Matthew Trueblood

Eric Lauer, the breakout starting pitcher of 2022 for the Milwaukee Brewers, has very strange platoon splits. Let’s talk about why, and what those splits can do to inform our 2023 projections for Lauer. Image courtesy of © Rick Scuteri-USA TODAY Sports Throughout his career, Eric Lauer has had reverse platoon splits. Despite being a left-handed pitcher, he’s always gotten righties out better than lefties. Since he established himself with the Brewers in 2021, though, that has at least begun to change. Eric Lauer, Platoon Splits, 2021-22 and Career v RHB v LHB AVG OBP SLG AVG OBP SLG 2021 .211 .270 .371 .228 .328 .307 2022 .230 .299 .426 .217 .296 .330 Career .244 .313 .412 .276 .351 .424 Lauer is hardly alone in this way, though. Plenty of pitchers (especially starters, and especially lefties) have neutral or reverse splits. What makes Lauer unique is the way his splits break down, at a more atomic level. Here are his splits for 2022 alone, using some different data. Eric Lauer, Platoon Splits, 2022 v. RHB v. LHB Hard Hit % 39.2 32.4 Ground Ball % 31.5 51.4 Whiff % 24.6 22 Now, we’re starting to hit on something truly unusual. Most pitchers who are tougher on opposite-handed batters manage that by limiting hard contact and keeping the ball on the ground against them. Lauer’s splits in that regard are extreme in their magnitude, but ordinary in their direction. He’s a ground-ball guy who induces soft contact against lefties, and a fly-ball guy against righties who gives up plenty of well-hit balls. Pitch mix comes into play here, and really highlights the oddity of Lauer. Most hurlers with big splits in terms of contact quality and trajectory are sinkerballers; Lauer relies on a four-seam, rising fastball. Most guys who miss more bats against opposite-handed hitters have great changeups. Despite a few stories about his work with one early last year, that’s not Lauer, either. In fact, here’s an especially quirky finding. Since the start of 2021, Lauer has gotten whiffs on 30.9 percent of swings at his four-seamer by right-handed batters. Of the 52 lefties who have gotten at least 300 swings against their heaters by righties during that time, only four induce whiffs more frequently. Flip the batter to the left side, though, and only 16.2 percent of opponent swings have come up empty. He’s 57th of 67 qualifying southpaws. His whiff rate is nearly twice as high against opposite-handed hitters with his fastball. As the drastic change in his ranking implies, that’s not normal. Why is it so? Why does Lauer get so many more whiffs on his heater against righties? It’s almost entirely a function of location, and it’s at least partially intentional. Here’s where Lauer got whiffs with his four-seamer in 2022: Here’s where he threw his four-seamers to righties: And here’s where he threw it to lefties: When he arrived in Milwaukee, Lauer was a soft-tossing southpaw with subpar extension. His fastball lacked the ability to effectively miss bats anywhere in the zone. With his shorter arm path and increased efficiency in his mechanics, though, he now has average velocity and average extension. That means that he can get whiffs with the pitch–but only at the top of the zone. Craig Counsell noted in a story as far back as early 2021 that Lauer “is a left-hander who likes facing right-handers, because he likes to throw it up in the zone and likes to throw it in on their hands. But you have to have the confidence to do that, because there are thin margins when you do that." Indeed, Lauer works almost everything in his arsenal toward the glove side (in on right-handers, away from lefties), and at the same stage in 2021, he discussed the importance of feeling comfortable with his approach. "I know myself better than anybody else. Anybody can say on paper, ‘Hey, this is your best pitch.’ But, to me, there’s a way I get to that and there’s a way that I make that my best pitch,” Lauer told Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “People could obviously see that it made sense, because I could actually execute instead of just flailing stuff out there.” In the case of his four-seamer, that craving for comfort and confident execution manifests in Lauer working lefties down and away. That’s one reason why he’s been more successful recently against them, despite his inability to miss bats against them. He induces many more called strikes on the four-seamer against lefties, part of the way he uses that pitch, his slider, and his cutter in symphony on the outer part of the plate. "I don't throw extremely hard, I don't have incredibly hard breaking stuff, but the more I can get pitches to look like each other and then go opposite ways or split, I think that's kind of the way that I find success," he told Hogg back then. This can tell us much about Lauer’s 2023. There might be upside left for him, if he can start confidently applying the same principles he uses to get weak contact against lefties to his battles with righties. He could also find more whiffs against lefties, just by working up in the zone with the fastball a bit more often against them. Next week, we’ll delve more into his statistical outlook, but before that, we need to discuss one more aspect of his revamped delivery and his repertoire: where it’s coming from. That’s a story for Thursday. View full article

