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.

The story of the Brewers’ remarkable winning streak that has carried them into the playoffs and now a League Championship Series matchup with the Dodgers has been the dominance and run-prevention of the bullpen. With a matchup looming against a much stronger team offensively than the Rockies (the Dodgers finished the season fifth in MLB in runs scored per game and first in True Average), not to mention a longer series and therefore more outs to “get,” it’s fair to ask how sustainable the heavy bullpen usage looks to be for the rest of the postseason.

Usage
Inning limits seem to be an inexact science at best, given what we know publicly.  There may be a slight effect in terms of injury prevention when drastic inning increases are managed by teams. But beyond injuries, suffice it to say that given the toll pitching takes on the human body (with the caveat that every pitcher is different), generally pitchers approaching substantial workload increases are more likely to fatigue. This makes sense on an intuitive level.

Among likely Brewers to make the NLCS roster as non-starting “out getters,” most of the pitchers seem to be in relatively good shape with regard to their innings in the previous season and well within their career highs, with a maximum of 14 games left in the season. Knebel, Burnes, and Woodruff in particular are encouraging in terms of how many innings they may have left over last year’s totals. Freddy Peralta has already pitched over 20 innings more than his 2017 season and might be managed more carefully, especially if the Brewers see him as a starter moving forward.

The real danger zone may be with Jeremy Jeffress, who, despite sitting out a few games to manage minor injuries toward the end of the season, is 11 innings above what he pitched last year. That may not or may not be a factor moving forward, but it is [checks math] a higher workload. As such, there could be fewer opportunities for Jeffress to cover multiple innings. Combined with his recent minor injuries that made him unavailable in Game 163, and his performance so far in October, it’s worth keeping an eye on the next area of the pitching staff to consider for the aggressive bullpenning Brewers.

Fatigue
This is where there is a small area of concern for Jeffress’ availability moving forward to the degree he has been used so far this season.

Source: BrooksBaseball.net

The one-mile per hour difference on Jeffress’ four-seam fastball might not be anything, and in fact comes with a major caveat of a sample size of just 15 times that he’s thrown it in October. But coupled with the recent minor injuries and increased workload, it certainly stands out among the other Brewer relievers, who are mostly throwing harder in October than they have in the season overall.

As a unit it seems like the Brewer bullpen isn’t suffering from any fatigue just yet in October. Somewhat unbelievably, Josh Hader is actually up two ticks on his fastball, and the young and promising duo of Burnes and “secret weapon” Woodruff are also up pretty significantly. Basically, if Craig Counsell is looking just at in-game performance or the metrics that might imply fatigue among his relievers, there’s seemingly little to raise a red flag.

Schedule
This is where the bullpen strategy gets a little tricky. During a 7-game series, how will the Brewers manage their run-prevention strength with also needing to cover more innings overall?

Playing a strictly “bullpen game” as the Brewers did in Game 1 of the Division Series is still workable but may be a bit more difficult to pull off when there are just simply more outs to cover. For example, if after Jhoulys Chacin and Wade Miley pitch Games One and Two, and Counsell decides to bullpen Game Three, he could find himself without Woodruff and Burnes for games Four and Five, leaving a shorthanded staff presumably with Gio Gonzalez and/or Zach Davies toeing the rubber to start Game Four. Perhaps a Game One bullpen game is in the cards again, as it would allow the Brewers to put their best pitcher, Johnny Wholestaff, up against Clayton Kershaw, and then have Chacin go for Game Two. That would allow the bullpen to get some extra rest for the travel off-day to Los Angeles before Game Three.

My head hurts.

At any rate, there are more decisions to consider in a longer series that has 3 games in a row, and it will also likely limit the number of relievers the Brewers are willing to burn for multiple innings at a time.

The bullpen overall looks to be in good shape given their usage so far in the season and at least by velocity, there doesn’t seem to be much drop off in production, either. The Brewers will, however, need some kind of help from their bats or a third starter especially in the middle 3 games of the series in Los Angeles if they want to maximize meaningful innings for their best run-preventing weapon.

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.

