Stealofhome

I haven't been able to find comprehensive metrics to cover "quality plate appearance" anywhere, but I had heard of that somehow being available. But one possibility is to look at the percentage of productive outs, available on baseball-reference. So far in 2024, the Brewers rank 27th in MLB with 24.1% compared to a league average of 27.9%. Here's the data going back to 2014, it does appear that they are consistently toward the middle to bottom of the league in this. It's also interesting to see that the league average percentage has been trending downward. Year Pct Avg Pct Rank 2024 24.1% 27.9% 27 2023 27.7% 26.8% 13 2022 24.4% 26.9% 27 2021 24.4% 26.4% 24 2020 24.0% 25.3% 20 2019 22.3% 26.7% 30 2018 27.5% 27.3% 13 2017 27.2% 27.9% 19 2016 28.2% 29.4% 21 2015 28.3% 30.4% 22 2014 31.9% 31.1% 11 It's also worth noting that the teams near the bottom this year include the White Sox, Braves, Yankees, and Guardians, so it doesn't really track to team winning percentage.

Baseball Savant shows his most similar pitcher under batted ball profile as 2018 Wade Miley. Keller was placed on waivers on May 20th, so the White Sox have until May 27th for potential trades, which might be necessary for the Brewers since they're currently behind 21 teams on the waiver claim order. It will be interesting to see what happens.

When you say: Where does that come from? Is there some research that points to this minimum value?

I'm not sure if there has been any discussion about this, but I wonder if the Brewers have intentionally created their system in this manner to throw off other teams' projections of them. If you have many interchangeable pieces it can be quite difficult to create a firm game plan, almost like hitting a moving target.