Matthew Trueblood

There have been plenty of highs and lows in the career of Luke Voit. He's an archetypal all-or-nothing slugger, and volatility is part of the package. This year, though, the power that should make up for all his whiffs has been absent. Voit hopes a mechanical tweak will help him find it again. Image courtesy of © Isaiah J. Downing-USA TODAY Sports Though thick and burly, Luke Voit has always cut an athletic figure. His very setup in the batter's box telegraphs his desire to be athletic in his swing. He prefers a deep bend of his knees, an open stance, and a big stride. Those things inevitably lead to a lot of swings and misses, because they're all geared toward generating maximal bat speed and torque, and not toward staying short and compact in his swing. When things are going right, though, no one worries much about the whiffs. Voit led MLB in home runs during the COVID-shortened 2020 season. Of the 240 batters with at least 500 batted balls from 2020 through 2022, Voit had the 15th-highest Barrel Rate (the percentage of batted balls that blend exit velocity and launch angle in an optimal way). His game is hammering the baseball, and despite some painful inconsistency, he's been one of the league's best at that over the last few years. His game has deserted him in 2023. Voit's average exit velocity is down over four miles per hour from 2022. The percentage of his batted balls that leave the bat at 95 miles per hour or faster has dropped from well above average to slightly below. He's whiffing far too often within the zone and drawing walks far too rarely to maintain any value, but those are symptoms of the larger problem. Voit just isn't mechanically right. He's trying something new, though, in the hope of changing that. To see what's going on, we need to first go back to a good swing from last year, when he was with the Nationals. Here's one. 90e7ad8a-8fe3-45b0-bdea-a2ca11944ac6.mp4 This has all the markers of a typical Voit swing. The long, multi-phase, swooping leg kick is there. So are the high hands. The barrel of the bat pops up as he begins his swing, engaging his core and leaning into the swing, but then it flattens back out to get him behind the ball. His hips open up, but he stays on the outside pitch enough to drive it to right field with authority. Now, let's take a look at a swing typical of his dreadful start to 2023. 08e04dff-555a-454a-932a-730aefbeff64.mp4 The setup is the same. The basic movements are the same. Voit's timing has gone wrong, though. As his hands bring the barrel back down to start its arc toward the hitting zone, there's a deadly hitch. It throws everything out of whack. He's late, or else he's rushing to catch up to his lower half, and thus off-balance. Here's another look at things going poorly, from more recently. 96266280-cfee-4f9a-b9ed-b7c7fbf038ef.mp4 The adjustment he's trying here is actually to lengthen his stride and the hangtime of his leg kick, in order to give himself more time to get his hands started while staying in sync with the rest of his body. As you can imagine, though, the same problems of balance enter into things there. He's also not able to work uphill to the ball, and thus generate the loft needed, with this tweak. Now, let's take a look at the long, long single he hit against the Giants on Friday night. 7317364a-ba38-43c7-8d26-65f1177c702e.mp4 You needn't be an expert in hitting (which is good, because I'm not one) to see what has happened here. Voit has his feet underneath him a bit more. His weight is back into the middle of his feet a little more, so he doesn't end up lunging or leaning farther forward than he can manage while maintaining balance. His leg kick has quieted back down. The really huge change, though, is in his hands. It jumps right out at you. He starts them much lower, and it speeds everything about his swing path right up. He goes through the same sequence of timing cues--tip the barrel up, then bring it back down--but it doesn't flatten out as much, and there's no hitch. The movements are smaller and tighter, and his whole body can move more fluidly because of that. That's no guarantee that Voit has found a permanent fix for everything that ails him. His approach has also been a bit flawed. He still has some areas of weakness that pitchers will attack, and if this change to his mechanics creates some problems, he'll have to find a new one to fix them. He's never been able to settle in with exactly the same swing for very long, and that's unlikely to change now. However, getting back to a fluid transition from load to swing was a vital fix for Voit, and his leg kick now seems better calibrated to deliver power without compromising his ability to see the ball and make good swing decisions. The Brewers need Voit to produce the way they envisioned when they signed him, to help pull them out of their offensive funk. These changes could help him meet that need. View full article

The Brewers lost their fifth straight game Friday night in San Francisco, and a big part of the reason was another frustrating start by Corbin Burnes. The most maddening thing about Burnes's struggles is the fact that there seems not to be any explanation. Image courtesy of © John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports Through seven starts, Corbin Burnes has a 3.86 ERA. That's underwhelming, from the ace of the staff and a preseason co-favorite for the National League Cy Young Award. Worse, though, is the fact that his ERA doesn't even fully tell the story of his difficult young season. Burnes's strikeout rate has cratered. His walk rate is up. His results are worse almost across the board. Yet, after looking in all the usual places, it's hard to find the root cause of the trouble. Burnes hasn't significantly changed his release points. He hasn't changed his pitch mix, to either right- or left-handed batters. His velocity is down, but only very slightly, and that's normal for this time of year. His spin rates aren't changed. The movement profiles on his pitches haven't changed in any significant way. I dug into Burnes's pitch locations. I dug into his sequencing. I looked