Matthew Trueblood

If Brewers fans were hoping for a full metamorphosis and breakout from reliever Bryse Wilson in 2023, they've been disappointed. Wilson isn't an out-of-nowhere relief ace. He still can't miss bats the way great relievers can. He's been solid, though, thanks to his ability to stay off the barrels of opposing hitters' bats. Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-USA TODAY Sports Is it possible to have both a below-average cutter and an above-average one? In this era of pitching analysis, it certainly is. Bryse Wilson is proof of the concept. Though he still hasn't found a pitch that allows him to rack up strikeouts, he's learned to manage contact in a more consistent way than he had in any of his previous big-league stints. It's the cutter that has fueled that success, but interestingly, it's hard to pinpoint what makes that offering special for Wilson. Of the 101 pitchers who have thrown at least 100 cutters this year, Wilson lies shockingly close to the average in velocity on the pitch, and in both horizontal and vertical movement. He gets an above-average number of whiffs per swing, but batters swing at the pitch at a below-average rate, so his actual whiff rate on it is average. When batters don't swing at the pitch, it's called a strike at exactly an average rate. That accretion of average attributes makes for a pitch cutting-edge pitching metrics find unimpressive. The Pitching+ suite of numbers uses release point, spin rate, movement, velocity, and location to evaluate pitchers' offerings, and it only rates Wilson's cutter as a 95 (where 100 is average, and higher is better). At the same time, opponents are only hitting .175 against the pitch. By linear weights, the cutter has been worth 3.9 runs above average for Wilson this year, good for 18th in all of baseball. That statistic is cumulative, too, so the fact that most of the pitchers above him have thrown more cutters than he has means he's had something more like a top-10 cutter in the league. Which thing is true? Frustratingly, it's both. Wilson has gotten lucky on the cutter this year. It's not yielding an exceptionally high groundball rate. The .182 BABIP hitters have racked up against it is unsustainable. The pitch modeling metrics are right, on that level. On the other hand, there are things that aren't yet worked into those models, and anyway, pitching is more than optimizing things to fit a model. Some of the things Wilson does well lie outside the vision of Pitching+ and similar tools. For one, Wilson uses a four-seam fastball and a sinker, in addition to the cutter. The three pitches have very similar spin axes and spin rates, which make them all look very similar to a batter out of his hand. Because of Wilson's grips and seam-shifted wake, though, they move differently. This is why the addition of the cutter has been so important for Wilson. He's still only striking out 19 percent of opposing hitters, which is well below the average rate for relievers in 2023, but the frequency of hard contact against him has ticked down this season. Hitters are squaring the ball up much less often, because that slight misidentification of pitches results in the ball crawling up toward the handle or running out to the end of the bat. Much of Wilson's value to the Brewers' bullpen lies in his versatility. He can (and often does) work multiple innings, and he comes back relatively well when called upon with limited rest. The team doesn't need him to come in with runners on base and get pivotal strikeouts, or to dominate the best hitters in the opposing lineup. They need him to eat innings and save other pitchers on the roster in medium-leverage spots, when there's a margin for error but a pitcher who will abuse that margin could cost them the game. He's a supplemental piece, but an important one. In that way, his role on the team is similar to the cutter's role in his arsenal. The odd paradox of that role--that it can be both very valuable, and expendable--also reflects the inability of metrics to agree on the value of the pitch. View full article

The Brewers fought like hell to earn their 14-5 start. They had to overcome the immediate loss of Luis Urias. They had to brave series against two of the juggernauts of the NL in 2022, in the Cardinals and Mets. They had to survive a long West Coast swing, during which they lost both Brandon Woodruff and Garrett Mitchell for long periods. Now, they get to start from scratch. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports Tuesday isn't the first time the Brewers have woken up looking up at first place in the division since their Craigtember in April promotion. This time, though, it has a much greater sense of gravity and danger to it. The Pirates, who had briefly eclipsed them a couple other times this spring, are in freefall. The Cubs remain a few games back, stumbling in their own ways. The Reds, though, seem to be just hitting their stride, while the Crew are floundering. When the class of the National League for 2023 came to Miller Park Monday night, it was a chance to prove that the Brewers should be primarily identified as a first-place team, rather than as one who has been outscored on the season and can't hit its way around even the slightest misstep by its pitching staff. Instead, before the first out was recorded by Corbin Burnes, the rout was on. The Diamondbacks looked around, figured one turn-of-the-century retractable-roofed rectangle was as good as another, and made Milwaukee their home field for the night. It's true that the Brewers are getting healthy, now. They won't get Mitchell back at all in 2023, and Woodruff seems to be a month or more away, but the rest of the guys who were felled by injury as the team faded from its hot start--Urias, Jesse Winker, Wade Miley, Willy Adames, and Eric Lauer--are back, in various forms. It's just not nearly enough to make a difference. The team isn't in a death spiral, but their unproductive fishtailing continues. On a given night, everything depends on what their starting pitcher has, because they're hardly ever going to bowl an opponent over with their bats, and their defense is no longer the very best in baseball. On Monday, Corbin Burnes couldn't figure out how to finish off any of the Diamondbacks. He only induced six whiffs in an 86-pitch outing, and Arizona relentlessly chipped away at him. That's not all his fault. No team in baseball makes contact at a higher rate than Torey Lovullo's this year. They're the 2023 version of last year's Cleveland Guardians, only they