Lots of Brewers Bullpen Bills Came Due at Once Wednesday Night. All That Matters Now is Thursday.

[Matthew Trueblood]

Like an amateur on a highwire, the Milwaukee relief corps had wobbled and leaned its way forward over the last few weeks. Wednesday's loss was a resounding splat of a fall from the wire, but now the team can shake it off and go on.

Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

Sometimes, bullpen implosions really are like implosions--or explosions, even. They feel like the result of a rapid transition from potential energy to kinetic energy. Often, be it because of the makeup of a given relief corps or the pattern of usage a team falls into because of the flow of their games, you can feel that potential energy building. You can sense just how high the wire is off the ground, and you know a fall is coming--and that it will hurt, when it does.

The last fortnight has been a long wobble atop the wire by the Brewers bullpen, which is getting healthier but also includes a bunch of players who have never gone through a full MLB season without encountering injury or failure before. They had a collective Win Probability Added of 1.81 over the first 20 days of August, third-best in baseball, but you could feel what finally happened Wednesday night coming.

It still hurt. The three pitchers the team tentatively expected to trust most heading down the stretch and into the postseason are Devin Williams, Trevor Megill, and Bryan Hudson. All three contributed to the ugly collapse in St. Louis, and the fact that all three are a few weeks or less removed from time on the injured list is more like another layer of concern than it is like an excuse or a source of solace. It's fair to wonder how whole (and, therefore, how effective) each can remain over the next two months.

On the other hand, that feeling of oncoming doom--that sense of rising potential energy--is gone now. The explosion happened. Now, the bullpen can reset. It's much better to have concentrated these poor appearances so tightly that they cost the team just one game, than to have let it lead to four or five losses over a 10-game stretch. In addition to Williams, Megill, and Hudson being likely to get right over the final six weeks of the regular season (and in addition to the team still having the most comfortable division lead in baseball, and a chance to win their series against the Cardinals by bouncing back on Thursday afternoon), the team has good depth beyond them--and it might soon get a whole lot better.

One thing Wednesday night did was raise the sense of stakes around the looming possibility of the team promoting Jacob Misiorowski and/or Craig Yoho from Triple-A Nashville. It might also have increased the probability of the team doing so, which is a good thing. Those two hurlers have the stuff to alter the character of this pen and make them the scariest playoff matchup in the league. There are no guarantees that either will enjoy immediate success, just as there are none that Megill, Hudson, Jared Koenig, or Nick Mears will be solid in September and October. It's more clearly worth the gamble and the use of an evaluation period now, though, and that could lead to the optimization of this pen for the pursuit of the team's first National League pennant.

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[rolafaive]

This bullpen should never have imploded like this, Murphy went to the well(Williams) one too many times within a week, with a back issue I warned in previous remarks that his load should be lighter to conserve the back, as soon as Williams loaded the bases he should have been pulled, we will blame this loss on Murphy mis managing that pen. But it is only one and now he should have learned Williams limits.