Stealofhome

Agreed, that's one of the big things - so few appearances against them this year.

The Brewers signed Rhys Hoskins last offseason to be a power bat in the middle of the lineup. It was a bit of a gamble by the team, as Hoskins missed all of last season with a torn ACL, but a measured one because of his consistent ability to hit. Coming into 2024, Hoskins had over 2,800 plate appearances with a 125 wRC+ and turned 31 toward the end of spring training. By all accounts, he is great in both the clubhouse and community, and was clearly a fan favorite during his six Major League seasons in Philadelphia. But despite his consistent seasonal output, he was also known in Philadelphia to be a streaky hitter. If we look at Hoskins' offensive output by month over his career, we can see some of that inconsistency, where he'll struggle for a month or two before rebounding (splits data all from Fangraphs). The last data point in the plot is this month, June 2024, one of the worst months in his career to date. Much of that inconsistency can be attributed to right-handed pitching. In particular, according to Baseball-Reference, it appears that Hoskins struggles against power pitchers. Those are defined as "in the top third of the league in strikeouts plus walks." His OPS is much lower against these pure strikeout pitchers. It is possible that in the months he is struggling, he is facing more power pitchers or getting poor match ups, playing in difficult stadiums, or it might just be randomness. But most of it occurs against right-handed pitching, which is to be expected, since Hoskins is himself right-handed. His career splits show that he has been a pretty good hitter against everyone, but that he has particularly taken advantage of his platoon splits against lefties. And that brings us to 2024. The right-handed, first base-playing, power bat in the middle of the Brewers lineup has a 66 wRC+ against left-handed pitching this season. Instead of hitting like Ronald Acuna Jr., he's hitting like Martin Maldonado. He has a wRC+ below 100 against southpaws every month this season, a streak in his career matched only by the second half of 2018. In May of that year, Hoskins fouled a ball off his face and landed on the disabled list with a fractured jaw. He returned 11 days later and demolished right-handed pitching but struggled against lefties. This year, he has dealt with an injured hamstring and his return to baseball after an entire year and has yet to prove that he can hit opposite-handed pitching. What is happening in his approach that is causing him to have a .172 batting average, 5 total hits, one home run, and a .261 wOBA against lefties? His Baseball Savant page can give us some clues. All of the following statistics will be against left-handed pitching. He has a .327 wOBA against the fastball but .181 and .111 against breaking stuff and offspeed, respectively. But his walk and strikeout rates this season (11.4% to 17.1%) are actually better than his career numbers (17.9% to 20%). He is seeing more fastballs (65% compared to 52% in 2022 and 59% in 2021) and is whiffing on them a little more (24% fastball whiff rate in 2024 vs. 18% in 2022). His barrel rate against all pitches is down this year, from 14% in 2020, 19% in 2021, and 15% in 2022 to 8% in 2024. So he isn't necessarily swinging and missing, but swinging and missing the barrel against lefties. He has a 100% ground ball rate against breaking pitches and 43% against offspeed this year, up from 33% for both in 2022. His pop-up rate on fastballs this season is 38%, up from 12% in 2022. Taking in all that information, it appears that Hoskins is getting under the fastball to pop it up and getting on top of the breaking and offspeed stuff to ground it weakly to shortstop or third base. Hopefully he can get back to mashing lefties and providing high quality plate appearances against right-handed pitching. But for now, he is one of the main reasons that the Brewers are struggling mightily against southpaws this season.

Yankees, for most of the same reasons.

I have the same question as well. We will be there for Monday's game. I have some friends who have visited so can ask around but they have likely only visited a few times at most. It would be helpful to hear from a local.

What's odd is that he is struggling mostly against left-handed pitching. Not really striking out too much against them, just a lot of pop-ups on the fast ball and ground balls on the offspeed stuff.

Also, how long is the leash on Hoskins before the fans at the field turn on him?

They were hoping Snoop would call Yelich's 200th HR. Didn't quite work.

The Reds have been one of the hottest teams in baseball the past two weeks, but I hope the Brewers can cool them off.

Thanks for this article, in particular the note that xSLG (and xwOBA, xBA, etc) do not include the horizontal angle of the batted ball. I had always assumed each of those statistics did, so that was new to me. I did some work on expected run value a few years back and it made perfect sense to include the horizontal direction of the batted ball because a hitter does have control over whether or not they are pulling or going opposite field and of course those things matter. It seems like a fault of those expected result numbers to only include "exit velocity, launch angle and, on certain types of batted balls, Sprint Speed."

