sveumrules

No Greinke wasn’t an ace with the Brewers. He ranked 71st in rWAR among 94 qualified SP in 2011. Sheets had one ace level season, 2004 when he ranked 4th in rWAR among 89 qualified starters.

The standard isn't past Brewers aces, who weren't really aces to begin with in the grand scheme of things. The standard is Burnes own past performance. From 2020 through 2022, Burnes threw 428 IP with a 63 ERA- and 58 FIP-. His 14.0 rWAR and 14.4 fWAR were both tops among all starting pitchers during that stretch. So far this year he has a 77 ERA- and 97 FIP- which are 14% and 39% worse than the results he turned in over the last three seasons on a rate basis. His 1.6 rWAR ranks 30th and his 1.0 fWAR ranks 45th among 68 qualified starters.

Sure, Giannis has the edge on defense and Jokic has (I’d say a bigger) edge on offense, but the real separator between them for me are health and postseason resilience. Giannis 18-23 RS: 326 G | 10516 MP | 30.6 PER | .625 TS% | .261 WS/48 Giannis 18-23 PS: 60 G | 2130 MP | 27.3 PER | .580 TS% | .204 WS/48 Jokic 18-23 RS: 368 G | 12127 MP | 29.4 PER | .641 TS% | .267 WS/48 Jokic 18-23 PS: 68 G | 2556 MP | 29.0 PER | .614 TS% | .236 WS/48 Thats 50 more games and over 2,000 extra minutes on the floor for Jokic over the last five seasons, plus he maintains his production much better during the postseason even with all the additional games/minutes.

I’m not taking anything for granted. Giannis is clearly the second best player on the planet right now. If he wants to maintain that standing as long as possible, or maybe even reclaim the top spot, I think his game necessarily has to evolve at some rapidly approaching point as we’re already seeing the diminishing returns of running into a wall over and over and over again. Hopefully the front office has some deft moves lined up and the new coaching staff has some fresh ideas to help facilitate that evolution.

Giannis 16-18: 26.7 PER | .599 TS% | .209 WS/48 Giannis 18-22: 31.0 PER | .631 TS% | .275 WS/48 Giannis 22-23: 29.0 PER | .605 TS% | .204 WS/48 His production last season was much closer to All Star Giannis during the Kidd era than it was to MVP Giannis during the first four seasons of the Bud era. I hope it is just a one season blip, but yes, barring changes to his playing style we very well may have seen the best of Giannis already. Is it really that wild to think his reckless game based on being stronger and more athletic than the other guy might not age the best, especially after we've already seen a notable drop in efficiency while the games missed pile up a little more every year?

The Braves are the best team in the NL and they lost a series to OAK. They were so embarrassed they’ve gone 7-1 in the eight games since then.

Miley (122 IP | 71 ERA- | 96 FIP-) is the most recent example, but the Brewers definitely have a history of coaxing good results out of mediocre stuff guys with Chase Anderson (438 IP | 85 ERA- | 107 FIP-), Zach Davies (417 IP | 90 ERA- | 101 FIP-), and Brent Suter (373 IP | 84 ERA- | 95 FIP-) in larger samples, or even Gio Gonzalez (112 IP | 73 ERA- | 90 FIP-), Alex Claudio (81 IP | 92 ERA- | 106 FIP-) and Jordan Lyles (75 IP | 61 ERA- | 90 FIP-) in smaller samples all notably outperforming their underwhelming peripherals. Granted, lots of those IP were pre-pandemic, but the Brewers are also tops in MLB in dIfferential between ERA (4.02) and FIP (4.65) this year so it appears they may be at it again. There is no doubt all that really matters is what happens over the next four months, and that Julio will regress from his current 36 ERA- | 92 FIP-. Hopefully that ends up closer to good Julio (87 ERA- | 102 FIP- over 795 IP from 2013-16) than bad Julio (101 ERA- | 117 FIP- over 575 IP from 2017-21).

Yeah, I was just looking at the top of the leaderboard by total value. Don’t think JDM was ever signing anywhere but LAD to reunite with his old hitting coach Van Scoyoc, but great pick up by them for sure.

