Article: The Weekly: Better Devils

[Brent Sirvio]

448 pitchers can't be wrong.

The Weekly is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others.

After Saturday's frustrating 9-0 loss to the Chicago Cubs -- no, that's not accurate. Let's try again.

During Saturday's frustrating 9-0 loss to the Chicago Cubs, I went back to a lurking, recurring question I've had rattling around in my head for years now: Why do the Milwaukee Brewers always seem to struggle against inexperienced pitchers?

After the game and a cathartic walking of the dog on a lovely, if not warm late afternoon, I fired up Stathead and decided to see if my hunch was correct. 

For context, I decided to filter down to the Brewers' era of relevance, from their Wild Card appearance in 2008 through the start of this season (which doesn't mean much beyond being the far end of the parameters.) That's just under 3,800 games, and of those, the Brewers have seen 448 first-time pitchers.

To be clear, these may not be inexperienced pitchers: included here are veterans the Brewers hadn't seen before. The way I had to set the filtering up had to be pitchers facing the Brewers as a starter for the first time in their careers. Even then, I think the exercise is particularly instructive in that it underscores the big takeaway.

The surface numbers: starting pitchers facing the Crew for the first time are 118-167. Hey, that doesn't seem so bad.

Let's take a look at the medians, though:

Innings Pitched: 5 2/3 (The perfect median here is Jacob deGrom, including 18 others; luminaries like Matt Garza, Burke Badenhop and something called an Edgar Gonzalez, who may or may not be a comp-generated player in MVP Baseball 2004 franchise mode.)

Strikeouts: 5 (65 times first-time starters struck out five Brewers, including some studs like Touki Toussaint, Joe Musgrove, Madison Bumgarner and Kyle Hendricks [ducks], and Guys like Ian Kennedy, Chad Kuhl, Andrew Cashner and Erik Bedard.)

Hits: 5 (Uh-oh. The Brewers could only amass five hits 85 times against first-timers, legitimate arms like Carlos Carrasco, Walker Buehler, Max Scherzer; also, and Tommy Milone, Homer Bailey, Doug Fister.)

Walks: 2 (120 times.)

Runs: 2 (a lot of times.)

Game Score (James model, average is 50): 51 (Dustin May, Daniel Cabrera, JT Brubaker, Tyler Glasnow, Jayson Aquino)

Win Probability Added: Flat (63 pitchers neither added anything to nor took anything away from the game's outcome; Guys including Tyler Mahle, Carlos Rodon, Nathan Eovaldi, Jhoulys Chacin, Zach Davies and...Luke Hochevar?!)

WHIP: 1.313 (Spencer Turnbull, Nick Kingham, Ryan Rowland-Smith - League average WHIP in 2008 was 1.39; at 2021's end, it was 1.29.)

TL; DR: Your run-of-the-mill first-time starter against the Brewers is going 5 2/3 innings, striking out five, giving up two runs on five hits and two walks and generally keeping your team in a position to win the game.

Here's where things get weird: Teams that run a first-timer out there and that starter doesn't get the decision have gone 95-58. Further, the Brewers historically perform worse as these strikeout totals diminish. Even if they were chasing pitchers from contests -- which is what one would hope from a potent offensive team: make lesser or rookie pitchers pay! -- the offense tends to stall out, or their pitching implodes, resulting in a shootout and hoping for the best, which in this case, by the evidence, would be hoping against hope.

The other interesting aspect of sorting through nearly 150 box scores -- acute PTSD aside -- is how many of these pitchers would eventually become Brewers. And in some cases, one might be tempted to think the only reason they became Brewers was that they performed against them in that one instance. First impressions, indeed. 

But all of this underscores an institutional deficiency that has persisted since the Brewers returned to October baseball almost 14 years ago: it's not the superstar hurlers that will kill a team's chances; it's often the workhorses, the average guys, and in the Brewers' case, the fringe dudes that curtail championship ambitions. After all, there are only so many aces to go around and most of them do their laundry on the coasts now. The Brewers, with their current rotation -- two games into 2022 notwithstanding -- are very much an exception.

While pitching keeps runs off the opponent's line, hitting and generating runs matters in what is increasingly returning to a pitcher's game. And if proficient hitters beat mediocre pitchers, the flat fact is that the Milwaukee Brewers offense has not been as good or sustainable as it should be to maintain serious pennant and World Series aspirations. Through managerial, coaching and front office changes over the last decade-plus, the beat remains the same: this franchise has not done and it does not do enough in the way of business intelligence [read scouting the competition] either at the major league or developmental levels.

You could roll the dice with the devil you know, or the angel you don't, Justin Verlander or Justin Steele: the reality is that it likely wouldn't make much difference throughout this era of Brewers baseball.

Stathead was invaluable in helping to remove this particular splinter from my mind.

View full article