Isaac Collins Has Been Wonderfully Fine, for a Brewers Team in Need

Just a correction, Collins was a minor league Rule 5 draft pick not a waiver pick up.

Guys like Collins are kind of a dime for a dozen. Not meant as an insult. He’s a valuable role player, and I like him. I just don’t think the Brewers did anything particularly unique in developing him that every other organization doesn’t do with their bench players. 

Isaac Collins' reward for holding down the fort amid a short-handed outfield arrives this weekend when he gets to play in front of family and friends at Target Field. He is a product of Maple Grove High School, the jock school that produced Wisconsin basketball star Brad Davison. 

4 hours ago, sveumrules said:

It was the Rockies, so they might fall outside of the purview of "every other organization", but the main thing the Brewers did with Isaac was just identify him as an MLB calibre player and acquire him for nothing.

Every team needs four outfielders minimum, so far this year there are 118 players with at least 80 PA in the outfield. Collins is tied between 39th and 44th with 1.0 WAR.

From 2023-24 there were 110 players with at least 400 PA in the outfield, Blake Perkins 2.3 WAR tied him for 68th to 70th on that list.

Of course the template was Tyrone Taylor, one of the few Melvin regime holdovers that made it through to the Stearns & Arnold years. From 2021-23 there were 109 players with at least 600 PA in the outfield with Tyrone notching 3.7 WAR, good for 57th.

That's three different "fourth outfielders" the Brewers have gotten starter level production out of now, a big reason why their 37.2 WAR is 6th among all outfield units since 2021.

They've done the same thing at catcher with their 33.7 WAR since 2018 topping all of MLB. Of course getting three All Star level seasons from Contreras and Grandal helped in there, but no one expected Manny Pina to chip in 5.5 WAR when he was picked up for an aging out of the league K-Rod.

Omar Narvaez (5.1 WAR) was already an MLB player, but was acquired for nothing and the template for how the Brewers can help transform catcher's defensive chops. Victor Caratini had 1.3 WAR in 1,033 PA before joining the Brewers, then wracked 2.6 WAR in only 540 PA with Milwaukee.

Infield hasn't been nearly as good with Jace Peterson (3.0 WAR over 630 PA from 2021-22) the only real backup we got starter level production out of, but they appear to be one of the better MLB organizations of late when it comes to maximizing bench production from catcher and outfield.

I'm not a WAR guy. Not a proponent of most, if not all, of the 21 century/Moneyball invented metrics. Far too subjective of a valuation. Any Win Above Replacement would have to factor in the performance of all the other players in the books in those games, and how they performed. It can't just be W vrs L relative to Player A vrs Player(s) B,C which is how I understand it to be. 

Teams do have to identify guys who can at least produce to a minimum standard at the MLB level, and every team does to varying degrees of success. Perhaps the Brewers are a little better at it than others. But at the end of the day, none of those minimum standards meeting, role / utility / platoon level players are difference makers that decide the team's seasonal fate. Collins, like so many others, is a filler track buried on the 2nd side of an LP from 1975. Solid, complimentary, supplementary, valuable....but not the defining part of the whole. 

You have to have those guys on your team, but they can't be roughly 1/3 of your everyday lineup which is the case for MIL at the moment. 

At this point Isaac Collins has been more than wonderfully fine…he might just win NL ROY

He’s currently sporting a 128 wRC+ and 2.3 fWAR. His chief competition should be Drake Baldwin (130 wRC+ and 2.2 fWAR), although Misiorowski will have something to say about that

Just a fantastic player this season