have better power and (therefore) are even more dangerous. Still, Burnes was coming off an impressive and important start against the Orioles, in which he looked as though he was poised to turn a corner and become the workhorse with the sub-3.00 ERA that Brewers fans were able to enjoy for the last three years. Instead, faced with the inability to miss bats, he imploded, like a disguised cyborg on an old cartoon when confronted with a simple riddle. As much as the offense should be castigated for its utter unresponsiveness against the unimposing Merrill Kelly, it would be wrong to drop the blame for Monday night on them. Burnes left the team with no realistic chance to win before they were even able to Velcro their batting gloves. Then again, it's the inefficiency of the offense that helps make situations like the first inning snowball. Burnes tried to be too fine, knowing that even allowing two or three runs in the first frame was as likely to prove fatal to the team as the six Arizona eventually scored against him. That 14-5 start happened to a different team. This one bears little resemblance to it. That doesn't mean there aren't good things happening. Christian Yelich has been better during the team's bout of turbulence than he was during their halcyon start. William Contreras keeps hitting, however flawed his profile might be. Despite significant turnover, the bullpen has been what the team hoped it would be. Still, the 14-5 version of the Brewers--with optimism bubbling around Brice Turang, plenty of production from Willy Adames and Rowdy Tellez, and a hot start by Brian Anderson--was more complete than this one. Whatever advantage that start gave them remains, in some sense, because without it, they might be in as rough a shape as the Cubs, or even the Cardinals. It feels irrelevant now, though. They're back to Square One. Winning this year's NL Central will not merely be a slog through the mud. It might also be a Sisyphean rolling of a stone uphill. Every now and then, because they're broken and star-crossed and because the rest of the division is good enough to at least stay close, the Brewers are going to find that they've fallen right back to their starting point--that their progress has been erased, and have to get the stone moving again from the bottom of the hill. Inarguably, the Central is a messy, undignified race this year. Changes to the schedule have made the division look even weaker than it really is. The Cardinals' collapse has created a power vacuum, and no team has yet been equal to the task of filling it. The Brewers are still the best-equipped team to do that. It's just that they no longer have even the vestigial head start they'd enjoyed over the last few weeks. View full article

Right, but what I’m highlighting here isn’t the presence of all four pitches. It’s that he’s never utilized them all so much within one start before. They were, for the first time, complements to one another in relatively equal mixture, instead of replacements for one another when something wasn’t working. That’s an important distinction.

There have been games in which Freddy Peralta leaned as heavily on his curveball as he did Sunday, There have been some in which he leaned as heavily on his changeup. There have been plenty in which he used his slider at least as often. But we might never have seen the Brewers' young right-hander use all four of his pitches as much as he just did. What could this mean? Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports First of all, it's important to note that the Pirates didn't want Freddy Peralta facing any more right-handed batters than was absolutely necessary. Manager Derek Shelton wrote out a lineup that included left-hitting Ji-Hwan Bae, Jack Suwinski, Tucupita Marcano, and Josh Palacios, plus switch-hitters Bryan Reynolds, Carlos Santana, and Rodolfo Castro. As a result, Peralta threw most of his pitches against lefties. That's the same challenge Corbin Burnes had to navigate in his start against the Orioles a little over a week ago, about which I wrote last week. For Burnes, the solution was to throw his cutter unusually often, and it seemed to help him find a feel for the pitch that was absent when he was using it less often earlier in the season. Peralta, however, took just the opposite tack. Partially because of his established pitch mix, but also partially in an effort to show a large number of batters something different, he varied his arsenal more than he usually does. Peralta developed his current changeup at the start of 2021. From that point through his previous outing this month, he had never thrown the pitch more than 15 times in any outing. He only used it 20 total times across his last three starts. On Sunday, he threw the Pirates 18 changeups. It wasn't a devastating offering. He only induced three swings with it, and none of the three resulted in a whiff. He got just four called strikes. By and large, Pirates hitters spotted it, and they let it go for a ball. However, by using it so much, he forced those hitters to keep the change in mind. That's not terribly newsworthy, of course. A pitcher whose changeup tends to be a marginal weapon threw it a lot because he faced a bunch of opposite-handed batters, and the results were mixed, even if there was some fringe benefit to merely making it part of the mix. However, that's just one part of the story. Peralta also threw 20 curveballs Sunday. That's more than he's thrown in a start since last August, and the two times he depended that much on the hook in that month, it was because he had no feel for his slider. Sunday, he used both breaking balls. We've seen him make such equipollent use of the two breaking balls before, but it was mostly in 2021. Even then, it was always at the expense of (or, more likely, to make up for) the changeup, which he would throw less often. The man they once called Fastball Freddy now seems to have four full-fledged pitches, and an idea of how to use them to get deep into a game. Even if only three of those pitches are likely to be at full strength on a given night, and even if it requires somewhat unusual circumstances for us to see them all on display within a start, Sunday was a milestone in the evolution of Peralta into the top-of-the-rotation guy Brewers fans have envisioned for so long. If he can do this consistently, he'll be a credible co-ace for the next few years, and saying goodbye to either Corbin Burnes or Brandon Woodruff could be less painful. View full article

