What's Changed for the Brewers With Runners in Scoring Position?

[Jack Stern]

Image courtesy of © Dale Zanine-Imagn Images

Let's get this out of the way first: the Brewers have not permanently forgotten how to hit with runners in scoring position. During the course of a 162-game regular season, teams go through ebbs and flows, especially on offense. The Brewers still have an .800 OPS with runners in scoring position this year, the third-highest in baseball. Last year, they ranked ninth. The year before, they ranked second. Before last Monday, the Brewers still had an .842 OPS with runners in scoring position in June. It's been one bad week. They'll bounce back sooner than later.

"We're just going through a rough stretch of it," Christian Yelich said. "We've been really good at it at times. Right now, we're in one of those times where we're really bad at it, but we'll come through on the other side of it, and I think we'll start getting back to normal."

It truly has been an abysmal week, though. Since the start of their series in Cincinnati, Milwaukee hitters have slashed .118/.216/.230 with runners in scoring position. The Brewers managed to go 4-2 during that stretch, but the lack of timely hits proved costly on Sunday, when they dropped a 4-3 contest to lose a three-game series to the Chicago Cubs.

Performance with runners in scoring position is a particularly fickle stat, especially in such a small sample. However, the quality of the Brewers' at-bats in run-scoring situations has been much worse lately. As their lack of production has continued, they're getting jumpy in the box.

"Sometimes guys maybe try to do too much, and that's where we try to preach you've got to take what the game gives you," offense and strategy coordinator Jason Lane said postgame on Sunday. "And that might be taking pitches and handing it to the next guy. But there weren't too many mistakes in those situations, from what I saw. Just, we offered at some pitches on the edges that got a couple ground balls, a pop-up, and a strikeout in those situations."

The numbers bear out what Lane is saying. During this stretch, the Brewers have chased significantly more pitches outside the strike zone with runners in scoring position.

RISP Split	Avg LA	Under%	K%	Z-Swing%	Z-Contact%	O-Swing%	O-Contact%
Thru 6/21	7°	20.3%	21.3%	65.9%	85.5%	29.3%	59.0%
Since 6/22	13°	33.3%	31.7%	64.1%	72.0%	34.8%	50.0%

That's not the full story, though. The Brewers have also whiffed at an alarming number of in-zone pitches, and they're making more contact underneath the ball. It goes without saying that striking out and hitting pop-ups with runners in scoring position is a poor recipe for success.

It's not worth looking further into those chases. Pitches outside the zone are much harder to reach, so those swings will never be lined up with the ball particularly well. Swinging at those pitches in the first place is the problem, not the quality of swings at those pitches.

Instead, the question is what the Brewers are doing differently on more hittable pitches. Once again, the answer is that they're too jumpy. According to Statcast, on pitches in the heart of the strike zone, they've been more on time, but for the wrong reason. The Brewers want many of their hitters to let the ball get deep, so the fact that they're late less often means they're cheating to pitches in attempts to force damage. As a result, they're pulling off the ball and flailing at more pitches, running out of bat to make contact.

Split	Late% (Fastballs)	Late% (Breaking)	Late% (Offspeed)	Flail% (Fastballs)	Flail% (Breaking)	Flail% (Offspeed)
Thru 6/21	24%	10%	6%	10%	13%	22%
Since 6/22	19%	4%	0%	15%	17%	33%

In other words, the hitters are feeling pressure to deliver. They're trying too hard to make something happen, and it's leading to more chases and whiffs.

"Trying harder and wanting it more isn't going to make it happen," Yelich said. "Obviously, you want to get the job done. Everybody wants to get the job done. There's no right answer for how to do that. It's just, oftentimes, you've got to slow that down and try to focus."

Look no further than a few key at-bats on Sunday. With runners on first and third and one out in the third inning, Jackson Chourio and Brice Turang stranded them with back-to-back strikeouts. Chourio chased a high fastball for strike three, while Turang expanded the zone on a pair of fastballs during the middle of his at-bat.

In the fourth, after Andrew Vaughn's leadoff triple, Jake Bauers rolled over a 2-1 changeup on the outside corner, and Gary Sánchez popped up an up-and-in curveball. Sal Frelick hit a 100-mph groundout, but it was already too late; no more productive outs were available.

With runners on first and second in the ninth, Cooper Pratt and Joey Ortiz chased several high fastballs to abruptly extinguish a potential walk-off rally. The Cubs would score three runs against Joel Kuhnel in the top of the 10th, and the Brewers fell short of a comeback in the bottom half of the inning.

That was too many brutal at-bats in one game, the latest entries in what has become an unfortunate recent trend for the offense.

"You feel like you kind of left one out there today, but it is what it is," Yelich said. "Part of the season, and you've just got to keep grinding through it."

Given the Brewers' track record, it's safe to assume they will round back into form. That must happen sooner rather than later, though. For this particular lineup, which lacks the tremendous in-game power to sell out for damage on too many pitches, less is often more.

"Maybe we could have waited for a better pitch, but that's the battle of driving in runs," Lane said. "It's the hardest thing to do at the plate sometimes, and it's where your discipline has to show up, and we didn't do a great job of that today."

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[ChapelHeel66]

Good analysis (including using the new Statcast timing metrics). 

 

[JimmyC]

I believe it will turn around. It’s just that it’s so hard to watch these last few games.