It’s an ending that seemed inconceivable on Opening Day.  Fans were optimistic, sure, but the pitching staff was young and unproven, and the offense was full of question marks.  It seems like years ago that Ryan Braun started the first game of the season at first base.  In the six-plus months since, Yelich became the likely MVP, Josh Hader became a dominant relief ace, and Braun rediscovered his old form.

Sports are weird.  The connections they inspire are somewhat arbitrary, as fans attach themselves to athletes who play for a team that happens to be in the same city they live in.  One of the main storylines on the national broadcast was the Brewers’ connection to Southern California and how Yelich and Braun grew up as Dodgers fans.  The fact that they were trying to beat their childhood team, and disappoint the thousands of fans in the stadium with whom they had a lot in common, is slightly odd.  It is, of course, a coincidence of fandom and how people interact with their local institutions.

Keeping these connections in context is important.  Friendly rivalries are fun and good, and Brewers fans will always have a healthy dislike for the Cubs and Cardinals, and the members of those fanbases as well.  But fans of the Brewers have more in common with fans of the Cubs than they do with the actual players on the Brewers, who, generally, will not maintain a connection with the city of Milwaukee once their time with the club ends.  Fans, though, will continue to root for the next generations of Brewers.  Cubs fans will act the same way.

Sports teams are valuable civic institutions that provide a unifying point for otherwise-disparate communities.  As Nicholas Zettel wrote earlier this season, “Milwaukee is a deeply segregated city.”  People in different parts of the city do not have the same lives, but shared sports memories bind people together.  The Brewers are a communal experience that anyone in the city can be a part of, and that is important.  Civic pride is a valuable resource that sports teams can help build.

What we should not lose sight of, however, are the limits of what sports can provide.  Sports are an escape for some people—an opportunity to immerse oneself in an important but ultimately consequence-free athletic competition.  For other people, though, sports are anything but an escape; instead, they are a manifestation or reminder of how they are viewed.  A city suffering from significant income inequality may spend hundreds of millions of unplanned dollars on a baseball stadium rather than allocating it to organizations designed to help people improve their lives.  One of baseball’s oldest and most revered stadiums may be built on top of houses that were vacated only when city authorities forcibly dragged people from their homes.

This site has not shied away from addressing these concerns.  On its very first day, Jack Moore explained how Miller Park continues to cost taxpayers millions of dollars.  Earlier this season, Nicholas Zettel wrote the aforementioned analysis of Milwaukee’s housing segregation.  Last offseason, I discussed the impact of professional athletes’ public statements.  There are also many other examples of us covering off-field issues, and I point this out not to be self-congratulatory but instead to reinforce the importance of proper context.

Sports are supposed to be entertainment.  We invest ourselves in people who wear our city’s name on their shirt, and in some circumstances, our happiness depends on how they perform on the field.  That is good and normal, as we should build connections with those things that matter to us.  For example, Brewers fans should care about how the Brewers do, and hating the Cubs is perfectly normal given the animus between the two teams and cities; these connections help us enjoy the game even more.  Rivalries help bring additional meaning to certain games throughout the year, which certainly enhances the season’s entertainment value and piques fan interest at otherwise dull parts of the year.

This season was fun.  It should not be less fun just because the Brewers did not win the World Series, nor if this is ultimately the closest this iteration of the franchise comes to a championship.  There are a lot of great memories from this year, and there is likely to be another one when Yelich wins the MVP award.  After July 12, the Brewers did not have sole possession of first place in the NL Central until after Game 163.  They were 2.5 games behind the Cubs with a week to go, and they overcame that deficit to win the division.  They won a winner-take-all game against the Cubs that determined home-field advantage throughout the National League playoffs.  Those games all happened, as did all the other moments throughout the summer that you enjoyed watching, whether it was Jesus Aguilar’s unlikely All Star Game selection, Freddy Peralta’s wonderful debut on Mother’s Day, the wild fifteenth inning walk-off against the Pirates that featured Jordan Lyles drawing a walk, or any other game that you may have positive memories with.  Those games are all a part of the experience of being a fan.

Sports are a focal point for communities, and they link generations.  They are a place for kids to learn, grow, and develop into adults, and those same people then pass that experience on to their children or friends.  People may watch games with their family, friends, neighbors, or by themselves.  Everyone’s relationship with their team is different, but each individual story contributes to the team’s importance to its community.  Those communities, though, go beyond sports.  The choices people make about their teams’ relationship with the community impacts more than just on-field performance; and while we remember this most vividly when issues such as public funding are making headlines, it is always true.

