The Brewers' Offense Isn't This Good, But It Has Made Real Strides

Even after scoring just six runs across its last two games, the Brewers’ offense has still been one of the most productive in baseball. Milwaukee enters Wednesday with a 125 wRC+ as a team, the third-highest mark in the sport. Its .346 batting average with runners in scoring position leads Major League Baseball.

The offense tied a franchise record last week, when it scored at least seven runs in six straight games. That stretch included three games with a double-digit run total.

As exciting as it would be to see the Brewers sustain that gaudy output, the lineup will come back down to Earth. The regression may have already started in the current series with the San Diego Padres.

Many stretches of offensive dominance (especially ones from a team that lacks power hitters throughout its lineup) require some good fortune on balls in play. The Brewers have experienced such luck when hitting the ball on the ground. Milwaukee hitters are batting .355 on ground balls, 47 points ahead of the Texas Rangers for the highest mark in baseball. The league's batting average on ground balls is .245.

This lineup has traits that could enable it to overperform most teams on grounders. According to Statcast, the Brewers have the fourth-highest average sprint speed in baseball, and that speed should help them leg out infield hits at a high rate. Pat Murphy’s offense has also deployed a style of play that can manufacture a few extra hits on ground balls.

The Brewers have hit 17.2% of their ground balls to the opposite field, a few percentage points higher than the league average. This can help with beating the shaded positioning that remains legal in baseball, especially early in the season, when opponents have yet to gather enough data to adjust how they align their infielders.

Then there are plays like the one Joey Ortiz executed on Monday night. With Blake Perkins running from first base on the pitch, the right-handed Ortiz chopped a ball to the right side. Because second baseman Xander Bogaerts vacated his position to cover the base, the ground ball snuck through for a hit. That’s not a lucky play, but an intentional one by Ortiz.

Still, none of these elements are enough to explain a success rate on ground balls over 100 points greater than the league average. Guiding grounders through holes at such a high rate is not a repeatable skill. Teams improve their positioning as the season progresses. The precise locations of gaps in the infield change from batter to batter, and even pitch to pitch. It’s physically impossible for most hitters to consistently time their swings to produce contact that finds those gaps.

The Brewers have the ingredients to be a pesky offense when hitting ground balls, but not a revolutionary one. Those results will soon regress, and what once looked like great pieces of hitting will become routine groundouts. That doesn’t mean the offense will fall off a cliff, though. The Brewers are also producing more damage by driving the ball, which was the sustainable means of scoring they lacked last season.

Milwaukee’s offense has incrementally improved its fly ball rate from 25.3% to 27.9% this year, but more importantly, those fly balls have become more impactful. In 2023, 40% of the Brewers’ fly balls counted as hard hit (exit velocity of at least 95 mph). That figure has jumped to 51.7% this year, which is the third-highest mark in baseball.

Hitting fewer lazy fly balls and more well-struck ones has helped Brewers hitters do more damage when they elevate. After ranking 23rd in baseball with a .414 wOBA on fly balls last year, they now rank fifth with a .486 wOBA.

An even more impressive .522 xwOBA implies that the Brewers have been unlucky on fly balls. During the three-game series in Baltimore, the abnormally deep left-field wall at Camden Yards turned several would-be home runs for Willy Adames, William Contreras, and Rhys Hoskins into outs or doubles.

A good portion of the Brewers’ stellar scoring output is smoke and mirrors, but the lineup has made real strides that should hold up throughout the year. While not one of the best offenses in baseball, this group is a welcome improvement over last year.