76 wins? Fourth place? The Brewers, whose expectations haven't changed, scoff at those notions.

PHOENIX – Wade Miley has seen the projections, and he’s not the only one in the Milwaukee Brewers clubhouse to have done so.

The Brewers are in a bit of a different spot as the 2024 regular season dawns, both in how the roster looks and in what is expected of it outside the room.

Milwaukee’s over/under win total set by oddsmakers is 76.5. Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA projections give the Brewers 79 wins this year. FanGraphs is a tad more optimistic but at 80 wins still pegs the team to have its first losing full, 162-game season since 2016.

Those numbers are meticulously crunched yet they are also quickly dismissed among the Brewers.

“Look at our projections,” Miley said. “Like, 76 wins. How do you quantify a group of guys coming together and saying they’re only going to win 76 games? I like it.”

Inside, the standard hasn’t changed for a team that has made the playoffs five of the last six seasons with three division titles in that span.

“Not at all,” said shortstop Willy Adames. “I feel everybody in the clubhouse has that mentality of, 'We’re going to go out there and compete as hard as we can.'"

On one hand, it’s easy to see why any ballclub would be dismissive of a low projection placed upon them by an algorithm. It’s even more cut-and-dried for a team that won 92 games just last year and is seeing prognostications of them taking fourth place in a mediocre division.

On the other, it’s also worth looking at why the Brewers are predicted to have a decline of anywhere from 12 to 16 losses from 2023.

Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff will make precisely zero starts for the club this year, the rotation is largely unproven and the entire roster is filled with young, inexperienced players who are inherently difficult for these systems to project. The path to a division title seems a bit more uphill through those lenses.

New first baseman Rhys Hoskins, who signed a two-year, $34 million contract with an opt-out, understands at least some of this nuance. That doesn’t necessarily mean he agrees with it, though.

“I know it’s been lower than we’ve ended up here in the past,” he said. ”I think those numbers really are about the youth and the unknown. But we get a chance to see these guys work every single day and the progress that everyone's making as we gear toward the start of the season. We’re excited.

“There's going to be times where it’s not going to look good because of some of our youth. That happens in baseball. But what the Brewers have done an unbelievable job of is preaching being as consistent as you can and, over a long 162 games, it ends up looking like a division title.”

A division title is not only what the front office believes, as well. Deep within the Brewers’ internal database, their numbers are much more optimistic than what Vegas or Baseball Prospectus or FanGraphs believes.

That belief has emanated to the players, too.

“I think we’re capable of a lot more than people think,” pitcher DL Hall said. “It’s nothing flashy but we got some really good ballplayers in here that really know how to play the game.”

The pitching staff is the largest question surrounding this Brewers team. The bullpen returns most of its arms from an elite group last year and the offense, with Hoskins, Adames, William Contreras and Christian Yelich forming the core, should be much better. But the arms are a different story, with questions – as simple as “who’s going to pitch?” – being prompted as soon as the second game of the year with "TBA" listed as the probable starter.

Miley, the longest-tenured veteran on the team in terms of MLB experience, recalls a similar situation facing the Brewers before the 2018 season, though. Who would step up from the starting staff was a significant question that year. It turned out that Miley and Jhoulys Chacín did, and Milwaukee won 96 games and reached the National League Championship Series.

“In 2018, we were only supposed to win 78 games,” Miley said. “What did we win, 90 something? One game from the World Series. I kind of like that. I kind of like the position we’re in. The last couple of years, it’s been more favorable with the arms we had and the teams we had put together. But then we lose a couple of guys and it’s like, ‘Back to the cellar they go.’ Like, no. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Starting Thursday in New York, the Brewers can put pen to paper – or, rather, ball to bat – and prove that, like Miley said, it doesn’t have to be that way.

"We're going to play hard and compete," Murphy said. "Be careful. Because they might just believe themselves into contention."

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Ahead of 2024 season, Brewers scoff at low expectations, predictions