The Omar Narvaez experience

[wntrtxn21]

In my eyes, the Brewers simply cannot let another player come to Milwaukee, fail miserably or never get a shot, and then show themselves to be a competent starter on another team. Jesus Aguilar, Jonathan Schoop, Brandon Kintzler, Eric Sogard, Dylan Moore, Jonathan Villar, Scooter Gennett, Jean Segura, Jeremy Jeffress, Tyler Webb, Brad Miller, Travis Shaw, Brock Holt and others are a constant reminder that they do not have a talent problem, they a failure to develop and maintain talent problem.

 

At some point this organization has to realize when things go wrong for our guys, we are absolutely horrible at getting them right. Now we've seen Yelich fall apart. Hiura looks lost. Avi Garcia looks terrible. And Narvaez forgot how to hit or take a pitch. This is a Brewers problem and letting another guy like Narvaez walk, when he's shown to be a good player in other competent organizations, would be a huge mistake.

 

And we also saw Yelich who only took off once he came to the Brewers.

Jeremy Jeffress...I remember him looking pretty good here as well. We drafted him...and he's thrown ~305 of his 424 innings as a Brewers where he's been better collectively than everywhere else.

 

Jesus Aguilar-WE'RE the team that plucked him from the scrap heap and turned him into an OF'er.

 

In fact...most of the players you mention broke out when playing for the Brewers...and the Brewers have done a better job of finding other teams players and having success than other teams have had picking up our discarded players.

 

Sure, guys like Shaw who we non-tendered(again, AFTER he broke out here for a couple years)...I don't understand how you're using these players as examples of the Brewers not being able to develop talent.

 

Maybe the case is more the Brewers can't afford to acquire elite talent at numerous positions so they have to take risks. Often times those players have had some measure of success, then regressed toward the players they actually are and gotten expensive and the Brewers have had to let them go.

 

Again, the point isn't that they can't find talent, it's that they are abhorrent at maintaining talent and fixing issues when they come up. Jeffress was one of the five best relievers in the National League in 2020 and the Brewers let him walk. Shaw turned in one of MLB's worst seasons in 2019 and in 2020 he would have had the 6th highest OPS on the Brewers. Urias played substantially worse for Milwaukee in 2020, while having a substantially better home park to play in 2019. Sogard's OPS dropped 250 points, YOY. Holt's OPS dropped 450 points from last year, then as soon as he goes to a different team - in the same year - his OPS jumps 346 points. In the same season Aguilar gets traded his OPS goes up by 66 points. Zach Davies is going to be on the Cy Young ballot, meanwhile Eric Lauer was left off the 28-man playoff roster for guys like Adrian Houser and Josh Lindblom.

 

And Omar Narvaez was the 3rd worst hitting catcher in all of baseball, only outpaced by dynamos Tony Wolters and Roberto Perez. What's the common denominator?

 

Shaw stunk and his OPS was .717. Just because he would have had the 7th best OPS on one of the worst hitting teams in MLB, doesn't make him anything CC would have wanted. You are basing all your assumptions on a very short season. To follow your logic, Yelich should be traded because he stunk. Belinger should be available for a song because he stunk. Stearns should dump Woodruff because he had a bad year too. Nothing can be assumed based solely on this season.

[Lathund]

Pandemic shortened season is indeed the answer. Further cutting that season into smaller pieces like comparing 36 and 70 plate appearances for Holt, makes for even less meaningful samples. 36 PAs is the kind of sample where one out turning into a double would've raised his OPS by 100 points, and he had some hard hit balls straight at defenders. A few more of them go through and we'd instead be excited about the signing. There is just so much randomness involved in these tiny samples that you can't really trust the surface stats. There will be many 2020 "flops" who have very good seasons next year, and many "breakout" players who will be below replacement level in 2021. I guess the best we can do is to put some faith in the metrics that can have meaning in such small samples, but even then rely a lot on data from previous seasons. And only really trust in 2020 data when there are very strong underlying reasons to do so. And even then, the off the field situation makes that potentially unreliable too. Maybe someones poor offensive performance really was due to swinging and missing at everything and making poor contact, and not due to poor batted ball luck. But perhaps at same time the player's family and whole life situation was heavily affected by COVID-19. Was that a major contributing factor to the struggles, or did it have nothing to do with it? How can even front offices and coaching staffs truly tell with any great degree of certainty? Let alone us fans.