Sports inform our relationships with our cities and neighbors, and they create bonds between people who may not otherwise have any or reinforce them between people who are already close.  They provide people with an emotional outlet that comes with no lasting consequences.  But they are also just a portion of the way we experience the world.  As long as we remember their role in our lives, they are a great escape and place to invest ourselves.  They are fun, and we should remember that.

About five years ago, Russell Carleton found that “prior playoff experience has no predictive power over outcomes in the postseason.”  I am sure that is still correct, as I can see no fundamental change in either the game or the makeup of the players that would impact this analysis.  Nonetheless, I found myself curious whether the Brewers’ much heralded veteran acquisitions played a key role in the team’s commanding NLDS victory over the Brewers.  The homegrown core of this club has little experience in the playoffs, so any familiarity with the postseason would have to come from external acquisitions (and Ryan Braun).

Ten of the Brewers on the 25-man NLDS roster had previous playoff experience, and most of those players were important in the series.  The only three pitchers to have previously appeared in the playoffs are Gio Gonzalez, Jeremy Jeffress, and Joakim Soria, and both Jeffress and Soria pitched in all three games against Colorado.  Of the seven hitters with a playoff track record, only Curtis Granderson wasn’t relied on particularly heavily.  Each of Hernan Perez, Travis Shaw, Jonathan Schoop, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, and Ryan Braun play key roles in the Brewers’ offense, even if they don’t each start every game (or if Schoop only had two at bats against Colorado).

Moustakas, Soria, and Schoop were each midseason acquisitions, and this was Cain’s first year with the club.  Their talent is the reason the Brewers were interested in acquiring them, but in previous years we’d have heard about their playoff experience and what that kind of leadership can bring to a club.  To that end, I wondered whether these players had performed particularly notably.

Interestingly but not surprisingly, there was no particular correlation between playoff success and playoff experience.  In fact, Cain’s 1-12 performance was the worst by any starter, and the two best showings were from Erik Kratz and Christian Yelich, neither of whom had swung a bat in a postseason game before last week.

On the pitching side, Soria was pretty good, as five strikeouts in 2 and 2/3 innings indicates, but Jeffress’s Game One blowup was notably bad.  He was the only Brewers’ pitcher with a negative Win Probability Added (WPA), which means that he was the only one who across all his appearances made the Brewers less likely to win.

For regular readers of Baseball Prospectus, I don’t expect the above information to be particularly surprising.  Among other things, this was three games, and even the best players can have a bad weekend.  Also, as I mentioned above, Russell Carleton’s thorough study found no relationship between playoff experience and playoff success, and I would never suggest this unscientific “analysis” would take the place of his actual study.

Anecdotally, though, this series provides an interesting data point.  A three-game sweep can seem anti-climactic at the end, but the short series means that a lot turns on one game.  And when Jeffress came in to close the door in Game 1, the Brewers can have expected to take a 1-0 lead.  When he blew the save, though, the direction of the series was up in the air.  A road team winning the first game means that the Rockies would know they only had to win both their home games to win the series.

Jeffress had only one inning of prior playoff experience, with Texas in 2016.  Nonetheless, he had taken the mound in a playoff game and was supposed to be used to the adrenaline and pressure.  That is the prototypical environment in which playoff experience is supposed to help.  It didn’t, though, and the Brewers were in a difficult position. However, it is worth noting they were bailed out by former World Series champion Mike Moustakas and his game winning hit.

There isn’t an overarching point here, exactly.  Prior playoff experience doesn’t particularly help in the present, but you likely already knew that.  Instead, what we saw in the NLDS was an illustration of the randomness of a short series, and it is that randomness that dominates postseason baseball.  Jeffress, who had been great all year, blew a save in what could have been a key moment.  Cain, who is an MVP candidate in his own right, got one hit.  Meanwhile, playoff rookies Yelich and Kratz each posted an OPS above 1.000, despite one being the likely MVP and the other being a journeyman.  Baseball is weird.

As we approach the end of the season, the Brewers will be looking to line their starting rotation up to maximize their chances in that one game.  They don’t have a traditional ace, especially with Jimmy Nelson out all season, so there isn’t a clear favorite to take the mound.  Because there is no one for the Brewers to turn to without question, manager Craig Counsell will probably have a quick hook and ask his bullpen to do the heavy lifting.

