Matthew Trueblood

Thanks to a confluence of strange circumstances, the Milwaukee Brewers might just have a chance to make a high-impact double move before Opening Day 2024. It would come with some risk, but don't count out the possibility. Image courtesy of © Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports What the San Francisco Giants did to J.D. Davis is unfair, and they might not be done hearing about it or paying for it. After the Giants signed (first) Jorge Soler and (recently) Matt Chapman this offseason, they were left without room for Davis, a third baseman and DH slated to make $6.9 million after winning an arbitration case this winter. They tried to trade him, but found no takers that would save them enough money to justify the move. Instead, they tried to avail themselves of a loophole for arbitration-adjudicated salaries under the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the league and the MLB Players Association (MLBPA), and released Davis. In theory, that saves them the lion's share of the award Davis earned, because they released him more than 15 days before Opening Day. As was deftly covered at MLB Trade Rumors, it's not quite that simple. The CBA sets a clear standard for when that clause can be used, and Davis's circumstance doesn't appear to meet it. A grievance that might get Davis significant restitution should be in our future. That's unlikely to be resolved in short order, though, and it wouldn't change the new, essential fact of the matter: Davis is now a free agent. The Brewers have thrived for the last several years (and showed themselves to be especially savvy this winter) by being willing to change directions quickly and aggressively. They don't overcommit themselves to a single plan; they adapt and react. Thus, while they seem to have spent right up to the budget mark set by owner Mark Attanasio for this season, they might just be able to create some room for Davis, who would be an awfully strong addition to their lineup at the position (third base) where they have, perhaps, the least clarity right now. That's because of another (mostly) unexpected development that has tilted the picture in the NL West this spring. Coming into camp, the Los Angeles Dodgers expected to play Gavin Lux at shortstop this year, with Mookie Betts as his partner on the double-play pivot. A fortnight into the Cactus League season, that plan is kaput. Lux showed insufficient arm strength for short, and then some signs of the yips even after switching sides with Betts and becoming a second baseman. He's fast working his way out of the picture for the Dodgers altogether. You can see where this is going, by now. The Dodgers, the unexpectedly semi-desperate team of destiny, need a shortstop. The Brewers have one, and if they want to pursue Davis in free agency, they need to clear some money from their books. What if the Brewers traded Willy Adames for Dodgers pitching prospect Kyle Hurt, then slated Joey Ortiz and Brice Turang for shortstop and signed Davis to play third? If Hurt's name doesn't ring a bell, it's because the Dodgers are overflowing with such pitching talent that he just hasn't managed to escape the enforced anonymity of being merely good on a team full of all-timers. It's not a perfect comp, but you can sort of think of Hurt as a right-handed DL Hall. He was a fifth-round pick in the COVID-truncated 2020 MLB Draft, by the Marlins, but was traded to the Dodgers before he threw his first professional pitch. He put up some ugly overall numbers in the LA system in 2021 and 2022, but maintained high strikeout rates, and in 2023, he was just plain good. At the highest levels of the minors, he piled up 152 strikeouts over 92 innings of work, and he had an impressive MLB debut late in the season. Hurt is big, and he throws hard. He lacks the fastball command you want to see from a starter most of the time, but (like Hall) he has both of the traditional flavors of breaking ball and a downright nasty changeup. The latter, like Hall's, is one of the best cambios among all pitching prospects right now. Long-term, it's hard to say whether Hurt will be a starter or reliever, but he's definitely a multi-inning weapon, and he's MLB-ready. Already coming up on his 26th birthday, he'd better be. Like Hall, he's an electric arm available only because he's taken such a long time (chronologically) to find a foothold in the majors and because it's not fully clear what role he'll fill in the long run. The Dodgers don't need Hurt as badly as most teams would need a pitcher with such upside. Trading him for an impact player at a position of need is a luxury, but one the Dodgers can afford. To be sure, for his part, Hurt would be an exciting addition to an already imposing Brewers pitching staff. The question is whether the benefits would justify the costs. That's a trickier thing to assess. In one sense, Adames is a player with just one season of team control left, playing on an eight-figure salary for 2024. At Baseball Prospectus, the PECOTA projection system forecasts a 103 DRC+ for Adames (three percent better than league-average production), but it projects Davis for a 99 mark that is within the margin of error. At FanGraphs, ZiPS projects Adames for a 112 wRC+, and Davis for a 107. They're very comparable hitters, and the Brewers would get a high-end pitcher with six years of team control in the process of a likely cash-neutral, short-term value-neutral swap. On the field, it makes a world of sense. Off the field, it gets harder to justify. Adames is very important to this team's fabric. He's a leader and a beloved figure. Though Davis has a solid reputation as a clubhouse citizen in his own right, bringing him in on the eve of the season wouldn't lend itself to any kind of leadership role for him. This maneuver would have uneasy echoes of the 2022 trade deadline. It needn't automatically play out the same way, but that's the pitfall the team would need a rock-solid plan to avoid if they went forward with such a radical solution. I think it's a worthwhile risk, on balance. The Dodgers are the team most likely to pay a handsome price for Adames, be it now or in July. By doing it now, the Brewers could rip that Band-Aid off sooner, letting the scab form and life return to normal by mid-April, with the new era of Ortiz at shortstop underway and a very dangerous lineup in place. It's unlikely that Matt Arnold would trade Adames for Hurt alone, but a far-off secondary piece should balance the scales well. Adames has, inevitably, less trade value than Corbin Burnes, but getting a good analog of Hall (and the ability to sign Davis and play Ortiz right away at his best position) in exchange for him would come close to matching the value the team got for Burnes. A lot of things have to happen for this to go from idea to reality. The Brewers have to slightly prefer sustainability and long-term competitiveness to 2024 World Series odds, but they also have to believe Hurt is a difference-making hurler for their versatile mix, and therefore a booster to those odds. They have to persuade Davis to sign with them, though that should be doable, because the team is fast developing a reputation for treating players in tough situations with respect. Witness their release of Austin Nola to pursue a big-league opportunity after they signed Gary Sánchez last month. The final thing is selling the Dodgers on giving up Hurt, who ranks 86th on FanGraphs's Top 100 prospect list and is one of the half-dozen best prospects in their excellent farm system, to acquire a one-year solution at shortstop. That should be feasible, too. The big challenge here is doing all of these things in a very short time window, while keeping Pat Murphy in the loop so that he can effectively manage the clubhouse and keep unwanted intangible effects from canceling the tangible benefits of this twinned move. Is it likely that the team does this? Of course not. The odds are always stacked against this kind of complicated series of transactions. If they can pull it off, though, the Brewers might be in a better position to both make a deep run this October and keep getting bites at the apple thereafter. What do you think of this proposal? Would you try it? Do you worry about the on-field ramifications of it, or only about the potential havoc within the clubhouse? Let's discuss, while we wait to see what becomes of Davis and of the Dodgers' unfortunate middle-infield dilemma. View full article