 

I'd also like to point out Jeremy Jeffress there; He was by no means a top 5 reliever in the NL. His BABIP was 140 points below his career norms, despite a career-high exit velocity given up and a record high hard hit %. Strikeouts and swinging strike % was way down, and walk rate was up. He benefited from a good defense behind him, and most of all from luck. Straight up ERA without context is a poor way to judge individual reliever seasons under the best of circumstances, it's even worse when we're talking 20 innings. JJ deserved better results than he got in 2019, he deserved a lot worse results than he got in 2020.

[ctmyers]

Shaw stunk and his OPS was .717. Just because he would have had the 7th best OPS on one of the worst hitting teams in MLB, doesn't make him anything CC would have wanted. You are basing all your assumptions on a very short season. To follow your logic, Yelich should be traded because he stunk. Belinger should be available for a song because he stunk. Stearns should dump Woodruff because he had a bad year too. Nothing can be assumed based solely on this season.

 

You completely missed the point. The players are not the issue - the staff is. Woodruff was one of the best pitchers in baseball, but we should disregard that, because shortened season reasons. And, again, there is more than enough evidence prior to this season.

[MrTPlush]

If you think Woodruff had a bad year you should probably go reevaluate. He was one of the best pitchers in baseball.

[TURBO]

You can't base anything in the future on the 2020 season, however, you can't just ignore it either...

[ctmyers]

Pandemic shortened season is indeed the answer. Further cutting that season into smaller pieces like comparing 36 and 70 plate appearances for Holt, makes for even less meaningful samples. 36 PAs is the kind of sample where one out turning into a double would've raised his OPS by 100 points, and he had some hard hit balls straight at defenders. A few more of them go through and we'd instead be excited about the signing. There is just so much randomness involved in these tiny samples that you can't really trust the surface stats. There will be many 2020 "flops" who have very good seasons next year, and many "breakout" players who will be below replacement level in 2021. I guess the best we can do is to put some faith in the metrics that can have meaning in such small samples, but even then rely a lot on data from previous seasons. And only really trust in 2020 data when there are very strong underlying reasons to do so. And even then, the off the field situation makes that potentially unreliable too. Maybe someones poor offensive performance really was due to swinging and missing at everything and making poor contact, and not due to poor batted ball luck. But perhaps at same time the player's family and whole life situation was heavily affected by COVID-19. Was that a major contributing factor to the struggles, or did it have nothing to do with it? How can even front offices and coaching staffs truly tell with any great degree of certainty? Let alone us fans.

 

I'd also like to point out Jeremy Jeffress there; He was by no means a top 5 reliever in the NL. His BABIP was 140 points below his career norms, despite a career-high exit velocity given up and a record high hard hit %. Strikeouts and swinging strike % was way down, and walk rate was up. He benefited from a good defense behind him, and most of all from luck. Straight up ERA without context is a poor way to judge individual reliever seasons under the best of circumstances, it's even worse when we're talking 20 innings. JJ deserved better results than he got in 2019, he deserved a lot worse results than he got in 2020.

 

You can call it luck, but results are results. If you want to project regression based on unsustainable numbers, fine, but his season is in the books and for all of the metrics that matter, he was one of the best in the NL. And of course the samples are going to be small, but they were large enough for the Brewers to release Holt mid-season. They obviously thought he couldn't hit and yet he showed he could as soon as he was on another team.

[sveumrules]

You can't base anything in the future on the 2020 season, however, you can't just ignore it either...

 

Right. 60 games is about 37% of a regular 162 game season. Considering the abnormal nature of the season I would give them even less credence than that, so maybe around 25-30% of the stock I would put into typical full season results.

[HiAndTight]

Jesus Aguila an OFer? OFer = outfielder, right? If so, I'm confused.

 

I meant to say All-Star. Just on auto-pilot a that point.

[Devinep]

Narvaez switching to a slow pitch softball swing, even if just for 60 games, is very concerning

[Lathund]

You can call it luck, but results are results. If you want to project regression based on unsustainable numbers, fine, but his season is in the books and for all of the metrics that matter, he was one of the best in the NL. And of course the samples are going to be small, but they were large enough for the Brewers to release Holt mid-season. They obviously thought he couldn't hit and yet he showed he could as soon as he was on another team.

