2025 Brewers vs. Top Starting Pitchers

[gregmag]

A point people have made a lot, notably during the offseason and at the trade deadline, is that the Brewers' "string together baserunners" offense won't work well against the kind of high-end pitching that teams tend to send out in October.  One way of testing that claim is to look at how the Brewers have done against top starting pitchers so far this season.

I used ESPN to find the list of MLB pitchers who have at least 3.0 WAR (I think ESPN uses bWAR) so far this season.  It's a list of 23 starting pitchers (plus Freddy Peralta).  That seems like a reasonable cutoff for "the best"; anyway, that's what I looked at.  The Brewers have faced pitchers from that list 15 times so far this season.  To conveniently evaluate how the Brewers did against those pitchers, I used ESPN's record of pitcher game scores (I think ESPN uses the conventional Bill James method for calculating game scores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_score.)  If you haven't looked at game scores, they just use a starting pitcher's box score stats to boil down a start to a single number, with 50 as a roughly average score.

Here are those top starting pitchers' game scores in the 15 games:

Max Fried, 3-29: 36

Kris Bubic, 3-31: 72

Nick Lodolo, 4-3: 68

Tarik Skubal, 4-14: 78

Robbie Ray, 4-21: 50

Framber Valdez, 5-7: 72

Joe Ryan, 5-16: 76

Paul Skenes, 5-23: 66

Garrett Crochet, 5-26: 65

Ranger Suarez, 6-1: 54

Andrew Abbott, 6-4: 43

Joe Ryan, 6-20: 54

Paul Skenes, 6-25: 40

Yoshinobu Yamamoto, 7-7: 26

Matthew Boyd, 7-28: 32

In March, April, and May, the Brewers faced top starting pitchers nine times.  Those starters' average game score was 64.8.  Seven of the nine were 65 or higher.  That's pretty dominant.  To put it in perspective, Garrett Crochet's 65 game score from May 26 reflects a box score line of 6.2  5  2  2  2  11.

In June, July, and August, the Brewers faced top starting pitchers six times.  Those starters' average game score was 41.5.  Only two of them were above 43, none above 54.  That's pretty bad.  To put it in perspective, Paul Skenes' 40 game score from June 25 reflects a box score line of 4  4  4  4  2  4.

If you believe the Brewers found their offensive formula around June 1, then these numbers may provide some reason to think that formula works fine against top starting pitching.  The seven best performances against the Brewers by top starting pitchers all happened before June 1.  Even if you take it back a little further, the five best performances against the Brewers by top starting pitchers all happened before May 18.

A couple of caveats, however.  The six games by top starters since June 1 isn't a lot of data.  In fact, one takeaway here is that the Brewers have been fairly lucky since June 1 to not face many of the best starters.  Also, this analysis only looks at starters, not relievers.  I'm not sure whether there's good support for the claim that homers are a better bet against top closers than stringing together baserunners, but that claim seems plausible.

Still, the Brewers' performance since they turned their season around provides some evidence against the claim that a well balanced higher-OBP, lower-power lineup can't succeed against top starting pitchers.

[sveumrules]

Good stuff here.

Obviously some small samples going on as you noted, but that’s kind of the nature of the beast when looking at such narrow parameters.

Either way, definitely encouraging to see the arrow has been pointing in the right direction.

[Underachiever]

In the playoffs, managers will go to their bullpen earlier than they may in a Wednesday game in June. I’d be interested to see the occurrences of multiple hit, non-homer, crooked number rallies in the playoffs (I am not going to do the work).  

[LouisEly]

There are 227 pitchers with at least 20 IP who have started at least three games this season.  The Brewers have 10 on that list, so call it 217 that they could have faced.  Assuming that the ESPN list used is the same as Fangraphs (unlikely, but we'll roll with it), the chances of facing one of those top 23 pitchers in any one game is about 10% (10.6% to be precise).

The Brewers have played 112 games so far.  Assuming random assignment of any one of those 217 pitchers for any of their 112 games, the expected number of times facing one of those top 23 pitches is 12 whereas they have faced them 15 times.

So, statistically, they have faced top 23 pitchers more times than expected so far this season.  This jibes with what I looked at earlier this summer, where the of the first 20 or so games the Brewers played after they started to get "hot", only 3 of them were against SPs with an ERA >4.00.