at videos of his mechanics. None of these things have materially changed in 2023. The spin direction on each of his pitches is essentially the same, and so is the deviation from that spin direction in his observed pitch movement. He's not getting struggling in any particular count, or collection of them. I think we have to assume that hitters are picking up on something from Burnes. He's tipping something, or hitters are guessing correctly at an outrageous rate. That's the only reasonable explanation for all of this. The scale of the problem is huge. Right-handed batters are hitting .305/.364/.441 against Burnes this year, and it's not dependent on tremendous BABIP luck. He's only struck out 13 of the 78 righties he's faced so far. That marks roughly a halving of his strikeout rate against them from last year. Hitters are swinging much less often against him this year, and when they do, they're making contact more often, especially within the zone. With Brandon Woodruff hurt, the Brewers need Burnes to be at his best, in the worst way. They're very fortunate that the rest of the NL Central has stopped and waited for them during this bump in the road, but they need to get back to running the pennant race quickly. The stakes here are high. When J.D. Davis came to the plate in the bottom of the first on Friday night, he had a plan. He sat on a low cutter, got it, and drove it out of the park to right field. That requires a talented power hitter to be right about the pitcher's plan of attack, and to bring to bear an approach that works. It looks almost like bad luck. It looks like a good pitch getting beaten. One way or another, though, it's emblematic of the difficulties Burnes has had. Davis either saw something in Burnes's delivery, or was apprised of a pattern that lurks somewhere in his data set. That kind of thing has happened far too often to Burnes so far, and because the cause of the problem is either multifarious or entirely indecipherable, it might not be an easy fix. View full article

A month into the season, plenty of things are going well for the 18-11 Brewers. Chief among those is their league-leading defense, of which rookie second baseman Brice Turang has been an integral part. That's what makes this awkward. Turang probably needs to head back to Triple-A Nashville. Image courtesy of © Stephen Brashear-USA TODAY Sports It's been a joy to watch Brice Turang play second base for the Brewers. He's showed the ability to throw accurately and strongly on the run. He's demonstrated good body control and a nose for the lead runner. He's part of the team's fielding phalanx. Offensively, though, Turang has been a mess. In 84 plate appearances, Turang has struck out at an alarming rate, north of 30 percent of the time. He's walked just five times all season. That's not fully disqualifying, of course. Rookies nearly always struggle to control the strike zone. Turang's iffy approach doesn't wash away the value of his glove, nor of his baserunning. To the problem of all those strikeouts and so few walks, though, Turang adds the compounding one of not driving the ball when he does make contact. His Hard Hit Rate this year is around 33 percent, lower than three-quarters of qualifying hitters. Over 43 percent of his batted balls are poorly-hit grounders, the 14th-highest figure for any hitter with at least 50 batted balls this year. He's not lifting the ball or hitting it hard, and even his left-handedness and his good speed haven't been redeemable for enough singles to make up for those shortcomings. The team has done everything it can to shield Turang from bad matchups. Not counting switch-hitters, only Jesse Winker has taken a larger share of his plate appearances against opposite-handed pitching so far. That Turang's overall line (.228/.274/.329, 72 DRC+ according to Baseball Prospectus) has been amassed under the most favorable set of conditions the team could muster only reinforces how badly things have gone for Turang at the plate. If Luis Urias were healthy, Turang would probably already be in Nashville. As it is, his defense and the team's need for it have kept him around. It was worth giving him a chance to work through adversity, too. If he hasn't busted out by the end of this Western sojourn, though, the team should swap him out with Abraham Toro and see how the more veteran infielder handles some chances. Toro is a switch-hitter, capable of playing both second and third base. Mike Brosseau and Owen Miller can handle second base, too. All three have, right now, more viable big-league bats than Turang's. Brian Anderson can hold down third base and obviate any need to feel thin at the hot corner due to needing those guys at second more often, especially now that Tyrone Taylor is back from the injured list. By no means is it too late for Turang to discover something that works and emerge as an important, everyday player for Milwaukee for years to come. Undeniably, though, his first taste of MLB pitching has left him looking overmatched, and the team shouldn't wait around long for him to turn things around. Their alternative options are too good; their lineup is not quite deep enough; and the need to win games is too urgent for that. View full article