 

You used Jeffress as an example of an inability to maintain talent or fix players. Jeffress got fewer strikeouts, walked more batters and gave up harder contact after leaving Milwaukee. He then lucked into better results despite that. Doesn't mean it was the wrong decision to let him go, they were right about him. Performance isn't the same thing as results; they are very closely linked, but in a huge-variance sport like Baseball it takes time for those two things to join up.

 

The Brewers probably hadn't changed their evaluation of Brock Holt all that much from the time they signed him to when they released him. They know that a .136 BABIP isn't sustainable, and that given time and at bats his results will improve. But they also know that in a 60-game season they don't have the time for that if they want to make the playoffs. The Nationals picked him up and are a good illustration of the short-season issues. They started 19-31 last year and won the World Series. They had a similar record this year at 50 games, yet were close to being mathematically eliminated from the postseason by that point. It makes player evaluations very different. In a normal 162-game season Brock Holt would still be a Brewer (Or be given a longer leash at the very least), but in a short season where so many others were struggling too (If it's just one guy, you can "hide" him on the bench for a while) they felt they had to try something. The 80 wRC+ he put up on the Nationals is also only really good by comparison to the first half. The difference between him as National and as a Brewer is simply a matter of BABIP, again. He struck out a bit less as a National, but walked less. Plate discipline numbers are essentially the same. Yet, as so often happens in these cases, the balls bounced differently.

[markedman5]

[jerichoholicninja]

 

One of the things that I hate about baseball media. Let's create a set of parameters so specific that only one or two players fit it and then present it as something important.

[homer]

 

One of the things that I hate about baseball media. Let's create a set of parameters so specific that only one or two players fit it and then present it as something important.

 

Didn't seem like they were presenting that as important. It was an interesting little factoid.

[ctmyers]

You can call it luck, but results are results. If you want to project regression based on unsustainable numbers, fine, but his season is in the books and for all of the metrics that matter, he was one of the best in the NL. And of course the samples are going to be small, but they were large enough for the Brewers to release Holt mid-season. They obviously thought he couldn't hit and yet he showed he could as soon as he was on another team.

 

You used Jeffress as an example of an inability to maintain talent or fix players. Jeffress got fewer strikeouts, walked more batters and gave up harder contact after leaving Milwaukee. He then lucked into better results despite that. Doesn't mean it was the wrong decision to let him go, they were right about him. Performance isn't the same thing as results; they are very closely linked, but in a huge-variance sport like Baseball it takes time for those two things to join up.

 

The Brewers probably hadn't changed their evaluation of Brock Holt all that much from the time they signed him to when they released him. They know that a .136 BABIP isn't sustainable, and that given time and at bats his results will improve. But they also know that in a 60-game season they don't have the time for that if they want to make the playoffs. The Nationals picked him up and are a good illustration of the short-season issues. They started 19-31 last year and won the World Series. They had a similar record this year at 50 games, yet were close to being mathematically eliminated from the postseason by that point. It makes player evaluations very different. In a normal 162-game season Brock Holt would still be a Brewer (Or be given a longer leash at the very least), but in a short season where so many others were struggling too (If it's just one guy, you can "hide" him on the bench for a while) they felt they had to try something. The 80 wRC+ he put up on the Nationals is also only really good by comparison to the first half. The difference between him as National and as a Brewer is simply a matter of BABIP, again. He struck out a bit less as a National, but walked less. Plate discipline numbers are essentially the same. Yet, as so often happens in these cases, the balls bounced differently.

 

So, at worst, if the balls would have bounced differently this year, Jeffress would have been similar to Josh Hader. I think in a worst case scenario, matching the output of one of your most reliable bullpen arms is something the Brewers would have preferred to have, rather than trotting out Feyereisen, Rasmussen, Knebel, Wahl, Grimm, etc. At the same time, if you're going to say that Jeffress was lucky this year, you have to point out that he was unlucky last year. GB% dropped to a career low with the Brewers, BABIP spiked, LOB% dropped to a career low with the Brewers, all while battling through a hip injury on his plant leg. And they could have had him for next to no money.

 

Regarding Holt, after being let go 16 games into a 60 game season, they essentially gave his AB's to Jace Peterson. I could understand the trade off if they had someone waiting who had a track record of success at the major league level, or a prospect requiring a shot against better competition, but Peterson was neither of those. Punting on Holt essentially showed that the Brewers were waving the white flag on trying to fix things with him. Rather, they decided to throw more stuff against the wall, hoping something would stick.