Yeah, stuff-wise, it's a no-brainer. The question is whether they can: 1. Trust him to go on back-to-back days or to work multiple innings in unpredictable relief situations, as opposed to needing the routine of being a starter; or 2. Afford to carry a non-optionable reliever with strict usage restrictions. Most of the time over the last half-decade, they haven't had that luxury. But we'll see. It really is a hell of a slider.

Put another way, because this is the real crux of it: Do guys throwing bad, flat fastballs in spring training find some shape on it once the season begins? Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports While he's been reluctant to grant the same status to higher-dollar free agent signee Jakob Junis, Pat Murphy has been quick to say that he thinks "the front end" of the game is the best place for Joe Ross in the Milwaukee Brewers' 2024 pitching mix. Part of that, to be sure, is Murphy's willingness--almost his eagerness--to use that staff creatively, meaning that Ross might not pitch deep into most games. Another part, certainly, is that Ross's long and luckless injury history makes it more desirable to use him as a starter, where he can maintain a gameday routine that maximizes his chances for success. The big drawback of doing things that way, though, is that Murphy might find opposing managers employing the very strategy he celebrates the ability to neutralize through nimble use of guys like Junis, Robert Gasser, and Bryse Wilson, among others: loading the lineup with opposite-handed batters. And Ross, unlike Gasser or Wilson, seems not to have any way to effectively combat that tactic. Let's talk about Ross's arsenal, because this spring, he's talked (to Dom Cotroneo of WTMJ, for instance) about a four-pitch mix. The Brewers are treating him as a full-fledged starter on the basis of his having a four-pitch mix. In reality, though, he doesn't have a four-pitch mix--at least not in any traditional sense, where a hurler has at least three pitches that are near or above average for MLB and another he can show opposing hitters in select situations without getting hurt. No, despite Ross's personable nature and Murphy's effusiveness about him, what Ross has is a very good two-pitch mix, and then two offerings that are going to get him tagged in the big leagues. Here's how his stuff is moving and looking this spring. This might be immediately obvious, or it might not be, but that is a gorgeous, tight, devastating slider. It's a pitch that plays right off his sinker and just wrecks a right-handed batter, and in a vacuum, it has an equal potential to overmatch lefties. It's not a sweeping slider; it can tunnel off a four-seamer too. Therein, as the bard would tell us, lies the rub. Ross is, as he alludes to in the video above, trying to throw more four-seamers, but it's not working at all. That pitch is flat, and not in the good, vertical-approach-angle way. It's a pitch without hop or life, and it only comes in at an average of around 92 miles per hour. Nor is this a new problem. It's been exacerbated, but Ross wasn't exactly getting the extra yard on his four-seam heaters even over the previous couple of years. A fastball without plus velocity, a highly unusual release point, or consistent and freakish lateral movement (none of which Ross can boast) needs to have at least 15 inches of induced vertical break (IVB) to get outs in the big leagues. Ross's averaged 12.4 inches last year, and has sagged to 10.9 inches this year. As a pitch in the low to mid-90s, that's just not going to cut it. It doesn't set up the slider well enough, because lefty batters can spot the spin differential between the two pitches earlier than righties can distinguish between his sinker and his slider, and the slider doesn't have enough movement separation from the fastball to miss bats off of it. Ross's changeup is too firm and doesn't have enough depth or run on it, even as he's worked on the pitch, to earn whiffs that way, either. Ross just doesn't have the weapons to do anything effectively against lefty batters right now. Because he's been hurt so much the last few years, it's hard to corroborate that process-based information with results, but let's try. Since the start of 2022, across all levels of competition, he's faced 38 left-handed batters. They've batted .370/.526/.481, with four strikeouts and eight walks. That's a laughably small sample, so let's go all the way back to 2020. That's a sample of 300 lefty batters faced, and Ross has been battered to the tune of .266/.371/.444. I did a quick research study, to figure out whether pitchers sometimes add ride to their fastball after the conclusion of spring training. We hear, all the time, about guys working on things, focusing on mechanics, and modulating their effort. Could that mean that spring training IVBs undersell what we'll see in the regular season? No. I studied 108 pitchers who had at least 50 four-seamers captured by Statcast cameras in spring training and at least 250 of them in the regular season last year, and the correlation between the IVBs (given the small sample I accepted for the spring training data) was very, very strong. Ross's current Cactus League IVB on fastballs would be way, way over on the left side of this graph, where we'd expect the corresponding regular-season mark to be in the 12-13 inch range, on the high end. There are two notable outliers who did gain a bunch of ride on their heat from spring to summer, here, but they don't constitute good news for Ross. They are Bryce Elder, of Atlanta, and Cade Povich, a prospect in the Orioles system, each of whom basically reinvented their fastballs on the fly and gave the pitch a whole new shape. Ross, with his litany of recent maladies and his 31st birthday coming in May, is not a great bet to mimic the changes we saw from two harder throwers in their early 20s last year. The good news, here, is that Ross is still very much a viable sinker-slider out-getter, when you can leverage him against some righty-heavy lineup patches. The bad news is that that's not the role he's still hoping to earn, or one with which Murphy and the Brewers infrastructure seem comfortable for him. Nor is it one that tends to jibe with the kind of arm care a team ought to prioritize for a pitcher with Ross's background. Let's imagine a scenario in which Devin Williams has to open the season on the injured list, thanks to his suddenly suspect back. In that case, Ross might be able to find a home in the bullpen, despite his usage limitations and the inability to option him to the minor leagues. It's not hard to envision him being a good seventh-inning guy in the mold of Elvis Peguero, but with a bit more in the way of whiff potential. The big question would be whether he could comfortably stretch out to two or three innings of relief work within one outing, were he to shift into a reliever's regimen. If so, he could be even more valuable, and come very close to working at the front end of games, but Murphy would probably need to shield him from opponents by starting someone like Gasser, Aaron Ashby, or even Hoby Milner. A numbers game looms for the Brewers pitching staff, whether Williams or Wade Miley are ready to go when the season begins or not. Ross is just one of the boats being tossed around in that brewing storm, and because of some of the weaknesses in his game, it's hard to take seriously the degree of faith Murphy would have us ascribe to his veteran hurler. Instead, this feels like one of those times when (despite signing a big-league deal relatively early in the winter) a player might have only a short stay with the Brewers. In order to stick around longer, Ross will need a new grip on his changeup, a new shape to his fastball, or an emergency cutter implantation from Chris Hook and his cutter-loving bunch. It's hard to justify giving a guy with a 2.29 WHIP across seven spring innings a designated rotation spot to begin the season, but without some concrete reason to believe he's not the guy those numbers and the pitch data say he is, "hard" becomes "impossible". View full article