Jeremy Jeffress struggled in his Game One appearance. The Rockies started the inning with three singles, then an Orlando Arcia error allowed a fourth straight runner to reach base before Jeffress settled down and recorded the next three outs. Looking at his pitch plot, he spent too much time in the strike zone.

About sixty percent of Jeffress’ pitches are sinkers or curveballs. His approach is to keep the ball low, either inducing swings on balls below the zone or living in the bottom third, extending from the middle to wide of the zone. The intent is even more pronounced when the sinker and curveball are isolated. Whether due to playoff jitters or just poor placement, Jeffress threw two sinkers that caught much more of the plate than he intended.

The playoffs are a heightened atmosphere where each mistake is magnified and takes on an outsized importance, but as his subsequent two scoreless appearances showed, this was one bad outing and there doesn’t seem to be a flaw that could come back to haunt Jeffress. His fourseam fastball velocity was slower than in any outing since April, but it ticked back up in Game Two and Three, and none of his other pitches showed any decrease in speed. There seemed to be some loss of horizontal movement, but the two pitches with the biggest drops were his sinker and curveball, which also rely on vertical movement for their deception. The sinker moved more than ever, while the curveball did suffer some loss in vertical movement.

Even taking into consideration his unexplained medical absence from the NL Central tiebreaker game, I think that there’s not much cause for concern with Jeffress. The team immediately inserted back into high pressure situations and he’ll continue to contribute as a back end member of the bullpen.

One of the major storylines coming into the series centered on how the Brewers would handle Trevor Story. Single season numbers against a team are too small of a sample size to be regarded as having any type of predictive value, but Story’s .333 batting average /.387 on-base percentage /1.222 slugging percentage slash line, which included seven home runs in seven games, worried some fans and pundits and became a talking point after the Rockies won the Wild Card Game.

It turned out that no one needed to worry, the Brewers executed their plan perfectly. They planned to keep the ball out of the strike zone and dare him not to swing. During the regular season, Story swung at thirty-two percent of the pitches he faced out of the strike zone. That number went up in the NLDS. The Brewers kept the ball low and away. The approach was best exemplified by his at-bat against Jeremy Jeffress in Game 1. Jeffress had run into some trouble and Story came to the batter’s box with runners on first and second with two outs and a chance to win the game with a hit. Jeffress threw three curveballs, none of which were particularly close to the strike zone, and Story waved at all three pitches.

Story finished the series 2-for-12 with six strike outs and one of his hits came in the bottom of the ninth in Game 3 when the series had already been decided. This pitching staff can lock down any batter in the league and will be up for the challenge of whichever team emerges from the other side of the National League bracket.

Josh Hader made fifty-five appearances during the regular season. He pitched on one or no days’ rest for sixteen of those outings. How often Hader will be used will continue to be a sub-plot throughout the postseason run.

Hader pitched four times last week, including the tiebreaker game. If the gloves are off, it was inevitable that he would need to pitch on back to back days, which he hadn’t done since August. After throwing 1 and 1/3 innings in Game One, Hader was used in a high leverage situation in Game Two to get Milwaukee out of an inning with a runner on third base and two outs. His spot in the lineup came up in the next half inning and Jonathan Schoop pinch hit for him, so Hader only threw twenty-two pitches in the two appearances. He exceeded that number in more than half of his 2018 games.

Hader added another seven pitches in Game Three and by finishing the series so quickly, he’ll get some extra time off. The middle of the NLCS includes three games in three days and it is unlikely that the Brewers can avoid using him in at least two of those games. The Brewers will need to hope that their regular season usage plan for Hader will keep him fresh for these important games.

The Brewers finished in the top 10 in MLB in baserunning runs. The area where they far outpaced all of baseball was opportunities to advance on wild pitches, passed balls and balks. Milwaukee is an aggressive team on the base paths; they were top four in stolen base opportunities. There is value in putting pressure on opposing pitchers and defenses and giving them something real to worry about when a batter reaches base. However, the team could use this next week to tighten up their running game. There were a few baserunning gaffes against the Rockies. The competition will level up in this next round and beyond, and Milwaukee cannot give away outs on the base paths from ill-advised advancements.

