December of 2017 was not a fun month to be a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers, on the surface. Shohei Ohtani considered Milwaukee for approxiomately 1.25 seconds before deciding against the Midwest. The Cardinals got significantly better, adding Marcell Ozuna to their outfield for next to nothing (although watching them stumble over their own feet […]
Tag: 2018 Brewers analysis
The Quiet Upside of Tyler Webb
As the 2017 All-Star break wound down on the morning of July 13, the insurgent Milwaukee Brewers ruled the NL Central by 5.5 games. Against expectations, the Brewers were in a position to buy at the deadline, and had already been linked to a handful of top pitching targets. That very day, the Cubs went […]
Jhoulys Chacin’s Troubling Splits
On December 20th, the Milwaukee Brewers shored up the backend of their starting rotation by signing the soon-to-be thirty-year-old right-hander Jhoulys Chacin to a two-year, $15.5 million dollar contract. Chacin is coming off of what was perhaps the best season of his career. He was worth a career-high 2.9 WARP over 180.3 innings pitched with […]
Improving on “Good” is Hard.
I like Yuniesky Betancourt, and it’s not just because one time he had a shockingly productive playoff performance for the Brewers. I like Yuni because it’s really easy to improve on Yuni. If you have Yuni as your shortstop or, god forbid, your first baseman, you can sign a guy like Adam Lind to a […]
Low Rotation Shift
The Brewers allegedly signed free agent Yovani Gallardo over the weekend, with official announcement of the deal awaiting physical. Brewers fans either expressed joy at seeing the return of Gallardo, or expressed puzzlement at GM David Stearns’s move, with the historical cynics taking their chance to point out how Gallardo’s position among the franchise’s best […]
How the Brewers Beat the Cubs
For all the noise about the Cubs’ issues throughout the 2017 season, and there were real issues, the club finished with an offense approximately 73 runs better than Wrigley Field / 2017 National League. While this is quite a decline from the monstrous +103 RS the Cubs posted during their storybook 2016 campaign, there is […]
Against the Austerity Ideology
2017 may go down as the year of triumph of the austerity ideology in sports. Not only did the Astros break through and shockingly satisfy Sports Illustrated’s once-ridiculed (by yours truly among others) prophecy to win the World Series a mere half-decade after entering one of the boldest tanking projects in sports history; Basketball’s Philadelphia 76ers have also […]
Checking In on the Lind Trade
On December 9, 2015, the Milwaukee Brewers traded their starting first baseman for a trio of teenaged pitchers. Adam Lind, the first baseman in question, had just batted .277 for the Brewers with 20 home runs, a high walk rate, and a TAv of .294. Defensive deficiencies prevented him from being more than an average […]
A Big Splash is not the Answer
Fresh off a surprise 86-win season, David Stearns and company are licking their chops to make some moves and build off the team’s promising 2017 season. According to Kyle Lesniewski of Brew Crew Ball, the organization has money to spend. The Brewers payroll has been under 65 million dollars two years in a row. The […]
Domingo Santana’s Changed Approach
As regular readers of this website are undoubtedly aware at this point, Statcast gives us a wealth of information that we did not previously have access to. We are now able to do more in-depth research than was previously possible, and the results are—at the very least—interesting. I think the jury is still out about […]