The Brewers opened their season by winning two of three games from the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field.

Attanasio also addressed the contract status of 2021 NL Cy Young Award winner Corbin Burnes, two-time All-Star pitcher Brandon Woodruff and shortstop Willy Adames, who has been selected team MVP by the Milwaukee chapter of the Baseball Writers' Association of America each of the last two seasons.

All three players have one more year of arbitration eligibility before they could become free agents at the end of the 2024 season.

"I'm always eternally optimistic," Attanasio said. "I also recognize that the three of them are about as good as you can get in the sport at their positions. And so there's the challenge of what those contracts would be. They'd be deservedly significant, and we'll just take it, it's pretty much a season at a time now because most guys don't want to talk in season. We'll see what the season and the offseason bring."

They're not the only notable Brewers facing uncertain futures. Craig Counsell, the NL's longest-tenured active manager, has a contract set to expire after this season. Counsell has one son playing college baseball at Minnesota and another who has committed to play at Michigan next season.

Attanasio said that "we'd love to keep him here, obviously."

"He's had a couple World Series rings [as a player], got now two sons going to play college baseball, you'd always imagine you'd be watching them play," Attanasio said. "They're only going to be playing college baseball once.

"So on the other side of things, he's really enjoying what he does here. And he is, as you know, very impactful. I think back to when I first talked to Craig about doing this in 2015. He said the only thing he felt he had left to do in baseball was bring a World Series to Milwaukee. And so that's still a goal of his, so we'll see how he balances all of that."

Attanasio spoke to Brewers beat reporters for the first time since the team sent four-time All-Star closer Josh Hader to the San Diego Padres at last year's trade deadline.

The Brewers were leading the NL Central at the time of the trade but staggered afterward and finished seven games behind St. Louis and one game out of the NL's final wild-card spot, snapping a franchise-record string of four straight playoff appearances.

"There was a lot of commentary last year about the Hader trade, which we all know," Attanasio said. "But what was missed in the commentary is we're desperately trying to compete for a long period of time. And so we stumbled last season with that trade, but now we have [catcher] William Contreras here. Things like that show the confidence I have in our baseball ops group to keep finding that next guy."

The Brewers acquired Contreras -- a 2022 All-Star -- from Atlanta as part of the multiteam trade that enabled the Braves to land catcher Sean Murphy from Oakland.