The 162-game, six-month slate that is a Major League Baseball regular season has the ability to introduce ever-changing levels of parity to some degree, and it is something fans and those of us in the media are witnessing once again.

Some teams sustain success, while others have it before squandering it. Some teams struggle before getting hot at the right time, and others catch lightning in a bottle.

The difficulty and the duration of an MLB season are what make it so interesting, and watching how predictions play out is all part of the fun. The Athletic harnessed the sphere of prediction and created a time capsule exercise of sorts when it asked fans in the spring how optimistic they were about their favorite team this year.

Now, with the season nearing its end, The Athletic is circling back to what fans said in the spring vs. how they feel now. The exercise, dubbed the "Hope-O-Meter," is changing a bit, as The Athletic will produce results reflecting how fans feel about their favorite club's chances of making the World Series.

Until those results are released, it is interesting to see how fans might feel now. For example, fans who love the Tampa Bay Rays were not confident in the results the team would produce this season when asked in the spring. As Stephen J. Nesbitt reported, two-thirds of fans said they were not optimistic, which left exactly 31.6% of fans who aired on the side of optimism.

I bet the latter group is saying "I told you so" right about now.

With the Rays, some of the pessimism was to be expected after a below-average 2025 campaign, but where do the fans of a good team like the Milwaukee Brewers stand on this topic? Let’s find out:

When it came to the Brewers, who were fresh off notching the best record in baseball and a trip to the National League Championship Series a season ago, 87.8% of fans were taking the optimistic route.

This makes sense, given Milwaukee’s success in recent seasons, but it's not as if Brewers fans were as high on their team as other fan bases. Milwaukee’s fan base placed fifth this spring out of the 15 that were asked.

The Brewers had a good 2025 campaign, but it ended with a sweep at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Moreover, the organization traded away Freddy Peralta in January.

At the time, Peralta was an ace who would soon become unaffordable, so he was shipped out. Brewers fans and the rest of the baseball world could not have predicted the type of struggles he would undergo for a good portion of the season with the New York Mets before ultimately being traded to the Rays.

It is also likely that, for the wider fan base, there was no writing on the wall that Jacob Misiorowski would have a Cy Young-level season in just his second year as a pro. Now, Milwaukee has won the NL Central Division for the fourth year in a row, and it is two wins away from reaching 100.

The Brewers have also shown that they can beat the mighty Dodgers this season. So, when the next poll comes out asking how fans feel about Milwaukee’s chances of winning the World Series, their place on the "Hope-O-Meter" will be even higher.