Before this season began, there was some sturm and drang about the Brewers' bullpen. They consciously eschewed spending any major resources on that unit over the winter, and brought back much of the same group that struggled down the stretch in 2022. Now, though, they've essentially rebuilt the relief corps on the run, and the players they've used to do it conspire to make this group feel a lot like the league's best bullpen-building outfit. Image courtesy of © Sam Greene-USA TODAY Sports The Brewers made three big trades this winter. In two of them, they acquired a relief pitcher as a secondary piece in their side of the transaction. When they landed William Contreras, they also got Joel Payamps from the Athletics. When they sent Hunter Renfroe to the Angels, they not only got some promising potential starters, but reeled in Elvis Peguero as a throw-in. Now, in mid-June, Payamps and Peguero are the chief setup men to Devin Williams. Merely by getting those two at such low cost and then seeing them perform so well, the Brewers merit some praise. They're emulating the model the Rays use to assemble an elite bullpen virtually every season. The particular ways in which they've done it, though, make that comparison more compelling. As I wrote late last month, Payamps has reconfigured his pitch mix, and he's also throwing harder than ever. Peguero has not seen a similar velocity change, and the tweaks to his pitch mix have been quite subtle. He's only made one meaningful adjustment, gaining more consistency and a more lateral shape on his slider. Here's his spin direction chart for 2022: And here's the same chart for 2023: The movement on Peguero's bowling ball of a sinker is a hair more consistent this year, too. It's a small change, but it's been sufficient to make Peguero a good middle reliever. Credit has to go to the Brewers front office for grabbing these guys, based on traits they'd identified and on analyses of the rosters of potential trade partners. That allowed them to hone in on hurlers who might be viewed as expendable elsewhere, but who would be valuable here. That can't be a purely precision-based operation, because the reason those kinds of players become available precisely because of the risks associated with them. It has to be something you try with more players than you need, so that you can latch onto the successes and jettison the failures. To that end, we saw the Crew bring in not just those two as right-handed relievers, but also Javy Guerra, Gus Varland, Bryse Wilson, and (after the season began) Trevor Megill. This is where the coaching staff and the lower-level front office members who engage with the team on a day-to-day basis come in for their laurels. Personnel decisions ultimately need to be made by the likes of Matt Arnold and his closest advisors, but it's the coaching and support staff who gather and process the most important information about players. Their work allows quick decisions to be correct ones. The Brewers cut the right guys, because they were able to get all of these hurlers in front of their best player development thinkers and their best technology. It's not a simple test of talent or skills. It's not even about whether the player is receptive and responsive to good coaching and tech-driven optimization. Sometimes, things take, and a new weapon is created. Sometimes, they don't, and the trick lies in recognizing those cases and moving on quickly enough to land another player with some real upside. Megill is the latest such player. The Brewers scooped him up after things didn't work out in San Diego, Chicago, or Minnesota. There's no guarantee that things will be different in Milwaukee, but he's throwing harder than ever--touching 101 miles per hour and frequently lighting it up at 100--and generating tighter movement with his curveball. Sometimes there's an extra tick for a player to find, while at others, there's a new pitch to unlock--as with the cutter that Wilson has made a centerpiece of his arsenal. The new fireballers fit in among the team's existing core of relievers, which was designed primarily to give hitters radical and unexpected looks. Devin Williams's screwball. Hoby Milner's funky left-handed delivery and east-west attack from the port side. Peter Strzelecki's equally idiosyncratic mechanics from the right. As the Rays famously do, the Brewers have different arm angles and pitch shapes throughout their pen. There's no hitter for whom they won't be ready, and there's no shortage of ways Craig Counsell can chase outs when he needs to hold onto a lead. View full article

Since his return from the injured list on June 5, Luis Urias has looked exactly like a man who had a disjointed spring training and an unexpected, jolting halt of a leg injury on Opening Day. He's overmatched. The Brewers should send him to Nashville, in favor of the more robustly ready Abraham Toro. Image courtesy of © Nick Turchiaro-USA TODAY Sports It's true that Luis Urias has only come to the plate 36 times in his first fortnight of big-league action in 2023. He hasn't yet had any chance to shake off the rust that comes with a hamstring strain severe enough to have put him on the shelf for two full months. It's almost unfair to even discuss optioning him to Triple A. Nor has Abraham Toro burned it up so relentlessly that promoting him from Nashville to Milwaukee is a no-brainer. Toro did do a bit of impressive work during his very brief call-up earlier this month, but on the year, he's only hitting .252/.337/.344 even in Nashville. That line is, perhaps, misleadingly weak, because the OBP is pretty strong, and Toro has drawn 22 walks while striking out just 28 times, in almost 200 plate appearances. Still, his numbers make less than an ironclad case for him. Even so, Milwaukee needs to make the move. Urías is scuffling badly, in just the same way as the rest of the lineup. He has two hits, and both were for extra bases. Like the lineup he's joined, he's an all-or-nothing hitter. Toro would provide something of a counterbalance to the identity of the Brewers offense, whereas Urías only makes that identity more extreme. This maneuver is pretty easy, logistically. Urías has two option years left, and the shape of his development makes it hard to imagine that the Brewers will still want to send him down at any point in 2025 or beyond. Giving him a chance to see Triple-A pitching for a while--to get his timing and approach calibrated better without costing the parent club outs in the process--would cost the team almost nothing. Meanwhile, Toro could be the lineup-lengthening infielder