Jesús Aguilar struggled against the Rockies. He hit 1-11 with a walk a home run and four strikeouts. Aguilar started to scuffle in the second half, when he slashed .245/.324/.436, well below his first half line of  .298/.373/.621. As the year went on, Aguilar’s absurd numbers against fastballs went down, but his power against non-fastballs completely fell off a cliff.

Through the first two games, Colorado pitchers made sure to attack Aguilar low and away, which has been a season-long focus for pitchers. They also noticed the numbers in the above chart and gave him fewer fastballs to hit. For the season, he faced around sixty percent fastballs and never dipped below fifty five percent for a month. Fewer than half the pitches he faced in the NLDS were fastballs. The best news for Aguilar coming out of the series is that his home run came off a curveball. To get pitchers to respect him again, he probably needs to start laying off those pitches as much as possible. The effect of pitchers going low and away is even more pronounced when fastballs are stripped out of the zone plot. Aguilar can’t dramatically improve his pitch recognition on the fly, but even something like taking any pitch that appears like it’ll go below his belt will help him out because right now decent breaking balls are giving him fits and it’s creating a hole in the lineup.

Christian Yelich collected two walks in each game of the series. His regular season walk rate was 10.5 percent, but in the NLDS it approached fifty percent. In his second at bat of Game One, Yelich hit a home run off a poorly placed changeup. Pitchers had some success with changeups against Yelich in 2018, but all of them were inside or low; otherwise, Yelich had a good chance of hitting it far. After that, Rockies pitchers had their own plan to avoid getting hurt by Yelich.

While pitchers generally looked to get inside on him or keep the ball low, Colorado was all over the place, so long as the pitch wasn’t in the middle of the zone. They seemed content to make Yelich chase bad pitches, or take a walk. He also saw more fastballs than in any other month in the 2018 season. To Yelich’s credit, he was willing to take the walks. Pitchers have had more comfort pitching this way to Yelich because Lorenzo Cain has struggled at the plate. He went 1-12 with two walks; Games 1 and 2 was only the second time he went hitless in two straight playoff games. If Cain can get on base, pitchers may feel more pressure to give Yelich pitches in or closer to the strike zone. If they don’t, then it gives Ryan Braun the opportunity to hit with more men on base.

With Atlanta’s escape against the Dodgers last night, there’s a Game Four in that series (today, Monday, October 8). Brewers fans will want the series extended to a Game Five to ensure another cross-country trip for their eventual opponent. According to Baseball Prospectus’ adjusted standings, the Dodgers are the best team in the league and they’ve played like the superior team against the Braves so far, but this is why the games are played on the field.

Runs Prevented Worksheet: End of Season
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kf2hMxo9p4H92R7S5N7y-_d-AhrayPJgGFXjPKLpKDs/edit?usp=sharing

Milwaukee’s park-adjusted run differential reflected these uncertain elements at the end of August, as the club was basically a “true” 83-win team, posting an overall -2 Runs Scored / +27 Runs Allowed performance on the year. This matched their overall trajectory as an 85-win club, which is calculated from the average of their Daily Pythagorean records.

And so the Brewers surged. Our beloved Milwaukee Nine played their best baseball to close the season, a stunning reversal of the collapse expectations that seasoned Brewers fans fearfully expressed. There was no collapse in this team, nor were the 2018 Brewers simply a .500 team following an excellent May performance; this club would recover after August. Given the timing of the now-infamous comments by Cubs southpaw Cole Hamels about the lack of a rivalry with Milwaukee’s southern neighbors, one would be forgiven if they thought the Brewers were making a statement. Now that dynasty is unseated; the previous comparisons seeking The Big Red Machine and other great clubs experiencing long-term success are done for the Cubs. There is no dynasty in Chicago.