Was it someone in the Dodger's front office or the Cubs/Cardinals/Reds/Pirates that texted Rosenthal and begged him to write this?

The Brewers are currently 19th in OPS vs. LHP and Rhys Hoskins has been much worse this year than in his career. William Contreras is also doing worse against lefties this year.

I did a quick and dirty method by joining the hitting and pitching tables from the previous Fangraphs link and came up with this table: Runs Scored WPCT 0 0% 1 7% 2 20% 3 41% 4 54% 5 69% 6 76% 7 85% 8 87% 9 88% 10 100% 11 90% 12 100% 13 100% 14 100% 15 100% 16 100% 17 100% 20 100% Four teams have lost while scoring 11 runs this year, but otherwise anything over 10 is a win.

Keller went unclaimed and signed with the Red Sox.

Thanks for this article, perfect context with which to watch today's game against the Tigers

Thanks for sharing the way to get to this data! I had been pulling the game logs from baseball-reference which was too manual for my taste. Now with all team data, we can look at a lot more of the trends. I did find some discussion about whether or not run volatility matters on Bill James' website (this link was working before, but not today for me) and oddly enough, Reddit. Some of this probably requires a bit more space to really get into, since run scoring is not always normally distributed and what is precisely the right way to compare volatile offenses? Anyway, this is what the distribution looks like for all of MLB: Then here are the top six (top 20%) of teams in runs per game and what their distribution looks like so far this year.

I wonder if an additional benefit of trading Burnes to a "team known to be near the cutting edge in pitching instruction and development" is to see how they use him. The Brewers seem good at getting the most out of kitchen sink guys but maybe they have room to grow on someone like Burnes. So trade him to a team that can get the most out of him and then learn how to improve for a future talent.

I watched Biloxi for the first time this evening and turned on the game late. Boeve swung too hard, hurt his hamstring, and was lifted for a pinch runner. Yoho couldn't hold the lead to close the game. I'll just not watch in the future, sorry.

I wonder if the Angels are willing to listen to offers on Reid Detmers. He's a former top 10 pick and just got send back down to AAA after a rough start to this season.

If you look at the baseball-reference split pages, the worst batting splits on this year's team so far is vs LHP as RHB. Hopefully Rhys Hoskins gets back to his career numbers, as he sports a career 144 wRC+ vs LHP but only 79 this year. Perkins, Wiemer, Chourio, and Miller are a combined 20 for 118 (.169) with 10 walks, 2 doubles, 2 HR, and 34 K vs LHP. It seems like they could use some help hitting lefties as much or more than they need a lefty power bat.

MLB did reduce the pitch clock with runners on base this year from 20 seconds to 18 seconds. We can look at the median pitch tempo change on Baseball Savant, which is fairly constant with bases empty and down a tick with runners on base. But that doesn't take into account any strategy, count leverage, more important situations, etc. I put together a plot that compares the Brewers run scoring in the first couple months of the season from last year to this year: Those 0 and 1 run games are much less common, and the 8/9 run games are now 10+. It's almost like they went from bimodal (either 2 or 7 runs) to trimodal (3, 7, or 10 runs).

Usually the hitting numbers are higher during the summer months, so there is some room for them to go up league-wide yet. I couldn't easily find a chart to show that but just looking through the league splits on baseball-reference reveals that trend.

This is great work! And I do wish we could put a single number on pitchability to include not only pitch shape, but sequence. That all seems to be the biggest part of the game and very rarely talked about or taught in the general public viewing. I wish TV announcers talked about how the pitcher is sequencing batters and changing pitch shape instead of whether they prefer ketchup or relish.

Per Todd Rosiak on May 22, Garrett Mitchell begins taking swings off a tee Friday in Boston. Next major steps would be Arizona to accrue ABs and then a minor-league rehab stint. Mitchell's goal is a return to the field in the Angels series in Anaheim on June 17.

What does CC mean?

Of qualified batters this year, Oliver Dunn has the worst run value on pitches taken. Sal Frelick is tied for last on run value for pitches taken in the heart of the plate, and Christian Yelich and Oliver Dunn are tied for the worst run value on pitches taken in the waste part of the zone.