Brewers' Recipe for Success Under New MLB Schedule: Massively Expensive Technology, Coaches with Eye Bags, and Blissful Ignorance

Beginning in 2023, MLB made an important change to the schedule each team plays each year. Gone are the wildly imbalanced schedules that had been the status quo for the previous two decades. Each team plays 13 games against each divisional opponent, instead of 19—and all those games shaken loose (plus a few others) are scattered across the two divisions of the opposite league that a team used to miss in any given year.

"Yeah, there’s a lot more teams you play, for one thing," Brewers manager Pat Murphy said on Sunday. "And every team you play, those games are important, and the amount of time that goes into preparation for the coaching staff is a way higher volume."

The change, in other words, is not a mere matter of allowing every fan to watch Fernando Tatis Jr. or Jackson Chourio play against their favorite team every season. It comes with a new and substantial weight of needed preparation time. Coaches have to work harder, because there's less familiarity baked into the approaches of all of their pupils. The ever-climbing number of pitchers used per team only exacerbates that, at least when it comes to helping hitters feel ready.

Maybe it's a sign of how coaches do that difficult work, or maybe it's a matter of the lifestyle of a ballplayer (board this bus, then the plane, then that bus; get some sleep; report to the park; hit), but the two most experienced big-league hitters in the Brewers clubhouse haven't felt the weight of the change.

"Nope," Christian Yelich said, when asked if the schedule has made a difference he can feel in the day-to-day workload of getting ready to hit. "I mean, you’ve faced a lot of these guys. I’ve been around a minute, so unless it’s their first year in the league, I’ve probably got some sort of experience against guys, and at this point, I kind of know how to prepare and what you’re trying to do up there."

This is in keeping with the first mandate of the hitter, in a way: think atomically. Don't think too far ahead, or try to extrapolate too much from past experience. It can sometimes be best to treat each encounter with a given pitcher as a new showdown, anyway. Brice Turang doesn't bother filing too many things away when he faces a given pitcher; he knows they'll be adjusting even as he does.

"I mean, they change all the time," Turang said. "They’re adapting, so I just be on time for the fastball, and all the other things happen."

Mark Canha is, to say the least, a more cerebral player, and he's noticed the difference, but he feels as though it's in keeping with other, bigger changes to the game.

"You feel it," Canha acknowledged. "I just think, you can overthink it. In some cases, it just makes it less easy to prepare, and puts you in a place where you have to simplify things a little bit more. Just because of the more diverse pitchers that you’re going to face over the course of a year. That, and the pitch clock, just forces you to think less and be more instinctual, and just swing at strikes and take the balls—things like that."

While the facts of the matter—there are more different teams on the schedule and fewer games against the most intimate ones—are clear, Canha proposed an alternative, multi-year explanation for the phenomenon: growing bullpens, and more frequent injuries.

"You have smaller windows of opportunity now," he said of the periods over which players in previous generations (like Tony Gwynn, with his famous notebooks full of notes on opponents) could cultivate an expectation of how a pitcher would approach them, "and you just have to make the most of them."

That explanation has plenty of merit, itself. In all likelihood, it's part of what's leading to that increased opponent diversity. The schedule is another unavoidable contributing factor, though.

In Yelich's first full season (2014), he had 660 total plate appearances, and faced 203 different pitchers. There were 12 hurlers he saw at least 10 times that year. In 2023, when he had a comparable 632 trips to the plate, they came against 266 different pitchers, and he only got 10 looks at two of them. Canha had 497 plate appearances in 2019, against 207 pitchers, and 462 in 2024, against 219. Rhys Hoskins played a full season in the final year before the schedule change, 2022, and went to bat 672 times. He saw 238 pitchers and faced six of them 10 times or more. Last season, in just 517 at-bats, he saw more hurlers (253) and didn't face anyone 10 times.

"Another advantage for the pitchers," Murphy said with a smirk. But then: "Trajekt!"

He mock-shouted the word, as a way to emphasize the value of the $750,000 machine most big-league teams now use to prepare for specific pitchers using video and high-tech engineering to mimic the arsenals of each guy a player might face in their next at-bat, from velocity and release point to spin rate. For multiple seasons, now, the Brewers have not only had a Trajekt setup in their hitting cages at American Family Field, but transported it down to the spring complex in Phoenix so players can train on it throughout camp.

"Now, with Trajekt, that machine is giving them such good feedback of live ABs," Murphy said. 

Can players use that technology to reduce their need for a raw number of reps, which might exceed what's advisable for a player trying to stay mentally and physically fresh over the 162-game gauntlet?

"I think you can," Murphy said, noting it can be especially helpful to keep players from trying to swing 1,000 times to find their way out of slumps. "Guys get used to their routines and their habits, and then when things aren’t going well, what’s the first thing you do? You get in the cage. It can become counterproductive."

You can tell how valuable the rig is not only by observing that teams are willing to pay a price tag equal to that of carrying a 27th player at the league's minimum salary all year, but by the secrecy players still use to guard it—even though the cat is long out of the bag.

"I have, nothing to say about that," said Joey Ortiz, with a half-nervous laugh, when asked how the Trajekt informs his own preparation.

The coaches apply elbow grease, the magic hitting machine makes it easier to learn fast, and players take such strict tunnel vision (literally, and figuratively) that they barely even notice the ground they're losing in their collective war with pitchers. When you ask a catcher, though, you quickly realize that the dynamic is real.

"Yeah, for sure," Eric Haase said of whether the change has altered what goes into catching meetings. "Obviously, when you’re playing in division, you’re seeing the same guys over and over again. It really comes down to who’s making better adjustments, who’s executing. There are really no secrets. Everyone’s got the same data, they’ve got the same game-planning for the most part. It just comes down to execution. When you’re seeing a bigger list of guys, it obviously makes it a little hairier, but at the same time, it can be nice, not getting beat up by the usual suspects. There’s good and bad to it."

In theory, that might make it easier to utilize certain options that typically don't work well when a hitter gets a few looks at them. It could give pitchers and catchers more leeway to approach opponents in unexpected ways. In practice, though, Haase noted that the game naturally constrains that set of choices.

"That’s more of a day-to-day thing, too," he said. "That’s assuming that guys are having their third and fourth pitches, which, in baseball, that’s a big assumption. You hope it shows up there, but that’s not always the case, so it’s kind of just, you show up and whoever you’re playing, you’re playing. But the division stuff was definitely more of a comfort."

That kind of stuff is what keeps catchers up nights—or at least keeps them in the room, planning and plotting and studying opponents, a bit longer than they might otherwise. It's the counterbalance in the great, slow lean toward more demographic and logistical advantages and more technological advances for the batters. Catchers, like their coaches, have to bear the extra burden of the more scattered schedule, at least in part.

There's even more to consider, when it comes to the schedule change and its implications. So far in the new schedule era, the Brewers are averaging 28,073 miles traveled per year—that's for 2023, 2024, and 2025, since the schedule for this year is already set. (We're assuming only essential and direct travel, for these purposes.) Over the final six full seasons (not counting 2020, of course) of the previous format, they averaged 25,646 miles traveled. In so many small ways, this schedule requires more work, carries more risk of wearing players down, and poses more challenges to certain players. Only carefully honed "ballplayer brain", coaches working behind the scenes, and a futuristic, fortune-costing pitching machine protect them all from the extra strain.