After 163 games, the Brewers are many things: they are still an “average” 85 win team based on their underlying Runs Scored / Runs Allowed elements. They remain a team that outperformed their run differential on the field, mostly thanks to an excellent bullpen and efficient defense. According to Baseball Prospectus Overall and Park-Adjusted Defensive Efficiency statistics, the Brewers can claim a true top five fielding unit in the MLB. The beauty of this defensive alignment was no more evident than at Game 163 in Wrigley Field, where the Milwuakee fielders morphed into alien shapes and swapped positions at will to produce the best possible arrangements. (May it be known that I even saw Mike Moustakas cross the diamond to play second base at one point and time, while Jonathan Schoop and Orlando Arcia seamlessly traded places depending on the pitch count). Yet even if Milwaukee was an inconsistent offensive team earlier in the season, the bats have picked up the club since the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline, and improved mightily in September. This simply is not due to MVP-candidate Christian Yelich, who basically sealed the deal on the MVP vote with his stunning September, but also due to successful performances around the diamond. When I last considered the MVP ballot, Milwaukee boasted four players in the top 25 percent of National League regulars (Yelich, Lorenzo Cain, Jesus Aguilar, and Travis Shaw).

If Milwaukee’s season seems strange, they have an equally bizarre League Divisional Series foe in the Colorado Rockies. The Rockies spent much of their season as a sub-.500 club in terms of Run Differential, and only recently climbed into the black. In fact, when I previewed the NL Playoff Sprint toward the end of August, the Rockies averaged a daily run differential worth approximately 73 wins; they averaged an 83 win pace on the season. This series has the “trap” appearance of a weakness-versus-strength arrangement, as the Rockies have the worst offensive unit in the Playoffs, while the Brewers’ strength is their pitching staff (and yes, this is a strength for both their rotation and their bullpen, even though the bullpen gets top bill).

This is also a unique series, as compared to the American League, most National League playoff teams lag behind for overall run differential performance. Colorado is the “worst” team in the playoffs; the Brewers are the second “worst,” by run differential; but, that simply proves that both clubs were prepared to win in uneven divisional environments and take advantage of a relatively mediocre league. While it is indisputable that the American League features some truly elite clubs, their clubs also feasted on some true bottom-feeders, which may explain the unbalanced terrain between the NL and AL playoff standings.

The good news for the Brewers is that while Colorado claims the very best pitcher in the playoffs in Kyle Freeland, Freeland just produced an excellent Wild Card performance that likely means he is out of commission until a potentially pivotal Game Three. Notably, four of the Top 10 pitchers in the MLB are not working during the playoffs, and only 12 of the Top 20 pitchers are working; Individual Runs Prevented performance is not everything to a team.

While many have noted the Cubs perceived struggles over the last couple of weeks, perhaps Colorado’s biggest favor was knocking Chicago’s bullpen out of the playoffs. In terms of Average Runs Prevented, both the Rockies and the Brewers claim some of the best relievers in the postseason; yet, Chicago was the richest team of them all in terms of bulk of quality bullpen arms.

The Brewers have the very best reliever in the National League in Jeremy Jeffress. Although he has faded, Josh Hader remains a quality option, as he ably demonstrated during the Brewers’ bid to win the National League Central.

Notably, in terms of assessing current Runs Prevented against mid-September performance, both Colorado and Milwaukee are among the most improved pitching staffs in the MLB. Both teams are improving at the right time, which throws the series into doubt: Milwaukee may escape facing Freeland twice, depending on how the series unfolds, but the remaining Colorado rotation features some formidable arms. Yet, the same can be said of the Brewers’ quietly effective pitching staff: Jeffress, Hader, Wade Miley, Jhoulys Chacin, Corbin Burnes, and even new addition Gio Gonzalez finished within the Top 20 percent of MLB pitchers (by Runs Prevented); Chase Anderson just missed. With an improved Corey Knebel on the roster as well, Milwaukee’s bullpen is now deep enough with quality options to answer any questions about the rotation behind Miley, Chacin, and Gonzalez (spoiler alert: the rotation is fine).

So, that leaves one to question how the battles of these two bullpens will fare overall, and how the suddenly strong Brewers offense will perform against the most improved pitching staff from September.

It’s playoff time! Go Brewers!