who has been missing from the positional corps. If Willy Adames and Brian Anderson were hitting better, the decision would be a bit easier. If Andruw Monasterio and Owen Miller weren't proving so versatile and valuable, it might be impossible. As it is, though, the spot on the roster and within both the offensive and defensive lineups that Urías occupies can be quite fluid right now. They have interchangeable parts everywhere. A targeted trade of a player with a redundant skill set for one with something new to offer an offense in crisis makes good sense. The Brewers were cautious with Urías's injury, but because they couldn't hit and felt he was ready, they moved him more quickly through the rehab assignment phase of his recovery. It's time to pay the piper for that. Urías isn't broken, and he'll eventually rediscover his approach. While he regains the balances and rhythms he's missing, though, Toro deserves a longer look. He might provide a nice little charge for the bottom half of the lineup, where the team has been stunningly flat lately. View full article

In the stormy present, it’s hard to remember the halcyon home stretch of 2021, and even harder to see a sun-drenched dynasty emerging in the near future. Yet, blending current trends with core identity, it’s the Brewers who look best-positioned to own the NL Central for the next half-decade. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports A losing jag at home, especially one punctuated by a sweep at the hands of the worst team in MLB, can make everything seem hopeless. At this moment, the Brewers (who started 14-5, against what looked like a formidable early slate!) are barely over .500, and they’re staring up at the Pirates in the standings. Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, and Willy Adames are all a year and a half from free agency, and it’s not clear which (if any) is a good candidate for a contract extension at an agreeable price. Craig Counsell isn’t under contract beyond this season, and the lack of news on that front has gone from eerie silence to an active, ominous sucking sound. That’s one way of looking at things. Here’s another. If you had to line up the five teams in the NL Central from best to worst for the next five years (2024-28), based on their current assets and liabilities (be they players, ownership, market strength, or other), how would you do it? I think I would go: Brewers Reds Cardinals Cubs Pirates If the early progress of this season has taught us anything—and that’s a subject of some debate, but let’s take it as read for now—it’s that everyone in this division has problems. Funnily, despite Bud Selig having long ago made sure that they were the embodiment of baseball’s Third World, the Crew currently have first-world problems. Their owner is consistently committed and motivated, to a greater extent than at least three of their rivals. Their front office has demonstrated greater competence in scouting, player development, and roster construction than at least three of their rivals. They have a better balance of proven talent and help coming from the farm system than at least three of their rivals. At the moment, and in defiance of all odds before this season began, the Reds look like the most serious threat to the Brewers’ hegemony. They’ve built a promising, young pitching staff, and even with Kyle Boddy having moved on from his affiliation with the team, they feel as close to the state of the art in technology-driven pitching development as any team in the division. They were perspicacious and fortunate in trading off the core of their last would-be contending club, and they’ve drafted quite well recently—blending betting on upside and smart draft demography as well as any team in baseball. They also have Elly De La Cruz. On the other hand, nothing in the track record of any members of the Castellini family suggests that they’ll be as patient or as resilient as Mark Attanasio has been. When they spend money, they do it hurriedly, fitfully, temporarily, and not on a sufficient scale to obliterate the downsides of those errors. In all likelihood, they’ll leave the door open for others to win the division, even when they have enough talent and (theoretical) spending power to lock things up. The Cardinals still have the best mix of organizational fundamentals—tons of money, an august market, good player development—of any team in the Central, but let’s be honest: they’re a mess. They’re a mess in 2023, and the particular way in which they are a mess makes it likely that they’ll remain pretty messy in 2024 and beyond. Their farm system, especially compared to those of the other four teams in this group, is top-heavy, and their current core is getting old right in front of our eyes. That leaves the Cubs and Pirates, who are what they have been for the last 125 years or so: perfect foils. The Cubs are always rich, but only sometimes interested in acting like it. They’re often talented, but frequently uninspired. Owned for much of their history by monuments to nepotism and vestigial entrepreneurship, they’ve frittered away many of their best chances to claim lasting dominion even in this minor regional kingdom, and the Ricketts family (the very reason why they’ve fallen so far in the last half-decade) is the most galling example of that yet. The Cubs need new baseball leadership, but lack owners with the give-a-damn to see that need, let alone act upon it. The same problem has often haunted the Pirates, but whereas the Cubs’ endless supply of money creates a wide and lived-in margin for error, the Pirates never have one at all. As has sometimes been the case, though, Pittsburgh has the edge at the moment. They have as deep a farm as anyone in the race, especially if one counts the infusion they’ll enjoy after picking first in next month’s draft. They have made some improbably fan-friendly moves recently, including extending Bryan Reynolds, and there are signs that they’ve gotten back to (or even north of) average in player development, after falling behind the curve several years ago. Still, you can’t trust the Pirates to be good for long. As much as they make better foils for the Cubs throughout history, in the modern baseball landscape, they’re like the Reds, only more so. At some point, they’ll fall behind on the development side again, and they’ll fail to invest what would be required to make up for that, financially. To a greater extent than at any time in recent memory, the division is wide open. The Cardinals are at a 30-year nadir. The Cubs aren’t in position to strongarm anyone. Yet, to a greater extent than usual, every team seems to have short- or medium-term hope. There’s no clear-cut favorite locked in for the years to come. Do you agree, though, that the Brewers have the brightest future? Or do they face a steeper set of peaks and valleys ahead, as they navigate the nearing free agency of some key contributors and the aging curves of others? How would you rank the five NL Central clubs, starting next season? View full article

