Brock Beauchamp

In the world of DH ball, it's not crazy to put a decent hitter in the nine slot. Without a .300 OPS pitcher screwing up the bottom of a lineup, it allows a manager to more readily move their best hitter to the two spot (where they belong), which slides up the entire order. Having an intriguing bat (but not "best") in the ninth spot basically allows a decent order to line up earlier every time around, excepting the first inning.

No worries, if I post something like that, it's just a gentle reminder to take a breath. No need to apologize.

Damn it. DELETE POST DELETE POST DELETE POST

@Brewcrew82 and @willie key please take a deep breath and remember you're both cheering for the same team.

I mean, not that exact hoodie, no need to be a creeper, just that design.

I still want Counsell's hoodie.

Oh yeah, for sure, any starter who walks as many as he does is going to be a wild ride on any single night... but he's been so bad this season in comparison to the past couple of years.

Just logged in and I see Peralta is still... not awesome.

Yeah, that's why I'm less than confident in their answer. Twins Daily is on a faster server but its traffic load is *much* higher so any extra hardware bandwidth would surely be consumed by the additional traffic. Anyway, I haven't given up on this, I'm still exploring options, it's just taking longer than I hoped.

The ad provider keeps shifting the burden of this on to our site, and I'm not sure they're wrong. So that means this won't be an immediate fix but I always planned to move us to a faster, better distributed server system but haven't done it because it's bloody expensive. This is probably the kick in the pants I need to move in that direction more quickly.

Weird. So you're saying that Corbin Burnes, like pretty much every other world-class athlete, wants to take the ball every night and sometimes his manager needs to rein him in? Strange. That kind of story is so rare in professional sports.

I have no idea how to interpret this comment. Compliment? Insult? Back-handed compliment? I JUST DON'T KNOW

I have no idea how to interpret this comment. Compliment? Insult? Back-handed compliment? I JUST DON'T KNOW

I have no idea how to interpret this comment. Compliment? Insult? Back-handed compliment? I JUST DON'T KNOW

I have no idea how to interpret this comment. Compliment? Insult? Back-handed compliment? I JUST DON'T KNOW

We are not quite one-tenth of the way into the 2022 season and the Crew have rebounded from a bit of a rough start to find themselves just one-half game behind the Cardinals. A scheduling quirk this coming week sees the Brewers travel to Philadelphia for a weekend series with the Phillies, then back to Milwaukee for a single-game against the Giants, before they head back to the Keystone State for three more with the Pirates. Image courtesy of Brewer Fanatic We are not quite one-tenth of the way into the 2022 season and the Crew have rebounded from a bit of a rough start to find themselves just one-half game behind the Cardinals. A scheduling quirk this coming week sees the Brewers travel to Philadelphia for a weekend series with the Phillies, then back to Milwaukee for a single-game against the Giants, before they head back to the Keystone State for three more with the Pirates. The Brewers' return to their winning ways has improved the vibe in the forums this week. So let's look back at the last seven days of conversation at Brewer Fanatic. Let's kick off this week by looking back at one of the iconic games in Brewer history. @craigharmann recalls his memories from Easter Sunday, 1987, when the Brewers came back from a 4-1 9th inning deficit to defeat the Texas Rangers 6-4 for their 12th straight win to open the season. The then 11-year-old @dlk9s wanted to leave the game early, but some clever negotiations by his father resulted in their staying. How lucky is that, considering the game wasn't even televised in Wisconsin. Was there any doubt the Brewers are going to win that day? The date was 4/19, after all. Head Brewer Fanatic @Brock Beauchamp reported on the early returns from the Minor leagues and the(ir) pitch clock. The pitch clock, which is 14-seconds with the bases empty and 18 with runners on, shaved 25 minutes off the average game time in its first week. Over a 162-game MLB season, 25 minutes per game is 67.5 hours. Or nearly three days. Or the time it takes to cook about 1,000 frozen pizzas. Whatever metric you use, the change is, to quote our leader, "bonkers!" It will be interesting to follow this more as the season progresses. @Tbadder wonders if this will result in more injuries, while @areacodes thinks we may see less maximum-effort pitches from pitchers with less time between throws to the plate. As you'd expect after the Brewers have gone 7-3 in their last 10, the 2022 Brewers Optimism Thread! has seen a bit more action. @MVP2110 linked to a tweet from April 18 which talked about Christian Yelich's grand slam being his third batted ball of the season with an exit velocity over 108 after going the entire 2021 season with only one. And the Crew's sweep of the Pirates inspired @torts to bring out a classic brooms GIF. As we close out another week, don't forget to check the forum daily for Brewer game threads and the best Minor League Coverage in our Minor League Forum. If you've never taken the time, stop by and see what it's all about. That's it for this week. Enjoy the week to come, and GO CREW! View full article