Yeah, those were definitely cutters. Savant has even reclassified them as such as of today. Actually, I think *two* of them were cutters, and one was a four-seamer where he was starting to run low on steam, but it's a cutter he's working in. I would guess Hook wants to see him go to that instead of the glove-side sinker, if he can get comfortable doing so, but the sinker is his default fastball at this point. They'll only have him utilize the cutter if he finds a good feel for it in his final couple of spring outings.

I didn't spend any time with J.B. the week I was out in Arizona, but I have a couple of interesting notes on him. More importantly, though, I do believe Jack has him in his sights for this week, so check back. We're on the Buka-beat.

The more you study the Milwaukee Brewers at the midway point of spring training, the more irresistible the conclusion becomes: this team is still comfortable being uncomfortable, even if you're not. Image courtesy of © Allan Henry-USA TODAY Sports We've already run a couple of Opening Day roster projections for the Brewers on this site. I like doing those. I have scribbled down about 100 lineups for the 2024 Brewers, over the long time desert of this winter--killing time while on hold to pay a bill, or during halftime of a Packers game, or as I tried to shake a half-formed story idea into something more organized and wrinkle-free. Since I was a kid, I've been writing lineups and depth charts in the margins of pages of notes on Central American history, and on bank envelopes, and on takeout menus for places I had long ago tried and decided not to order from again. I think, though, that the roster projection and the scribbled-down dream lineup have become as antiquated as the idea of a bank envelope. The amount of uncertainty around the Brewers this spring is nearly overwhelming, but they're not treating that like an opportunity that desperately needs to be solved. On the contrary, they're leaning into it pretty hard. Fluidity is salubrious for a roster architect, and while the Brewers lack the stability and reliability of a deep lineup full of familiar, established names, they have tons of fluidity. It's become the plan for them, and for many teams throughout MLB, and we fans are going to have to get more accustomed to that. Roster rules still constrain roster moves. Eric Haase and Jake Bauers can't be sent to the minor leagues without being subjected to waivers (and thus, without the risk of another team claiming them for their own), which will inform the team's choices at the fringe of the roster on the positional side. The team won't want to lose either player if they can avoid it, so they might try to squeeze them each onto the roster to begin the season, but beyond that, it doesn't matter that much which players go north with the team. If Joey Ortiz begins the season in Nashville, he could easily be in Milwaukee by mid-April. Ditto for Joey Wiemer and Garrett Mitchell. There are endless ways for the team to recombine the pieces of the supporting cast to their stars. It's the same way on the pitching staff. Of their bullpen guys, only Bryse Wilson, Joel Payamps, and Thyago Vieira are out of options. The Crew's depth means Elvis Peguero will almost surely spend some time in Triple-A this year, but the nature of pitching and the inescapable attrition involved in it mean Peguero will almost surely get some high-leverage bullpen work in, too. This is a hard thing to quantify. I tried going through and counting the out-of-options players on each team's 40-man roster to see whether the Crew has an unusually small number of them, but quickly gave that up. They don't, but that's partially because their entire projected starting rotation (minus DL Hall) is ineligible to be optioned. So are Christian Yelich, Rhys Hoskins, Willy Adames, and Gary Sánchez. With the possible exception of backend starter Joe Ross, the Crew would never want the option of not rostering any of those players when they're healthy, so their option status really doesn't matter. The team also doesn't project to use an extreme number of platoons. Rather, there's just a large number of alternatives and a shocking absence of clear-cut answers at a handful of positions. It's nebulous, but very real. This team is going to need to play the hot hand, mixing and matching until someone asserts themselves in an especially forceful way, but they just don't seem to mind that, at all. I still expect Pat Murphy to use a relatively static top half of the lineup card, because Yelich, Hoskins, Adames, and William Contreras are everyday players with obvious roles. Beyond that, though, everything projects to be fluid. Murphy has already stated his intention to be extremely flexible in the way he deploys starting pitchers, and he's been studiously noncommittal with regard to his bevy of options in the non-Yelich outfield spots, and at second and third base. I count 55 players I expect to see play for the Brewers in 2024. That's more than 16 MLB teams used in 2023, and there are always, always players you don't expect to see who make their way to the roster. Only three of the 14 clubs who used more than 55 players last season made the playoffs: the Rays, the Dodgers... and the Brewers. This is the new normal, for teams run along the lines of these three, and though it makes it harder to sketch a reassuring roster on the empty half-page at the end of the Brewers chapter in the Baseball Prospectus Annual, it's fun, in a different and sometimes richer way. View full article