The Brewers' much-heralded ace has rarely been in top form thus far in 2023. In his most recent start, however, he might have begun to shake off the muck and get up to full speed for the first time. Was the Orioles' lineup the key to getting Milwaukee's stud going? Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-USA TODAY Sports It's hard to blame Orioles manager Brandon Hyde for not wanting to send out more right-handed batters than necessary against Corbin Burnes Wednesday. Since the start of 2021, they're only hitting .195/.257/.318 against him. Lefties have actually put up almost identical numbers during that span, but the minatory bulk of him and the spin of his fastball have to make him a pitiably miserable at-bat for a righty. Thus, Hyde ran out a lineup in which the only right-handed hitters (at least against a righty like Burnes) were Austin Hays and Jorge Mateo. Seven of every nine of his batters would have the platoon advantage on the crossdraw California cowboy. As it happened, Burnes was so efficient against Hays and Mateo that facing lefties made up even more of his start than that breakdown would imply. As anyone who tuned into that game knows, though, it didn't matter. Burnes struck out nine batters for the first time this year. He fired eight dominant innings, allowing just two hits and no runs. The lefties were helpless against him, as were Hays and Mateo, thanks to an extraordinarily sharp day for Burnes's cutter. In one sense, that was just the natural response to the circumstances he faced. Burnes has made heavy use of the cutter against lefties all season. He was fractionally more reliant on that pitch against them than is his wont, but still mixed his changeup and curveball in with the offering against them, Because facing so many lefties got him so deep into his cutter, though, or because he had superb feel for the pitch, or just because he doesn't have as much faith in his other options at the moment, Burnes also leaned much more heavily on the cutter against Hays and Mateo than he usually does against right-handed batters. As Brewers fans know, the cutter is the key to everything for Burnes. It's far from being his only weapon, but it's the pitch at the heart of his repertoire, and it hasn't been itself this year. Opponents seem to be getting unusually good looks at it. His command of it is much less fine than it usually is. That he went to it so relentlessly and so successfully Wednesday, then, is encouraging. It's just possible that, thanks to the Orioles' ability and eagerness to play matchups against him, Burnes is now back in the saddle. He overwhelmed and overcame a good offense almost solely on the strength of his cutter, and got to throw it more often in a single start than he might have done in a couple of them under normal circumstances. Tuesday night's start in Minnesota will be a fascinating test. Will Burnes go back to that well as often against the Twins, or revert to trying to mix his pitches and changing speeds and eye levels on hitters who are geared up for the cutter? Was his success against Baltimore serendipity--the confluence of slightly better feel for a pitch on a given night with some friendly umpiring and accidentally accommodating matchups from the opponent--or the start of something more significant and sustainable? We can't answer that question. Even Burnes can only make a more educated (but, perhaps, also more biased) guess. We don't know ourselves well enough to tell luck or random variation apart from concrete, lasting change, especially when the competing possibilities are complicated by interactions with forces beyond luck or internal control, like the opposing force of an opponent and their adjustments. Plainly, though, Wednesday was a good development for Burnes. It represented a step on the journey back to the land of aces, and whether his next step is clearly in the same direction or not, he's closer to being the hurler the Brewers need him to be after having that outing. View full article

Hitting at the big-league level is incredibly hard, even for players with extraordinary talent and clear idea of what they're trying to do. As the Brewers wallow at the bottom of the league in offensive production, it's becoming clear that their hitters lack the latter, neutering the former. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports In 2022, only the Yankees swung at fewer pitches in the bottom segment of the strike zone and below it than did the Brewers. Hitters on both of those teams were happy to take a walk, but their real goal was to force opposing pitchers to elevate a little bit. When they did, the hitters could elevate and do damage. This season, the Brewers are similarly close to the bottom of the league when it comes to swing rate at pitches near the bottom of the zone. The Yankees are still below them, and now the Reds and Pirates are, too, but it's not a major gap. Milwaukee hitters wait out opposing pitchers when they attack the bottom of the zone. Alas, the conviction and the competence that allowed last year's team to punish pitchers when they did leave a pitch up is absent. It seems as though, between new acquisitions and some injuries that have limited familiar faces, the 2023 Brewers lack the capacity to pounce when a mistake pitch comes. In baseball, there's nothing more deadly than a missed opportunity, and the Brewers seem to lead the league in those. To his credit, when he got a couple of pitches up around the belly on Saturday afternoon, William Contreras did not miss. His game-tying homer was the kind of thing he needs to do consistently, in order to make up for the inevitable ground balls that come when he gets less friendly fodder to hit. He's been roughly what the team expected at the plate this year; it's just that everyone else has been worse. Willy Adames's ground ball rate has climbed by more than 7 percentage points. Brian Anderson's is up, too, and unlike Adames, he hardly had anywhere to go in that direction. He's now putting it on the ground nearly 53 percent of the time. Add