The Brewers announced that they would shut down RHP Junior Guerra for the year. Yesterday, BPMilwaukee’s Jack Moore covered Guerra’s pitching profile and rookie season. Although Guerra played his age-31 season, he is relatively new to baseball as a full-time starting pitcher; the righty pitched one of his highest career innings totals, reaching an apparent innings limit set by Milwaukee.
Here’s an approximation of Guerra’s workload over the five seasons entering 2016, with some innings unknown. As I see it, the Baseball Reference record of the Italian league (or Guerra’s team) does not include a 2014 season, but if the season was indeed 24 games long, Guerra may not have had a huge workload:
| Guerra IP | G / GS | IP | Leagues |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 34 / 21 | 154.7 | American Association / Venezuelan Winter |
| 2012 | 20 / 9 | 54.0 | Mexico (AAA) / Venezuelan Winter |
| 2013 | 31 / 21 | 142.0 | American Association / Venezuelan Winter |
| 2014 | 15 / 15 | 78.0 + [unknown] | Venezuelan Winter [Also: Italian baseball unknown innings] |
| 2015 | 46 / 21 | 144.0 | American League / MLB Minors (AA-AAA) / Venezuelan Winter |
| 2016 | 25 / 25 | 148.3 | National League / MLB Minors (AAA) |
The innings ceiling is nice to see, given the irregular work that Guerra pieced together between 2011-2014. While the righty certainly showed an ability to find more than 120 innings in a few recent seasons, his workload also frequently fluctuated and came at different points in the calendar year in some cases. Now, with two consecutive seasons in affiliated baseball, Guerra has a stable 145-150 IP base that should support a full season of work in 2017.
Related Reading:
Grading Future Guerra [Two Parts]
An Unlikely Hero
The Splitter
Anatomy of a Gem
The Call-Up
Throughout the season, BPMilwaukee has covered the astonishing ace. Guerra stands as one of the brightest stars of the 2016 rebuild, perhaps ranking second only to Jonathan Villar’s elite discipline/speed/power breakout. Now that Guerra’s season is complete, it is worth emphasizing that the righty has started the most games during their debut season of any divisional era, age-31 starting pitching debut. That’s right: in the divisional era only 14 players have made their first start during their age-31 season, and of those pitchers Guerra started the most games. He has one of the largest age-31 starting pitching debut workloads, one of the best K / BB / HR ratios, and not surprisingly, is one of the most valuable. Here, only Hisashi Iwakuma beats out Guerra:
| Age-31 SP Debuts | G / IP | K / BB / HR | DRA | PWARP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 Hisashi Iwakuma | 30 / 125.3 | 101 / 43 / 17 | 2.98 | 3.1 |
| 2016 Junior Guerra | 20 / 121.7 | 100 / 43 / 10 | 4.31 | 1.5 |
| 1984 Doug Corbett | 45 / 85.0 | 48 / 30 / 2 | 3.37 | 1.5 |
| 2003 Jose Contreras | 18 / 71.0 | 72 / 30 / 4 | 3.92 | 1.4 |
| 1997 Darren Holmes | 42 / 89.3 | 70 / 36 / 12 | 4.12 | 1.3 |
| 1987 Mark Clear | 58 / 78.3 | 81 / 55 / 9 | 4.78 | 0.5 |
| 1988 Stew Cliburn | 40 / 84.0 | 42 / 32 / 11 | 4.43 | 0.4 |
| 1987 Ubaldo Heredia | 2 / 10.0 | 6 / 3 / 2 | 4.31 | 0.2 |
| 2006 Marty McLeary | 5 / 17.7 | 8 / 6 / 1 | 5.79 | -0.0 |
| 1976 Oscar Zamora | 40 / 55.0 | 27 / 17 / 8 | 4.68 | -0.2 |
| 1999 Al Levine | 50 / 85.0 | 37 / 29 / 13 | 6.03 | -0.3 |
| 2008 Dan Giese | 20 / 43.3 | 29 / 14 / 3 | 6.92 | -0.7 |
| 1993 Dwayne Henry | 34 / 58.7 | 37 / 39 / 6 | 7.77 | -1.6 |
| 2009 Justin Lehr | 11 / 65.3 | 33 / 28 / 14 | 8.37 | -2.1 |
One can work in several directions with Guerra’s season. Focusing on the 4.31 DRA, one might not expect Guerra to match his excellent 20 runs prevented season again. Pointing to the development of the righty’s sinker, one might argue that Guerra’s pitching approach is in flux, and the righty has the tools to outperform his peripherals and prevent runs. Finally, one could simply split the middle, noting that Guerra’s strike out and walk profiles allow him some space to develop and depreciate as he ages. Any way one slices it, Milwaukee landed a cost-controlled pitching asset that is valuable to the club for his performance, and valuable to the fanbase for his story and splitter-based pitching profile.
Rebuilding seasons can be rough for many reasons — it’s difficult to see your favorite club refuse to spend revenue at the big league level, or refuse to assemble the best possible roster for current wins, since “winning in the future” seems like such a difficult premise to plan. However, the flip side of this difficulty is that if teams did not periodically rebuild, it is questionable whether players like Guerra would get their shot. Thankfully, the Brewers gave Guerra a shot in 2016, and he seized it — even Craig Counsell emphasized recently that the credit goes to Guerra and Guerra alone, that the club did not expect the righty to perform at this level.
For GM David Stearns, the Guerra move provides a lesson for building the next Brewers winner. Here is where rebuilding and contending converge: for, there should not necessarily be a reason that a great waiver claim can only work with a rebuilding team, rather than a contending club. Hopefully the baseball operations team mines Guerra’s scouting profile and previous statistical record to extrapolate as many lessons as possible to inform their use of future waiver transactions. If the Brewers take this lesson to heart, it could be another Guerra that leads the next contender, even moreso than the obvious choices of those prospects stockpiled in the minors. Will the front office strike that balance?