If the season began today, the Brewers' No. 2 starter might well be the rookie whom they acquired in exchange for last year's ace. That's thanks to a couple of key adjustments he made last summer, and another that might be just peeking out this spring. Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports In the first half of 2023, DL Hall was a pretty good pitcher, but he wasn't at full strength. After coming to spring training with an injury to his lower back that required careful maintenance, he was handled with kid gloves early in the Triple-A season, then sent back to the team's complex in Florida for two months. There, he hardly appeared in competitive games at all. He worked, instead, on getting stronger and building his velocity, and he made a couple of adjustments. When he returned to the highest level of the minors (and eventually to the Baltimore Orioles) in the second half, there were some stark differences. Now, the new version of Hall is a Brewer, and whereas he pitched in relief only down the stretch last year, he looks likely to be a starter for the Crew in 2024. Thus, we should take a few minutes to be specific about the transformation he underwent last summer, and about what he might already be doing slightly differently under the tutelage of Chris Hook. First, to lay the groundwork, consider Hall's pitch break chart for the first half of 2023. Here and in the next few images, I've elected to color the data points by velocity, rather than pitch type. You'll see why in a bit, but for now, it should be easy enough to pick out his fastball, changeup, slider, and curveball, based on the shapes of movement suggested by the chart. (The image is from the pitcher's perspective, so a point in the lower right quadrant is a down-breaking offering that is moving away from a lefty batter or in on a righty.) As you can see, there's some wide velocity variation within Hall's slider mix. He was reaching 90 miles per hour with it at times, but at others, he would soften it to the underside of 85 miles per hour to gain more movement. It was, in those cases, almost a sweeper. The rest of the arsenal is pretty standard: fastball with great life but ordinary x-and-y movement, changeup fading off of it, curveball with mirrored spin and a three-quarter shape. While he was down in Sarasota, though, Hall made two major changes. Firstly, he changed the grip on his slider, and it radically altered that pitch's movement profile. The spin he imparted on the pitch out of his hand didn't change from the first half to the second. So we can rule out, with reasonable confidence, the idea that Hall changed his hand position or wrist action on the slider during that interregnum. The change he did make, though, generated a huge change in the actual movement of the pitch. As I alluded to in noting the sweeper-like movement of some of his slower first-half sliders, Hall was getting a bunch of lift on that offering. He got underneath it a bit, as pitchers will occasionally say, resulting in lots of sweep but little depth. In the second half, after whatever subtle change he made, the same spin out of the hand was producing a truer, but heavier actual break. It still has some horizontal movement (especially compared to his fastball), but it's also moving much more, vertically. The above implies that, but here's his second-half pitch break chart, to verify it. That's a nasty pitch, especially when it's routinely thrown 87-89 MPH. Importantly, though, Hall threw it that hard in the context of working as a reliever. We can assume that he'll give back a tick on just about everything if he sticks in the rotation this year. Even so, it's going to be a killer offering, given the action on his fastball and the confidence he's gained in his excellent changeup. Another important change occurred during that time down in Florida, and might be just as important as tweaking the slider. With his back fully healed and some time carved out just to get stronger, Hall moved over toward the first-base side of the rubber, got down the mound better, and improved the consistency of his release extension. Here's where he was releasing the ball in the first half: And here, after the slide across the mound and the mechanical and strength work, is where he did so in the second half. As I wrote for Monday, Hall's fastball is dominant not because of its raw movement or its sheer velocity, but because of the interaction between those elements and his release point. Changing that release point--and especially improving his extension--augmented the dynamism of that offering, and his new place on the mound sets up some different things in his approach to hitters, too. Ok, one last chart before we go. On Sunday, Hall appeared in his first Cactus League game of the spring. Because it was at the only venue in the Cactus League that gives us all access to public Statcast data, it was a treasured opportunity to test something I thought I spotted during Hall's dazzling sim game against a few teammates last Monday. Indeed, among a handful of the same new sliders he showed last year, there was one little outlier worth attending to closely. Early last year, Hall had a sweepy slider, without much depth. Late last season, he threw a slider with plenty of depth, but little sweep. On Sunday (and in that sim game early last week), he showed both, even if he only threw a sweeper-ish one once Sunday. If he can maintain feel for both of those slider looks and establish a fifth pitch, he could take the next step toward ace status this season. Many of these changes are ones he made before being traded to the Brewers, but they fit very nicely with the things the Brewers have done to help other pitchers improve in recent years, up to and including this spring. The match between Hall and Hook seems as good as that between marble and Michelangelo. Hall is the best reason to be excited about the Brewers' starting rotation; he just needs to stay healthy enough to take his place in line behind Freddy Peralta. View full article

Yeah, I think Murph loves this very cluster of traits in both guys, too. Dunn's best defensive position might be 3B, too. I wonder if we could see: -Dunn start at 3B, with Frelick in RF -Someone like Wiemer or Sánchez pinch-hit for Dunn -Frelick come in from RF to 3B, with Wiemer or Blake Perkins going to RF fairly often. Sal did tell me we'd keep seeing him start games in OF and move to IF during Cactus League, and I think that's happened twice already. Seems like something he and Murph want to make sure is comfortable and familiar.