As the Brewers prepare to play their first game of the second full month of the season, we have a final chance to pause and celebrate the best hitter of the first. He's an underrated all-around hitter, and the most dangerous slugger in the team's lineup. He's Big Randy. Image courtesy of Brewer Fanatic Milwaukee Brewers hitters got off to a fast start, with some big early performances lending hope of more consistency from their offense. However, familiar problems against left-handed starters have resurfaced, and several injuries have hit home along the way, with Luis Urias and Tyrone Taylor missing the whole month, and Garrett Mitchell’s absence forcing Blake Perkins into the lineup at times. That being said, there are some standout performances that have helped carry the Brewers to an 18-9 record in the month of April. Hitter of the Month There was only one player really in the running for this, and that’s the red-hot Rowdy Tellez. After a slow start to the season saw him hitting just .147 through April 12, he’s caught fire, hitting eight home runs since. His slash line now sits at .247/.333/.553, which adds up to a .910 OPS in the month of April. He has hit successfully against both left- and right-handed pitchers so far, and has really dialed in with runners in scoring position, to the tune of a 1.052 OPS. Coming into the year, his underlying stats from last season, particularly a .219 BABIP, showed there was likely more performance to come from Tellez, especially with the removal of the shift. He’s being very patient so far in waiting for his pitch, taking a lot of pitches and then barreling the ball with regularity when he gets a mistake, with an average exit velocity of 101 miles per hour on middle-middle pitches so far this year. He’s also swinging less often at pitches out of the zone, compared to last season. He’s forcing pitchers into the strike zone, and then making hay. He’s also been hitting more line drives compared to fly balls so far this year, which is one reason why his BABIP has increased, but as you can see below, his expected slugging numbers have been fantastic, showing the damage he can do and making up for his lack of range at first base. There’s no area where he isn’t able to hit the ball hard, and it’s why he’s been such a carrying force for the offense over the period in which Brian Anderson, Christian Yelich, Jesse Winker, and Willy Adames have all struggled to make hard contact consistently, as well as the dip from the Freshmen. Honorable Mentions Willy Adames Adames has come into 2023 with a different approach. Although he’s failed to get particularly hot with the bat as of yet, he has significantly raised his floor due to his increased patience at the plate. He’s stated a goal of 70 walks over the season (his previous career high is 57), and with his current on base percentage of .345 he’s putting this to work. He’s still refining the approach, as shown by a significantly below-average whiff and chase rates, but he’s been a streaky hitter in his career and we’ll see the power come through soon enough Brian Anderson A healthy Anderson has shown just what he’s capable of, with a cannon arm both at third base and in the outfield coming in handy, but his bat has really shone. After some injury-plagued seasons, he’s been demonstrating an ability to drive the ball, with a 15.4% barrel rate and an expected slugging percentage of .458. He started the season very hot, mashing home runs and racking up RBIs to bring the Brewers some early-season momentum, and even though his strikeout rate has risen in the second half of April, he’s been an invaluable addition to the team. William Contreras Contreras had a 12-game hitting streak snapped to start the season, but his propensity to hit has been a vast upgrade on the recent production of Brewer catchers (although Victor Caratini has looked much more proficient, now that he’s not being worked to the bone). His framing improvements have garnered a lot of attention, but his bat has developed a lot too, with a strikeout rate in the 76th percentile, averaging almost 91 mph in exit velocity, and (as Bill Schroeder loves to tell us) utilizing that opposite-field approach very proficiently. He has a .382 OBP, almost a 12% walk rate, and with a lot of red numbers on his Baseball Savant page, it looks sustainable over the course of the season. What do you think, Brewer Fanatics? Should anyone else be up for this award? Who can you see getting hot in May? View full article

With each season, MLB becomes a bit more of a slider league. This year, that trend has been accelerated by the profusion of the sweeper. The Brewers, though, are zagging against that widespread zig, with an approach to pitching that sets them apart from most of the rest of baseball. Image courtesy of © Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK Since the dawn of the pitch-tracking era, and especially since Statcast and the data it generates began to inform pitching development in 2015, MLB teams have steadily become more reliant upon breaking balls--especially sliders. The primary driver of that trend is the pursuit of swings and misses, which the slider gets at a higher rate than any other offering. Thus, we shouldn't be surprised that the young 2023 season has only seen the march toward slider hegemony continue, as teams adjust to new rules that make opponent contact more dangerous. Slider and Sweeper Usage by Season, MLB, 2015-23 Year Pitch % xwOBA 2023 22.4 0.278 2022 20.8 0.269 2021 19.2 0.272 2020 17.9 0.272 2019 17.4 0.269 2018 16.7 0.255 2017 15.9 0.259 2016 14.8 0.26 2015 14.3 0.251 The hottest pitch in baseball this spring has been the new version of the slider, dubbed the sweeper, which has only made it easier for the league to increase its use of the pitch. A sweeper is just a slider with greater horizontal movement and less vertical movement--a big-breaking cutter, in one way of viewing things, or what would have been called a roundhouse curve back in the first half of last century. Hardly anything in baseball is truly new, and the sweeper is far from being an exception to that bit of wisdom, but the eagerness with which many teams, players, coaches, and fans have embraced the concept of the sweeper as a new and distinct pitch only highlights the desire of everyone in the MLB orbit to ratchet up slider usage and utility by whatever means. The Brewers have a couple of purveyors of the sweeper. Colin Rea has used it to miss a surprising number of bats since being called upon to fill the unexpected void left in the rotation when Brandon Woodruff went down. Rea has introduced his sweeping slider against right-handed batters, at the expense of the curveball he used to prefer, and it's yielded solid results. However, it's not the most notable change he's made. Rea's switch from leaning on a four-seam fastball to being primarily a slinger of sinkers is telling. The above is just his pitch usage against right-handed batters. (Always analyze pitchers' repertoires by first isolating their work against lefties and against