[BruisedCrew]

42 minutes ago, LouisEly said:

There are 227 pitchers with at least 20 IP who have started at least three games this season.  The Brewers have 10 on that list, so call it 217 that they could have faced.  Assuming that the ESPN list used is the same as Fangraphs (unlikely, but we'll roll with it), the chances of facing one of those top 23 pitchers in any one game is about 10% (10.6% to be precise).

The Brewers have played 112 games so far.  Assuming random assignment of any one of those 217 pitchers for any of their 112 games, the expected number of times facing one of those top 23 pitches is 12 whereas they have faced them 15 times.

So, statistically, they have faced top 23 pitchers more times than expected so far this season.  This jibes with what I looked at earlier this summer, where the of the first 20 or so games the Brewers played after they started to get "hot", only 3 of them were against SPs with an ERA >4.00.

One immediate reaction I have is that the top pitchers are likely to have a higher percentage of starts than others. So, the assumption that any of those 217 starters are randomly assigned is significantly flawed.

Just using the Brewers as an example, if they have 10 SP in that group of 227, a team might expect to face Peralta in 10% of their games against the Brewers if the SP are randomly assigned. But Peralta has made 23 starts in the Brewers 112 games. or 20.5% of their games.

I would think that making 20% of a team's starts would be pretty typical for a top of the line pitcher who hasn't had to skip starts because of injury or load management. In a 3 game series a team is lucky if it doesn't face a top pitcher, if the opponent has one.

[formerlybis]

Thank you for all the work here. Can you tell how many times other teams have faced the top pitchers? I understand Milwaukee is facing them slightly more than expected, but I'm curious if there are teams that get them more or less often. My expectation is that teams want their aces to go more against the top teams than the bottom. 

[BruisedCrew]

3 minutes ago, formerlybis said:

Thank you for all the work here. Can you tell how many times other teams have faced the top pitchers? I understand Milwaukee is facing them slightly more than expected, but I'm curious if there are teams that get them more or less often. My expectation is that teams want their aces to go more against the top teams than the bottom. 

I think for most of the regular season teams use their SP (including their top SP) more on the pitcher's schedule than based on their possible opponents.

[formerlybis]

6 minutes ago, BruisedCrew said:

I think for most of the regular season teams use their SP (including their top SP) more on the pitcher's schedule than based on their possible opponents.

Yes, true, though there is some "setting up" that goes on when teams have off days where you might change the rotation order.

[BruisedCrew]

This has nothing to do with who the SP have been, but I think it's related to the issue of the Brewers offensive turnaround. So, I'm going to raise it here.

As I have often said , while scoring 17 runs in a game can be fun, and can fluff up a team's and players' stats, I am less concerned about how many total runs the team scores than how those runs are distributed across games.

Scoring 17 runs gets you one win when, in most cases, the game could have been won with 8-10 runs, if not less. The runs scored in the late innings against the dregs of a bullpen or a position player don't really tell you anything about the quality of a team's offense. And if that 17 run game is followed by 3 games scoring 1 run each, the team will probably have a 1-3 record despite scoring an "average" of 5 runs per game.

I think a better sign of a good offense is minimizing the number of games in which it is held to very few runs. The Brewers run distribution this season provides a good illustration of how the offense has improved over the last two months. 

For the season, the Brewers have scored 2 runs or less in 30 games (9 shutouts, 8 with 1 run, and 13 with 2 runs.) The Brewers are 2-28 in those 30 games. It is not surprising that a team loses most of the time when scoring 2 runs or less.

On June 11, the Brewers lost to the Braves 6-2,. That completed a stretch of 6 home games against the Padres and Braves in which the Brewers scored 11 runs and lost 4 of 6. After that game the Brewers had a record of 36-33. In those 69 games the Brewers scored 2 runs or fewer 25 times (or 36% of those games) and lost 24 of them. The Brewers were 8th in the NL in runs scored, fewer than any of the current playoff contenders in the NL except the Paders.

Since that date, the Brewers have gone an amazing 32-11. In those 43 games they have scored 2 runs or less just 5 times (just 11% of the games), including a 2-0 win over the Dodgers.

When the Brewers have scored exactly 3 runs (as they did last night) they have a record of 11-6, which I suspect is significantly above the league average. The Brewers pitching doesn't necessarily require a lot of runs to deliver a win, but they need more than 2.

 

 

[Dragonbait]

So, for us laymens... it's a good record?