There will still be a starting pitcher, though, and at this point it seems likely to be Jhoulys Chacin.  He has been the club’s most valuable starting pitcher this year despite being a cheap acquisition last offseason, and he is the only starter to be worth even one win above replacement.  Even though his 4.49 Deserved Run Average (DRA) does not jump off the screen, it is the second-best among all Brewers’ pitchers who have made at least five starts (only Wade Miley’s 4.16 is lower).  Zach Davies has missed time but is now back, so he could get the nod, but neither he nor last season’s breakout star Chase Anderson have been particularly impressive this year (5.32 DRA for Davies, 5.37 for Anderson).  Chacin’s 100.4 DRA- tells us he has been almost exactly league average and he has been consistently available, so he seems likely to take the mound in the Wild Card game.

The Rockies and Cardinals also don’t have clear-cut aces to start a Wild Card game, but they are choosing from better options.  Colorado could select Jon Gray, who started the game last year but has a 4.06 DRA this year, or Kyle Freeland and his 2.96 Earned Run Average (ERA) and 3.74 DRA.  St. Louis could use Miles Mikolas (3.51 DRA), Jack Flaherty (2.89 DRA), or even Adam Wainwright (who has plenty of playoff experience, is now back from the disabled list, and looked sharp in his most recent start).  If the Dodgers are the Brewers’ opponent, Clayton Kershaw will likely be on the mound, and his track record speaks for itself.  Essentially, the Brewers will have the worse starting pitcher no matter who their opponent is.

Of course, the Brewers won’t have made the playoffs on the strength of their rotation, and they will rely on their bullpen heavily in a one-game playoff so as to minimize the role that the talent disparity in a rotation can play.  In fact, rotation quality is likely to be more relevant in a longer series when fatigue will factor into a reliever’s ability to be effective.  In a one-game playoff that comes after a day off (the NL Wild Card game will be Tuesday after the season ends Sunday), every relief pitcher should be available for as long as they can possibly go.

Most importantly, though, this is a one-game playoff and anything can happen.  Chacin may be outmatched by whoever his opponent is, but the team with the better starting pitcher does not always win these games.  This is an obvious statement about how single game playoffs work, but it is worth remembering.  The table below shows the starting pitchers for each of the Wild Card games since the playoff format was changed before the 2012 season.  It contains both the pitcher’s season DRA and career DRA to give a sense of the pitcher’s overall caliber as well as what type of season he had that year.  It is then sorted by season DRA.

As the table above demonstrates, Chacin would be one of the worst pitchers to ever start a Wild Card game.  But the only pitcher who’d been having a worse year did win the game, and six of the top seven names on this list lost or did this.

In 2012, Joe Saunders pitched 5 2/3 innings for the Orioles and held the Rangers to just one run.  Because one game of baseball is unpredictable, Chacin could very well do the same thing.  The Brewers won’t need him to do that, though.  Davies will likely be available out of the bullpen, and Josh Hader and Jeremy Jeffress will be asked to pitch more than one inning.  Chacin will only be asked to keep Milwaukee in the game.  The fact that he doesn’t match up to the usual caliber of Wild Card game starting pitchers is relevant but not determinative; the Brewers will have ridden their offense and bullpen to the playoffs, and they will count on that part of their roster in this winner-take-all game.

Cain has been one of the best players in baseball over the last few years, but he has crossed the dreaded age-30 threshold so there were worries he would slow down.  His relatively slow market this past winter suggested that teams were in fact concerned about his age and injury history, but so far the Brewers have not regretted signing him up to play center field every day.

In 2015, Cain played 140 games and ranked ninth in position player WARP.  In 2017, he played 155 games and ranked eighteenth.  So far this year, he has played 119 of 139 games and ranks fifteenth.  The veteran did play only 103 games in 2016, but he has shown the remarkable ability to generally age out of injury concerns while at the same time developing into one of the game’s most consistent offensive performers.

Although Cain’s defense has declined as he has aged, his overall performance generally has not because he has improved as a hitter.  It is no surprise that his defensive metrics at 32 are not as good as they were in the past (his 0.7 FRAA this year is his lowest full-season mark), but he is posting the best offensive numbers of his career to make up for that minor deficiency.  He remains an average defender at a premium position, so he is still providing positional value.  At the same time, though, he has become a very good hitter whose .314 TAv ranks sixteenth in the majors this year.