righties; the two tasks that make up pitching overall are distinct and need to be treated that way.) Here's what he's done against left-handed hitters. It would be hard to overstate the extent to which the Brewers' approach with sinkers is bucking the league norm. I wrote this weekend about the fact that Peter Strzelecki has not only added a sinker to his arsenal this spring, but used it fairly often against left-handed batters. Few teams in baseball instruct their pitchers to use their sinker against opposite-handed hitters, unless it can't be helped. The Brewers are an exception. Just as importantly, here, note that Rea has become primarily a cutter guy against lefties. That's more conventional, but equally telling. The Brewers love sinkers and cutters. They want hard stuff with late movement, the kind that limits the quality of opponents' contact and lets the team's league-best defense do its job. They want the good control that comes with throwing fewer breaking balls and more of what amount to fastballs. As a result, only one team in MLB has thrown fewer sliders and sweepers than the Brewers in 2023. Sliders and Sweepers as Percentage of all Pitches, Top and Bottom 5 MLB Teams, 2023 Team Pitch % SF 30.8 LAA 30.3 PIT 30.1 OAK 27.6 KC 26.7 BAL 18.3 DET 17.6 SD 17.4 MIL 15.1 AZ 14.8 Even Rea, the rare Brewer who has developed a new slider this year, helps illustrate what the Brewers prefer to do instead. Strzelecki's new sinker tells a clear story. The fact that the team elected to bring back Wade Miley via free agency is telling. With Corbin Burnes as their ace, the pitching staff really seems to have taken on his identity and learned the lessons implied by his breakout: that smaller, sharper movement can be more effective than big, sweeping break and prioritizing spin rates. View full article

Yup! Strzelecki, too. Being able to throw strikes with confidence even when you're not missing many bats is a luxury relatively few teams give to their staff.

He spent the spring fighting just to make the roster, and early on, he was mostly there to soak up low- and medium-leverage innings in the middle of games. Only a month into the season, though, Joel Payamps is becoming a more important part of the Brewers' bullpen--and the Brewers planned it this way from the start. Image courtesy of © Rick Scuteri-USA TODAY Sports The Brewers were able to acquire Joel Payamps in the William Contreras trade because Payamps is the very model of the modern replacement-level relief pitcher. He played for four teams over his first three MLB seasons, and changed teams during both the 2021 and the 2022 campaigns. He slotted into a battle with several other relievers for the last few spots in the Brewers pen as spring training opened, and part of the reason why he made the team was simply that he had no remaining minor-league options. If he hadn't made the club, he would have had to be placed on waivers, and he might well have been claimed. Since the season began, however, he has both rewarded the small investment the Brewers made in him, and demonstrated the value of prioritizing roster flexibility when making decisions about who should make the Opening Day roster. In 11 appearances, Payamps has 12 innings pitched and a Win Probability Added of 0.7, making him a valuable middle reliever. He's the fringe reliever who has survived the early-season roster churn: Gus Varland is on the injured list after being hit by a comebacker, and Javy Guerra was designated for assignment last week. With Payamps, Varland, Guerra, and Bryse Wilson filling out the back half of the bullpen depth chart, the Brewers had four guys without minor-league options to start the year. That makes for a lack of flexibility in roster decisions, superficially, because taking any of those four off the 26-man roster would risk losing them. The season is long, however, and guys like these reach the points in their careers where they can only be retained on the big-league roster by being risky, anyway. The Brewers front office played a numbers game by carrying the four, knowing that injuries (be it to those players themselves or to someone further up the hierarchy) or underperformance would force changes soon, but that those changes would slowly increase the flexibility of the roster. Varland and Matt Bush have now hit the injured list, creating opportunities aplenty. Payamps has been the big beneficiary. Wisely, Craig Counsell tested him and sought to learn how much he can trust him right away, giving him the ball in the sixth inning of a close game, with a runner on, in the Cardinals series at Miller Park in early April. Payamps escaped that jam, and gained a little bit of his manager's trust. He acted as the emergency closer at the end of a crazy extra-inning game in San Diego, and gained a little bit more. Since then, he's been called upon to close out a game with a four-run lead and to make two seventh-inning appearances in tied games. These are jobs you give to your fourth-best reliever, which is right where Payamps slots in right now. He was seventh on that hierarchy just a month ago. How is he doing it? Well, he's not missing bats. That's the bad news. Payamps has never piled up whiffs the way teams want their late-inning bullpen arms to do, which is part of why he's been left on the scrap heap a time or two. Over the last two years, though, he has shored up his control enough to at least partially make up for that deficiency, and he's thrown tons of strikes for the Brewers so far. He's only issued three free passes to the 51 batters he's faced. As a good middle reliever must be able to, Payamps is now also able to handle both left- and right-handed batters. He's tweaked his pitch mix this year, featuring completely different weapons against the two types of opponent. Against righties, he's now throwing almost exclusively sinkers and sliders. Against lefties, meanwhile, he's increasingly comfortable throwing his changeup for strikes, and it plays best off his four-seam fastball. With that pair of strong pairs of pitches, Payamps can attack the zone and still minimize hard contact against all batters. To wit, he's running a career-best ground-ball rate of 59 percent, and his average exit velocity is sixth-lowest of 340 qualifying pitchers. That doesn't mean he'll continue to be as good as he's been, but it's reassuring. He hasn't been succeeding purely through smoke and mirrors. The Brewers have replaced Guerra, Varland, and Bush with (for the moment) Jake Cousins, Elvis Peguero, and Tyson Miller. All three of them have minor-league options, meaning that the team can now rotate arms pretty freely through the back of the bullpen. For that strategy to work, they just needed one or two of the guys in the original quartet of locked-in arms to emerge as reliable medium- to high-leverage hurlers. In Payamps and Wilson, they now have that. The roster is taking a less fluid shape, as it should, and the wins keep accumulating. View full article