While winning remains a priority, this feels like a season of transition for the Milwaukee Brewers. As such, many fans and media members have tried to attach an identity (old or new) to the 2024 squad. Those can be reductive, though, and Pat Murphy won't have that. At various points last week, Murphy talked about the challenges of balancing the strengths and weaknesses of his young and highly modular team, rather than leaning into any particular strength at the expense of something else. "A little bit of this, a little bit of this, too much of this can make you really exposed over there," Murphy said, gesturing semi-broadly to indicate the pieces moving around his imaginary chessboard. "So I think that, because the pitching is so inexperienced in their current roles, that there might be reason to be really mindful of more defensive capabilities, but you gotta take care of everything. You can’t be a football team that just runs the option. You’ve gotta be able to be diverse. We might have to give up some defense to get something somewhere else. How much is enough?" Rarely will Murphy be captive to a single moment or matchup. He talked about times when he might eschew removing a given player to optimize one plate appearance's odds, not only because the incumbent might come up later in the game to greater advantage, but because sometimes, he would want certain players to feel empowered and involved--that winning a given game was just one piece of a larger puzzle, and that incrementally increasing the chances of one win would be folly if it incrementally decreased the chances of several by making a player lose confidence or connection within the clubhouse. The team is awash in players (especially infielders) who might play multiple positions, and Murphy is grateful for the flexibility that versatility will lend him, but he was also careful to note the obstacles that kind of nomadism can put in the paths of young players. "Especially young players. It’s hard," he said midweek. "I’d rather just say, ‘Hey Oliver Dunn’---which I might do—'just concentrate on third.' Christian Arroyo, who’s not a younger player, he can handle it. A guy like [Joey] Ortiz, we’ve gotta keep an eye on that. He’s so confident in his defense, although he hasn’t played much third, that I think he’s got a better chance to move and not be affected by it than most young players that aren’t as confident." Dunn has played third almost exclusively since then, as Murphy tries to make a sound evaluation of what's best for both the individual player and the team. I had a question that sat in my notebook for a couple of days, once I realized how Murphy thinks about lineups. I wanted to ask him about the fascinating findings of Tom Tango, last fall, that having one or two left-handed teammates in the lineup makes right-handed batters more effective against left-handed starters. In other words, the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts, in a delightfully tangible way, because the presence of even a couple left-handed batters forces a southpaw starter out of the comfortable rhythm and repertoire with which they assail righties. And then, in response to a totally different question... he just... started talking about it. "I happen to believe that a lot of lefty starters don’t want to face lefties," Murphy said, taking a tangential detour the broader subject of pursuing platoon advantages for his own pitchers. "I know that’s crazy, but I’ve talked to a lot of lefty starters in my years. They don’t like facing righties and lefties, righties and lefties. But when you look at the actual matchup, who’s a better matchup? Usually, it’s the opposite hand over a period of time, if it’s measured. "It’s more of an uncomfortableness. They can’t get into their groove as easily. You can’t ever measure it, because they might get the lefty out. But it screws up your rhythm going forward, because when you’re facing nine righties, you can just get in this pattern that you do. You can feel comfortable, you have space [to the arm side]." That's an excellent example of the way Murphy seems to approach everything. As I wrote in another dispatch from the desert, he's a firm believer that even lived experience and wisdom has to be falsified by good information, and that the gut is to be overruled when good evidence is presented. Yet, he doesn't zero in on any one decision, because to him, they're all concatenated. They don't matter without one another; they barely exist without one another. For a skipper entering his first full season on the top step in MLB, there's a soupcon of peril in this approach. Hard, atomic data specific to a given plate appearance or game can be a valuable life preserver when the seas of the season get rough, and Murphy's desire to consider the thing more molecularly could make him less likely to find a good grip when the water surges over his head. On balance, though, he's the kind of person you want managing a team like this. He'll resist the temptation to make rash choices, or to default to conservatism. He won't run out a player with a .450 OPS for a month straight, and he won't push buttons out of panic or obligation. If he can actualize the building of shared purpose and trust that has been his top priority by the time the team breaks camp, the Crew will have the right mix of talent and mental toughness to not only repeat as NL Central champions, but clear the hurdle that has tripped them early in recent postseasons. View full article

Mm. That's probably poor rendering of the quote on my part, but it is verbatim. He was sort of thinking aloud about the numbers he's targeting, saying, "anywhere from eight to... if I can get to", if that makes more sense.