Yelich’s brilliance and Jesus Aguilar’s miracle season have overshadowed Cain somewhat, but he deserves all the credit he receives.  His durability has been important this season for a team that has had to rely on its top-level performers; somehow, with as well as Yelich, Cain, and Aguilar have all played, the Brewers are only seventh in the National League in runs scored.  The offense has thus needed the production Cain has provided, and the potential drop-off to Keon Broxton or Domingo Santana is steep enough that an extended Cain absence might very well be the difference between the Brewers earning a playoff spot and missing out.

Cain is also a fun player to root for on his second go-round with the club.  As with Jeremy Jeffress (twice), it is fun to see a player return to his original organization and thrive, and Cain has certainly done that thus far.  His story of arriving to baseball late is well-documented, but it is nonetheless still exciting and fun.  I find it difficult to watch Cain without appreciating the joy he exudes while playing, and that combines with his talent to make him an easy fan favorite.

We cannot know what the future will hold for this Brewers team or for Cain.  This may be the Brewers’ best shot to make a run in the playoffs if Jimmy Nelson doesn’t return healthy and Jesus Aguilar regresses, but being a baseball fan doesn’t have to involve constantly worrying about the future.  We can instead focus on enjoying the present.  The Brewers are in a true playoff race again, and competitive baseball games are fun.

So too is watching Lorenzo Cain.  This contract may not age well, as Cain may return to his injury-prone ways or age particularly poorly.  I don’t have a crystal ball to tell me what will happen.  I do know, though, that Cain is a key contributor for a fun 2018 Brewers’ team.  Whether they make the playoffs may not rest solely on his shoulders, but he will certainly be a contributing factor should they make it.  We should not let his performance slip under the radar.

Photo Credit: Benny Sieu, USA Today Sports Images

Baseball Prospectus’s DRA is the best and most recent attempt to evaluate pitchers.  As its name (“Deserved Run Average”) suggests, however, it has a backward-looking component.  It attempts to apportion credit and blame for what happened while a pitcher was on the mound.  Context-based Fielding Independent Pitching (cFIP), which is another recent BP statistic, attempts to measure only true talent.  (A summary of DRA and cFIP are available here.)  Both are valuable resources, but they measure pitcher effectiveness in different ways.

Chase Anderson was good last year by any publicly available measurement, though.  His ERA was 2.74, his FIP was 3.59, his cFIP was 93 (where 95-to-105 is average, and a lower number is better), and his DRA- was 81.9 (here 100 is average, with a lower number better).  These were all career-best marks, so there were two possible interpretations: either Anderson had developed and taken a step forward, or 2017 was one of those unrepeatable career years that players occasionally have.

In 2018, Anderson has not been as good.  All of his cumulative numbers have regressed, and both his DRA- and cFIP are worse than his career average.  All of the public pitching stats agree that he has not been good, but they all agreed that he was good last season.  Both the forward-looking stats and backward-looking stats agree on this.

It is this conundrum I find the most interesting.  In broad strokes, we can break pitching metrics down into two categories: forward-looking and backward-looking.  FIP and cFIP are prospective, while ERA is retrospective.  DRA is somewhere between the two, but seeks to explain past performance.  And both sets believed Anderson was good last year in terms of underlying performance and run prevention.

But that performance has not carried over into this year.  The traditional regression examples are pitchers who have good ERAs but bad cFIPs or DRAs, which indicates that they just got lucky and there was no uptick in performance.  Those pitchers are expected to not be as good the next year.  By contrast, good peripherals (as taken into account by cFIP) that match good run prevention numbers are supposed to indicate that someone is able to sustain that performance going forward.  Anderson breaks that model, though.

There are possible explanations for this that don’t require metrics to have missed.  Anderson could be pitching while hurt this year, or he could have made a mechanical adjustment that has not worked.  But we don’t know whether that has occurred, so I am assuming he isn’t dealing with any physical issues beyond the general fatigue we expect big league players to battle through.  He could also just be an outlier in these numbers; a sample size of one is insufficient to draw overarching conclusions about the validity of the stats, and that is not what I am attempting to do here.

Anderson provides the fulcrum for this discussion, but he is just a part of a larger question about how to measure pitcher performance.  There has been increased focus on how accurate our defensive metrics are because they have not kept up with shift tendencies, but pitching, although not seen as reliable as offensive numbers, has not received similar scrutiny.  I don’t believe anyone is suggesting that the current pitching metrics are perfect, but I wonder what else is missing that can be incorporated to help fix this type of blind spot.