Good thoughts here! I'm curious, because I think this was beyond the scope of your piece: Do you think they'll really try to remain that homegrown? Or will they trade one of their (hopefully) surfeit of good young outfielders to land an established pitcher with some team control remaining?

This has been a good conversation. I’ll say that I think Strzelecki and Ashby could also figure into the equation, before it all has to be decided either way. And that I think they’ll trade Williams, rather than play it all the way out, unless he responds well to overtures about what would be a pretty team-friendly extension. I doubt it happens before midseason 2024, though.

Yeah, I think there’s an element of PR to this, from both player and team. “Screwball” (not without reason) scares people. That said, I think we also can acknowledge that he clearly has a special ability to apply spin in that direction, which must mean it’s SLIGHTLY less dangerous for him than it might be for your average pitcher.

On any list of the most devastating individual pitches in MLB, the primary weapon of Milwaukee Brewers closer Devin Williams would have to be near the top. It’s a bat misser, but he can throw it for a strike and catch a batter staring on occasion. It neutralizes power as well as any offering in baseball. The Airbender is many things–it just isn’t a changeup. Williams throws a screwball, and that’s a fact that matters. In 2022, Devin Williams threw his screwball 620 times. It accounted for 58 percent of his pitches. Among hurlers who compiled at least 40 innings, not only did no one throw a changeup that often, but only San Diego Padres right-hander Nabil Crismatt even crept over the 50-percent threshold. However, seven pitchers used a slider at least 58 percent of the time. Breaking pitches, because they rely more on spin and movement and less on deception, are slightly more versatile and useful than are changeups. One argument, then, is that Williams’s pitch is some form of breaking ball, purely because it’s improbable that he could have this much success while relying on a changeup. That would be a thin argument on its own, of course, but it’s buttressed by the characteristics of the pitch itself. First of all, Williams’s pitch has 11.0 inches of horizontal movement on average. That’s more than any changeup in baseball, but it’s right in line with the best sliders, sweepers, and curveballs in the league, according to the PitchInfo Leaderboards at Baseball Prospectus. A slightly less extreme version of the same story plays out when you compare the pitch’s vertical movement to prospective peers. Again, though, Williams’s pitch is obviously an outlier. We can’t disqualify it from being a changeup purely because it moves more than any other changeup in baseball. It also moves more than almost any slider, sweeper, or curve. Let’s consider another dimension of pitch characteristics, though–first a metaphorical one, then a literal one. Williams’s pitch spins at a bit over 2,700 revolutions per minute (RPM), on average. That’s not only the highest spin rate on a so-called changeup in the majors, but beats the field by 200 RPM. It’s about 500 RPM higher than his fastball spin rate. A changeup, by any reasonable definition, is a pitch predicated on fooling the hitter into seeing a fastball. The deception comes from using the same arm motion and arm speed, and a very closely matched release point, while killing speed and spin by gripping the ball with more of the pitcher’s hand. Most good changeups spin considerably less than their purveyors’ fastballs. Williams’s pitch spins more. Now that we have detailed data on exactly where the pitcher releases the ball in three dimensions, we also know that Williams does that differently than guys throwing changeups do. His release extension–the distance in front of the pitching rubber at which the ball leaves his hand–is about an inch and a half greater on his fastball than on his screwball. That’s not typical, at all. A changeup not only relies on mimicking the release point of the heater, but usually invites a fraction of extra extension, as the pitcher’s hand works through from behind the ball and they “turn it over.” That’s where both the velocity differential and the fading action of a changeup comes from. However, many pitchers do have slightly less extension on their breaking balls than on their fastballs. That’s because a breaking ball requires something different. The hand goes around the ball, rather than through it, maximizing spin and altering the axis thereof at the same time. That’s what Williams is doing with his pitch; he just does it with his outer fingers and a pronating turn of the forearm, rather than his first two fingers and a supinating one. He’s using a modified version of what we now call a circle changeup grip, but the circle change is just the gentler, modern variant on the old screwball. Why does this matter? The result is the same, whether you call it a changeup or a screwball. There’s no pitch in baseball quite like it. Well, there are a couple of important factors involved. One is the health implications of throwing the screwball. Creating that much spin with a pronating delivery puts strain not only on the elbow, but on the shoulder, and it’s important to remember that as we project Williams’s longevity as the Brewers’ relief ace. There’s a reason why most of the great screwballers you can name (Christy Mathewson, Carl Hubbell, Warren Spahn) have grainy black-and-white photographs on Baseball Reference. The pitch is dangerous. We’ve already seen shoulder issues render him unavailable at the worst possible time. Another reason why we should care what this pitch is called, though, is so that we can understand it–and the sport we love–better. As a changeup, it’s not merely awesome, but baffling, and not entirely in a good way. It starts to seem unfathomable and inscrutable. When we reconceptualize it as a reverse breaking ball, though, it makes more sense, and that new comprehension doesn’t compromise our ability to marvel at it. It just brings us a little closer to the clarity and vividity reserved for the really careful baseball fan, and that closeness heightens our overall enjoyment of the game itself. View full article

