Stealofhome

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.

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.