Yeah, thanks for reminding me about this. I contacted the ad provider and they ghosted me (not a normal occurrence, I promise you). I'll reach out again and try to get this resolved.

Yep, Either May 1 or 2, rosters go back to normal (26 man, 13 pitcher max).

Yeah, I was in a bad mood (and a little drunk) after watching the Timberwolves get demolished and took it out on the user. Not my finest moment. But that doesn't mean I wasn't at least partially correct. Reviving old threads is bad policy, as a user may not know where to start, notice the date of the first post, and it just pollutes the first page of a forum. It's better to create a new thread if new injury news has broken or, like the Urias thread, it's an on-going issue where the first post is still relevant to the latest post. Having giant, sprawling stream-of-consciousness topics may feel natural to established users who were here on day one but they're intimidating and off-putting to new users trying to discuss what is happening with the Brewers today, not accidentally click into an ancient thread with wildly out-of-date information.

There's a bit more to it than that and I wrote an article about it earlier today (largely based on how this thread had played out and my interpretations of it).

To suggest Christian Yelich is a polarizing figure within Brewers fandom is an understatement. He posted two consecutive MVP-level seasons immediately followed by two disappointing seasons, with 2021 being even worse than his already disappointing 2020 campaign. Early in the 2022 season, we see a mix of those two Yelichs. Which will be the real Christian Yelich in 2022? Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports To suggest Christian Yelich is a polarizing figure within Brewers fandom is an understatement. He posted two consecutive MVP-level seasons immediately followed by two disappointing seasons, with 2021 being even worse than his already disappointing 2020 campaign. Early in the 2022 season, we see a mix of those two Yelichs. Which will be the real Christian Yelich in 2022? As a newcomer to the Brewers internet sphere, I was surprised as I saw the vitriol from within the community aimed at Yelich and his recent performance. As a long-time Twins fan, the obvious comparison is to that of Joe Mauer: left-handed, hard contact, low launch angle, and the vitriol. So much vitriol. That’s not the point of this piece, though; I wanted to see what we can glean from Yelich’s first two weeks of play. While there are no solid conclusions from such a small sample size, Yelich has made enough contact with the ball that there are some reasons to be optimistic about an offensive rebound coming in 2022. This will be rather heavy on advanced stats, so bear with me a bit; I will attempt to quickly give bad/average/good parameters for each statistic for those unacquainted with the terms I’m using. First, I want to look at FanGraphs’ wOBA (weighted On-Base Average) and xwOBA (expected weighted On-Base Average). These stats are used to give each hitter a single value for their offensive performance based on their hitting outcomes (wOBA) and then, using the quality of the contact - how hard the ball is hit and where - to give a value to what the outcome should have been (xwOBA). Average is .320, good is .350, excellent is .400. Here is how Yelich has scored using those metrics over his Brewers career: wOBA xwOBA 2018 0.422 0.411 2019 0.442 0.424 2020 0.343 0.343 2021 0.325 0.325 2022 0.380 0.416 Surprising to no one, in 2018-2019, Christian Yelich was an elite hitter. He was well past “excellent” and into perennial MVP territory, according to the OBAs. And, reinforcing our eyeball tests, he immediately plummeted to “decent” in 2020 and “average” in 2021, losing over .100 wOBA points in only two seasons of play. In 2022, we’ve seen a big bounceback through the first 11 games of the season. As good as Yelich has looked over the past 3-4 days, his wOBA still sits at .380, roughly .050 points below his MVP-level seasons. The real story is in his xwOBA, which tells us that he is hitting the