Matthew Trueblood

With yet another one-run save Saturday night, the Brewers' relief ace continued to show that he's an elite weapon. This year, Craig Counsell has used him masterfully. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports In major-league history, there have been 6,179 qualified player-seasons by relief pitchers. Only six of them have seen a pitcher average a Leverage Index of at least 2.50. (Leverage Index (LI) is a measure of the importance of a given plate appearance to the outcome of that game, using mathematical modeling. An LI of 1.0 is average, and an LI of 2.5 is two and a half times as important.) If the season ended today, though, that number would rise to seven, and Devin Williams's 2.69 average LI would become the highest ever. Williams is currently pitching in tougher, more crucial situations (on average) than anyone else ever has over a full season. He owns a decent-sized advantage, too. Highest Leverage Index, Single Season, s. 1871 Player Season Average LI Devin Williams 2023 2.69 John Franco 1991 2.57 Troy Percival 2000 2.57 Bobby Thigpen 1991 2.54 Francisco Rodriguez 2008 2.53 Jordan Walden 2011 2.53 John Franco 1998 2.52 This is one of the most aggressive, interesting, and deft uses of a relief ace in baseball history. Since mid-May, Craig Counsell has not asked his closer to lift a finger when it doesn't matter. Williams has only made 12 appearances with an average LI under 1.0 this year, and half of them (including the four lowest-leverage) came in April and May. For the year, his 14 appearances in low and medium leverage are tied for the fewest by any pitcher with at least 35 total appearances--and he's pitched 14 more times than Andres Munoz, the Mariners reliever with whom he's tied. After easing him into the season and getting him work at times just for its own sake to keep him on schedule, Counsell has pivoted to a narrowly defined but demanding role for his closer. Williams had three saves of four outs or more in May; pitched four times in five days in late June; and saved all three games of the Crew's sweep of the Reds coming out of the All-Star break. Then, he pitched four times in five days again earlier this month, and had to come in mid-inning to bail out struggling lesser relievers to lock up two of the team's three wins in Texas last weekend. It's clear that, keeping in mind the workload Williams bore as the closer for Team USA during the World Baseball Classic, Counsell is trying to make him comfortable and get him into games only when actually needed. However, Counsell is also a brilliantly ruthless bullpen manager. He never chases wins by putting in his best relievers when the team trails by a single run, and he never lets relievers in whom his trust is imperfect or incomplete try to close out close wins. Williams can reliably predict when he'll need to be ready, based on game context, but he can never be certain of a night off. That Williams hasn't made multiple-inning appearances since May should help him stay fresh down the stretch. He's also only made two appearances since the start of July in which he had to throw more than 21 pitches: his rough blown save against the Cubs on July 5, and a gravel-in-the-gut save against Atlanta on July 22. Counsell has calibrated this nicely. As Joel Payamps seems to be hitting a bit of a wall, Abner Uribe and Trevor Megill are emerging as fine complements to him as set-up options. Williams doesn't have to bear a heavy sheer innings load for this team. He just has to have his spikes on by the seventh inning every night, just in case. He can and should manage that, and if Counsell keeps managing him the way he has, the result should be both an NL Central championship and a small slice of history. View full article

No team is as good as they look at their best, or as bad as they look at their worst. Even accounting for that fact, though, the Brewers currently look really, really good. Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-USA TODAY Sports The San Diego Padres limped into town this weekend like an old dog needing to be put down. It's not the fact that the Brewers won their sixth straight game Friday night that prompts me to say this, because their opponent wasn't up to the challenge. Rather, it's the way they won, and some of the contributors who got a chance to remind everyone how dynamic they are. Rowdy Tellez is not fully restored to the 2022 version, and we probably shouldn't expect him to be so at any point this year. With his first home run since returning from the injured list, though, he reminded everyone how deep this lineup starts to feel if some of the guys in the middle of the order warm up enough to start consistently driving in Christian Yelich and William Contreras. Carlos Santana, Willy Adames, and Tellez have each recently demonstrated that they still have access to their considerable power, and with Yelich (.371) and Contreras (.353) running strong on-base percentages in front of them, that's a recipe for quick runs. The really dazzling thing about Friday's win, though, was the pitching. Brandon Woodruff pulverized any remaining doubts about his status not only as fully recovered from the injury that cost him half the season, but the ace of this rotation, with 11 strikeouts and a lone solo home run allowed in six innings, all against a good Padres offense. Then, Abner Uribe and Trevor Megill really put on a show. The 24 fastest pitches of the night were thrown by those two, ranging from 99.3 up to 102.1 miles per hour, and Woodruff himself came in 25th--not with an overheated first-inning missile, but with a fastball to strike out Fernando Tatis in the fifth frame. Add these guys and their overwhelming upside to a pitching staff that had already carried the team this far--with Corbin Burnes, Freddy Peralta, Devin Williams, and Joel Payamps leading the way--and you have the most formidable corps of arms of any team in baseball. It's frightening to think that they could still add someone like Jacob Misiorowski to that mix, but Friday night only underscored that they don't