Well, that was fun. The Brewers’ remarkable season came to an end this past weekend, with their magic running out just one game shy of the World Series. PECOTA’s preseason projection graded the Brewers as the fifth-best team in the National League and third-best team in the NL Central; some incredible performances from Christian Yelich, […]
Author: Seth Victor
Did Postseason Experience Impact the LDS?
Baseball analysis is full of truisms, and we generally take their truth for granted. One of the defining aspects of the sabermetric “revolution” of the past twenty or so years has been a challenging of those assumptions. Baseball, both the sport and the fans, is better off for it. We now can tell whether something […]
How Does Jhoulys Chacin Compare to Other Wild Card Starters?
According to Baseball Prospectus’ playoff odds, the Brewers’ chances of making the postseason 98.5 percent. Nearly all of that likelihood, however, is tied up in the Wild Card game (84.8 percent). It is thus fair to say that the Brewers are overwhelmingly likely to be in the National League Wild Card game. Who their opponent […]
Appreciating Lorenzo Cain
Christian Yelich has rightfully gotten plaudits for his recent performance, as he took home the most recent NL Player of the Week award. His fellow offseason arrival has been essentially equally valuable, and Lorenzo Cain is who I want to focus on here. Cain has been a consistent presence in center field and an anchor […]
Was Chase Anderson Good Last Year?
We are now multiple decades into the sabermetric “revolution,” and it is still unclear how to determine how good a pitcher is. There are metrics that have come into and then gone out of vogue, but there isn’t a consistent approach to these measurements the way there has been for offensive statistics. The earliest and […]
Finding Balance between Hoarding Prospects and Overpaying
A few days before the trade deadline, the Brewers traded Brett Phillips and Jorge Lopez to Kansas City for Mike Moustakas. Moustakas is under contract through the end of this season, and then there is a mutual option at $15 million for next year. Phillips and Lopez have each spent time in both Triple-A and […]
Searching for Brandon Woodruff
Brandon Woodruff has had an interesting 2018. He started the season in the majors and hopes were high, but he has been shuttled back and forth between Milwaukee and Triple-A Colorado Springs. His surface-level numbers look poor—4.80 ERA in 30 innings—but Deserved Run Average (DRA) thinks he has been much better than that; Woodruff’s 3.73 […]
Thames is Still Good
This season’s Brewers storylines have been dominated by the bullpen, and with good reason: they wouldn’t be in first place in the NL Central without the top-three bullpen. Last season, though, the first half of the year was dominated by Eric Thames stories. He was so good in April that he was mentioned in early-season […]
The Power of Jonathan Villar
Jonathan Villar has had a weird season. For the first month, the stats on television graphics made him look like he was playing pretty well. He hit .271 in April, which is fine for a second baseman who the Brewers couldn’t have been sure would do even that much. But it was an empty batting […]
Historic Pitching Profile
Anyone following this Brewers team knows that the bullpen has been the driving force behind the team’s success. The Brewers have the National League’s best record, and their offense is a solid but unspectacular sixth in OPS, while their starter ERA of 4.04 ranks eighth. The bullpen ERA, though, is second only to Arizona. This […]