Brewers Video
Coming into 2024, we knew the Brewers would have to overcome some depletion of their pitching depth. Trading Corbin Burnes and losing Brandon Woodruff to injury inevitably led to some scrambling, and the team didn't spring for the high-quality replacements that another, richer organization might have pursued. Staying competitive was bound to be more difficult after those losses, and injuries this spring have only made things harder.
That shows up even in the surface-level numbers for the team. They're almost precisely average in terms of runs allowed per game, but in any of the last few seasons, it would have been viewed as a major disappointment for them to fall into that range. Worse, the peripheral numbers suggest that there's room for things to get worse. The Crew have the fourth-lowest strikeout rate in the big leagues, and have allowed home runs (6th-highest) and walks (8th-highest) at higher rates than the league average.
An array of skillful, athletic young players behind the moundsmen and a focus on maximizing harmless contact usually allow the Brewers to outperform their collective strikeout, walk, and homer numbers, but these are still disquieting numbers. Improved though it is, the Milwaukee offense is incapable of slugging enough to outpace a below-average pitching staff; they need to see an improvement in run prevention, and further degradation seems more likely at the moment.
One way to think about this, and to assess things at an even more granular level than the secondary outcomes do, is to study and evaluate the quality of each pitch the team throws, based on its release point, velocity, angles of release and approach to the plate, location, and movement. A handful of modern models now allow us to do just that, rating pitches based on the essential characteristics that should define them. Good versions of these do account, not only for raw velocity and movement, but for strange arm angles and looks a pitcher might give to a hitter, and for command, and for interactions between the various weapons in a pitcher's arsenal.
I don't subscribe as strongly to these evaluations as some others do, but when done well, they provide a new kind of insight into the craft of pitching. The best of the publicly available numbers, in my opinion, is the model recently released by Baseball Prospectus, using the categories StuffPro (evaluating the physical characteristics of a pitch, alone) and PitchPro (which incorporates location, count, and other factors to provide a more holistic assessment). These numbers are expressed as runs better (negative) or worse (positive) than average, per 100 pitches thrown.
Most of the time, these data are tabulated and studied at an individual level, but let's zoom out and take a look at the Brewers' StuffPro and PitchPro on each of the seven pitch types they throw most, along with their rankings among the 30 MLB teams for each.
Brewers StuffPro and PitchPro by Pitch Type, 2024
| Pitch Type | MIL StuffPro | Rank | MIL PitchPro | Rank |
| Four-Seamer | 0.2 | 17 | 0.2 | 21 |
| Sinker | 0.1 | 11 | 0 | 13 |
| Cutter | 0.4 | 22 | 0.3 | 26 |
| Slider | -0.2 | 25 | -0.2 | 26 |
| Sweeper | -0.7 | 19 | -0.5 | 22 |
| Curveball | -0.4 | 10 | -0.4 | 10 |
| Changeup | 0.2 | 26 | 0.7 | 30 |
(Remember, negative run values are good here. Fewer runs is better for pitchers.) This chart is discouraging--especially because the team's PitchPro, with its extra inputs that should account for the things the Brewers would say make up for lackluster raw stuff, is worse than its StuffPro. If your team is below-average in terms of vital characteristics on every pitch but the sinker and the curveball, it's hard to make the case (as just about all of us would, without these numbers staring us in the face) that you're ahead of the curve when it comes to pitching development.
These data certainly affirm certain things the Brewers do, like using fewer offspeed pitches than any other team in the league and leaning on sinkers instead. That's how they've performed better than you would expect them to, given the poor walk, strikeout, and home-run numbers cited above, and given the collective grades on their stuff. They're utilizing the right offerings within each individual pitcher's repertoire, and their increased urgency about getting the platoon advantage makes sense when you understand the disadvantage they face in terms of sheer stuff.
Nor does the team lack for guys with good StuffPro and PitchPro, sometimes even on multiple offerings. Hoby Milner (sinker, curve), Trevor Megill (fastball, curve), and Bryan Hudson (fastball, sweeper) each have two separate weapons that rate well on PitchPro. Freddy Peralta has three pitches (fastball, sweeper, curve) that are better than average via StuffPro. On the whole, though, the team isn't as dazzling or dominant as they've been for the past half-decade.
That's not really news. Again, the great rotation around which the team was built for that half-decade is now all but torn down, and the relief ace who made their bullpen so formidable the last couple years is on the 60-day injured list right now. Still, it's important to keep it in mind. The Brewers might need to explore some external upgrades, or revisit some of the engineering choices they've made in the pitching lab--not because that lab has been anything less than successful or essential to their winning ways over the past few years, but because pitching evolves very quickly. At the moment, the Brewers don't seem to be on the cutting edge, where they need to live in order to thrive.
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