Brewers Offense Overachieving Through Excellent Balance and Team Baseball

Back in the early going of this season, I introduced a new offensive metric to help capture the excellence of new Brewers slugger Rhys Hoskins: weighted sweet-spot exit velocity. It takes the average exit velocity of batted balls within the launch angle band from 10 to 35 degrees (line drives and non-lazy fly balls), and weights it for the frequency of those batted balls, as a percentage of all plate appearances. At a team level, it correlates more strongly with overall offensive output (as measured by weighted on-base average) than do things like average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, or Barrel rate, the latter of which is sort of a cruder version of wSSEV. 

The stat is meant to loosely account for the ability to avoid striking out, but especially, to measure the ability to make consistently dangerous, high-value contact. Here's the thing: the Brewers rank dead last in MLB in it. 

Of the top 10 teams in MLB in weighted on-base average, eight are in the top 10 in wSSEV. Then there are the 20th-place Astros, and the 30th-place Brewers, who are eighth in the league in wOBA. For no other team in baseball does overall performance correlate so weakly with the ability to hit it hard on a line and in the air, and it's not even close.

How is this possible? Well, consider the wisdom imparted by Davy Andrews last week for our Caretakers: the Brewers are very good at hitting singles up the middle, which hardly ever rate as hard-hit line drives or fly balls. That's part of the story. Another part is their speed, because even though their sterling stolen base totals and success rate aren't part of wOBA, the same speed that facilitates them makes it harder to defend the Brewers when they're in the batter's box. The team gets its share of infield hits, and it sneaks some balls through the infield because the opponent is playing a bit out of shape, a step too shallow, trying to account for the speed of the hitter.

Another part of the story, of course, is their patience. Only the Yankees can match them for laying off pitches outside the zone and accepting their walks, and the Yankees can't match the Crew's .312 team BABIP. Only the Dodgers edge out the Crew in team OBP, and as any early-21st-century baseball nerd could have told you, not making outs is even more important to the goal of scoring runs than is hitting the ball over the fence.

Pat Murphy told us all what to expect, back in spring training. While his team has more dynamism and more power (not just Hoskins, but a resurgent Christian Yelich, more in touch with his power stroke, and the young thump of Joey Ortiz and Jackson Chourio) than Craig Counsell's 2023 team did, that's still not the personality of this offense. Murphy believes in passing the baton, and the team has shown the same patience, the same eagerness to use the big parts of the field, and the same relentlessness that characterized the best of Counsell's offenses. 

Conventional wisdom says you can't string together good outcomes often enough to score at a competitive rate, in the modern game, without lots of long hits. As evidenced by their wSSEV, the Brewers don't get lots of long hits. They're exactly average (and 16th of the 30 clubs) in the percentage of their plate appearances that end with a batted ball leaving the bat at 100 miles per hour or more. When it comes to pulling the ball with authority in the air, only the atrocious Marlins are below them. They're 14th in MLB in slugging average and 21st in isolated power.

Yet, they keep scoring runs. They're not afraid to embrace that harder way to score, even in a game mad about strikeouts and quick with the hook on starting pitchers, and it's working. While that ability to mash the ball on a high-value trajectory is a bit of a missing ingredient (and while it would sure be nice to see Hoskins and Willy Adames provide more of that, as it looked like they would early in the season), the team keeps cobbling together enough rallies to break through and win at a high rate. In the second half, it seems much more likely that their wSSEV rises than that their wOBA plunges.