No bang for our outfield bucks

[PeaveyFury]

Garcia was definitely acquired for offense and I am not sure why Bradley Jr. wouldn't be viewed the same way.

 

JBJ has basically been an average-ish bat over the past 5 seasons of his career, while playing very good defense. If you thought that he was signed primarily for his offensive value, I'd argue that your assumption was statistically unreasonable.

[MrTPlush]

Garcia was definitely acquired for offense and I am not sure why Bradley Jr. wouldn't be viewed the same way.

 

JBJ has basically been an average-ish bat over the past 5 seasons of his career, while playing very good defense. If you thought that he was signed primarily for his offensive value, I'd argue that your assumption was statistically unreasonable.

 

Well, all I can say is they didn't give $13mil for him to hit like crap and bring good but not elite defense. Clearly the Brewers themselves had him hitting average at least, if not maybe a bit more hitting in Miller Park half his time. If not they could have signed one of about many dozens guys that could provide no offense and even better defense than Bradley Jr for 1/13th the price.

[PeaveyFury]

I won't continue it further because I intended to make one point about how even defensive guys have offensive expectations they need to meet, not get into some weird argument about phrasing.

 

Not an issue about phrasing, it's an issue of claiming I'm saying something I'm not. You're saying 'Because you said X, you must also mean Y'. I didn't- I only said X.

 

Once again to summarize what I'm actually claiming,

-The Brewers built a team focused on good pitching and good defense. They aren't scoring 6-7 runs a game because they weren't designed to do so on a night-in, night-out basis.

-Though many of the bats are underperforming, many of them have still added value to the team with positive defensive performances. In a lot of ways, this was probably part of the risk mitigation thought process when signing the guys they did. The offensive side is likely to revert positively to the norm, and defense is unlikely to vary to the negative.

-The record reflects this, and is less fluky than you might think at first glance.

 

That's it.

[PeaveyFury]

Well, all I can say is they didn't give $13mil for him to hit like crap and bring good but not elite defense.

 

Yes, I'm sure that's accurate as well. Doesn't change the point I've been making all along.

[AKCheesehead]

As of today FanGraphs has our outfield worth 1.0 WAR (14th in MLB), despite hitting well below their career norms to this point.

 

Spotrac has us down for the 11th most expensive outfield in MLB this year.

 

So far, we have been getting roughly commensurate value for our buck, even with a noticeable lack of bang.

 

As Yelich & Cain hopefully return, & guys like JBJ & Avi likely hit closer to their career norms as the season goes on that value should only increase.

 

I had to take a look on FanGraphs about this. Looking at individual players' 2021 WAR, it's showing:

Taylor .6

McKinney .4

Yelich .2

Cain .1

Garcia 0

JBJ 0

Ray 0

[monty57]

Well, all I can say is they didn't give $13mil for him to hit like crap and bring good but not elite defense. Clearly the Brewers themselves had him hitting average at least, if not maybe a bit more hitting in Miller Park half his time. If not they could have signed one of about many dozens guys that could provide no offense and even better defense than Bradley Jr for 1/13th the price.

 

Bradley's career line (including the small sample from this year) is .237 avg / .319 OBP / .409 SLG / .728 OPS, good for -10.7 fWAR for Offense and 47.1 fWAR for defense. He is hitting .190/.256/.304/.560 for the Brewers, so they probably expected better offense than they have received in his first 86 plate appearances, but as the WAR numbers show, he was almost certainly brought in for his fielding more than his hitting. You don't bring in a guy with 3,300 career PAs and a -10.7 offensive WAR and positive 47.1 defensive WAR for his bat.

 

Just a guess, but when Cain said his off year workout regimen was "mostly chasing after the kids," and then he had some injury issues in spring training, the Brewers probably figured they needed some insurance. They had some money to spend, so they figured they'd spend it on a guy with a better resume than "some guy" they could get for 1/13th the price of Bradley. In addition to this, they did pick up "some guys" in Fischer, McKinney and Reyes who were cheap, "lightning in a bottle" types.

 

With all the injuries they've had this year, I'm glad that Stearns had the foresight to stock up on OFs. We've needed a lot of them. Hopefully Yelich and Cain get healthy and take the playing time away from the backups. Then we can have a debate over whether we're getting "bang for the buck" out of our starting OFs. You don't provide any "bang" from the IL.