even need to do so. Their depth is staggering. Plenty of teams would be thrilled to insert Adrian Houser into their rotation, or Elvis Peguero or Hoby Milner into their bullpen. On the Brewers, those guys are on the fringes. That group is finally convalescing and coalescing, at just the right time, but the team was able to survive even while they were well short of full strength thanks to one of the best defenses in baseball. If Adames continues to pull out of his funk at the plate, it further alleviates the pressure on that group, because he can remain the everyday shortstop, and Brice Turang can stay at second base, where he's a stellar defender. If Tellez can meet the high threshold to be a useful DH, then Santana can play every day at first base, where he's a significant defensive upgrade. The more those guys hit, the less the team needs to swap the defensive prowess of Brian Anderson for the extra lineup depth of Andruw Monasterio. Tellez settling in as a platoon DH would make it easier for Craig Counsell to optimize the balance between offense and defense in his outfield options. We could see a lot of creative mid-game substitutions down the stretch involving Sal Frelick, Joey Wiemer, Tyrone Taylor, Mark Canha, and Blake Perkins. In defiance of conventional wisdom, I'm a firm believer that (if anything) high-powered offense is the key to October success. In general, it's better to bet on the best team in any playoff matchup, but to keep in mind that the margins are shockingly thin and that quality will not always win the day. Certainly, there's no one formula for converting playoff appearances to World Series rings. Just as certainly, there are teams who can be much better than the Brewers when they're at their very best. Still, at this moment, I'm not convinced that anyone would feel good about their chances against this team in a short series. The sheer stuff of the pitching staff, especially with the back end of the rotation and the underbelly of the bullpen trimmed away, is as good as that of any team in baseball. Much can change in six weeks, but the Brewers are currently as healthy as a team can hope to be at this time of year, and though they won't win as many games as the 2018 or 2021 clubs or have the offensive firepower of the 2011 team, this feels like a team with as good a chance as any in recent Brewers history to fly their first-ever World Series championship flag. View full article

Orioles closer Félix Bautista has dibs on the nickname The Mountain. The Brewers, then, will have to settle for a humbler sobriquet for their latest bullpen weapon. Meet Sasquatch. Image courtesy of © Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports It's not that no one believed in Trevor Megill. There have always been believers out there. There have even been glimpses--little hints of what was possible, if this monster of a hurler could figure out how not to throw the ball right down the middle and how to add a little movement to his very hot heat. It was just impossible to document that his upside really existed, beyond the imaginations and circumstantial evidence. Through the appearance that last got him banished to Nashville in late July, Megill had pitched 86 innings in 84 MLB games, with 103 strikeouts and just 32 walks--but also 12 home runs allowed, and a 5.84 career ERA. This time, though, something has changed. In four outings since returning to the Brewers bullpen, Megill has faced 14 batters, allowing two singles and nothing else. He's struck out six of those 14 batters. More importantly, he's slightly but steadily raised his release point, making fuller use of his 6-foot-8 frame, and it's unlocked his exceptional fastball. Megill's velocity has ticked up to new highs, He's averaged a career-best 99.6 miles per hour on his heater this month. He threw nine pitches to close out the Crew's win over the Twins Tuesday night. They were all fastballs, and three of them exceeded 101 miles per hour. Velocity is easy to find, in the modern game, but Megill has reached a point where there still exists premium value. Just as importantly, though, getting his arm slot up and his hand behind the ball has also increased his extension at release and the vertical movement on that pitch. He's not quite getting the ride Bautista gets on his fastball, but it's now on a par with elite relievers like Jordan Romano, Pete Fairbanks, and Aroldis Chapman. In the past, though, it wasn't the sheer stuff on Megill's fastball that caused him trouble. Rather, it was the fact that he threw too many of them right in the heart of the zone, without any precision. That problem was compounded by his shaky command of his two breaking balls, which also (more often than not) took the form of filling up the heart of the zone. When he did miss out of the zone, it was too easy for hitters to lay off, because they were picking up the differences both in his arm speed and in the spin on the offerings. His slider was especially ineffective, as opponents slugged better than .550 against it in 2021 and 2022. Under the Brewers' tutelage this year, Megill has let go of the slider. He's now strictly sticking to that explosive four-seamer, and his high-spin, high-velocity knuckle curve. It's a pitch he commands much better, and its spin mirrors that of his fastball just about perfectly, making it difficult for hitters to spot out of the hand. His location is much better with that pitch, and so is his whiff rate. Of the 150 pitchers who have thrown at least 100 curveballs this year, only six (Alex Lange, Eury Perez, Ray Kerr, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, and Corbin Burnes) are getting whiffs at a better rate than Megill--and that's over the full season, including his earlier, less successful stints. Whether it's been primarily the mechanical adjustments he's made or a better-defined approach, Megill is throwing far fewer meatballs (with both his fastball and his curve) than he has in the past. Pair that better feel with the uptick in stuff and the elimination of his weakest pitch, and it's not hard to