The most basic analysis of Anderson’s season last year would have been that it was just a career year and he was likely to return to being the type of fourth starter he had been previously.  DRA, cFIP, and similar metrics provided possible justifications for Anderson having made substantive improvements that would carry forward.  To this point, though, those possibilities have not panned out.

I do not intend to just point to pitchers who public metrics cannot comprehend.  Instead, Anderson demonstrates a specific phenomenon: he had a career year last season, but it was backed up by improved peripherals in such a way that we don’t normally see in fluky performances.  The statistics that try to remove luck from the equation thought that Anderson had improved, but, at least to this point, it appears he had not.

Moustakas’s mutual option is difficult to evaluate.  Mutual options are not usually exercised because one party or the other is incentivized to gamble on the market.  If the club wants to pick up the option, it is because the player has performed well and thus likely can get a longer term deal as a free agent.  Similarly, if the player wants to pick up the option, the team will likely feel like it can get similar production for less money in the free agency market.  However, Moustakas is a decent player (league average or better three of the last five seasons) that the Brewers may want to keep for next year, and Moustakas may be scared off of the free agent market by what happened last winter.  Thus, it is at least possible that the mutual option here is exercised.

In that best-case scenario, the Brewers traded two prospects with less than six years of team control for eight months of Moustakas (two this year and six next year).  Of course, whether Phillips and Lopez are worthy of a major league roster spot for six years each is an open question, but Phillips seems like a solid fourth outfielder at worst and Lopez is a potential bullpen option.  Each of those profiles has value around the league, and thus value in trades.  I don’t think it unreasonable to call this an overpay.

Then, on the day of the deadline, the Brewers traded Jonathan Villar, Luis Ortiz, and Jean Carmona to Baltimore for Jonathan Schoop.  Schoop is under team control through 2019, and he has been an above-average player just once in his career (4.7 WARP last season).  Villar, meanwhile, has a similarly inconsistent track record (4.7 WARP in 2016) and is under control through 2021.  Ortiz was a highly regarded prospect not long ago.  Although Villar has not shown any indication that he will return to being the player he was in 2016, Schoop is not a sure bet to be much better.  And because Schoop is a second baseman, the Brewers’ infield defense got much worse with this trade.  Just as with the Moustakas trade, I don’t think it is unreasonable to call it an overpay.

With all of that being said, however, I do not necessarily think these were bad trades.  The Brewers were trading from depth. Phillips and Lopez were already on the 40-man roster, and Ortiz was going to have to be added this winter (as was Kodi Medeiros, who the Brewers also traded at the end of July).  Additionally, Phillips’s path to regular playing time in the big leagues is completely blocked, with Lorenzo Cain, Christian Yelich, and Ryan Braun the likely starters for the next few years.  The club also has plenty of mid-rotation and middle-relief options, so Lopez, Ortiz, and Medeiros are surplus to those requirements as well.  The Brewers know the most about their prospects, and if they decided these were the players they felt least confident about, then dealing them is a smart decision that makes some sense.

But I think we are at risk of hand-waving questionable trades so that we don’t sound like prospect hoarders.  Most prospects don’t reach their ceiling or even make an impact in the majors, so organizations should be more willing to deal those they are not confident in.  Because of the Brewers’ pending 40-man roster crunch, they did have to make moves to get value for players they otherwise would have lost for nothing in this offseason’s Rule 5 draft (which Ortiz and Medeiros were both candidates for).  And although trading for Moustakas and Schoop could work out if they both hit and the Brewers can shift competently enough to cover the defensive holes, neither one seems a particularly good fit with this roster.

I don’t expect either of these trades to look particularly bad in hindsight.  Phillips is the only prospect dealt I have any significant expectations for, and Schoop could very well return to being an above-average second baseman during his time in Milwaukee.  What I do think deserves scrutiny is whether this was the best use of assets.  Just because a trade can be justified does not mean it was the right deal.  I cannot know what other options were on the table for David Stearns, but I am skeptical that the best use of major-league caliber assets was dealing them for short-term contracts for slugging infielders with no clear-cut path for the club to accommodate all of them.