those numbers and trend arrows to the well-documented tendencies of both Contreras and Christian Yelich to hammer the ball into the ground, and you have a team that spends far too much of its time hoping to squeeze a two-hopper between infielders, instead of trying to place a slicing liner between outfielders. On its face, that the team so assiduously waits out low pitches would seem to clash with the fact that they hit so many ground balls. In truth, though, that reflects the swings the Brewers build, the types of hitters they like to acquire, and that lack of a clear, simple process at the plate. They don't ignore low stuff because they want to get slightly underneath the ball at contact, and have more room to do so when the pitch is up, but because it's harder to get the barrel to the ball low in the zone given the swing profiles of most players on this roster. The same swing profiles, though, are exploitable by elevated pitches. Hurlers can manipulate most Brewers batters not only by getting whiffs (although there are far too many of those in the lineup right now), but also by moving the ball up and down their bats. Ground balls often happen because a hitter is unable to adjust to good, late horizontal movement, and the Brewers are no exception to that. Pitchers get them out by getting them to look for a pitch in a certain spot, but violating their expectations about which pitch it will be when they do throw to that spot. Milwaukee batters have the third-lowest in-zone contact rate in MLB. That's obviously a bad thing, on its own, but trading contact for damage when contact is made is often a viable strategy. The problem is that, unlike other teams with similar problems, the Brewers aren't executing those tradeoffs. The other four teams in the bottom five in the league in that number are the Braves, the Twins, the Royals, and the Mariners. All four are in the top 10 in MLB in terms of the rate at which they pull the ball; the Brewers are 27th. The Twins, Mariners, and Royals are all in the bottom five in MLB in ground ball rate; the Brewers are fourth. Trading Hunter Renfroe over the winter was defensible, and after a strong start, the Angels outfielder has struggled mightily over the last six weeks. Acquiring Contreras at such a low price was a no-brainer. Signing Anderson has, on balance, panned out well so far. Still, a bit more than 40 percent of the way through this season, the Brewers have to reckon with the fact that they have the second-worst offense in the National League. Tweaks to several players' approaches are in order, but it's hard to gauge how well those will be able to take root, midstream. For that matter, it's hard to tell whether the Brewers even recognize the need for these changes, beyond knowing that whatever they're doing is not working. The team conceived and implemented a certain approach this spring, and it feels disturbingly unlikely that they'll be able to make an immediate change to it now. View full article

Lately, it feels like there's a weekly line change on the Brewers roster, as a few players return from the injured list and a few others land there. The first two and a half months have been a bloodbath, testing the depth and the mettle of the team, and they've survived. Now, they're getting closer to full strength. The question will be whether they can stay that way for any length of time. Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports With the returns of Willy Adames and Luis Urias this week, the positional corps is starting to look the way the team envisioned before the season began. Although Jesse Winker is nominally on the IL, he's really off the roster because he wasn't hitting the way he would have needed to in order to remain on it. He's hit the ball hard much more often in his first couple of rehab appearances, but needs to prove his power is back before rejoining the team. Garrett Mitchell won't be back, and it seems like Tyrone Taylor's elbow injury could be a lingering problem, but Joey Wiemer and Brian Anderson have been good enough to minimize the impact of those losses. With Christian Yelich, Wiemer, and Anderson available in the outfield; Adames, Urias, Rowdy Tellez, Abraham Toro, and Andruw Monasterio on the infield; and William Contreras and Victor Caratini sharing the catching duties, the lineup is more or less what the team hoped it would be two months ago, at least in terms of the names. Obviously, that's the not the same thing as being pleased with the production. The team is last in the National League in both on-base percentage and slugging. The hope is that the full-strength lineup will be better than that, even if the goal is more in the range of league-average than of becoming a juggernaut. Alas, so far, Urias looks compromised by his long injury-enforced layoff, and Adames has been as boom-or-bust since his return as he was for the month before he went down with a concussion. On the pitching side, the reinforcements aren't really here yet, but they're getting close. Matt Bush had a solid inning on Thursday for Triple-A Nashville, with two strikeouts and only one baserunner allowed. His fastball was sitting 95, and his curveball had its usual, healthy movement. It's no surprise that Bush overpowered hitters at that level, but the outing underscored the fact that he's nearly ready to return to what has become a somewhat shorthanded bullpen. Eric Lauer's first rehab appearance for Nashville was rocky, in terms of results, but his velocity was up, and the drop in that very number was a major indicator of the trouble he had before landing on the injured list last month. More than whether he gets hit or not, what matters for Lauer is showing that he can sustain that velocity as he stretches back out and works on normal rest. If so, he should be back before the month is out. Wade Miley, too, figures to be back in the rotation soon. The Crew has stayed afloat through considerable adversity. They've shown well even against tough competition, as when they beat the Orioles in a home series this week. Still, losing to the A's Friday night is a good reminder that being down so many important contributors takes a toll. Even a team that feeble can steal a game (or, God forbid, a few of them, as the Pirates found out this week) when their opponent is so diminished by injuries that they have a flavor of Triple A themselves. With the roster regaining its intended shape, the Brewers should be able to avoid losses like that one in the future--even against left-handed pitchers. For now, though, they just need to continue convalescing. Over the next three weeks, they'll play two series against the overachievers from Pittsburgh, and if Counsell has a healthy group when those games are played, the team should come out of them with a fairly comfortable division lead. View full article