understand how he's hugely improved in a short period of time. Megill is a reminder of why scouts don't give up on players, and why teams give so many retread relievers one more chance than most fans would. Megill is still only 29 years old, and he's under team control through at least 2027. He might yet implode again; it's too early to declare total victory over his past home-run problems. Even so, he's delivering significant value for the Brewers just by showing up and being useful down the stretch here. His emergence is timing out perfectly, as he should be able to make up for the recent struggles of Elvis Peguero and the potential weariness of Joel Payamps. A deep bullpen is as important to the Brewers' preferred style of play--to their way of winning games--as it is to anyone in MLB. Devin Williams and Payamps have been stalwart this season, but the rest of the unit has seen a lot of rotation and turnover. Guys have looked trustworthy for a time, then hit rough patches. It was true of Peter Strzelecki, and of Bryse Wilson. It seems to be true of Peguero. Abner Uribe has largely looked great, and his pure stuff can rival Megill's, but he has yet to demonstrate that he can throw enough strikes to dominate. Megill goes against type, that way. When one thinks of the journeyman hard-throwing reliever with the high-spin breaking ball, one pictures big walk totals. It makes logical sense that it would work that way, because the harder one throws and the more spin one applies to the ball, the faster several body parts have to be moving. That tends to decrease one's control over each of those moving parts. That has never been his problem, which is inarguably a good thing, because throwing strikes is still the single most indispensable skill for a big-league reliever. In order to be a useful high-leverage arm, though, Megill needed to find a way to allow less hard contact. He's done it. Now, the remaining challenge is to keep it going. It will be interesting to see whether, and to what extent, Craig Counsell will start to entrust Megill with more important moments. Only one of Megill's appearances since his latest recall was in anything but low leverage, and that's been the pattern throughout the year. He only gets the call with anything on the line when other circumstances have created a near-emergent lack of other options. There might be a mental hurdle to clear for Megill. He's tended to make his most glaring and harshly punished mistakes when given the rare chance to pitch with the game on the line. August and September, in a pennant race, is a tough time to let a guy with that kind of track record prove that he's made the mental adjustments, even with the several important physical ones he's already accomplished. Still, if Megill does have everything aligned and locked in, Williams might be the only Brewers reliever who can shut teams down as impressively. The Brewers have cut and shined up a real diamond in the rough. View full article

In the Brewers' superb defensive lineup, the closest thing to a weakness has been the hot corner. It might be time to rethink the way the team divides the duties of their two top options at that spot? For as long as there have been baseball teams, there has existed the notion of the defensive replacement. Teams find a way to get good bats into their starting lineup, but late in games (especially close games, and especially those close games in which they have a lead), managers love to remove a bat-first position player and bring in a good fielder--even if it comes at the cost of some late scoring opportunities. This is how baseball teams always think, really. Because the sport does not allow players who leave the game to re-enter it, teams try to start their best players, and players have come to think of starting as a major privilege. Unlike in, say, the NBA, there is very little honor attached to coming into games off the bench, especially now that pitchers no longer hit and the opportunities for pinch-hitting are drastically reduced. In that way of thinking, Andruw Monasterio has usurped Brian Anderson, who started the season in a timeshare with Luis Urias as the Brewers' third baseman. Monasterio has been an unexpected but indispensable offensive contributor for the team, and as Anderson has battled both injuries and inconsistency, he's been deprioritized. On the other hand, though, Monasterio is a poor defender, on a team that emphasizes defensive excellence as much as any in baseball. The Brewers are second in MLB in Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), at 46, and they're markedly above-average at catcher, first base, second base, shortstop, center field, and right field. The team's pitchers aren't fielding aces, and they've knowingly traded some defense for the much-improved production of Christian Yelich in left field, but otherwise, their weakest defensive link is third base. Even then, they're better than average, but only narrowly. It's Monasterio costing them a better rating there. He's been a bit better at second base, but his hands aren't soft enough for that spot, and his arm has gotten oddly erratic when he's played third. Anderson, by contrast, has shown really good range at third, and his arm is fine. He hasn't moved well enough to field bunts effectively, but the bunt is such a small part of the modern game that it hasn't hurt him. Anderson is four runs better than Monasterio at third, according to DRS, in about 50 percent more innings there. Since his scorching start, though, Anderson has collapsed at the plate. He's running a weak 86 wRC+ for the season, and since May 1, it's even uglier. In 239 plate appearances over that span, he's batted just .210/.301/.324. Meanwhile, Monasterio has rescued the anemic offense, stabilizing the bottom of the batting order. He has a 96 wRC+ on the year, and he makes up for his lack of power by bringing a .340 on-base percentage to lineup positions where teams often take a number more like .310. That's what Monasterio has become the starting third baseman for Craig Counsell. Anderson has entered