For whatever it is or isn’t worth, baseball trade values has Bieber at $45M, Burnes at $51M. Obviously the values aren’t incontrovertible, but some combination of Frelick ($33M), Ashby ($20M), Quero ($14M), Mitchell ($12M), Black ($9M), and our Comp Balance Pick ($6M) would likely be the most appealing assets to Cleveland.

I’m normally a slave to the numbers, but I’d go Wiemer…isn’t everyday you break a record held by Bill Schroeder.

Believe this is the most recent info we have.

Are we pouring it on yet?!?!?1?

Wow, early returns are not pretty… HITS Judge (9/360) 188 wRC+ | 2.8 WAR Dansby (7/177) 118 wRC+ | 2.6 WAR Nimmo (8/162) 126 wRC+ | 1.8 WAR Yoshida (5/90) 146 wRC+ | 1.2 WAR MISSES Turner (11/300) 79 wRC+ | 0.7 WAR Xander (11/280) 106 wRC+ | 1.8 WAR Correa (6/200) 88 wRC+ | 0.2 WAR deGrom (5/185) 63 ERA- | 0.8 rWAR TJ Rodon (6/162) YET TO PITCH Diaz (5/102) HURT AT WBC Contreras (5/87.5) 89 wRC+ | 0.6 WAR Verlander (2/86.7) 105 ERA- | 0.4 rWAR deGrom was dealing before getting injured (who’d have guessed?) and Xander is borderline but I went miss based on the size of contract, wRC+ down 28% from his prime and ugly StatCast numbers. Not a FA deal, but might as well throw the Machado extension in the miss pile at 11/350 for 80 wRC+ and 0.2 WAR so far. Suddenly Yelich (5/136.5 remaining after this year) doesn’t seem so abysmal at 108 wRC+ | 1.6 WAR to this point.

Good breakdown. Hadn't noticed before how much the Phillies defense (-12 DRS | 24th) had impacted Wheeler specifically so far this year with that 4.33 ERA vs 2.85 FIP, though he's also had some HR luck early on with the 3.58 xFIP. Either way, I don't see the Phils dealing him just because they are so pot-committed with big money long term contracts.

Brewers MLB best bullpen Win Probability Added is now up to +5.04. Defense has fallen off a little bit, but still strong at +18 DRS (4th). Assume instead the Brewers had an average bullpen by leverage and average team defense, put those seven wins in the loss column...and they are still a game and a half up on the Cardinals.

Brewers Full Season Pythag… 2017: +1 2018: +5 2019: +8 2021: +2 2022: +1 Anyone fretting over the Brewes pythag hasn’t been paying attention to how the Brewers have been constructing their teams and exploiting leverage situations for the last half decade.

That’s an 82 wRC+ which would rank behind Yelich (102), Anderson (102), Adames (84), Tellez (114), Contreras (108) and Miller (125) among regulars and dead even with struggling rookie Wiemer (82) before tonight’s game. If we throw in Monasterio (137) in a small sample, Turner’s performance would rank 8th or 9th among current Brewers. Not bad for $300M.

It’s pretty simple to me. The version of Giannis that won back to back MVPs four/five years ago now at age 24/25…is gone and ain’t coming back. The version of Giannis that won Finals MVP three years ago…is gone and ain’t coming back. I know there are a bevy of advanced metrics, but one of the most basic and telling for me is TS+, essentially the same idea as OPS+, but for scoring efficiency. Over the last five seasons Giannis has gone 115, 109, 111, 112, and then down to 104 last year. That’s a big drop off. Obviously load management is a whole thing of its own in the modern NBA, but Giannis isn’t sitting games for the fun of it. He’s sitting games because his overly reckless play style exposes him to additional injury risk and it’s piling up. He’s missed 10, 10, 11, 15 and 19 games the last five seasons. If Griffin and staff can’t figure out a way to re-invent Giannis into his thirties (and get him on board with it) so he regains his efficiency via a new scheme/style of play that allows him to start playing gradually more instead of increasingly less…nothing else will really matter all that much anyway.

