphy. But the ballclub's identity is in organizational buy-in to an analytical approach to improve every player on the roster.

Until the Yankees can get that level of buy-in, one they've turned into great minor league developmental success of late, they won't be able to reach the Brewers' cohesion 1 through 9.