Close, hard-fought wins have defined the first month of the Brewers’ 2023 season. Budding star reliever Peter Strzelecki has been indispensable in securing those victories, and he’s found success partially through an unusual adjustment. Let’s discuss it. Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports For Peter Strzelecki, deception is the name of the game. The palpable funk in his delivery makes life tough on opponents, both in terms of making contact at all and in terms of hitting the ball hard when they do get the bat on it. He’s thrown enough strikes to dominate through the early going, and he hung another zero in the top of the eighth inning Friday night against the Angels. That scoreless frame brought Strzelecki’s ERA down to 0.71. He’s faced 50 batters this year, and issued only one free pass. It would be a great story if he were merely mowing hitters down with the high fastball and big, sweeping slider combination that yielded so many strikeouts last season, but there’s more to the story. In fact, Strzelecki has only fanned seven batters. Instead, he’s succeeding with that excellent control and an improved ability to manage contact. He’s inducing more ground balls and fewer hard-hit balls. That’s how he got through that pivotal inning against the Angels, despite going through the heart of their batting order, and despite Mike Brosseau’s throwing error, which put the leadoff man on base. Specifically, what Strzelecki has done is curious: he’s added a sinker. That doesn’t sound radical, but for a short reliever who already had a functional three-pitch mix, it’s an odd choice. Stranger still, he’s throwing the pitch about equally often against both right- and left-handed batters. Usually, a sinker is a pitch with a big platoon split. The armside movement on the offering works well against same-handed batters, especially in combination with a slider that moves horizontally, but it usually creates just as many problems against opposite-handed hitters. When Strzelecki spoke to Curt Hogg of the Journal-Sentinel about the sinker early this month, he talked about using it to attack righties, not lefties. So far, though, the actual usage of the pitch has been much more broad. He’s not missing many bats with the sinker, but he’s throwing it for strikes and getting ground balls with it, even against lefties. His sinker is distinct from his four-seamer, in movement and even (albeit by only a mile per hour or so) in velocity. It almost operates like a turbo version of his changeup. The best guess here is that, because of his unusual mechanics and good command, Strzelecki can get away with (and even benefit from) something that other pitchers wouldn’t be able to pull off. He throws hard enough, from a strange enough angle, while hiding the ball long enough that any little bit of extra movement puts hitters on the defensive. Strzelecki’s changeup already helped him do that against lefties, but it’s a circle change that gets its movement from the spin direction that grip applies to the ball as it leaves the hand. The sinker, by contrast, spins much the same way as his four-seamer out of his hand, but the orientation of the seams leads it to move more like the changeup. There are still some important red flags around Strzelecki. His velocity is down two miles per hour thus far, which helps explain the fact that he’s generating fewer whiffs. One has to worry a bit about both his effectiveness and his health, given such a sudden and significant loss of heat. As long as he is healthy, though, the sinker is an interesting solution to the problem of having less intense stuff. His early results tell us that it has a chance to be a good one. View full article

A tough start from Eric Lauer put the Brewers behind the 8-ball early on Tuesday night, but by the bottom of the eighth inning, the team had a golden opportunity to salvage the game and stop their miniature skid. That's when William Contreras came up with the worst idea in the history of hitting. Image courtesy of © MARK HOFFMAN/MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL / USA TODAY NETWORK In the bottom of the eighth inning, with the Detroit Tigers leading 4-3, the Brewers mustered the smallest amount of opportunity that can credibly be called a rally. Luke Voit led off the frame with a double, and was replaced by pinch-runner Blake Perkins at second base. Willy Adames and Rowdy Tellez each put up a fight, but Tigers reliever Mason Englert struck them both out. That brought up William Contreras, who represented the go-ahead run, with two outs. The game hung very much in the balance. Tigers manager A.J. Hinch called upon Jason Foley to take over for Englert. Foley is a right-hander who throws as hard as 98 miles per hour at times, with a breaking ball that boasts impressive movement but seems to be beyond his real control. Hinch must have decided he wanted to bust Contreras inside, and that does seem to be sound advice for opponents so far this year. The Brewers' new catcher has done many things well, but he's not successfully pulling the ball or hitting the inside pitch yet. Contreras, to his credit, anticipated that plan. Here's where he set up for the 0-1 pitch from Foley, after fouling off an inside sinker for strike one. This is when the trouble started. See, Foley