Though he spent much of 2023 in a frustrating sojourn in the minor leagues, Janson Junk is back this spring to assert himself as a valuable piece of the major-league Milwaukee Brewers pitching staff. Image courtesy of © Allan Henry-USA TODAY Sports There's one surprising commonality among just about every pitcher in the Brewers clubhouse this spring: they're all pitching nerds. Ok, that's a tad strong. They're a pretty representative sample of big-league ballplayers, in many respects. They give each other guff about the way they do simple things. They gossip about the rest of the league. They talk golf. They're jocks, after all. Still, they all also share a fluency with advanced mechanical and quantitative jargon around pitching that would have been a foreign tongue within an actual clubhouse a decade ago. Chris Hook, it's clear, is not just telling them what to do and to trust him that it will work. They all have a fairly firm grasp of their own stuff, and of how they can improve. They've learned the underpinnings of their own performances, and they talk about them freely. Janson Junk stands out even in that crowd, though. He's not just willing to talk about how he's evolved over the last two seasons, or about why he believes he'll be good in 2024. He's downright eager to. "After the season, I train up in Seattle--that’s where I’m from--and I went to Driveline, and the biggest thing was I got my biomechanic report, and noticed that I was getting too quad-dominant last year," Junk said Saturday in Maryvale. "Meaning that I’m not utilizing my back half the way I should be to generate power. Junk in April 2023 Janson Junk April 23.mp4 "I was losing that power when I would leg lift and sink into that quad. I would start to work over my body, I would drift toward the third-base line and then work back toward home, and then I’m just fighting against myself. So the biggest thing that I worked on was hinge at my back hip, trying to get into my glute, and just think about sitting back in my mechanics, rather than falling forward a little bit." That's a funny coincidence, because the name Driveline--so much a buzzword it barely has any definition beyond the academy itself, anymore, to the modern baseball fan--actually comes from the principle that an efficient delivery means staying on an imaginary line from mound to plate. With greater engagement of the big muscles in his lower half, Junk gained both power and consistency. You can see a bit of what it "should" look like even in his final appearance of the season, Oct. 1 against the Cubs. Junk in Oct. 2023 Janson Junk Oct 23.mp4 Junk rotates his trunk later and is a little less meandering down the mound here, but there remained more cleanup to do. He now believes he's done it. "It’s about getting the most out of my body," he said. "I think this time last year, in spring, I was sitting 91-93, 94. My first live [BP] and my first game, I was 94-96. It’s very similar, but it’s just coming out better, feeling more efficient in my mechanics. I’ve always had the command where I can throw around the zone and put the ball where I want, but it’s more about getting the power out of my body that reflects on my strike numbers." Through plyo drills and a change in the set of his hips when he comes set, Junk said he now feels more precision and benefits that flow out to his arm path and to his use of his front side, as well. Whereas Bryan Hudson felt that a cleanup of his front side brought other aspects of his delivery into alignment, Junk has seen the improvements flow in the opposite direction. Beyond those mechanical cues and the increased velocity that comes with them, though, Junk also takes some optimism from what he thinks is a better pitch mix. He believes he chased a red herring last year, and will be better able to do what he does best in 2024. "Last year, coming into spring training, I really worked on my splitter, and lost focus on what I was really strong at, which is my curveball and my slider," Junk said. "Throughout last year, I was trying to force the splitter too much, and wasn’t having the results I wanted. So I went, 'Why am I doing this? I need to lean on my strengths.' "Midseason, I started doing that. So this offseason, I emphasized my slider: getting it where I wanted to, because last year I was going through a few grip changes, a few shape changes, and that’s really hard during the season—to nail that down when you’re only throwing one side a week, and you have to prepare for a game, and competing, and getting guys out. So this offseason, I really focused on the slider development, and how comfortable I was." Junk is far from the first pitcher to name the vicious difficulty of trying to make big changes to a pitch's shape or its usage within a season. It can be done, but it comes with an array of challenges. He found some things that worked during the campaign, but didn't feel able to lock them in. "Last year, my slider grip, I couldn’t execute it the way I wanted. The numbers would be good, but the execution of it wasn’t how I would like it," Junk said. "I have smaller hands, so I was trying to go with this two-seam, seam-shifted-wake slider, and then I banged that halfway through the season, because I wanted to throw a shorter, harder slider. During the offseason, I went to my trainers back home, and they were like, 'You can still sweep it good, let’s just play around with some grips, see what’s comfortable with you.'" You can see the changes he attempted to make throughout the season by isolating the sweepers and sliders from his pitch movement chart, and breaking it out by month. The consistency and manipulability he sought was elusive, though, even as he evolved. After his winter work, he feels like it's much more of a sure thing. "The big thing was keeping sweep while throwing it hard. I went to more of a spike slider, similar to what Colin Rea has. It’s still a seam-shifted slider, so I’m able to get on the side of the ball the way I want to and create the sidespin, while mimicking the hand position of my curveball, Junk said. "So it’s two very different movements, but similar hand positions. "That comfortability, where I’m like, ‘Ok, this is my fastball, and then I’m going neutral wrist with my breaking stuff, but one is more 12-to-6 and one’s sweepy. That simplified it, and allowed me to be comfortable with that grip and execute it the way I wanted." In the spring complex clubhouse, there's a line of lockers along one wall that includes: Wade Miley, Brandon Woodruff, Colin Rea, Jacob Misiorowski, Devin Williams, Bryse Wilson, Robert Gasser, Aaron Ashby, DL Hall, Jakob Junis, Hoby Milner, Junk, and Trevor Megill. It's hard not to hear what Junk says about his stuff and think about how it relates to things I heard recently from Milner (on having the same hand positions on both of his fastballs, making it easier to throw each in equal mixture) or Rea (on the feel for shaping the sweeper differently based on how he wants to use it, without losing the feel for either version of the pitch). Junk, who lockers right next to Milner, does seem to share that philosophy about setting a hand position, albeit for a breaking ball instead of heat. Just as he's all the way down the lane from Rea physically, though, he differs from his veteran teammate in the mental cue he wants when throwing the sweeper. "I don’t like the thought process of getting around the ball, because when I do that, I usually drop my wrist position and create lift to it. It’ll still have sweep, but it will have lift," Junk said. "If I have too much lift, I’ve seen it before, where I can’t get the swing and miss with it. I can still get the sweep, but it’s more about changing planes with that pitch. If I’m on top of it more, I can get more downward tilt to it and have that change of planes and get that swing and miss. And then if I want to get more depth, I can get over it like my curveball and have a little bit more depth. So it’s more about having a stiff wrist through release with my slider, and then my curveball, it’s about stiff wrist, and then coming through." One more similarity between him and those inline teammates, though: Junk, like Ashby and Wilson, believes fervently in using the slider against opposite-handed batters. "I love throwing sliders to lefties," he said. "Last year and the year before, I really started to lock that in. Going backdoor, I’ve seen that backdoor slider be amazing for anybody who throws that sweeping slider. You get a lot of takes from lefties seeing it as a ball out of the hand. And then utilizing the backfoot slider, as well, helps a lot." This level of thoughtful, exuberant openness pairs well with the concrete changes Junk has made, and manager Pat Murphy is suitably impressed. "Credit to the kid. The kid’s a worker," Murphy said in one media session. "You never have to wonder if he’s prepared." On another occasion, Murphy said he thinks Junk could help both in relief and in the rotation, which is in keeping with the very flexible approach he's taking to his pitching staff this year. "He looks fantastic. He really does," Murphy said. "The heater’s better. He’s confident." That, obviously, is not all that's different. It's plenty to get excited about, though, and Junk has the right outlook on the season. He understands that he won't be first in line for the team, but now that he has (physically and mentally) put himself on the right line, it's just a matter of time before success finds him. View full article