Because of the information imbalance between public observers and the front office, it is relatively easy to defend a trade by finding a justification for it.  If we assume the Brewers have certain ideas about the players they dealt and acquired, then it can make sense.  And this front office has undoubtedly earned the benefit of the doubt with the way it has managed the roster and acquired talent (the Christian Yelich trade is a good example).  However, shipping off useful pieces for players that don’t particularly fit is questionable to me.

I am not suggesting the Brewers should have kept Villar, Phillips, and Lopez because of some chance that each becomes a star.  I recognize that those outcomes are unlikely.  Instead, I believe those players could have been traded for more.  Neither Moustakas nor Schoop is particularly exciting.  They are useful big leaguers, but acquiring them together has created a situation where Travis Shaw may get less playing time despite being a better hitter than either of the new acquisitions.  This use of assets just does not make sense to me.

Prior to Woodruff’s most recent demotion yesterday, the righty’s minor league ERA is better but his peripherals are worse.  His 3.02 ERA in 50.7 innings in Colorado Springs looks good (and considering the altitude the Sky Sox play at, it is).  His strikeout rate in Triple-A is 7.5 per nine innings, though, which is much lower than the 9.5 per nine that he has posted in the big leagues.  His major league walk rate of 3.3 per nine innings is also better than his Triple-A rate of 3.7 per nine.

All of this is to say that Woodruff’s season has been a mixed bag.  He hasn’t had enough innings in the major leagues for us to understand how or even whether he will be successful.  30 innings this year (and 73 in his big league career) just isn’t a large enough sample size.

These innings do provide some data for a first step of analysis, though.  And because one of Woodruff’s problems is his walk rate, his release point is a clear place to start.  The chart below shows his release point for each of his months in the big leagues, and the lack of consistency is jarring.  Of course, some of the months represented are just a few innings (March 2018 is just two innings), but we would expect release point to be consistent from outing to outing because pitchers’ mechanics should not change this often.  Instead, what we see is that Woodruff has difficulty locating his preferred arm slot.

What exactly his preferred arm slot should be, though, is an open question.  How you measure a pitcher’s success is not as easy a question as it seems it should be, but Woodruff’s best months by strikeout-to-walk ratio are July 2018 (7.0) and March/April 2018 (5.0).  His worst months are August 2017 (1.5) and June 2018 (1.5).  Unfortunately, there is no pattern in his release points that indicates what leads to success.  His release points in August 2017 and July 2018 are pretty similar, but he was an entirely different pitcher.  Likewise, his high release point in June is similar to what he did in September of last season, but his results were different (a 3.33 strikeout-to-walk ratio).

If we measure pitcher success by ERA, we don’t get any more clarity.  Woodruff’s best months, August 2017 (1.62) and June 2018 (0.00), look nothing alike.  His worst months were May 2018 (8.10) and September 2017 (6.84); they too look nothing alike.

Derek Johnson has an excellent reputation.  He received praise for helping simplify Jimmy Nelson’s mechanics last year, and both Chase Anderson and Zach Davies had surprisingly good seasons in 2017.  If Woodruff becomes successful, it will surely be the result of more consistent mechanics, and those improvements are Johnson’s job.

I cannot say whether Woodruff will be successful, or which mechanical adjustments should be made.  However, it is hard to pitch well when the release point is all over the place the way Woodruff’s is.  Mechanics are supposed to be consistent.  They don’t have to be perfect; they just need to be repeatable so that a pitcher can place his pitches where he wants them to be.  Woodruff clearly struggles to repeat his delivery, and that is undoubtedly causing him problems.

The fact that there is no correlation between his release point and success (or lack thereof) is confusing to me.  Because of this, there is no clear path to follow, as he does not have a release point he can point to as the model for success.  However, this type of information is still useful; it tells us that the fix is not particularly simple.  Instead, Woodruff’s mechanical issues will likely be an ongoing problem that he will have to work on throughout his career.

Photo Credit: Benny Sieu, USA Today Sports Images

In 2018, though, Thames seems to be flying relatively under the radar.  He has not had the insane month to catapult himself into the news, but he has been a better player thus far in 2018 than he was last year.  His .327 True Average (TAv) in 2018 is twenty-three points better than his 2017 mark, and Fielding Runs Above Average (FRAA) has him as a better defender this year as well.  These improvements have him on pace to be a more valuable player in 2018 (1.6 WARP through 46 games) than he was in 2017 (2.6 WARP in 138 games).

