The biggest story of the weekend was Jimmy Nelson throwing his first career complete game in Sunday’s win. If the Brewers are to take themselves seriously as contenders, and their record and underlying performance currently give them no reason not to do so, they need a legitimate top of the rotation starter so they aren’t relying on the offense to bail them out every night. Nelson showed that he’s capable of being that guy, striking out 10 for the third time this season, and throwing a season high 118 pitches.

Nelson has spent the past month, which roughly coincides with his breakout, using the sinker as his primary pitch and sprinkling in some more curveballs, all at the expense of his four seam fastball. At that point opponents had a .234 ISO against his four seamer, so reducing its usage made sense since his other pitches were more effective. So of course yesterday Nelson returned to pumping his four seam fastball to great effect, throwing it forty six times and getting seven whiffs on the pitch.

The other notable aspect of yesterday’s game was Nelson’s curveball usage. He threw the pitch thirty seven times, smashing his previous season high usage of twenty four. His eight whiffs were a season high for the pitch. The curveball has flummoxed hitters all season, producing weak contact and not a lot of power. An interesting thing to note is the horizontal movement that Nelson puts on the pitch.

While Nelson got decent movement on the pitch early in the season, he shelved the pitch for two starts in early May. Since then, he’s regularly getting two more inches of movement on the pitch, which is the best movement of his career. The curveball has been the constant in his breakout. If he can sustain this movement, while throwing it this often, he’ll continue to keep hitters off balance and can be the top of the rotation pitcher the Brewers need.

It goes without saying that the Brewers have not been the best defensive team in baseball this season. Over the weekend they committed six errors across three games. While errors are not necessarily the best measure of defensive performance, they had the highest total in the National League entering Sunday’s games with forty nine total miscues. Baseball Prospectus has a coverall defensive statistic named Park-Adjusted Defensive Efficiency (PADE) which looks at how a defense makes outs on balls in play, adjusting for the park. The Brewers’ current PADE is -1.26, 8^th worst in MLB and ahead of only the Mets and Giants in the National League. Their number is already much worse than the -0.12 and -.026 the team posted in 2016 and 2015. While the team is good at converting ground balls into outs, and middle of the pack for fly balls, they’re in last place in MLB for line drives, which hurts their ranking.

According to Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), another all in one defensive stat, the Brewers defense has cost the team -9.3 runs, placing them 23^rd in MLB. The biggest culprit in this ranking is of course ErrR, also known as error runs, which looks at how many errors a player commits relative to a league average player. The Brewers are 29^th in this measure, at -8.5 runs on the season. The next closest National League team is Pittsburgh at -3.9 runs. Yes, your eyes have not been deceiving you, the Brewers commit a ghastly amount of errors compared to other teams, with the biggest culprit on the team being Jonathan Villar. Villar is also the second worst position player in MLB by this metric. If this had turned out to be a rebuilding year, maybe you can live with these types of poor plays, but with the team in contention, they need to tighten up.

Up Next: The Brewers conclude this home stand with a four game series against Pittsburgh. The Pirates lost two of three games over the weekend against the Cubs, falling to six games behind the division leading Brewers.

Top Play (19 percent)
Ryan Braun was already in rare company having improved during his age-32 season, and thus far the age-33 Franchise Player is showing that his power is not going anywhere. While the rest of Braun’s game warms up, the veteran is hitting big flies, including one that brought the Brewers back into the game on Sunday versus the Cubs. Last night’s game was no different, as Braun smacked a two-run homer to provide the Brewers some immediate insurance runs during their four-run-Fourth-Inning. That homer swung the Brewers’ odds of winning from 59 percent to 78 percent.

The Brewers are not really hitting thus far, but their runs scored do not reflect that; their mark of 40 runs over ten games is within three runs of the league average. Granted, this pace would result in a significantly below average offense for the full season (approximately 50 runs below average over 162), but the Brewers are sticking in games because of their excellent power. Braun is a mascot for this current batting line, boasting a .226 / .333 / .516 line (.287 Total Average). Against a National League batting .246 / .319 / .409, the Brewers’ line of .231 / .293 / .435 leaves something to be desired in terms of batting and on-base performances. That slugging is excellent, however, and it begs the question about how good the Brewers offense could be should those other categories slide closer to average; of course, that progression could also drain power, and there is also the possibility that this simply is who the Brewers are: strike outs and homers galore.

Bottom Play (-4 percent)
The worst WPA of the game occurred during the bottom of the first inning, as Jimmy Nelson could not retire speedster Billy Hamilton. Hamilton smacked an off-speed pitch (MLB GameDay called it a change up) to left field to open the Reds’ attempts at the plate. This event immediately shifted the game in the favor of the home club, moving their odds of winning to 58 percent. Hamilton stole second, but Nelson locked down, allowing one run on a Joey Votto sacrifice fly to limit the damage during the inning.

Much has been made over the years of Nelson’s off-speed pitches, as the righty shifted from his sinker / slider meat-and-potatoes to add a curveball, and now an (apparent) “split-change.” What shined on Thursday night was the fastball, which Nelson relied on heavily during his opening innings of work. To close the first inning, Nelson used 14 consecutive fastballs or “sinkers” to retire Reds batters, and he continued that trend as the game wore on: 15 in the second, 11 in the third, four in the fourth, and 20 in the fifth, 4 in the sixth, and 12 in the seventh. Out of 101 pitches, Nelson went to his heat 83 times, simply blowing away the Reds with a consistent set of fastballs.