ball similarly to how he made contact in 2018 and 2019. That’s promising… but it gets a little more complicated as we move over to Baseball Savant’s slew of StatCast-based data. If you’re not familiar with Baseball Savant, it’s possibly the most helpful tool available to the modern baseball fan. I highly recommend everyone dive into that site; it’s easy to get lost in the numbers, a mathematical Wikipedia of sorts. I want to focus on three stats that tell a lot about who Yelich was and possibly who he will be going forward: Exit Velocity, Launch Angle, and Barrel Percentage. The first two metrics are becoming more common in baseball broadcasts, so you probably have at least a passing understanding of them. Exit velocity is how hard you hit the ball, and anything over 90mph is good; anything over 95mph is excellent. Launch angle is the degree at which the ball travels off the bat, and if you’re looking at good power hitters, they usually sit in the 15-20 degree range. Barrel Percentage is the frequency at which the hitter “barrels” the ball. They often put “good wood” on the ball and drive it. Exit Velocity Launch Angle Barrel % 2018 92.6 5 12.9 2019 93.3 11.3 15.8 2020 94 7.1 12.1 2021 91 2.8 7.6 2022 94 3.1 22.7 These metrics tell us important information that has always made Christian Yelich a rarity in baseball, at least in the world of MVP-level players: he hits the ball hard but he doesn’t consistently elevate it, which means he’s often - probably too often - driving the ball into the ground. And his barrel rate, while good, has never been top of the class, as players like Mike Trout routinely sit at 18% barrels. On the other hand, even in 2020, Yelich’s exit velocity was excellent. We all knew that, though… which leads us to his early 2022 results. His barrel rate is way up to an unsustainably high 22%. His exit velocity remains in the good-to-very-good range, which confirms the wall-banging hits we’ve seen a few times out of him already this season. Unfortunately, his launch angle sits at only 3.1%, roughly ten points lower than you’d like to see out of a player with Yelich’s hit profile. If Yelich continues to barrel the ball but not elevate it routinely, he’s going to be a feast or famine player in 2022, which is what we’ve seen in the first two weeks: he has only eight hits on the season, but six of those hits have gone for extra bases. Given the ubiquity of the shift in the modern game, it’s likely Yelich will either roll over to an infielder or take at least two bases if this approach continues, which it almost certainly won’t, given his unsustainable 22% barrel rate. If that barrel drops to be more in line with Yelich’s Brewers career, we likely see an immediate return to the 2020 version; which isn’t a terrible outcome, but given how the rest of the offense has struggled, the team needs more from their left fielder than a slightly above average offensive performance. Unfortunately, we’re still seeing the biggest problem persist with Yelich, even if it has been masked over by a handful of 2022 balls that he managed to elevate. After his knee injury, something changed in his swing that caused him to stop elevating the ball with enough frequency to excel in baseball. And while some of his metrics have improved early in the season, it’s hard to see this early-season success continue without more elevation than we've seen. It’s possible Yelich will continue his “elevation explosion” which led to multiple extra base hits during this homestand but ultimately, it’s unlikely he will return to being an offensive juggernaut with a launch angle under 5%… which is a 2% higher launch angle than he has today. View full article

Mauer's 2009 season was basically as good as anything Yelich has done, though Yelich has two of those seasons. Mauer led the league in every triple slash category that season and did it while playing most of his games at catcher.

Which will move first: Yelich's high xwOBA or his 3.1 deg launch angle? They won't exist together for long. And frankly, I have no idea which one is more accurate and which will change.