However, at this point in the season, I believe it is time to point out that Thames remains a good and productive player.  We are approaching the trade deadline, so people are getting interested in what holes might need to be filled.  The juiciest rumors surround the middle infield, as the Orlando Arcia/Jonathan Villar plan from Opening Day has not worked out as hoped.  But to get a player of value, the Brewers will have to give up a player (or players) of value, and first base is now a position of strength.

Jesus Aguilar has obviously drawn all the attention, as he is a Final Vote candidate for the All Star Game.  He took the starting first base spot when Thames was hurt and has not relinquished it, as Thames has been relegated to the outfield since his return from the DL.  But Thames has been good this year, and he deserves to still be considered a valuable player.

Thames has not matched the absurd 1.276 On-Base Percentage plus Slugging Percentage (OPS) he put up in April 2017 at any point this year, but he also has avoided the lows that he hit during the middle of last season.  This consistency has helped him post the .327 TAv mentioned above, and that number is impressive.  It ranks fifth among all first basemen with at least 100 plate appearances, and his missed time because of injury is holding him back in the WARP rankings as well.  Thames has played only 46 games, as compared to Aguilar’s 80 and Freddie Freeman and Paul Goldschmidt’s 89, and he has slightly less than half the WARP (1.6 compared to 3.9 for Freeman, 3.5 for Aguilar, and 3.3 for Goldschmidt).

Now, durability is a skill, so handwaving Thames’s missed time is a mistake.  But when he is on the field, Thames has been as good a hitter as any of the top first basemen.  In fact, he has gotten even better in some key areas this season, as his TAv suggests.

Thames has improved both his contact rate (fewer whiffs per swing) and his exit velocity, indicating that he is better at choosing which pitches to swing at.  The result is that he is making better contact.  Not shockingly, that has boosted his power numbers.

Thames’s 2018 batting average and on-base percentage resemble his marks from last year.  His batting average is basically the same (.248 compared to .247), and his OBP has even dropped a little (.343 down from .359).  But he has been a better hitter because he is driving the ball more authoritatively.  His Isolating Slugging (ISO) is at .324, which is up significantly from the .271 mark he posted last season.  I still believe it is unclear whether or to what extent exit velocity is predictive, but the trend certainly seems positive: Thames is hitting the ball harder this year, so he is generating more power and is thus a more valuable hitter.

Since going to Korea, Thames has reinvented himself.  He remains a fantastic reclamation story and someone who is easy to root for, but his on-field success should not be overshadowed.  Assuming Aguilar returns to not-All-Star levels of offensive performance, Thames will be a key part of the stretch run.  If his improvements this year are as real and sustainable as they appear to be, the Brewers will have two good options at first base as they try to stave off the Cubs.

Photo Credit: Jeff Hanisch, USA Today Sports Images

In May, his batting average stayed basically the same (.275), but he added the power that had been missing from his game.  In Villar’s fantastic 2016 season, the middle infielder slugged .457, which was far above his career levels.  Last year, that number dropped all the way to .372, so the fact that his May slugging percentage (SLG) was .449 was encouraging.  That jump in power resulted in a .787 OPS in May.

June’s numbers look poor on the surface.  Villar is hitting just .230 this month, and his SLG is .410; while it is certainly an improvement from his bad season last year, it is not quite at the levels at which he is most successful.  His OPS this month is .675, which feels about right: Villar has not been as bad as he was in April, but he’s been worse than he was in May.

However, there are signs that the second baseman has in fact turned his season around.  Villar’s June batting average on balls in play (BABIP) is .289, which is far below his career .345 mark.  BABIP fluctuates within a season, but a player’s career number generally represents what one can expect their true BABIP talent to be. So even though .345 would normally be considered abnormally high, Villar may actual be able to produce that number consistently.  In fact, his overall season BABIP this year is .360.  Thus, the fact that his batting average dropped in June can be attributed at least in part to his lower BABIP.

Villar’s swing-and-miss numbers also haven’t changed, which indicates that he is making about the same amount of contact but the ball just isn’t falling.  This suggests that the lower BABIP is in fact the cause of his worse June performance.

Further proof that Villar is in fact hitting better is that his isolated slugging percentage (ISO) in June is higher than it was in May.  SLG is partially dependent on batting average, but ISO removes batting average, and all of its associated BABIP vagaries, and just demonstrates how many of Villar’s hits have been for extra bases.  In April, when his batting average was astoundingly empty, Villar’s ISO was .047; in May and June, it has been .174 and .180.  He is in fact driving the ball better, and that is making him a productive hitter.

