Why Andrew Vaughn is the Odd Man Out in Wednesday Night's Brewers Lineup

When Pat Murphy and the Brewers staff sits down to fill out the lineup card each day, they have a wealth of good options. Frustrating though it might be for fans to watch some of the weak hitters at the bottom of the order bat, Joey Ortiz, David Hamilton, Cooper Pratt and Blake Perkins each have considerable defensive and baserunning value. Ditto for Sal Frelick, when he's right. And even among their more offense-focused personnel, they have several good guys from whom to choose. Murphy has loved having such flexibility all season. Even during spring training, he was effusive about the improved depth of his team.

It does make the choices on which they settle more interesting, though. For instance, against a starter without stark platoon splits—and with different approaches based on the handedness of the opposing batter—how do you choose between Jake Bauers and Andrew Vaughn at first base?

Earlier this week, our Jack Stern wrote about the team's tendency to default to Bauers, even since Vaughn returned from the injured list at the beginning of May. Jack couched that daily dilemma largely in terms of the platoon advantage, and indeed, with right-handed starter Gavin Williams taking the ball for Cleveland on Wednesday night, it's Bauers starting over Vaughn. But there's a bit more to that decision, too.

Firstly, Williams is one of an increasingly common breed of pitcher who essentiually workessentially from two distinct arsenals. Against righties, he leans heavily on a sinker and sweeper, moving east and west to find outs. Against lefties, he switches gears, going mostly with a four-seamer and a curveball and mixing in a cutter. Thus, when evaluating which hitters match up best against him, the Brewers almost have to ask which hitter they trust against the type of pitcher Williams is in those specific matchups—while baking in the demonstrated value of having at least a couple of same-handed batters in a lineup to force a pitcher to switch back and forth between approaches or pitch mixes.

Because of the way the team's lineup works right now, this means assessing Vaughn, Bauers, Jackson Chourio, William Contreras and Frelick. In theory, the Brewers could sit any of them, or start all five, but mostly, Contreras's days at catcher and the imperative to use Christian Yelich when he's available will set up a short series of real dilemmas:

1. Is Bauers or Vaughn better-suited to hit the opponent?
2. If it's Bauers, should he go play the outfield for the night, at the expense of either Chourio or Frelick, making way for Vaughn?

The Brewers gave us their answer when they issued the night's lineup card. Bauers is in there. So are Frelick, Garrett Mitchell and David Hamilton, over possible right-handed alternatives like Gary Sánchez and Joey Ortiz. Contreras and Chourio made the cut from the right side, but Vaughn didn't. The interesting question is: Why those guys? And now, we can furnish some answers to ourselves, using new Statcast data.

Simply put, Vaughn struggles with the sinker-sweeper righty. That might be his toughest matchup. Looking at the distributions of his swing timing in all three dimensions against sinkers and sweepers from right-handed hurlers, you can see that Vaughn is often off the center of the barrel, often early or late, and unable to line up the barrel with the ball vertically as much as the average batter.

This data is quite new, so I'm not expecting you to have contextualized the above already. Hopefully, though, you can see the difference between those distributions and these, for Chourio:

Chourio can cover both pitches from a righty much better than Vaughn can. Even some of the times on which he's slightly off—early on the sweeper, for instance—result in hard contact in the air, because of his bat path and the way he adapts based on what he sees. Vaughn's best swing takes him through the ball on the inner third, and he struggles to connect cleanly if a pitch appears to be headed there and then ends up on the outer edge, instead. Chourio is much better at it.

Starting Chourio over Vaughn, then, would be an easy choice, but that's not really the choice the Brewers faced. They first had to decide whether to give the nod to Vaughn or Bauers at first base, and that meant evaluating Bauers's ability to handle a righty who throws a four-seamer, a curveball and a cutter.

The curve is awfully tough on Bauers, truth be told, but he's unexpectedly excellent at covering the four-seamer from a righty—especially up, His ability to line up the barrel with the ball vertically is far superior to that of the average batter, and with his elite bat speed, he's able to punish mistakes on either the cutter or the curve. In the past, we could have shrugged and said that a lefty is likely to hit a righty better than a righty is. Now, we can see clearly that Bauers is better able to stay on time and make solid contact against a pitcher like Williams than Vaughn is.

The final option for the team would be to bench Frelick at Vaughn's expense, by moving Bauers out to right field. That's a decision they need to weigh a bit more seriously, unless and until Frelick shows more than he has of late either at bat or in the field. When it comes to hitting a righty like Williams, though, Frelick is much better equipped to make solid contact than is Vaughn.

Frelick is superb at staying on time and finding the barrel against this suite of pitches, in this kind of matchup. His very low bat speed and tendency to let the ball get too deep on him are real concerns, but he's still much better against this type of pitcher than Vaughn is against the type of pitcher Williams is against righties. That's not to mention that a defensive configuration with Frelick in right field and Bauers at first is more robust than one with Vaughn at first and Bauers in right.

Not all starting pitchers pose such interesting problems. Not all teams have such an array of possibilities when building a lineup. Thankfully, though, we now have some insight into how the Brewers can choose between those options on a fascinating night like Wednesday. Vaughn doesn't belong in the lineup initially, but that doesn't mean there won't be a pitcher later in the game against whom he's the right bat. And the Brewers are armed with terrific data to tell when and whether that moment comes.