To be a non-roster invite to Milwaukee Brewers spring training is to play with your back to the wall. It means having your locker in an out-of-the-way corner of the clubhouse in Maryvale. For one low-profile bullpen candidate, that's ok. Being out of the way suits him. Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports "I like being tucked away over here," Jared Koenig swears, and once you get to know his story, it's not hard to believe. Koenig, 30, was born in San Jose, but when he talks about his training facility "back home," he means Scotts Valley, Cal., a city of 12,000 or so nestled just inland from Santa Cruz and about half an hour south of Palo Alto, Cupertino, and yes, San Jose. Koenig works out at Rossy's Training, run by local product and ex-pro Matt Rossignol, who pitched sparingly for a couple of independent league teams after graduating from Scotts Valley's Bethany University (since closed) and then got certification to work as a trainer. Rossy's is on Technology Cir. in Scotts Valley, but like the city itself, that mostly means the less glamorous kind of technology--the stuff without which Silicon Valley would sputter and stop, but not much like Silicon Valley itself. Next to Rossy's is a machine shop, and there are two electronics fabricators on the same block, just off Route 17. It's a good place to get things done, but not a great place to get noticed. The same can probably be said for Koenig's locker in Maryvale, and he's pleased about both. For the moment, Koenig is the most famous client of his little training spot, and he's trying to put both it and himself on the map. To date, his big-league career consists of a 39-inning stint with the moribund 2022 Oakland Athletics, and even that came only after a seemingly impossibe baseball journey. Hold on for this ride; it's bumpy. After finishing high school, Koenig went to Central Arizona College, which is really a junior college, and was drafted in the 35th round by the White Sox. Chicago never even made him an offer, though, so Koenig opted instead for a transfer opportunity to Old Dominion University, in Virginia. That stop was short and brutal, as Koenig pitched sparingly and had an ERA of 7.63. He next transferred to Cal. State-Monterey Bay, less than an hour down the coast from home, but things went only fractionally better. After that flier from the White Sox, Koenig was never drafted again. From 2017 through 2019, Koenig pitched in a staggering five different independent leagues: the Pecos League, the American Association, the Pacific Association, the United Shore Baseball League, and the Frontier League. In the winter after 2019, he went to Australia and pitched there, too. and somewhere in there, seemingly right around 2018, a funny thing happened: Koenig got better. He had impressive numbers in Australia and had the same in his last couple of stops in indy ball. The A's spotted him in Australia and signed him in Jan. 2020, but because of the pandemic, his affiliated pro career had to wait a year to begin. When it did, he put up good enough numbers in Double- and Triple-A to earn a reasonably long look with the parent club in 2022--even if it was for a team who lost 102 games. After finishing the season in the minors, however, he became a minor-league free agent. Throughout all this time--even for half of his stint with Oakland--Koenig was a starter. After signing with the Padres in late February, he tried his hand as a reliever in 2023. He had a 3.81 ERA in 48 appearances at the two highest levels of the minors for San Diego, but he was never especially close to cracking the big-league roster. After the season, he again became a free agent. This time, his free agency only lasted two weeks. The Brewers offered him the spot he now occupies, as a non-roster player but in big-league camp, on Nov. 20. In his work for the Padres in the minors, Koenig's stuff ticked up. Moving to the pen certainly helped, but so did a lot of work at Rossy's Training. "Everything with my trainer has been to help me see an increase in velo and consistency," Koenig said Friday. "But the last couple of years, we really focused on speed down the mound and pace—everything directed toward trying to create more velo from the body." It worked, in a big way, but even beyond what he worked on between seasons, some of the work he got in while with the Padres helped him find another gear near the end of the season, too. However you distribute credit, he's now frequently throwing about four miles per hour faster than he was in 2022, and two miles per hour faster than in early 2023. Late in the season, he touched 98. Another change he made after joining San Diego and moving to the bullpen was in his pitch mix. He has a very different fastball profile than he showed in 2022. "I throw a four-seamer, but very seldom," Koenig said. That was his bread-and-butter fastball prior to 2023. Now, it's a sinker, and the weapon now nearly in parity with it is his cutter. "The induced vert is pretty high for a cutter. I do throw a four-seamer, but usually the four-seamer is a little more distinct. It’ll have a little bit of perceived cut, but nothing compared to the true cutter I’m throwing. And then I have a sweeper and a changeup." The southpaw will see many more lefties, as a share of all opponents, now that he's made the move to relief work, so he's more comfortable using the sinker as his main fastball. That was the pitch everything else worked off of last year. Against righties, though, it was the cutter (once he found conviction in it) that became his primary offering. He gained much better feel (and applied better shape) to the changeup in 2023, as he alluded to above, and the pairing of the cutter and that change might just be the key for him to find greater success against right-handed batters. Check out the movement changes in his profile from 2022 to 2023, but keep in mind that almost all of the pitches coded by Statcast as four-seamers in the righthand image are actually the cutter, as Koenig moved away from the four-seamer. A starter needs three pitches they can throw to each type of batter, but a reliever only needs two. For Koenig, the cutter and changeup should work to righties, especially if he can keep the cutter above 90 miles per hour, as it was last year. The sinker and sweeper, meanwhile, will be very tough on lefties. The four-seamer can be reserved as a mere changer of eye levels at the top of the zone, on occasion. "This offseason with my trainer, the goal was to create more of a sweeper-like curveball—a little sharper, a little more left to right instead of north to south," Koenig said. That fits, if he'll primarily be throwing that pitch against fellow lefties. "And so with that, the goal is to have it be 15-20 [inches of sweep] and anywhere from 8 to, if I can get down to like 3 for [induced vertical break] then that’d be great. Then it’s just making sure the sinker is staying under 10 inches of vert. That’s the goal for that aspect." The sinker already meets that standard, and the magnitude of his movement on the sweeper (labeled a curveball, in the images above) is already right. With the tilt adjustments he's describing, he should be able to run the sinker in on lefties, then get them chasing fairly helplessly away on the sweeper. It's momentarily startling to hear a pitcher with Koenig's rural NorCal accent rattle off numbers like these so fluently, but then you remember: he's from the place where Silicon Valley's innovations become tangible things. Just like the machine shop next door, Rossy's is receiving specs and going about the process of manufacturing. In Koenig's case, that could mean manufacturing a big-league career as a lefty reliever, long after most people would have given up the game. He's not doing something radical and new, though a decade ago, all of this would have been. He's just one of the latest highly unexpected beneficiaries of this kind of pitch design. Don't expect Koenig to make the roster out of camp. Do keep an eye on him, though, because he's not a junkballer with little to offer. In his first two outings of the spring, he racked up five strikeouts in two innings. The stuff is legitimate, and the journeyman wielding it is clearly no quitter. View full article

Thanks! I like doing these, too. I've got an even better one (imo) for you tomorrow, in the same vein.

Opportunity is everywhere in the Milwaukee Brewers rotation this spring. For one hurler, though, claiming a place in that group is just about building upon the success he found last year--and the weapon he needs to do that is already in his arsenal. "A changeup was always a tough pitch for me to feel, but the games last year when it was good, it made everything else better," Rea said. "So it was one of those things where I needed to figure out a consistent grip, and so far this has been pretty good." As you can discern in reading those quotes, Rea isn't planning to rebuild his varied repertoire around the splitter. It's just a tweak designed to help him become more unpredictable. He knows that he'll also need better execution of his existing, largely unaltered offerings, in order to better neutralize lefties. One key will be greater depth on his sweeper, a pitch that became a crucial part of his attack last year. "It’s more of a thought," Rea said of manipulating that pitch for more depth. "If I want to throw it backfoot to lefties, I just try to get on top of it a little bit more. If I’m throwing it to righties, away, I’m more on the side of it—almost underneath it, so it comes across. I want that ride and sweep to righties. I think that plays a little bit better, depending on the swing." That's all pretty similar to what Bryse Wilson said earlier this week about his cutter. For Wilson, the cutter is a breaking ball, so it makes sense that he and Rea conceptualize that subtle but essential manipulation to change shape in the same way. Also like Wilson, Rea has a cutter that behaves more like a breaking ball than like his heat, but it was the sweeper that yielded the best results for him last year. Of course, everything about Rea's stuff will play better if he sustains the increase in velocity he enjoyed in 2023. Entering his mid-30s, he threw harder than ever. That's a recipe for success, and one Rea says came from finding balance between the many possible objectives a pitcher can elect to pursue during offseason conditioning. "I think the training I started to do a couple years ago in the offseason helped my mobility get back a little bit.," Rea said. "There were some years in there where I just wanted to get as strong as possible, and I kind of lost the mobility, so I went backwards. I didn’t lift as heavy, but gained range of motion." As you might expect of a journeyman who has found such a secure opportunity so late in his pro career, Rea can often be spotted carefully maintaining the feel of what works in the clubhouse. It's not unusual to see players practicing some aspect of their swing or their throwing motion near their lockers, but Rea does it more than anyone. He's often spinning a ball in his hands, and conversations with teammates frequently involve exaggerated examples of the mechanical cues he's talking about or searching for. Some of his improved power comes simply from better physical efficiency, "It’s also just constantly working with my mechanics here," Rea said. "And then I went to Driveline and did some stuff with them, got on a routine with the weighted balls. It’s just a combination of things." Last season, Rea was a semi-emergency fill-in and a bit of a bonus find. This year, he's an integral part of their pitching plan. Thus, they need to hope that his combination of new skills and his boosted power will have the desired effects, immediately. Research assistance provided by TruMedia. View full article