Oh, for sure. Again, Wong’s arm has lost its zip and they definitely upgraded. I mean only that it’s good to contextualize and not overly rely on ANY Savant stats, least of all the defensive ones. They can still be useful though.

Well, I’ll admit to using a stat that I think oversimplifies things a little in that regard. All of us who have watched Wong over the years know that part of his defensive smoothness is not throwing it harder than he needs to. His internal clock is pretty good and I don’t think he even tries to muscle up and fire it 90 MPH from second to first, most of the time. That probably biases the numbers somewhat, and Statcast only has limited ways to adjust for it. Still, I would grade his arm as markedly below-average, especially last year, so the data tells us a fair (if slightly exaggerated) story there.

Five years ago, the Milwaukee Brewers used defensive shifts as much as any team in baseball. Under the 2023 MLB rules changes, though, they shouldn’t suffer much, because they’ve phased out shifting as a primary run prevention tool over the last two seasons. It's one way they've stayed ahead of the pace of change in baseball, even as that pace has quickened. The Brewers front office and the field staff under Craig Counsell have always tried to optimize their choices and strategies in areas like fielder positioning, and for a long time, that meant using shifts. Not by accident did they briefly utilize the 1,000-pound infield of Mike Moustakas, Travis Shaw, Jonathan Schoop, and Jesús Aguilar, using shifts to make Schoop a passable shortstop and Moustakas and Shaw cromulent at second base. As you can see, though, they’ve veered sharply toward more traditional alignments on the dirt since the start of 2021. In fact, few teams are better prepared for the new rules preventing imbalanced infields or infielders playing on the outfield grass than are the Brewers. That’s not merely a matter of the team getting out of those alignments proactively and training their defenders to make the plays. It’s something they’ve addressed via their offseason moves. By trading away Kolten Wong and letting Jace Peterson walk as a free agent, the team ended up getting younger and more athletic, not only because those choices created more room for incumbents, but because new additions Abraham Toro and Brian Anderson are considerably younger than the men whom they’re replacing. Anderson and Toro also help in another way. It receives little attention, but infield throws are likely to get much tougher under the new rules. Strong and accurate arms are more vital to good infield play if a fielder is more likely to field the ball on the run, or heading away from their desired target, and that’s exactly what will happen in a post-shift world. Peterson has a very strong arm, but in Anderson, the Brewers got one every bit as good. Wong, on the other hand, had the weakest infield arm in baseball in 2022, according to Statcast, while Toro, Luis Urías, and Mike Brosseau all rated around average. The linchpin of the infield defense, of course, is shortstop Willy Adames. That’s another bit of good news, because he’s as unlikely to suffer disproportionately from positioning constraints as any shortstop in MLB. Some shortstops who are especially tall will have to show the ability to bend and make plays more often, but Adames is only six feet in height. Those with fringy arms, as we’ve already discussed, will be stretched, but Statcast measured Adames’s arm as the fifth-strongest among infielders last year. Older, slower guys who depended on their savvy and the extra step afforded them by shifts will struggle, but Adames is only 27 and is an above-average runner. Brice Turang only deepens the collection of good options on defense, and the scouting report on him from FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen highlights his utility under the new rules. “Turang is so defensively gifted that he is almost certain to have a significant and lengthy big league career, especially now that shifting is banned,” Longenhagen wrote in December. “He has plus feet, range, and actions, and will make throws from all kinds of odd platforms, including when he’s backhanding balls to his right and throwing on the run.” With Adames as the anchor and Anderson, Urias, Brosseau, Toro, and Turang as the supporting cast, the Brewers don’t need shifts to defend the infield well. That’s part of why they used them less over the last two years, and now that none of their rivals can use that tactic, the Crew gains a comparative advantage. They have one more edge, too. Only the Dodgers induced weaker ground balls, on average, than did the Brewers in 2022. There are no guarantees that they can sustain that skill, of course, and we can explore the chances of that another time. For now, though, it’s safe to say this much: the Brewers’ overall run prevention infrastructure is as well-suited to the new constraints teams will face as any team in MLB. View full article