three of his seven games since coming off the injured list as a late-game substitution, often with an eye toward having him play third base for the final inning or two. It's the traditional usage of players like these. Let's turn it on its head, though. Imagine that, instead, the Brewers started Anderson, but sought the first opportunity they could get to advantageously swap in Monasterio. Neither guy should be batting in the top five or six lineup spots for this team right now, anyway, thanks to the additions of Mark Canha and Carlos Santana to the mix ahead of the trade deadline. By starting Anderson, Counsell could steal an inning or two of defense before even having to accept the tradeoff of an at-bat from the struggling veteran. One edge that this way of thinking gives, in most cases, is that relievers tend to strike out more batters (and thus, induce fewer ground balls) than do starters. In theory, your defense-first player should be the starter, because you can hide them at the bottom of the batting order to minimize their damage there and you maximize the chances that they'll have a defensive impact. The Brewers are no exception to this, though the gap is smaller than for most teams. It's just 0.3 percentage points of difference, with starters allowing ground balls in 29 percent of opponents' plate appearances and relievers allowing them 28.7 percent of the time. This little bit of creative roster usage is even more valuable if your bat-first player hits relievers especially well. Unfortunately, that's not the case with Monasterio. Both he (.554 OPS) and Anderson (.582) have dreadful numbers against relievers this year. Still, on balance, it makes sense to start Anderson, and to bring in Monasterio when an opening presents itself. If there's a particular mid-game pitching matchup that Counsell feels would favor Monasterio, that's the moment to make the change. Otherwise, it can just happen if the team falls behind by a run or two, thereby raising the urgency of creating some offense and lessening the impact of team defense. Teams think about these substitutions from the perspective of minimizing regret and maximizing momentum. They sub in defensive whizzes late to protect leads, because they hate and fear the feeling of blowing a late lead. On balance, however, they'd do better to start with the defense-oriented player and tactically deploy the superior hitter. The Brewers have a good enough manager to entrust him with that kind of roster usage, and they ought to go for it. View full article

No. At least I don’t think so. Why?

A weekend sweep of the Rangers widened the Brewers' lead in the NL Central. On this day off on the schedule, let's check in on the team's leavened Playoff Odds. Image courtesy of © Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports According to FanGraphs, the Brewers now sport a 72.2-percent chance of winning the NL Central. They're 88.5-percent likely to make the playoffs. It's not yet an easy road to October, and nothing is guaranteed. With six games left on the schedule against the Cubs and so many other teams involved in the twin races for both the division and the NL's three Wild Card spots, it would be impossible to feel that level of security now. Overall, though, the Brewers are in terrific position. The Dodgers' hot streak since the trade deadline has torpedoed the Crew's hopes of earning a first-round bye, especially since that spree included the Dodgers sweeping the Brewers last week. On the other hand, in the same three-week span, Milwaukee's odds to win the NL Central have risen from 60 percent to that figure just north of 72, and their chances of attaining the postseason have climbed from 70 percent to nearly 90. With all their head-to-head contests against the Reds complete, the Brewers know they have (in effect) a five-game lead over Cincinnati. They only lead them by four games, but the Crew own the tiebreaker if they end the season tied. Five games is not an invincible lead, and the Cubs are closer on their heels anyway, but the gap within the division is getting more comfortable. At the same time, the Phillies and Giants have started treading water, and lesser Wild Card contenders Miami, Arizona, and San Diego seem to be in various stages of freefall. That's given the Brewers a much clearer path not only to a Wild Card berth should they be caught in the divisional contest, but to the top Wild Card entry, which comes with the same privilege (home-field advantage in the Wild Card Series) as goes to the third-winningest division champion. Rather than worry about any of this, from their position, the Brewers just need to keep winning games. This weekend was a wildly profitable one for them, and September might not be the ferociously tight thrill ride it looked likely to be a couple weeks ago. The deadline is passed, so the only decisions the team needs to make about the roster are about whether to call up certain prospects and how to balance the competing objectives of winning and keeping players fresh down the stretch. Given the increasing comfort of their position, maybe a bit less urgency is warranted than was when we pondered the team's standing a few weeks ago. The Brewers don't have to win every game. To merely string together series victories, and especially to win at least half of those six games against the Cubs, ought to be Craig Counsell's focus now. If they manage it, the team can start looking ahead at their most likely Wild Card Series opponents--the Marlins, Diamondbacks, and Cubs. That last would be a fairly crazy series, as it would come on the heels of a season-ending series between the same two teams at Miller Park, so tensions and drama would have time to swell as though the series were a best-of-seven. The Brewers should hope that all that potential drama waits until then, because if it does, it almost certainly means that they've cruised to their third division title in six years. View full article