missed with the 0-1, low, but it was another sinker, and Contreras got too excited about what he had just figured out. Here's where he set up for the 1-1 offering. Contreras likes to extend his arms. He's not a great hitter when pitchers crowd him. He was clearly trying to create some extra space, inviting Foley to keep coming inside but leaving himself room to extend his arms on that kind of pitch. All sound logic! Clever, and potentially delightful, if it works. It needs to be subtle, but games have been won by hitters doing just this type of thing. Only, Contreras went way, way past subtlety. Here's where he was as a 2-2 slider (the only non-sinker he would see in the entire plate appearance) came in. Remember in the Clooney/Pitt version of Ocean's 11, when the plan the team had formed to blow the power to their target casino was foiled by an error on the part of some construction workers who did exactly what the crew had plotted? They accidentally exposed their own weaknesses, and that led them to close it. It's the same thing with this slider. Foley missed his target badly, but if he and catcher Jake Rogers had somehow failed to notice Contreras backing away from the plate, they couldn't possibly have done so after that pitch. Here's a ball a foot inside, that would still have ended up on the end of Contreras's bat if he had swung at it. Surely, then, it was time to give up the ghost and move back to Contreras's original position in the box--or at least to pretend to. One could always bail out with the front hip, get going early. He just had to at least invite Foley back into that area. You probably know where this is really going, though. I think Contreras would have had to tape two of his bats together, end-to-end, to reach this pitch. It's right down the middle. He should have swung, though, because he might have hit Hinch's cap in the Tigers dugout as he did, and maybe they would have called manager interference or something. It's a good thing Contreras has already made an All-Star team and looks like a long-term contributor to this team, because the row of seats he basically sat in to watch this pitch are pricey seats. I can, loosely, see what he was going for here. Until that last pitch, the Tigers pounded him with a truly shocking relentlessness, going with sinker after sinker inside. He even made decent contact on an aggressive swing on one of them, well off the plate, fouling the pitch away. I can say that. I can acknowledge some rational basis for some version of what happened. But this wasn't rational. This was baseball breaking for a minute. The Brewers blew their last real chance to win this game because their hitter tried to walk backward around the world and sneak over to first base without anyone noticing, six inches at a time. Blame Blake Perkins, maybe. He's been lousy so far, especially in the field, and bad stuff just seems to happen to the team whenever he gets involved. As soon as he took over at second base, maybe Brewers hitters started seeing a mysterious shimmer in the air all around second base, where whatever ghosts haunt Perkins lurk and drift, and none of them could focus. Maybe we should blame the hitting coaches. Did they show Contreras a heat map of Foley drilling the inside corner with sinkers on the dugout iPad while he warmed up? Did they remind him he could die if the ball hit him wrong and just scare him witless? In all likelihood, we'll never know. Here's all I will say, with confidence: It was a profoundly weird and frustrating way to lose a profoundly mundane and frustrating game. View full article

Tuesday night, the Brewers host the Tigers for the second contest in a three-game series. Unexpectedly, that game now feels like the biggest of the season to date, both because of the team's recent mini-skid and because of their pitching situation. Their starting pitcher for the game symbolizes both. Image courtesy of © Stephen Brashear-USA TODAY Sports It's been a difficult start to the season for Eric Lauer. Something isn't right. His velocity is down over two miles per hour, relative to 2022, and is currently the lowest of his career. Every pitch in his repertoire has been dinged. That's a worrying sign, for the obvious two reasons. Firstly, it implies that Lauer might not be fully healthy. That's not the only reason why a pitcher might lose power this way, but it's certainly the most salient. Given the long-term questions about the health of Brandon Woodruff. the team can ill afford to lose Lauer, too. Even now, their rotation is beginning to stretch a bit thin, and fifth starter Wade Miley is no paragon of durability. Lauer has to be part of the bridge between Corbin Burnes and Freddy Peralta starts, even if he's not going to approximate their performance. Secondly, of course, less velocity typically means less effectiveness. Lauer is walking hitters at virtually the same rate as he did over the past two seasons, but his strikeout rate has dropped by three percentage points. Opponents are whiffing less often on all five of his pitches, and hitting all five of them harder than they did last year. It's practically miraculous that Lauer has managed to muddle through with a 4.30 ERA to this point. Practically miraculous, perhaps, but not truly so. There's a real tweak at work, one that has helped Lauer avert total disaster in a moment of crisis. His fastball isn't fast enough, and it won't stay out of the middle of the plate. Opponents are spotting his slider and his curveball out of the hand. He has no feel for his changeup, and has virtually given up on it. Into the void left by all that derelict stuff, Lauer has stuffed a whole bunch of cutters. Against lefties, all the cutter has to do is play off his four-seamer. If he can get hitters not to obliterate that straight heat, he can then show them the cutter, looking enough like the fastball to induce a fastball-speed swing. That leads to some balls off the end of the bat, and explains why Lauer has gotten better results with that pitch than with his other principal weapons this year. He's also using the pitch more against righties, although less dramatically so. The