Stealofhome

The Brewers hit with the highest winning percentage added all year in 2023 came from Jahmai Jones in his debut with the team. a4283736-60d33639-04f86390-csvm-diamondx64-asset_1280x720_59_4000K.mp4 And a pitching highlight as well, for all the grief Andrew Chafin gets, this was the biggest WPA play for a pitcher last year (of course, the single, walk, E1 to load the bases didn't help his cause): 390d6133-1d8a7838-b53e9889-csvm-diamondx64-asset_1280x720_59_4000K.mp4

In the spirit of the optimism thread, I thought it would be fun to put together some favorite highlights of the team. When things are going bad or the team is struggling, it would be nice to watch reminders of better days. I'll start with one of my favorite moments from last year, Mark Canha's grand slam. https://www.mlb.com/video/mark-canha-s-go-ahead-slam?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share canha_slam_91623.mp4

In fooling with some minor league comparisons in relation to Tyler Black, I came up with Troy O'Leary. Some pop, above average speed, walks a bit, and doesn't strike out too often.

Right, and I wonder if there is more to Altuve's success than just his history. Does the batter's setup prior to the pitch affect the height the umpire thinks that the strike zone should be? Or do they not even concern themselves with the batter's height as they swing and instead just call their zone? Also, of these only Altuve and Madrigal are right-handed, so that may play into what zone the ump calls as well.

Yep, looked like it bounced off the middle of the chain link fence above the line. But definitely not a clear replay.

Yophery Rodriguez had a home run that hit over the top of the fence but was called a double. Then got caught stealing third during the next PA.

@Outlander mentioned the possibility that umps are calling higher strikes than normal against Sal Frelick as a reaction to a particularly impactful missed call against him in Wednesday's game against the Angels. The Ump Scorecard: I couldn't find a quick way to visualize strike calls against Frelick that were mapped to his personal strikezone, so I decided to make one. Using Baseball Savant's search, we can pull the data from strikes called against him this year. The x-axis should be ideally be consistent for all players, though with Frelick being a left-handed hitter, he might be more likely to get the outside strike called against him. Then I looked through the video and found the Z values of the pitches that were right at the top and bottom of the strike zone on screen. They do seem to match up with the rule book definition: Here are the most borderline top and bottom pitches: Top at plate_z = 3 Bottom at plate_z = 1.31 And here are all the called strikes against him this year, viewing the pitches from the batter's perspective, so Frelick would be standing on the right side of this plot. There are quite a few high strikes getting called, but is that abnormal? If we set the zone of interest between +- 1.04 in the x-direction and 3-3.37 in the z-direction, Frelick has taken 23 pitches, with 14 called strikes and 9 called balls. All of the pitches called balls are either inside or outside. None of the balls over the heart of the plate are called. According to Baseball Savant's Delta Run Expectancy, those high strikes are responsible for -0.856 runs. The most impactful was in the Tigers game against Beau Brieske, when Frelick had two runners on an dropped from 2-1 to 2-2. I couldn't find win expectancy values, as the impact to the game on this one was minimal with a 10-0 score at the time. In this particular area of the zone, the MLB average is 28% ball and 72% strike. Frelick is 39% ball and 60% strike. But that doesn't account for the height of the player. Frelick's average strike zone top is around 3 feet, but Aaron Judge's is north of 4, so we would expect him to get more called strikes in that area. If we filter down to players that have an average strike zone height below 3, we come up with six players: Garrett Stubbs, Jose Altuve, Frelick, Nicky Lopez, Nick Madrigal, and Miles Mastrobuoni. Their collective percentage of balls to strikes in this zone is 48% ball and 52% strike. Of the six players, only Jose Altuve gets the ball called more often than the strike (67% balls on 27 pitches). It's hard to say with this information how much it is affecting Frelick, but it does nevertheless show that shorter players are forced to expand the upper part of the zone, unless you're a former MVP, 8-time all-star, 2-time World Series champion, and 6-time silver slugger.

Padres announcers said that their top two arms (Suarez and Estrada) are probably not available today. Availability chart.

You can look at the Baseball-Reference splits for the Brewers after 0-2 this season and their sOPS+ is 119, meaning they have been much worse than league average at that split. Last year they were 90, the year before that 80.

The Sounds are playing as the Oat Milkers tonight, a promotion from a Swedish oat milk company. I went to one of their promotional games this year and nobody had any idea what the purpose of the promotion was. The only thing they changed was swapped out the team name with Oat Milkers all night.

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.