Do we think they view the Hader trade as something negative, on the whole? The vibes that created were a problem; they’ve admitted that much. But Burnes is slightly less of a clubhouse linchpin than Hader was. The return would have to be gaudier anyway. And most of all, after turning Ruiz into Contreras, I would bet they take a pretty favorable view of their own decision-making there. I think the chances of them letting even two of those guys get as far as free agency are virtually nil. If I’m guessing, I’m guessing one extension, one trade, and one walks for a draft pick comp, but I’d sooner bet on two trades OR two extensions than two getting to FA—let alone all three.

That’s a perfectly reasonable preference, and the CBA (with its built-in help to small-market teams in terms of compensation when a free agent walks) does make it plausible. I would note that it’s not really how the Brewers prefer to do things, as evidenced by the Josh Hader trade. They think they get more value by trading or extending in situations like these, and they don’t like missing any opportunity to maximize value.

A fortnight before spring training begins, the Milwaukee Brewers and their ace, Corbin Burnes, seem unlikely to reach agreement on a contract extension. Their only hope of doing so might be to look to an extension signed at a similar career stage in 2019, by then-Mets superstar Jacob deGrom. Corbin Burnes, 28, is set to hit free agency after the 2024 season, and while it’s been a topic of conversation all winter, the fact is that extensions with two years of team control remaining are rare. Most team-friendly extensions, with big discounts for the team and club options at the end, come sooner than this in a career, when the club can apply more leverage. Most big extensions, the kind that mark a player as a franchise cornerstone, come a year later, when the potential value of a free-agent deal has begun to crystallize and the sides can negotiate more evenly. A player’s penultimate year of team control is, contractually, an awkward phase. That’s especially true for elite starting pitchers. In fact, in the last decade, only one hurler of anywhere near Burnes’s caliber has signed an extension with between four and five years of service time. It was Jacob deGrom , who signed a complicated and fascinating four-year deal with the Mets in 2019. That contract guaranteed him as much as $137.5 million, with a club option that could have taken its total value as high as $170 million. However, deGrom also had the ability to opt out after the fourth year, making the deal worth $107 million. (He did just that, of course, and signed a new pact for $185 million over five years this winter with the Rangers.) At that point, deGrom was better than Burnes is now. Because he had been eligible for arbitration for two years before that, to Burnes’s one, he was also set to make more in 2019 than Burnes can make in 2023. However, he was two years older than Burnes is, and had significant known injury risk attached to him already. It’s not unfair to use the deGrom deal as a reference point for a potential Burnes extension. What, then, would that look like? Well, the Brewers could pay Burnes $31 million over the first two seasons, roughly matching what he’d be projected to get via arbitration, anyway. In 2025, his salary would need to climb substantially, to somewhere just south of what a pitcher of his caliber commands on the open market. Three guaranteed years at a total of $100 million is a fair estimate. Again using deGrom’s deal as a guide, the team could add an option for a sixth year at $35 million. Burnes, though, would have the right to opt out after 2026. Assuming a small buyout would be part of the club option, this deal would guarantee Burnes $136 million over six seasons, with the option taking it to $166 million over seven. If Burnes opted out, he would do so with $40 million left on the deal, having made $96 million in four years and with plenty of time left to sign a deGrom-like megadeal. I know what you’re thinking. This isn’t how the Brewers do business, and they’re not going to sign him to such a contract. That’s probably true, although it’s worth pointing out that the deGrom deal included a huge chunk of deferred money, as does Christian Yelich’s current deal, so one tool for managing the budgetary implications of such a deal is already at hand for Mark Attanasio and Matt Arnold. This exercise merely helps us see a couple of important things. Firstly, there is still some discount to be had by moving now on Burnes, using a structure that has already worked once elsewhere. He needn’t be viewed as having a $200-million price tag, unless Milwaukee waits another year to make a decision. Secondly, though, it reminds us that the decision and action points on Burnes are getting closer than we might otherwise think. If he’s still a Brewer next winter, everyone will know for sure that he’s not going to sign an extension, and the team’s leverage in any trade talks will decline. That doesn’t mean they should trade him now, though, because with him alongside Brandon Woodruff atop the starting rotation, they still have a fine chance to win the NL Central in 2023. View full article