slider really has gone missing for Lauer this year. He's tried to reshape it into something more akin to his curveball, but it's not working. What is working, though, is the cutter, which has lost more velocity than his fastball and now has greater vertical separation from that pitch, too. With the cutter, Lauer can get in on righties and prevent them from looking to extend their arms and do maximum damage on the four-seamer. It's far from a perfect plan, but it's kept him afloat during this brutal stretch. As long as he commands the pitch over the inner half, he can make it a key part of his attack. For the first time this season, the Brewers have lost two consecutive games. Going back to the start of this homestand, they've lost three out of four. They're still sporting a fantastic overall record, but the Pirates have kept pressure on them within the division, and the injury trouble the team has already encountered makes their success feel a bit fragile. On Tuesday, Lauer has to keep the anemic Detroit offense in check, so that the team can get off the schneid and back on track. Thereafter, the team needs to see him regain some his velocity and settle into the kind of tenuous but tenable rhythm he established in each of the last two seasons. View full article

Of the new rules that have come into MLB this year, the pitch timer is by far the most visible. It's also (by a smaller distance, and with more room for debate) the most impactful. For the Brewers' relief ace, though, it's just been another dimension added to the chess game he plays with hitters. Image courtesy of © Steven Bisig-USA TODAY Sports Devin Williams will not be hurried. In the early going, he's in the 11th percentile of the league for pitcher pace. He's only had one ball assessed via pitch timer violation, but he flirts with it often. Notably, he came breathtakingly close to one a couple of times during his high-stress save against the Padres on Sunday. By every indication, though, he's unconcerned about it. He leaves the fretting over those seconds in which the timer approaches zero to others. He's using his full allotment of time, both to prepare his mind and body to execute the next pitch, and to make baserunners and batters nonplussed. In his book Music is History, Questlove wrote the following operational definition of "cool" in music: "Cool is staying just enough behind the beat to make an intelligent decision, without sweating the fact that you're slowing the pace for your own benefit." That's exactly what Williams is doing. Before this season, the game didn't have an urgent pace when a hurler like Williams entered. It often slowed way down, and both sides tended to be fine with that. Now, there are constraints on the work each side needs to do between pitches. The calling of pitches, the mental battles with opponents, and the physical recovery required to be ready for the next pitch all have to happen within 15 (if no one is on base) or 20 seconds. That could, in theory, make everyone rush to avoid the embarrassment and non-negotiable penalty of a timer violation. It applies a certain amount of pressure, to those who choose to see it that way. Williams rejects that pressure. So far, it's working gorgeously. In six innings of work, he's allowed only six baserunners, and he's fanned 11 batters. He's giving himself more time and more control over things by using the full clock, and if anyone else is worried about falling behind, that's their own problem. It will be interesting to see whether he adjusts, as the season rolls on, and occasionally speeds up his pace to throw hitters off. In the meantime, though, his appearances feel almost like an oasis of pre-timer baseball--in a good way. The timer is still there, ensuring that things don't grind to a stop the way they sometimes have over the last 15 years or so. The drama is occasionally heightened by the clock nearing zero. Williams seems effortlessly aware of it, though, and is only using the clock to guide and direct his preparation to unleash yet another pitch against which hitters will look helpless. View full article

The Brewers just climbed to 13-5 on this young (but maturing) season. They've already ensured a winning record on a very tough 10-game road trip. It's all good news, as long as the team and their fans can stay standing long enough to enjoy it. Image courtesy of © Steven Bisig-USA TODAY Sports The Brewers needed a nice, easy game in the worst way Tuesday night. Their series in San Diego included two easygoing blowouts (one in each direction), but those were bookended by a pair of taut, hard-fought wins. That came after a three-gamer in Arizona that served as a clear early notice: the Diamondbacks will be pesky this year. Brandon Woodruff will be out for multiple months, and Corbin Burnes is now nursing a minor injury. The team needed a little bit of a tension-breaker. No dice. Baseball will, sometimes, sense your fatigue and your desperate need for a rest, and ruthlessly deny it. Even in April, the length and layers of the 162-game grind can occasionally rush up and elbow you into a wall, leaving your ribs sore and your ego bruised. The Brewers had to withstand some early damage in Tuesday night's game, as stopgap starter Colin Rea had an up-and-down outing. The Mariners looked stumped by Rea's stylish new sweeper the first time they saw him, but they took the measure of that pitch and its purveyor in a four-run third inning. It would have been understandable if everyone quietly, professionally switched things off for the night at that point. The score was just 4-3, but Rea was scuffling, and Craig Counsell felt little choice but to keep him out there to grind through some extra outs. With Woodruff and Burnes eating fewer innings than expected, the bullpen has borne a heavy load in the early going. Milwaukee's schedule has been unforgiving, anyway, with fewer off days and a tougher road trip than April typically includes. It would have been ok if this one had simply slipped away, one of those 54 pre-programmed losses a team has every year. No dice. The Brewers showed a resiliency and a hunger that have quickly become