We're sixty games into the schedule now and there are no two ways about it, the offense has been bad. Like 87 wRC+ and 4.02 R/G (both 25th in MLB) bad. But as we all know, something happening for sixty games is no guarantee it is going to continue happening that exact same way for the next one hundred plus games. Projections try to suss out some of that still early season small sample noise, and as we know they do a better job of predicting future results than just looking at actual (or even pythagorean) results to date this early on. Want some mild, un-biased optimism? The computers at FanGraphs think that rest of season the team projects to score 4.47 R/G which would be 22nd, BPro thinks we have something like the 19th/20th best offense based on their DC RS team metric. They both seem to think the Brewers have underperformed their talent level to this point and better days are ahead. I was curious if looking at recent history might offer some additional insight so using the custom date tool on the FanGraphs leaderboards I went back over the last four full seasons and found thirty teams (a whole league!!) who had team position player wRC+ ranging from 80 to 92 over their first sixty-ish games or so, and then adjusted the dates to see how they performed over their remaining 100 some games to close the season. The results, with format of (60 game wRC+ | rest of season wRC+ | difference)... 2018 TEX (80 | 95 | +15) COL (84 | 101 | +17) BAL (85 | 89 | +4) ARI (85 | 99 | +14) MIA (86 | 90 | +4) SDP (87 | 92 | +5) 2019 BAL (81 | 93 | +12) CLE (81 | 107 | +26) CIN (85 | 96 | +11) KCR (88 | 82 | -6) CHW (88 | 94 | +6) SDP (90 | 97 | +7) PIT (91 | 99 | +8) 2021 PIT (81 | 91 | +10) SEA (83 | 100 | +17) DET (84 | 101 | +17) TEX (85 | 83 | -2) MIL (86 | 105 | +19) KCR (87 | 90 | +3) CLE (87 | 97 | +10) MIA (89 | 90 | +1) ARI (91 | 88 | -3) 2022 PIT (83 | 85 | +2) CIN (87 | 83 | -4) COL (88 | 85 | -3) CHW (88 | 104 | +16) KCR (88 | 95 | +7) ARI (90 | 04 | +4) BAL (90 | 103 | +13) TEX (92 | 101 | +9) Put if all together and out of the thirty teams...twelve (40%) were who we thought they were with their wRC+ getting worse or only improving marginally over the rest of the season, five (16.7%) saw an increase between five and nine percent, and the remaining thirteen (43.3%) saw an increase of over ten percent. The average across all thirty teams was an increase of about 7.6%. Obviously contextual factors are unique to each team, with some of the larger increases being driven by player acquisition (2021 MIL with Adames) or prospect ascension (2022 BAL with Adley/Gunnar), while most of the teams who saw a decrease or little to no change likely were also selling off players at the deadline and/or giving younger players a shot down the stretch. Either way, whether it is the computerized projections or a smattering of recent history, it appears as though the Brewers offense should see some degree of improvement as the season goes along. Will it be enough to win a mediocre NLC or maybe get hot and make some noise in the playoffs? I guess that all depends on how much one believes, in regression to the mean.

71 wRC+ vs LHP 93 wRC+ vs RHP A 93 wRC+ is below average sure, but it is still 22% better than a 71 wRC+. A Brewer with a 71 wRC+ was Erik Kratz. A Brewer with a 93 wRC+ was Jose Hernandez. I’d say Jose Hernandez was a much better hitter than Erik Kratz, that’s why he got 5,000+ plate appearances in his career and Kratz couldn’t even crack 1,000.

From 2020-22 there were 104 pitchers with at least 250 IP in MLB. Among that sample Freddy came in with a 76 ERA- (22nd), 72 FIP- (10th), 6.6 rWAR (43rd) and 6.8 fWAR (35th). All for less than 4 million dollars. No matter what happens from here on out, the contract is already a success from the team's standpoint. He's struggled to start the year, no doubt, but he has provided much more value to the Brewers than just signing a team friendly extension.

Peralta has a 107 ERA- so far this year. His Ks are down and BBs/HRs are up to the tune of a 110 FIP-. Throw in the injury history plus three affordable years remaining on the original extension and I see no reason to tack on another 4/54 at this point.

I’ve been calling him El Monje…because that’s who lives in a Monasterio.

Anyone catch why Eric Brown Jr. left early? Saw in the play log he singled, stole second then came around to score on a Joe Gray Jr. single in the bottom of the 5th before being replaced in the field top of 6th.

Some nice relief work from Brannon Jordan and Justin King who combined to get 5 of the final 7 outs via K.