On Sunday, the Brewers have a chance to complete an unlikely sweep of the AL West-leading Rangers. To do so, they turn to their fifth starter, the most unlikely member of their rotation. Is his spot there safe? Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports It's been a tough stretch for Adrian Houser. Since the All-Star break, he's made six starts, and he sports an unsightly 5.63 ERA. The Brewers have managed to win four of those six games, but Houser himself has posted a negative Win Probability Added figure in five of the six. He's getting hit much harder over that span than he had been previously. His ground-ball rate is down, so he's not getting the double play ball that helped him out of several jams in the first half. He's allowed 10 extra-base hits in the second half, after allowing just 14 in 11 first-half appearances. On the other hand, Houser is also missing more bats since the break, and his walk rate is fine. He's allowed a substantially lower opponent OPS over these six starts than he did in the first half, even as his ERA has jumped. That brings the central question into focus: Is he cooked? Or has he just gotten unlucky? The stakes of that question rise, not only as the season nears its conclusion, but with each start made by Robert Gasser in Triple A. Gasser sports a 3.81 ERA for Nashville, in what is (because of the microscopic automated strike zone and because of the very lively ball) a fairly extreme hitter's league. He's fanned 143 batters in 113 innings, and over his last four outings, he's run a 2.35 ERA and struck out 34 of the 95 batters he's faced. Gasser is clearly the higher-upside hurler at this point in time, even accounting for the fact that he would have to adjust quickly to the big leagues under the pressure of a pennant race. The argument for keeping Houser in place leans more on what the downside of each looks like. Obviously, Houser is capable of getting blown up now and then. However, even in this bad stretch of six starts, he's pitched 32 innings. He only failed to complete five frames in one of them, and in fact, he's gone at least five in all but that one start since returning to the rotation in late June. As the team's aforementioned 4-2 record in Houser's second half illustrates, a fifth starter doesn't need to dominate. Good teams just need that guy to keep them in games and avoid wearing out their bullpen. The wrinkle with this team, though, is that the offense has been so bad that it's hard to pin down what keeping them in the game means. Perhaps the explosion this weekend in Texas is a sign that all of that is changing, anyway, but if not, we need to account for the fact that four or five runs will often beat this team. Gasser is the guy who can, if he adapts quickly and bears up under the stress of a September fight for the division title, give a low-scoring team a clear path to victory even on their worse days. He just comes with added volatility, and a higher risk of leaving the bullpen to clean up a mess. Houser's low-grade reliability is a better fit, if the offense starts playing up to its potential, but the team needs to make a decision between the two based on their own merits, not on the chances that the lineup has an extended hot streak in them. There is another option, of course. The team could add Gasser to the rotation, without demoting Houser, thereby creating a six-man rotation. That would alleviate any concerns the team might have about Gasser's seasonal workload if he slotted into the rotation, and it might improve the chances that Brandon Woodruff, Freddy Peralta, and Wade Miley make it to the playoffs both healthy and fully effective. On the other hand, unless the Crew goes on a hot streak soon to create some separation between themselves and the Reds and Cubs, every game will be precious down the stretch. The team will be loath to risk losing a start for Corbin Burnes, or for Woodruff or Peralta, in the name of adding a couple by Gasser. Gasser is 24, and he pitched 137 innings last year. He could make the rest of the starts down the stretch without compiling a worrisome total for the year. If the team believes he can withstand the challenge, they should give him a shot in the fifth place in the rotation. If Houser shows well Sunday in Texas, though, he could secure his spot the rest of the way. View full article

They held on to win, but the Brewers had to really sweat late in their contest against the Rangers Friday night. The bullpen is struggling. Could their top pitching prospect be a balm for what ails them? Image courtesy of © Steven Bisig-USA TODAY Sports Let no one say that Matt Arnold didn't make any effort to upgrade the Milwaukee bullpen at the trade deadline. He went and got Andrew Chafin, with an eye toward lightening the burden on Hoby Milner against key lefties. That trade was a strange one, though, because Arnold dealt away Peter Strzelecki, who started the season as such an important part of the bullpen. Arnold was betting on making his bullpen's high-leverage unit better, rather than making the overall relief corps deeper. Now, it looks like he might not have even achieved that. It was Chafin who (again) imploded Friday night, nearly blowing a healthy late lead. Retiring only one batter, Chafin issued a walk and allowed two screaming doubles, forcing Craig Counsell to go to Devin Williams in what had been a comfortable 9-4 game just moments earlier. As sometimes happens when he's called upon to get warm unusually quickly and enter mid-inning, Williams was not his best self, either. The Crew was lucky to escape with the win, and it was as much thanks to Sal Frelick's defensive work as to anything the bullpen did. Hoby Milner and Abner Uribe did turn in tidy and impressive innings of middle relief Friday night, and Uribe ought to be right on the verge of sliding into the secondary setup role behind Williams and Joel Payamps. Even then, though, those pitchers have both been just shaky enough when given high-leverage chances that they're unlikely to enter Counsell's circle of trust in September. All of that could lead the team to consider calling up their top pitching prospect, Jacob Misiorowski. After his latest start with