their signature, and they fought back, even on a night when everyone seemed a bit less than their very best. Rea got through the fifth without allowing any further runs, despite some loud contact. Willy Adames, whose at-bats have seemed more systematic and calculated this season, got a pitch up and away in the top of the sixth and drove it out of the park to right field, tying the score. Counsell, to his credit, never lets his team's heart go to waste. If they show him that they have the fight to win on a given night, he responds by pushing every button he believes will increase their chances of winning. So it was that Hoby Milner, making his ninth appearance already in the team's 18th game and working on a second consecutive night, got four outs for the Brewers. Joel Payamps and Matt Bush also came back on no rest, and Devin Williams--who threw 33 pitches Sunday and got warm Monday night before the Brewers' ninth-inning insurance runs allowed him to shut it down--worked the ninth with the score still tied. Payamps is up to eight appearances. Bryse Wilson, who navigated the tumultuous 10th and 11th, has thrown 11 innings already, all in relief. Just three weeks into the season, the heavy schedule and the Brewers' unusually rigid bullpen construction (with Wilson, Payamps, and Javy Guerra out of options, and Gus Varland unable to be sent down without being offered back to the Dodgers) have them dealing with much more in the way of fatigue and workload questions than a team would ordinarily be worried about by this stage of the season. Part of that, of course, is that they just keep winning, and that happened again Tuesday night. Unless a team is a historic juggernaut, winning comes with some costs. Close games pile up, and the pitchers used to secure victories in them, wear down. Position players get fewer breaks, too. In this case, that state of affairs is also complicated by the youthful exuberance of the Brewers' youngsters. Garrett Mitchell suffered a shoulder subluxation on a desperate (though successful) slide into third base in the top of the 10th. Mitchell wasn't able to throw at full strength on the game-tying sacrifice fly in the bottom half of that frame, and he left the game immediately thereafter. That emptied out the Brewers' bench. No one is getting off their feet, and no one is ever taking it easy out there. That's the magic of this team, really. They're admirably hard-charging, relentless, and eager. Counsell pushes for every win he can get, on the theory that he'll be able to work with or work around whatever ramifications there are for that urgency. If Williams, Bush, Milner, or Peter Strzelecki wears out or wears down, well, Counsell has been giving Payamps and Varland auditions in situations that allow him to gauge their fitness for high-leverage roles. If Mitchell has to go on the injured list (which seems likely), Sal Frelick could come up to replace him. The Brewers' success throughout Counsell's tenure has depended on that capacity for taking chances and deploying every available resource to win games. They're not going to change that approach now, and the individuals they've brought into the clubhouse clearly buy in to it. It's paying off beautifully in the early stages of 2023, but the bill for this success will come due as the spring leans toward summer. Third Bucket Record: 6-0 View full article

Bryse Wilson has pitched primarily in low-leverage situations for the Brewers thus far in 2023, but he's already showing signs of being the team's next success story in pitching development. With Brandon Woodruff on the shelf for a prolonged period, the ways in which Wilson could have an impact have become more clear, and the stakes have been raised. Image courtesy of © Mike De Sisti / The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK Back in late February, I tagged Bryse Wilson as one potential X-factor for the 2023 Brewers. I wanted to capture the broader point that Chris Hook and the rest of the pitching instruction and support staff for the team are very good and versatile, but Wilson had specific indicators in his favor, too. Here's a snippet of what I wrote at that time. Lo, and behold: It's already clear that Wilson has both stuck with his higher arm slot, and swapped out his slider for a cutter. The cutter has been a go-to pitch for him so far, and it's working nicely. He's gotten whiffs on over a quarter of swings against it, and ground balls when batters do put it in play. It's also pretty clear that his four-seamer and curveball work better off one another from this altered slot, and he's achieved both the greater vertical movement and the higher whiff rate that I predicted with the curve in the early going. The samples here are minute, but in pitching, the little things all matter. That's not all that has changed, though. I also wrote about the fact that, just as he was raising his arm slot a bit, he slid across to the first-base side of the pitching rubber in his setup. The Brewers' advice to him, based on his new slot and new repertoire, has been to keep the mechanical change but return to the third-base side of the rubber, From there, Wilson's splitter (which has about six inches less armside run than does his straight change) works just fine, but the rest of his arsenal really plays up. His cutter can work across the plate, but is around the zone. He's much more able to consistently work left-handed batters away, but can steer his sinker in on righties. He's elevating his fastball and his sinker with more confidence, and while a high sinker might sound like a bad idea, it's exactly how Wilson's works best. That Wilson is also still using his full arsenal tells us he still wants to try his hand as a starter. With Woodruff sidelined, that opportunity is before him. The Brewers probably won't get another Eric Lauer-level breakout from Wilson, who (after all) cost much less to acquire and has a long track record of mixed results in MLB. He's been solid, though, thanks to the synthesis of some things under the guidance of Hook and company. He still has room to grow, and he's in the right place to do so. View full article