Villar’s value on the field is tied to his power at this point in his career.  Fielding Runs Above Average (FRAA) has never considered him a great defender, even at his mark of 4.6 FRAA in 87 games in 2014. Thus Villar’s value has been driven by his bat.  And he walks some, with a career 8.8 percent walk rate that is above the major league average of 8 percent, but his career .256 batting average isn’t particularly great either.  For him to be a valuable offensive player, he has to hit for power.

This season, Villar’s.126 ISO is still below MLB’s league average for second basemen of .141.  His batting average (.260) and OBP (.307), however, are right around the league marks (.248 and .309, respectively).  And yet, Villar has been a below-average hitter, as he has thus far posted a .255 True Average (TAv), and his negative defensive value has made him a replacement-level player in 2018.  Shockingly, this is in fact worse than he was last year when he posted 0.8 WARP (although his negative value this year is due to defense, and partial-season defensive metrics are more unreliable than their offensive counterparts).
What this has generally demonstrated, however, is that Villar needs to hit for power to be valuable.  He has begun to do that, though.  His April was quite bad in this respect, so his season-long numbers are still unimpressive.  But in the last seven weeks or so, he is now hitting for power.  If that continues, he may be serviceable at second base so that the club can survive with him in the lineup if a replacement does not arrive via trade.

Photo Credit: Benny Sieu, USA Today Sports Images

Bullpen management has obviously changed a great in the last twenty years, so it’s no surprise that good teams are relying more heavily on relievers than they have at other points in baseball history.  Starting pitchers are throwing fewer innings, and they are being replaced earlier in games with a parade of hard-throwing relievers.  Front offices are now manipulating their rosters to make more and more relievers available, as the 10-day DL and the increasing reliance on club-controlled pitchers allows GMs to shuttle relievers back-and-forth between the minor and major leagues.

Until the 1980s, no team had made the playoffs with a starting rotation that averaged fewer than six innings pitched.  Last year, though, only the Nationals had a rotation that averaged precisely 6.0 innings per start.  Baseball is obviously changing.

This year, though, the Brewers are trying to take that to the extreme.  They are currently averaging 5.2 innings per start, which is the seventh-lowest in all of baseball.  No team in the history of baseball has ever made the playoffs with that short an average start.  It is worth noting, however, that the two teams directly behind the Brewers in average start length are the Dodgers and Giants, both of whom would consider themselves to be in a playoff race.  Injuries have forced those teams to rely on their bullpens, though; Clayton Kershaw, Madison Bumgarner, Johnny Cueto, Rich Hill, Jeff Samardzija, and Kenta Maeda have all spent time on the disabled list.

It is fair to note that the Brewers remain without Jimmy Nelson and have now lost both Chase Anderson and Zach Davies to the DL at various times.  But the Brewers’ five most-used pitchers are about how they would have drawn it up in spring training (albeit in a different order): Jhoulys Chacin, Chase Anderson, Brent Suter, Junior Guerra, and Zach Davies.  Milwaukee’s reliance on the bullpen has been a feature rather than a bug.  Josh Hader has been stretched into a multiple-inning reliever, and Suter has been available out of the pen a couple times.  You have to get all the way down to Corey Knebel and his thirteen appearances before you reach a member of the Brewers’ pen who has averaged less than an inning per outing.

As it is still June, I don’t know if this pattern will continue.  Maybe when Nelson comes back and as Anderson and Davies (hopefully) re-establish their health, the Brewers’ starting pitchers will be able to go deeper into games.  But as I mentioned above, no team whose starting pitchers averaged 5.2 innings per start has ever made the playoffs.  In fact, only the 2016 Dodgers have ever made it averaging even 5.3 innings per start.  As the season wears on, the team’s standout relievers may struggle.  Josh Hader, Matt Albers, and Jeremy Jeffress may tire as they get called upon more and more.

Of course, the relievers may be totally fine as well.  There are reasons for optimism.  The aforementioned Davies and Nelson injuries can take pressure off the bullpen if each starter comes back at full strength, and Corey Knebel spent a month on the DL so he may be fresh enough to pick up the slack if/when some of the other relievers start to struggle.  I do find it interesting, though, that even if this era of bullpen reliance, no playoff team has ever asked its bullpen to do this much.

Photo Credit: Ken Blaze, USA Today Sports Images