Double-A Biloxi, Misiorowski has everyone dreaming a little on his long-term upside in that role, but for the final month of 2023, he could have huge utility as a fireman in the heat of a pennant race. If the front office has faith that he wouldn't vitrify and crack in that heat, they should give him a chance to slot into the role Devin Williams assumed late in 2019. No one in the Brewers organization, and hardly anyone in baseball, can top Misiorowski for sheer stuff. His huge 6-foot-7 frame, elite velocity, and ability to extend at release and spin the ball make his fastball overpowering, and his slider is one of the best in Minor League Baseball. His arsenal runs deeper than that, but in a late-season short relief capacity, that heater and slider could be sufficiently devastating. It's the obvious comp, and far from a perfect one, but Misiorowski really does loosely resemble a right-handed Josh Hader. Much of the question of whether to bring up a hurler like this rests on makeup. Even in the minors, Misiorowski has had trouble throwing strikes. Before striking out 12 in six scoreless frames this week, he'd posted a 7.80 ERA in his first four starts with Biloxi. In those starts, he either walked or plunked over a quarter of the batters he faced. If he continues to look locked in next time out, he could really bolster his case to be called up when rosters expand on Sep. 1. If he reverts to spraying the ball all over the place, it probably won't work. In either case, though, the front office needs to evaluate Misiorowski's mental readiness for the challenge of MLB, where the stakes will be high the rest of the way. If they believe in him on that score, they should give him a shot at deepening the bullpen for the stretch drive. View full article

Good question, and the answer (as to everything, anymore) is some version of “kind of” or “it depends”. But mostly, xBA and xwOBA do *not* account for positioning like this, no.

Some of those balls were well-struck, but it wasn't mere misfortune that lodged them in Dodgers leather. Image courtesy of © Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports It's tempting in the extreme to think that the Brewers got excruciatingly unlucky in the Hollywood hills this week. It seemed like all their hard contact landed harmlessly in the gloves of Dodgers defenders. Worse, the Dodgers themselves seemed to escape the same fates, en route to just enough offense to sweep the Crew out of town. In some part, that's a valid narrative. The expected batting averages generated from Statcast data would, broadly speaking, corroborate it. The Brewers hit a healthy number of fly balls and lofted line drives, often with some zip behind them. Bad luck does happen, and it needn't be confined to a single inning or game. Sometimes, it spreads itself out over a struggling offense, like fingers of icy water seeking any low spot. On the other hand, though: the Dodgers have a great defense. The Brewers have, on average, an even better one, but the Dodgers are rising into their full bloom at just the right time, while the Brewers are trying to figure out where they can swap a bit of defensive prowess for some needed lineup thump. More importantly, though, the game is changing. The Brewers' many deep fly balls and line drives were caught, and many of them were caught easily, when even a decade ago, some of them might have split gaps or one-hopped the outfield walls. That's because, in the last 10 years, teams have changed the norms and the shape of outfield defense. The Statcast Era (once a tongue-in-cheek term, but an increasingly legitimate one) is now in its ninth full season. In the first (2015), the median team's center fielders played an average of 312 feet from home plate. That year, the Brewers were extremists. Their center fielders played an average of 318 feet from home, and only the Rays (although by eight feet!) played deeper. The Cubs played an average of 300 feet from the plate that year. As batted-ball data suffused and reshaped the sport, things changed almost overnight. By 2019, the median center fielder played 323 feet from the plate--deeper than anyone but the Rays had been positioning people just four years earlier. That year, no team played shallower (on average) than 315 feet from home, such that an average team in 2015 was playing a full step shallower than the shallowest team of 2019. The Dodgers don't play unusually deep, by 2023 standards. On the contrary, they're 21st in MLB in average starting depth for center fielders. That depth is 322 feet, though. They'd have been playing three steps deeper than the average club eight years ago, and they'd be bang on average four years ago. Now, the average depth is another step deeper, at 324 feet, and two teams (the Nationals and Angels) play at least 330 feet from home on average. Obviously, outfielders (and infielders, for that matter) adjust their positioning from batter to batter. It's not a complete picture to look only at average positioning. Nor is center field the only position to consider. It's enough of a snapshot, though, to remind us that there's been a subtle but significant shift in the way defense is played in the modern game. Teams have made a careful study of batted balls, and realized they should be playing their outfielders deeper. They've done it. Now, while it's necessary to focus on generating power (thanks to the still-high global strikeout rate, among other things), anything less than over-the-fence power pays off much less than it used to. Draw a line at any batted-ball distance you prefer (I checked everywhere from 250 to 300 feet), and balls hit at least that far but not out of the park have gotten less productive over the period since 2015. The league's weighted on-base average (wOBA) on such balls was around .270 each year from 2015 to 2017, but it's been just under .250 each of the last two seasons. Deeper-positioned outfielders catch more long fly balls, which means the only valuable long fly balls are the ones that clear the wall. Last year, the Brewers cleared the wall more than