In a frustrating series finale, the Brewers let a lead slip away late, and the winning blow came against Peter Strzelecki. It's been a bit of a rough stretch for Craig Counsell's proudest underdog and versatile relief weapon, but Thursday's outing only represented some bad luck. Sometimes, it's the other team's day. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports The decisive home run Gunnar Henderson hit against Peter Strzelecki was not a cheapie. It wasn't a product of Miller Park. On the contrary, Henderson hit it to the corner, where only Wrigley Field steals away more homers than does the Brewers' home. Just as importantly, Henderson wasn't teeing off on a meatball, but anticipating and reaching for a first-pitch fastball up and away from him. It was about letter-high, running off the outside edge, and it hummed in at 93.5 miles per hour, above Strzelecki's norm. Henderson just got the barrel to it, which was a little bit lucky, and then got a little bit luckier still that it carried out of the park. The ball was well-struck, but significantly less so than most home runs, especially to the opposite field. It only left his bat at 97.9 miles per hour. Does that mean that Strzelecki's tough outing was purely bad luck? No. Does it mean he executed the pitch correctly on 0-0? No. Does it invalidate the fact that Strzelecki has taken a small step backward after a much-needed hot start to the season? No. It's just a reminder that, sometimes, you lose. Even when playing a bad team, in MLB, there are plenty of good and dangerous players in the opposing dugout. Against a team like the Orioles, there are even more of them, and they pose even greater risk of simply beating you, even if you do everything right. In fact, Strzelecki looked good throughout his appearance, except in a couple of small ways, and notwithstanding the results. His velocity was up. His slider had good movement, though not his best command. His changeup also had good action. On all of his offerings, he was just a bit less able than he usually is to steer the ball down in and even below the zone. That begat some problems. Still, he induced five swinging strikes and four called ones. He got three strikeouts and didn't issue a walk. Baltimore batters just found the good part of the wood, or the friendly part of the infield grass. Thursday's outing bloated Strzelecki's season ERA to 4.40 and pushed his Win Probability Added (the best way to measure the value a reliever has provided, although an imperfect one for any kind of forward-looking analysis) to the wrong side of 0.00. He's definitely posed a genuine concern at certain points this season--for instance, early on, when he was getting great results but relying heavily on his defense and missing some of the velocity he showed last year. While it was much more than mere lousy luck, though, this latest implosion isn't a sign that Strzelecki's most dangerous chickens are coming home to roost. On the contrary, his stuff looks good. It might even be ticking up as the weather warms. He just needs a little bit better location next time he takes the mound, and to have his opponent execute a bit less well than the Orioles just did. View full article

In the first inning of Tuesday night's hard-won Brewers victory over the formidable Orioles, Brian Anderson drove home the first run. It came on a line-drive single to left field, a ball he reached for down below his knees. That was a beautiful, many-layered moment, containing within it many truths about Anderson and about the art of hitting. Image courtesy of © Nick Turchiaro-USA TODAY Sports That's a funny term--the art of hitting. Throughout the history of baseball, there's been a constant (if often friendly, or at least tepid) debate about whether its various disciplines are more art or science. In 1968, the greatest hitter ever (Ted Williams) wrote The Science of Hitting, taking an extremely systematized approach to the toughest task in sports. In 1984, Tom Seaver wrote a somewhat less definitional text on his craft, and titled it The Art of Pitching. By and large, those images of the two major skills of baseball have persisted. It's not uncommon to hear good pitchers described as craftsmen, but only one or two hitters in a generation--Luis Arraez types--get that word attached to them. The truth, of course, is that there's plenty of both art and science in each thing--a blend of the subjective with the objective; of the continuous with the discrete; and of the quantifiable with the ineffable. At any given time, many of the bright lines and the categorizations we see are products of our societal inclinations. They exist mostly in our minds. What does any of this rambling have to do with a Brian Anderson RBI single? Fair question. Let's start with a quick look at the at-bat Anderson had. Anderson was hitting with two on and two out, and he immediately got ahead in the count, 3-0, as Kyle Gibson tried unsuccessfully to hone in on the outside corner. At that moment, as was noted on the Brewers' Bally Sports Wisconsin broadcast, swinging away on 3-0 made a lot of sense. Gibson was unlikely to want to walk Anderson, with Abraham Toro due next and only third base open. A hit would mean a run, and an extra-base knock would probably mean two. Gibson gave in, too. He not only went with the fastball, but gave Anderson a fairly fat one, over the inner third and just above the belt. Anderson, though, let the pitch go. Then, on 3-1, he chased a sweeper low and away, filling the count. Why did Anderson take that 3-0 pitch and then expand the zone on 3-1? It's not about disorganization or nerves. It's about self-knowledge. Anderson has an idiosyncratic swing, and it leads to unusual coverage of the strike zone. He can do some damage on pitches up in the zone, but it will virtually always be on mistake breaking and off-speed pitches. The way he attacks the ball isn't conducive to doing much with an elevated fastball. No, what Anderson does well is to go down and get the ball. One of the things he's worked with Brewers to do this year is to eliminate certain pitches and sectors of the strike zone, according to the count, the situation, and the opponent. He's swinging significantly less often this year, especially late in counts. That's led to