The Milwaukee Brewers collected their third win of the Cactus League season Sunday, beating up on the Diamondbacks at Salt River Fields in Scottsdale. That park is the only one in the Arizona spring training circuit that features public Statcast data, so let's dig in on our glimpse of the goods. This is far from definitive, and maybe Uribe just didn't have the usual feel for his four-seamer today. It also looked like a slightly different pitch in live action, though. This will bear watching, because if Uribe can start firing in a 95-MPH cutter without cannibalizing his other offerings, it gets downright unfair to opposing hitters in a hurry. DL Hall's Delightfully Dominant, Slightly Inexplicable Fastball I don't like to default to Stuff+ or PitchingBot, a pair of models designed to boil down the quality of a given offering to a single number using data about release point and movement. I think pitching is much more nuanced and interesting than that. I do find it fascinating, though, that those two models disagree sharply about Hall's fastball. Somewhat famously, multiple outlets who put scouting (non-quantitative) grades on players gave Hall an 80 (the very top of the scale) to the lefty's heater. PitchingBot, which is on the scouting scale (20-80), comes fairly close to affirming that, at 68. It ranked Hall's as the 20th-best fastball in baseball last year, of 727 qualifying pitchers. Stuff+, though, is much less impressed. That number is scaled to 100, where that figure is average and higher is better. Hall comes in at just 101, above average but far below any standard for excellence. He ranks 232nd in fastball Stuff+. I bring this up because, when you watch Hall, it's not hard to see what the scouts saw when they slapped that high grade on him. The fastball explodes on the hitter. It's just not easy to put a finger on why that is. I looked up Hall's percentile ranks in many categories, among lefties who threw at least 200 four-seamers, for 2023. As it turns out, while he doesn't excel in terms of sheer movement or sheer velocity, he's extraordinary in many other regards. We're certainly used to elite fastballs grades being given to fastballs with elite velocity, and failing that, we at least expect something weird to be going on in terms of horizontal or vertical movement. Hall is more subtle than that. It's a weird horizontal angle, but also a low release point, which gives him an extreme vertical approach angle, too. His very good extension lets the raw velocity play up, and he changes speeds on the heat much more than most pitchers do. That's an especially intriguing tidbit, for such a young pitcher. In the context of a short Cactus League outing, it's impossible to distinguish adding and subtracting on the fastball from tiring in a second inning of work, but I thought he seemed to be doing the former, not the latter, on Sunday. Changing speeds and giving hitters such a tricky look makes up for a lot of other things, and with Hall's good (though not dominant) power, it becomes a deadly cocktail in a hurry. In a short outing Sunday, he showed everything from 93.7 MPH to 96.9 on the fastball, with accompanying changes in spin rate. That touch might be what sets the pitch apart. Joey Wiemer Has Not Looked Good So Far We can discuss this more in a separate post later this week, but WIemer was one of the players I watched most closely this week. I wish I felt more encouraged by what I saw. He has talked at length about the benefits of a quieter swing since arriving at camp, but in games, he looks (if anything) less comfortable. He did manage a single Sunday, but his exit velocities on three batted balls were 69.5 miles per hour, 76.3, and 66.3, and the contact was no more impressive than that makes it sound. "Everything is just a little more quiet," Wiemer told me this week. "That’s been one of my focuses right now, is that my takes are a lot better. I’m not feeling like I’m falling forward as much." He did draw a walk Sunday, and a little more plate discipline is one highly plausible and valuable potential benefit of the changes he's made this offseason. I wrote as much last week. Throughout the early games of spring ball, though, he's looked as imbalanced as ever. Wiemer's the kind of player you assiduously avoid giving up on too soon, but barring a fast turn of the corner from here, I'd be surprised to see him break camp with the Brewers. He isn't doing enough to assert himself as a more valuable option than defensive specialist Blake Perkins or more versatile bench piece Owen Miller. If it comes down to Wiemer against either of the team's out-of-options position players (Eric Haase and Jake Bauers), I think the Crew should keep them and let Wiemer get more plate appearances in Nashville. Four More Whiffs on the Slider for J.B. Bukauskas No player is harder to evaluate in early spring training games than the reliever who comes on to finish games. They're hardly ever facing big league-caliber hitters, and those who do stick around that long could be forgiven for having mentally checked out. By and large, the fans have done so by that stage. Still, Bukauskas has impressed Murphy already this spring, and his nasty breaking ball catches both the human and the digital eye, too. The devastating thing about him is that his slider doesn't have crazy movement, in and of itself. It's his sinker that has exceptional run, and from his setup way over on the first-base side of the rubber, he can find the zone with that pitch. Then, when the slider does come, it's much too long before most hitters can see it for what it is, and they end up flailing foolishly. The Diamondbacks did plenty of that in a single inning Sunday. Again, it's silly to assume that these results will port right to real MLB games--the kind that count, where minor leaguers don't enter in a shift change at the seventh-inning stretch and pitchers who got knocked out of the box in one inning can't come back the next inning to finish their daily work, as the Diamondbacks did at one point Sunday. Nonetheless, as Murphy rightly notes, Bukauskas will pitch in the majors at some point this year. He's on the 40-man roster and can still be optioned for one more season. The next step should be to get him in while the bigger bats are still swinging, and see whether they cast a colder eye on his go-fish offerings. Research assistance provided by TruMedia. View full article