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Brewers Video
The Weekly Dispatch is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others.
First things first, temper your enthusiasm for revived Brewer bats: they hung 19 runs on a Pittsburgh Pirates club that lacks major league talent up and down its roster, left a young arm out to rot -- rightly earning the non-partisan scorn of Baseball Twitter -- and is about to sell its best commodity for what will almost certainly be 40 cents on the dollar. What they did Friday night is decidedly the exception to the rule.
We can look at a more manageable schedule and probably anticipate the Brewers build their division lead by 2-3 games in a tripartite involving the Pirates, Chicago Cubs and Pirates again, before hitting the road for stronger competition; the Minnesota Twins and the almost Minnesota ballclub, the San Francisco Giants, lead into the All-Star break.
The Brewers won't hang 19 runs every night, especially when they're not designed (primarily or otherwise) to fill up box scores. This remains a run prevention team that doesn't do a particularly good job of preventing runs. They are overly reliant on a injury-riddled pitching staff and three true outcomes (top-six in MLB in HR, BB, SO) and lefty bats in a home ballpark with a short right field fence that is, for the first time in its 20+ year history, benefiting pitchers. Whether that's the humidor or baseballs with the apparent composition of a wet sock, MLB has done the Brewers no favors in 2022.
In the same breath, though, the Brewers are doing themselves no favors this year.
This space has mentioned the apparent lack of advance scouting and good analysis on opposing pitchers in the past. It is a deficiency that has plagued this organization long before its current administration. It takes no real acumen for strategy to rely on three true outcomes: either hit ball hard, don't swing at ball. or get out trying, requires minimal mental investment.
The team approach to offense -- something, again, that has less to do with whomever occupies the hitting coach position and more to do with whomever is running baseball operations -- has been to lift and drive the ball, something that can best be accomplished with hanging breaking stuff and fastballs. The problem is that if a batter is unable to recognize a pitch, and the Brewers all season have struggled to pull the trigger on hanging stuff, it's easy to fool him.
So they launch, third in the majors in home runs, feasting on lesser opponents and scraping by against contenders. I looked at all batted ball outcomes in 2022 where Brewers hitters have made contact with a launch angle of 30 degrees or greater, and removed small sample size hitters to normalize results. The results? Well, Brewers hitters are clearly not being put in a position to succeed.
While these 30-degree and up outcomes represent less than 1.5% of total pitches seen, they comprise nearly 21% of team outs. If a pitcher wants to beat the Brewers, they'll simply get them to do what they've been instructed to do.
Here are the month-by-month breakdowns:
- April: 21-147, .126 BA, .158 xBA , .057 BAbip, .349 SLG, 46.49 average launch angle
- May: 32-196, .181 BA, .176 xBA, .027 BAbip, .661 SLG, 44.57 average launch angle
- June: 19-169, .130 BA, 140 xBA, .057 BAbip, .510 SLG, 46.26 average launch angle
Bear in mind, these figures exclude cameo appearance players and the Brewers as a team don't chase outside the zone relative to league average. If they get under the ball, it's not going out. To wit, the numbers on batted balls with a launch between 26-29* are much more encouraging, but the sample size is far smaller. Opposing batteries seem to know better and have adjusted accordingly. The Brewers, not so much.
In essence, the team is winning in spite of its own organizational prerogative. It was borderline absurd to expect Brewers' starters to replicate their franchise-best dominance in 2021 (saying nothing of sustaining health) and emerge from a lockout-induced sequester with two new hitting coaches and suddenly start mashing. In fact, given the interrupted offseason and staff-in-transition -- and the strong possibility there was some sort of fire causing the smoke of offseason rumblings about David Stearns and/or Matt Arnold being lured to another organization -- a continued reliance on 3TO was probably the most reasonable prediction.
Turning this cruiseliner around is no easy proposition. Getting better, more drivable pitches requires Brewers hitters to stop swinging at less-than-ideal balls in the zone. That's a challenge when they don't have adequate intel on what's coming, and regardless of whether it's a deficiency in databases or scouting, whatever it is they do have is obviously broken. Working counts into walks isn't a bad thing; there are those of us who remember the Brewers striking out with impunity not that long ago. Walks are great when a team is among the league leaders in grounding into double plays, keeps its bats on the shoulder more than league average, and also resides amongst the league's worst in BAbip.
It also requires the Brewers to paradoxically give up on the home run in favor of flatter-planed swings, forcing pitchers and catchers into adjusting their approach, wearing them down and digging into bullpens. Moving Christian Yelich to lead-off, recommended here by BF's own Tim Muma weeks before it happened, is in a way a concession to the need for a change in approach.
This is also a roster that wasn't necessarily built for athleticism on the base paths or for putting the ball in play. Given the litany of injuries and the lack of adequate reinforcements at Triple-A, making moves toward an offensive sea change in-season is highly unlikely. The Brewers are, from this vantage point, stuck with what they've got: a team that might be good enough to get into October, but also has some uncomfortably familiar 2014 vibes.
After three months of 2022, the takeaway from the data is clear: if the ball gets in the air, hope for the best and expect the worst.
Baseball Savant, FanGraphs, Baseball Reference and Statmuse were instrumental in developing this piece.
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