[Ron Robinsons Beard]

You can call it luck, but results are results. If you want to project regression based on unsustainable numbers, fine, but his season is in the books and for all of the metrics that matter, he was one of the best in the NL. And of course the samples are going to be small, but they were large enough for the Brewers to release Holt mid-season. They obviously thought he couldn't hit and yet he showed he could as soon as he was on another team.

 

You used Jeffress as an example of an inability to maintain talent or fix players. Jeffress got fewer strikeouts, walked more batters and gave up harder contact after leaving Milwaukee. He then lucked into better results despite that. Doesn't mean it was the wrong decision to let him go, they were right about him. Performance isn't the same thing as results; they are very closely linked, but in a huge-variance sport like Baseball it takes time for those two things to join up.

 

The Brewers probably hadn't changed their evaluation of Brock Holt all that much from the time they signed him to when they released him. They know that a .136 BABIP isn't sustainable, and that given time and at bats his results will improve. But they also know that in a 60-game season they don't have the time for that if they want to make the playoffs. The Nationals picked him up and are a good illustration of the short-season issues. They started 19-31 last year and won the World Series. They had a similar record this year at 50 games, yet were close to being mathematically eliminated from the postseason by that point. It makes player evaluations very different. In a normal 162-game season Brock Holt would still be a Brewer (Or be given a longer leash at the very least), but in a short season where so many others were struggling too (If it's just one guy, you can "hide" him on the bench for a while) they felt they had to try something. The 80 wRC+ he put up on the Nationals is also only really good by comparison to the first half. The difference between him as National and as a Brewer is simply a matter of BABIP, again. He struck out a bit less as a National, but walked less. Plate discipline numbers are essentially the same. Yet, as so often happens in these cases, the balls bounced differently.

 

So, at worst, if the balls would have bounced differently this year, Jeffress would have been similar to Josh Hader. I think in a worst case scenario, matching the output of one of your most reliable bullpen arms is something the Brewers would have preferred to have, rather than trotting out Feyereisen, Rasmussen, Knebel, Wahl, Grimm, etc. At the same time, if you're going to say that Jeffress was lucky this year, you have to point out that he was unlucky last year. GB% dropped to a career low with the Brewers, BABIP spiked, LOB% dropped to a career low with the Brewers, all while battling through a hip injury on his plant leg. And they could have had him for next to no money.

 

Regarding Holt, after being let go 16 games into a 60 game season, they essentially gave his AB's to Jace Peterson. I could understand the trade off if they had someone waiting who had a track record of success at the major league level, or a prospect requiring a shot against better competition, but Peterson was neither of those. Punting on Holt essentially showed that the Brewers were waving the white flag on trying to fix things with him. Rather, they decided to throw more stuff against the wall, hoping something would stick.

 

I know this board like to rag on the guy, but Jace Peterson put up an acceptable .749 OPS, and had an excellent .393 OBP this season. He was the least of the offense's worries.

[Outlander]

Having an on base twice your average isn't sustainable but he has played enough over the years to show he can't hit.

[tmwiese55]

Holt had a proven track record as a competent contact hitter with tons of position flex, and had a team option for next year. Unless there was some personality issues or general not fit to the team going on (based on his track record that would be surprising) I think they should have stuck with him longer. Even if he never really bounced back in the short year you'd still have for cheap next year. You're essentially going to be looking to sign someone just like him anyway.

[MrTPlush]

Jeremy Jeffers is a really weird example of a “player we couldn’t fix”. We countlessly fixed him after he was a train wreck elsewhere. He has a good 20 inning stretch elsewhere for once and we failed?

[RWeeksFan23]

Letting Brock Holt go was the right move.

 

I liked the signing, it was probably my favorite of our offseason acquisitions, but Holt was absolutely awful for us. It felt like literally 95+% of his at-bats resulted in a weak groundball to secondbase.

[tmwiese55]

Letting Brock Holt go was the right move.

 

I liked the signing, it was probably my favorite of our offseason acquisitions, but Holt was absolutely awful for us. It felt like literally 95+% of his at-bats resulted in a weak groundball to secondbase.

 

Such a small sample though. Can grab all kinds of 20 game stretches where good hitters are bad. Then add in the weirdness of this year. Not a huge deal or anything but I wasn't in the least bit surprised he bounced back or if he's perfectly fine next year.