At Bat, the Milwaukee Brewers Are Master Managers of the Count

[Matthew Trueblood]

Though they did add some fly-ball sluggers this winter, the Milwaukee Brewers remain an offense built around on-base skills and using the big part of the field. With a new metric by which to evaluate hitting approach, we can see how viable that team build is for 2024.

At the beginning of this month, Baseball Prospectus's Patrick Dubuque broke out a new way to measure the ability of hitters to manage the count. Dubuque took the value of reaching each count (based on the league's performance once they do), tabulated how often each hitter reached each count, and then leveraged the two against each other to create a simple and valuable assessment of count management by hitters, which he dubbed Count+. In this metric, 100 is average, and higher is better--meaning that hitters with higher scores spend more time in more advantageous counts.

The 2023 Brewers were one of the most patient, OBP-focused teams in baseball, so it should be no surprise to learn that several of them rated well by Dubuque's new measuring stick. No Milwaukee hitter was elite, but they were almost all above-average. Let's look just at the hitters who got substantial big-league time over the two-year sample Dubuque used to create the metric, who are now in the Milwaukee organization.

• Christian Yelich: 107.9 Count+
• William Contreras: 104.3
• Willy Adames: 102.4
• Owen Miller: 95.9
• Rhys Hoskins: 110.5
• Gary Sánchez: 106.2
• Eric Haase: 98.0
• Christian Arroyo: 88.5

It's far from the only reason why they were Brewers targets, but Hoskins and Sánchez stand out in this group. As much as his homers garner headlines, Hoskins's plate discipline is just about exactly as important to his game. He works diligently to get into counts where he can cut loose his steep, powerful swing with relatively little worry about whiffing, since he has a strike to play with. By focusing on areas of the zone within which he does damage, he also increases the likelihood that he'll connect on those swings.

Does that mean a lot of called strikes, at times? Sure. That's not a deal-breaker for the Brewers, though. Only three other teams took more called strikes in hitters' counts last year--including Sánchez's Padres. They like to get hitters thinking about covering a portion of the zone where maximum production is possible, rather than about covering the whole zone, when they're ahead in the count. The new guys fit in brilliantly.

Obviously, this is not a perfect or universally applicable metric. How hard a hitter should work to get into advantageous counts depends a bit on their overall profile. Taking the league-wide numbers through various counts smooths over some important differences between players and their unique expected production through those counts, based on their whiff rates, pitch identification skills, and contact quality. It also captures some things that are really contact skills (putting the ball in play more often, as opposed to fouling it off or whiffing) and sells them to us as matters of approach or intent.

Still, it's a great thumbnail sketch of how well a hitter mentally approaches winning an at-bat, with the base rates of the game in mind. The Brewers do it very well, because it's a point of emphasis for them. Under Murphy, and with their current personnel, they don't intend to lead the league in home runs. Instead, they'll create runs by putting hits and walks together in clusters, and that means taking a grinding, steady approach to winning each pitch and gaining the advantage within individual at-bats. Hoskins, whose charisma and track record make him something of an instant icon for this lineup and the carrier of the overall team identity, was a carefully chosen addition, balancing filling the team's needs positionally and in terms of skill set with a continued dedication to what they already think works.

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[Kripes - Brewers]

Seeing Willy up there with an above average number is surprising to me. I see him as a guy that goes into every at bat with a specific pitch he is looking for. I don't see him adjusting his approach based on his count, not working his counts - he didn't appear to care if there was an extreme shift when that was allowed and try to hit it to the open field, doesn't back off and look to make solid contact when he has 2 strikes, etc... He only appears to be looking for a ball in a certain zone that he can drive, and generally swings out of his shoes regardless. As you can tell, I'm not a fan of his more recent offensive approach. I think he was a better hitter early on, but became enamored with the HR once he started hitting them. Who can blame him, as he's about to be rewarded for those power numbers as he approaches free agency. He'd be better for our lineup if he'd learn to play the counts - all he has to do is watch Yeli, who I think is extremely good at that part of his game.

[Rick Daltons Flamethrower]