I really do love this topic, and I’ll probably do a full post on it soon, but in short: he uses a circle-change grip, which is really the screwball grip, as much as anything is. Christy Mathewson, Carl Hubbell, Warren Spahn—the screwballs for which these guys were famous were thrown with pretty much the same grip Devin uses. There are still differences, in mindset and arm action, and even subtle ones in grip of course, but I do think you can call it a screwball even though it’s gripped like what we now tend strongly to call a change.

Hi, Brewers fans! I’m Matt Trueblood. I wanted to take a minute to say hello, because hopefully, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the coming weeks and months. I’m joining Brewer Fanatic in a writing and semi-editorial role, with the goal of helping this community continue to grow and thrive as the best Brewers destination online. I have to lead with a confession, which might not be news to those of you who already know me from past endeavors: I grew up a Cubs fan. I mostly did so in Appleton, Wis., though, going to Timber Rattlers games and soaking up the Brewers by osmosis and exposure. I usually watched the Cubs, not the Brewers, and I would listen to Pat Hughes calling Cubs games on our car radio while I played basketball on summer afternoons. At bedtime, though, and in defiance thereof, it was always Bob Uecker and (most often) Jim Powell to whom I would tune in, trying to keep the radio just loud enough to hear the game without my parents hearing it, too. My first big-league game was a Twins-Brewers tilt at County Stadium. My first treasured big-league autograph was that of Jeff D’Amico, on a battered ball I got at that game. (I remember him being gigantic, which surely everyone seems to be when one is seven years old, but it’s also objectively true. That guy was massive.) All of this is to say that I feel deep roots in the Brewers community, even if it’s not my native tribe. After high school, I moved away from Wisconsin, but in national writing gigs at Baseball Prospectus and elsewhere, I’ve covered the Brewers, and I still consider them one of my baseball intimates. If you picked up the team-specific Brewers edition of the Baseball Prospectus 2021, almost every word you read therein was mine, from the team essay to the player comments to the top 10 lists of the best position players and pitchers in franchise history. I intend to bring all of that background and that understanding of what the Brewers are and what they mean to my work here. I also think this team is as perennially interesting and as rich a topic of conversations and good analysis as any in baseball right now. I have just two principled stands I want to carve out, and then we can be done with the pleasantries and get on to baseball. Firstly: it’s Miller Park. No American Family Field or AmFam nonsense from me. I don’t intend to impose a unilateral editorial standard or anything, but Miller Park was a lovely, fitting name, even if it was only officially applied as part of a craven financial transaction. Not having gotten a cut of either that old deal or the new one that has the team calling its longtime home by a clunky new name, I feel no fealty toward the latter. When I write “Miller Park,” I’m not forgetting anything. I mean what I say. Secondly: Devin Williams throws a screwball. We can get into more about why it’s important to me to acknowledge that fact in a separate post, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a screwball. Let’s have some fun. View full article

