The Games Keep Coming: Brewers Try To Survive Final Week of Grueling Schedule Stretch

Pat Murphy has been criticized in some parts for his ultra-aggressive, win-now mentality so far this season. His approach has proved successful in generating early wins, though. It’s a toss-up how that’s affected the team so far, but the Brewers have nine more games to go without another off day, and with offensive performances faltering slightly, they may benefit from using their bench players slightly more often.

The Impact of Days Off on William Contreras
In 2013, Russell Carleton at Baseball Prospectus did some mathematical analysis of the impact of a player who’s played in each of the last seven days, compared with those playing in five of those seven days, and noted a difference of around 3 points of OBP. This isn’t a lot, but consider the implications over multiple lineup spots and things start to get more interesting. That’s at just seven days, so picture William Contreras, who has played in every single game for the Brewers this season and shows no signs of being ready to voluntarily sit himself down. Murphy was asked about sitting his star catcher.

“We have a scheduled off day for him. It’s August 8th,” he joked.

Contreras has continued to mash at the plate, but there will come a point (as with all catchers) where he’ll likely see some of the contributions wane under a workload such as this. The reason baseball can be so demanding without a day off is almost as much a mental wearing-down as it is a physical one. Every day on which one confronts the intense focus of the minutiae involved in baseball brings a mental fatigue that can lead to errors in decision-making that you just cannot get away with at the major-league level. We saw it with Contreras perhaps having his poorest defensive game at catcher on Sunday. If Murphy won’t sit him out for a day, then he could at least DH him for a couple of games, now that Gary Sánchez is healthy enough to play again.

The Curse of The Streaky Hitter
In Willy Adames and Rhys Hoskins, the Brewers have two players who can carry an offense when they get hot, but unfortunately, both bats ran cold over the weekend. Adames showed against the Rays just what he can do, and is perhaps unfortunate not to have several more home runs given his quality of contact at Camden Yards last month, but Hoskins is struggling again, with a .182/.357/.364 line in his past seven games.

Perhaps I’m expecting too much--he's maintained good on-base rates--but he’s there to slug. So far, he has seen dropoffs in hard-hit rate and average exit velocity. The contrast to this is his expected slugging is .511 (actual .432), suggesting some bad luck on balls he has hit hard, while also showing strong plate discipline. It will likely continue to come around as the season goes on, and the luck will even itself out, but the Brewers without Christian Yelich rely heavily on the likes of Adames and Hoskins to drive in runs. At times, Contreras has seemed like a one-man show.

The Rotation Is Pieced Together With Duct Tape, but Not For Long
As things stand, the Brewers rotation isn’t exactly “elite,” with Bryse Wilson and Joe Ross expected to provide quality contributions. Both have, perhaps, been better than expected so far, but DL Hall’s uninspiring early form and injuries to reserves in the minor leagues like Robert Gasser and Evan McKendry have hurt the Brewers in both their bullpen and their rotation.

Gasser is likely to make a start on Friday against the Cardinals, while Hall has whispered to Sophia Minnaert about his velocity returning after some treatment and rest on his knee. Both of these could provide more reliability for the Brewers' rotation and allow them to get further into games before turning to relievers, with a knock-on effect of destressing a heavily taxed bullpen.

The next 10 days will be a matter of survive-over-thrive for the Brewers, hoping to grit and grind their way to a positive record before their next off day. The potential returns of Hall, Gasser and Yelich by the end of this stretch may be telling, but they'll need the middle of the lineup to fire again in order to stay afloat. Murphy has a challenge on his hands in terms of player rotation, and all in all, it may be a pivotal stretch of games for the Milwaukee Brewers season.