enough times to make an approach centered on long fly balls viable, This year, they're Team Warning Track Power, 22nd in MLB in homers and 28th in wOBA on contact. They don't swing and miss at an especially high rate. They draw a lot of walks, as a team. They can't consistently convert their grinding approach into runs, though, because they just don't have the power that fueled their offense last year. In a series like the one in Los Angeles, that becomes especially glaring, because the marine layer seeps in during those Dodger Stadium night games and makes it hard on fly balls that aren't absolutely obliterated. Austin Barnes beat the Crew Thursday night with a home run yanked into the reachable left-field corner, but alas, the Brewers also pull the ball less than almost any other team in MLB, such that they're too often using the big part of the field when they hit their good-not-great flies. This offense is capable of more than it has shown. That won't matter unless they unlock their potential in a hurry, though, and Dodger Stadium in August is just a friendly preview of the heavy air the team might find waiting for them in night games in Philadelphia, Chicago, or San Francisco come October. An approach change is needed, because given the way teams defend the outer reaches of the field in this new era of big-league baseball, hitting deepish fly balls just isn't a productive way to go. View full article

Twice in the early stages of Wednesday night's Brewers-Dodgers game, a catcher's interference helped the Dodgers score. This is becoming a pattern, so let's talk about it a bit. A decade ago, a night like the one William Contreras just had--twice committing interference in one game--would constitute almost 10 percent of all the instances of interference over an entire season, for the whole season. Now, it feels much more like a drop in the bucket. The numbers above don't even include Contreras's foibles last night. That's another thing, though. Are these really mistakes? Or are they just the natural, unavoidable, occasional result of changes in the way hitters, pitchers, catchers, and umpires interact? I wrote at length about this in 2017, for Baseball Prospectus. Hitters are trained, more than ever, to let their barrel travel backward as they begin their swing, to generate power and get on plane with the incoming pitch. They do so from the very back edge of the box, because pitchers throw harder than ever and are trained to maximize their extension toward home plate, so the precious extra inches of distance from setting up even in the middle of the box are much-needed. Catchers, meanwhile, know they're increasingly evaluated (and eventually paid) based on their pitch framing. They try to catch most pitches earlier, closer to when they cross home plate, because that's when they're more likely to look like strikes to the umpire. Thus, we have hitters taking bigger swings from deeper in the box and catchers creeping up to stick their mitts out there to get the ball if the big swing doesn't come. The real estate within which so much of the game is decided has moved slightly back, and it's become more densely populated. Collisions are inevitable. The Brewers' famous prioritization and excellent instruction of catchers in the area of framing seems to come at some cost in this area. They're now up to six catcher's interferences this season, second-most in MLB. Contreras, alone, accounts for five of those. No individual catcher in baseball has that many. In the medium term, he'll have to find some way to continue being a good pitch framer, without putting his glove out there quite so far. Giving up outs and runner advancement that way is always frustrating, but just as importantly, there's always some risk that this kind of collision could lead to an injury. For now, it's not a huge deal. The Brewers would not have won Wednesday night, even absent those accidents. It's just a little baseball enigma worth unraveling, while we have the chance. View full article

Pitchers have figured out what they need to do against the Brewers' hottest rookie hitter. Now, he has to try to find a way to combat their changing approach. Image courtesy of © Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports Sal Frelick couldn't have hit the ground running much more smoothly. His famous debut was only part of the story. For a bit, he looked like the savior of an underperforming Brewers lineup. He hit .273/.436/.546 in his first 16 games, and although none of his three home runs were moonshots, he seemed to be answering the questions everyone had previously had about his upside. Craig Counsell showed his confidence in the new guy by installing him as the cleanup hitter. Since then, Frelick has hit a rough patch. He's batted just .191/.261/.238 over his last six games, comprising 23 plate appearances. That sample, alone, is so tiny as to be meaningless, and anyway, he's walked twice and struck out only three times in that brief span. Dig in on a more granular level, though, and there are reasons to raise an eyebrow and wonder about that offensive upside, after all. Frelick has yet to hit a ball even 106 miles per hour in the big leagues. That isn't great. The median maximum exit velocity for qualifying hitters this year is 111 MPH, and if Frelick qualified, he'd rank in the bottom 10 overall. It's a survivable flaw, though. That end of the list is populated by players who share a lot of Frelick's positive traits, like good plate discipline, excellent contact skills, and value on the bases or in the field. Steven Kwan, T.J. Friedl, Luis Arraez, and Alex Bregman are all in the same range. So, for that matter, is Brice Turang. Those names highlight just how good a pure hitter one has to be to overcome the lack of legitimate power, though. Frelick can be valuable as an individual because of his great defensive skills, but if he wants to serve the team as the kind of major offensive threat they're hoping for down the stretch, his margin for error is pretty thin. He has to either gear up and start attacking the ball more, or get