This week, a massive controversy erupted, when Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic wrote an article that focused on a sensitive subject and appeared to treat it insensitively. Where did he go wrong? By not just filing the idea away. Image courtesy of © Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports By Friday, even Rosenthal himself admitted that he had erred in the choices he made when building the article that ran earlier in the week. To summarize (lest you missed it), the piece argued that the heinous crimes that seem likely to lead to prison time and the obliteration of an MLB career for the Rays' Wander Franco were an especially egregious example of the risks teams assume by signing players to massive contracts at very young ages. He got massive blowback for that, both because of the nature of those crimes (Franco is accused of sexually abusing a teenage girl and bribing both the girl and her family for their silence) and because of the perspective from which he seemed to write. That backlash was justified. While Rosenthal's position in the industry and role at his place of employment requires him to write from a vicarious front office point of view at times, the human empathy filter always needs to be interleaved with any other layer of analysis we apply to anything. That's the remit of readers and of writers, and belonging to the latter fraternity doesn't absolve one of the responsibilities that fall on both groups. Rosenthal is only human, himself, and it's fine that he was unable to turn off the part of his brain that is trained to see big stories from the angle of an executive making some theoretical future decision. The great dual mistake was that he elected to let that thought out, and that his editorial team then allowed that thought-turned-column to see the light of day. Somewhere beneath the firestorm lies a perfectly fine point. In suggesting that people barely out of their teens are risky propositions for nine-figure investments, he was only updating a frequent refrain of none other than Branch Rickey. The notion comes off as paternalistic, self-serving, callous, or some combination of the three, almost no matter when you say it, but saying it about a player who was involved in something so unforgivable and aberrant felt especially so. We ought never to turn off our critical thinking centers, and it's fine for highly visible moments like the Franco situation to serve as occasions for the kinds of closer reflection we too often neglect between crises. Rosenthal needed to pause longer and think harder about the impact it would have on readers, on victims of sexual abuse and pedophilia, and on the baseball community, though, before externalizing those reflections. My favorite novel is The Witch Elm, by Tana French. Like any good literature, it's not about any one thing, but rather, it works in layers and levels. Fittingly, perhaps, it centers quite a bit on the seemingly innocent but often lethally dangerous failures of young people to see beyond their own experience or past the thin masks put up by the others near them. For my money, though, the most important theme it advances is even simpler: We don't really know each other. We barely know ourselves, and then, we only know the fragile versions of ourselves that our life experience has created. We're so ignorant, we often fail even to notice the fragility of the aspects of ourselves we consider essential. That's something close to what Rosenthal wanted to communicate, I think. He might not want to say this, but it's pretty clear (not just from this instance, but from past writings and comments he's made) that he's uneasy with the massive wealth (and the inextricable power that comes with that wealth) given so freely to players who have barely reached adulthood. I share that unease, on a level deeper than any tangible risks I could articulate. It's a reasonable position. It might even be a noble one, and stating it aloud is worthwhile, sometimes. Timing is everything, though. Talking about such risks is hard in the wake of a thing like what Franco did. Choosing to talk about it specifically through the lens of what Franco did was a glaring and easily avoidable error of judgment. Rosenthal faced a dilemma familiar to any columnist who has ever wanted to make a point. If you don't attach a specific case or example to an argument, it will often be either dismissed or wasted, because people will fail to connect with it or fully understand it. He wanted to make what he probably believes (in an earnest, human way; Rosenthal is not an unfeeling guy) to be a worthwhile point. However, examples and news pegs have to be well-chosen. This one wasn't. It is sometimes the maddening, deflating duty of a good columnist to risk that vagueness or ineffectuality, in order to preserve their humanity and serve their readers and their community better. You might have to write some variation on a column a handful of times over a handful of years, in order to slowly bring more people around to the idea that the point you're making matters and that the side you're taking is the side of the angels. That's not ideal, but it's better than accidentally making smaller something so huge and ugly that it should never be thus downplayed. We don't really know each other. I certainly don't know Rosenthal. When I read his article this week, and when he made his appearance Friday on a web show to make amends for it, I was reminded of that in forceful terms. I refuse to impute any real malice to his choices in this case, but it seems to me that he needed to keep the lesson closer to the center of his own mind when he sat down to write. The fundamental conclusion we should draw from the premise that we don't know each other is that we need to proceed with greater empathy. We're all moving in the dark, so we should take care not to step on each other. Sometimes, that means putting an article idea in a tickler file for later. View full article