This is a fine development from Nelson, who has a perpetual set of “what if?” from Brewers fans and analysts. But where the questions usually focus on off-speed stuff, or command, or what have you, the answers have often been framed in “if Nelson can only make pitch ___________ work,” or “Nelson’s new pitch will _______________.” Now, Nelson’s move to his heat is the best possible answer.

Odds and Ends: Thus far, the Brewers are almost a perfectly average fielding club in terms of Defensive Efficiency. How does this compare to FRAA?

Behind Orlando Arcia, Hernan Perez is the best fielder on the club, using a 1.1 FRAA around the diamond to offset his cold start at the plate. That would be the seemingly logical line, except for the fact that among regular Brewers, Ryan Braun is even better in the field than Arcia thus far; Braun is using a 2.0 FRAA and that .287 TAv to drive the club in WARP.

Jesus Aguilar is the better defensive first baseman thus far (!!!), but he and Eric Thames are ultimately a wash at first…Domingo Santana is who we thought he is, even as his bat is beginning to be what we dreamed it could be. Against a .304 TAv, Santana’s dreadful defense is already worth -1.5 FRAA after nine games…Orlando Arcia had a great night at the plate, to go along with his stellar defense thus far (his FRAA perfectly offsets Santana’s)…Jett Bandy and Manny Pina have provided great offense at catcher thus far, but their defense is a wash (0.4 FRAA for Pina against -0.5 FRAA for Bandy)…Kirk Nieuwenhuis and Keon Broxton leave much to be desired in center field, combining for -0.6 FRAA thus far…At third base, Travis Shaw is also coming up short thus far, but history says the glove might come around….For all the bellyaching about Jonathan Villar’s defense, he is not close to the worst defender on the club thus far.

Up Next:
Friday: LHP Tommy Milone (-$0.8M surplus entering 2017, 4.99 career DRA) vs. RHP Scott Feldman ($0.9M surplus, 4.54 career DRA)
Saturday: RHP Zach Davies ($22.9M surplus, 3.92 DRA) vs. LHP Brandon Finnegan ($9.8M surplus, 4.60 career DRA)
Sunday: RHP Wily Peralta (-$3.3M surplus, 4.84 career DRA) vs. TBD [Robert Stephenson / Cody Reed / Sal Romano].

Note: Updated DRA lines is severely impacting some surplus numbers I published earlier this offseason. Peralta is one such victim.

It is true that they lead the league in errors, but at this point we know better than to trust that errors provide the full picture. At their best, errors tell a story, in the same way that RBIs do. They are not predictive, nor are they particularly valuable evaluative tools. Just like RBIs, errors can tell us what happened on a particular play.

But at their worst, errors are subjective and tell no story. Too often, whether or not a specific play should be called an error is in question, and the official scorer has the discretion to decide one way or the other. When those decisions are made incorrectly or unfairly, errors cease to provide any valuable information. That is not the official scorer’s fault; instead, it is the nature of the metric itself.

None of what I’ve said above is groundbreaking in any way; it was the rationale for developing better, more comprehensive defensive statistics, and we are all smarter, better-informed baseball fans because we have access to FRAA and don’t have to rely on errors or fielding percentage.

With that being said, though, errors still hold some level of sway over the general public, so seeing the Brewers at the top (or bottom, depending on your perspective) of the error leaderboard is an unwelcome sight. But errors do not tell the whole story; nor do they tell a particularly accurate one. And that is particularly true when it comes to measuring team defense.

The big issue with errors (aside from their subjectivity) is that they punish defenders who have more chances—that is, players with better range make more errors simply because they attempt plays that lesser defenders don’t even have a chance at. For this reason, metrics such as FRAA are better able to measure individual defense because they try to account for the difficulty level of the play the fielder is attempting.

On a team level, though, the easiest and clearest way of measuring defense is simple defensive efficiency, or the percentage of balls in play that the team defense turns into outs. In this category, the Brewers are middle-of-the-pack rather than worst, and that makes a big difference. Their .701 mark ranks 16th and puts them closer to the second-place Blue Jays (.718) than it does the 29th-place Twins (.681). This is not an elite defense, but it’s clearly better than the error leaderboard suggests.

This distinction matters for a couple reasons. First, from a fan or outsider’s perspective, proper context is valuable and important. The team defense is not a huge problem that needs to be addressed this offseason. Without watching every single error, there isn’t really a way to figure out exactly why the Brewers’ number is so high—it could be unlucky official scoring, truly superb range creating more difficult plays, an actual propensity for boneheaded mistakes, or something entirely unrelated—but the raw error total itself is not actually worrying.

And second, the defensive efficiency/error discrepancy matters from a team-building perspective. The Brewers should be looking to take a step forward in 2017, and if they truly had the worst defense in baseball, that would be a key issue to address. But they don’t, so the situation is not a disaster, and thus the front office isn’t forced into action on this particular issue.

Errors have been generally dismissed in the sabermetric community, and for good reason. But no one wants to show up at the bad end of a leaderboard—no matter what the statistic—so addressing this topic before it became a discussion point this offseason seemed wise.