his dramatic increase in walk rate, though it's also contributed to his climbing strikeout rate. It's not about blanket passiveness, though. It's about knowing what pitch he might get that he would be able to hit well, and being ready to do so. With that clarity of purpose comes some sacrifice, in the form of more theoretically hittable pitches (often strikes) going by unmolested, but it's been a sound tradeoff thus far. On 3-2, Gibson threw the hittable pitch Anderson knew he might get. It was a slider below the zone, but because Anderson was looking for a pitch down, it was still well within his hitting zone. That unique swing produced an artist's arcing brush stroke, a flare into left field that had no chance of being caught. It only left his bat at 76 miles per hour, but with the perfect amount of loft. Our highly scientific understanding of the game in 2023 allows us to say that the expected batting average on that ball was .940. Given that Anderson has enough power to force outfielders to play at least at an average depth, it was really 1.000 in that spot. The 3-0 take was good baseball, because that wasn't Anderson's pitch. The 3-1 swing on a ball well off the plate was good baseball, because he was seeing the right thing. They both made possible that 3-2 single, a sure-thing RBI in a way that not even a long fly ball hit on the fastball would have been. Anderson's approach has been far from infallible this year, but the Brewers have helped him understand the value of locking in on certain pitches and locations, and of being insistent upon getting the right pitch before committing himself. It hasn't turned him into an All-Star, because Anderson is a limited player whose holes and weaknesses are well-known to the league. Nor is it a finished job. There's a constant tension between knowing oneself and knowing when the opponent also knows you--between waiting for your pitch and needing to be ready to hit theirs instead. That balance is never permanently struck. It's just something one achieves for a bit, with the knowledge that it will soon be lost again, such that a hitter will have to go in search of it all over again. It's not unlike life itself, in that regard. A human is not done struggling until they're dead. A hitter is not done adjusting until they're retired. Anderson is still very much alive, and very much an active hitter. He will have to change and maintain a new balance soon. On Tuesday night, though, he was in the right physical and mental place to come up with a big hit for the first-place Brewers. View full article

In Sunday's Brewers win, first baseman Rowdy Tellez had the two hardest-hit balls of his 2023 campaign to date. He's been a peculiar case this year, with good numbers but a bit less punch than he provided over his previous Brewers tenure. Now, though, he might be turning the corner. Image courtesy of © Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports This year, almost no one in MLB has swung the bat less often than Rowdy Tellez. The only hitter who would qualify for the batting title (if the season ended today) who has a lower Swing % than he does is Juan Soto. Tellez chases the first pitch of an at-bat only about once every two games. He's been a patient hitter for as long as he's been a Brewer, but this is a new level. One reason for the change might have been a desire to see how pitchers are adjusting to him and what new plans he could make to counter them. Another (a very common, if often misunderstood, one) could have been that his swing was not feeling right. Sometimes, hitters who appear to be getting more patient are really only making up for a loss of bat speed or a nagging injury. They're not swinging because they don't expect the same rewards when they do as would be normal. Indeed, Tellez's batted-ball data for 2023 suggests that he's been less than himself. Pick your favorite way to measure exit velocity, and Tellez's has dropped this year. Average Exit Velocity: 88.7 miles per hour, down from 91.1 in 2022 Hard Hit Rate (Percentage of batted balls that topped 95 MPH): 40.6 percent, down from 46.0 Maximum Exit Velo: 113.0 MPH, down from 116.3 As we've noted, though, that last metric is already rising, thanks to those two laser-like singles yesterday. That's one sign that he's getting back into the swing of things. Here's another: his swing rate has skyrocketed here in June. In his entire career, the two months in which Tellez swung least often were April and May 2023. He'd never swung at fewer than 40 percent of total pitches in a month before this year, and both of those months were right around 35 percent. The sample is tiny, but in June, he's utterly reversed that. He's swung at 33 of the 62 pitches he's seen, good for 53 percent. While that figure is unlikely to hold over the whole month, if it did, it would be the highest rate of his career. Combine that fact with his recent streak of good contact, and it's not hard to see what's happening here. Tellez has waited out opposing pitchers. He's gotten a good look at what they're doing against him this year. He's now ready to attack. That shift in gear couldn't be more welcome in the Brewers' lineup, where a dearth of power is the biggest problem they face--even more damaging than their inflated strikeout rate. Tellez can help make rallies cobbled together by others' walks and singles pay off with multiple runs, and having him do so is a vital aspect of the Milwaukee lineup. His threatening presence in a lineup has a tutelary effect on the rest of his teammates, even if it doesn't work in the way or have the magnitude of impact imagined by those who used to espouse the idea of lineup protection so ardently. Most excitingly, perhaps, Tellez has put up fine numbers even during this long adjustment period to begin the season. There was a bit of good luck in that, but it also reflected the fact that he's a more well-rounded and intelligent hitter than most fans realize. His strikeout rate is up this year, but that's not because he's suddenly whiffing at a catastrophic rate. It's just the effect of more deep counts, thanks to the patience he showed early. Now, if he's successfully consolidated a new set of ideas about how pitchers will approach him; is healthy enough to get off his best swing more frequently; and has the warm summer and the lively baseball with which to work, he could become one of the most productive hitters in baseball the rest of the way. Tellez could be the guy who puts the Crew's offense back into gear for the playoff push ahead. View full article