even better at controlling and defending the strike zone. With wizard-like hands and wrists, Frelick avoids whiffing very much even on breaking balls and off-speed stuff, but it's only against fastballs that he does actual damage. His average exit velocity against everything else is 79.8 miles per hour, which not only ranks 496th of the 508 hitters who have had at least 10 batted balls on soft stuff this year, but actually (if infinitesimally) trails Mike Brosseau. Frelick doesn't crush balls in the heart of the strike zone, at least so far. He also doesn't swing the bat very often, relative to the rest of the league, regardless of whether the ball is in the strike zone or not. He's certainly a patient hitter, but he hasn't yet shown that he can manage the line between patience and passivity well. As a result, pitchers get a lot of called strikes against him, as long as they stay out of the middle of the plate. They don't need to generate many whiffs from him if they can continue to pound the zone with strikes at which he doesn't even offer. It's impossible to tell, at this early date, whether Frelick can adjust to and alter all of that. He's shown the bat speed to drive the ball out of the park, and to the pull field, but now, he has to show that he can sit on stuff that will be slow and bendy, rather than fast and straight, and still hit it with authority. He has to get more aggressive within the zone, in order to force pitchers to throw him fewer strikes. Again, he's going to put up good overall numbers, in categories like Wins Above Replacement, because he's a good contact hitter, baserunner, and outfielder. To have the impact the Brewers want over the final seven weeks, however, he has to quickly learn and improve upon the work he's already done. View full article

The Brewers have had two consistently productive hitters in their lineup this year. One of them is doing it without any physical consistency, though, and it might be catching up to him. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports No batter in MLB changes their stance and setup at the plate as frequently, nor varies those things as widely, as Brewers catcher William Contreras. He tinkers relentlessly, in ways noticeable even by casual fans. A kid looking to mimic his stance could, instead of doing anything in particular, assume whatever stance suited them and then claim it was Contreras's, and they'd probably be right. Contreras has utilized a closed stance at times this year, with his front foot closer to home plate than his back foot. 54088349-1e7e-4942-b6ad-92b27dc61997.mp4 He's also gone with an even stance, perhaps more often than anything else. a2686123-58f4-45ca-bfbe-4c4bb9342d11.mp4 Lately, though, he's slightly favored an open stance, with his front foot farther from home than his back foot. f8969019-6070-4065-aae3-5efba9f58584.mp4 Even then, he's not made that a permanent change. Nor is the position of his feet the only variable in his stance, setup, or swing. He adjusts the angle at which he holds his bat, the height of his hands, and his front foot's timing mechanism. He's used a toe tap, a high leg kick, and everything in between. Early in the season, he was using a back-foot stomp and slide to time and steer his weight transfer. In this age of tightly engineered, often grooved swings, it's a bit refreshing to see a player who hits by feel the way Contreras does. Certainly, given that he has been one of just two above-average regulars in the Brewers lineup all year (along with Christian Yelich), it's hard to criticize Contreras, who has also made such impressive improvements as a defensive catcher this year. Still, this lack of a sure, fixed foundation for his swing does seem to be costing Contreras something. He was a somewhat extreme ground-ball hitter even over the last two seasons, with Atlanta, and that tendency has grown even more pronounced this year. He's also pulling the ball less often in 2023. As anyone reading the offensive leaderboards can tell you, the Braves are the best team in baseball at helping hitters lock in on pitches to drive. They trade some contact to do so, but the exchange is a huge net win for them. Contreras has slashed his strikeout rate in his first season with the Crew, from over 27 percent to 20 percent. That's valuable. However, he's also given away a substantial element of power. Recently, pitchers are responding to that fact, and Contreras is seeing far more pitches in the strike zone--leading to very few walks. Though he's technically hitting at a higher average exit velocity and making hard contact more often than in the past, the odds that that well-struck ball will be on the ground to the right side make pitchers unafraid of him. Superficially, Contreras has still been very good since the start of July--better than earlier in the season, in fact. He's hitting .324/.389/.500 over that span. Some of that production has merely been a matter of picking on bad pitchers in blowouts, though. In reality, he's making less frequent high-quality contact, and in addition to his expected statistics being much less pretty than his actual ones, he's running a negative Win Probability Added during this month and a half. A functional playoff-caliber offense can't get so little meaningful production from a vital player. The Crew's young slugger has to lock in on something that will allow him to actually slug. There doesn't appear to be anything systematic or situational about Contreras's variations in stance and approach from one at-bat to another, or one game to another. It just looks as though he's trying what feels most comfortable in each moment. That's fine, broadly speaking, and his overall stats say it's working for him. As the pennant race heats up and cashing in opportunities becomes more important, however, the Brewers need Contreras to develop a more consistent idea of what his objectives are when he steps into the batter's box, and of how he can meet them. Failing that, he'll continue to be part of a tantalizing but frustrating lineup down the stretch. View full article