So it goes tonight at Miller Park, where Ace Junior Guerra hosts Ace Jeremy Hellickson, in a battle perhaps of who can throw the most off-speed pitches, or who can inexplicably baffle batters the longest. It is a battle of unexpected success from low-cost MLB acquisitions, a battle of success from seemingly pedestrian scouting profiles, a battle of baseball lifers who just don’t quit, even after facing adversity in 2017.

Runs Prevented Workbook, July 22:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tmMK4LKWkYmDrkjnwHvJDvuur7evmWAUrwynvyRapYo/edit?usp=sharing

Primer: Exploring Runs Prevented

The Brewers Have a Good Rotation
While it’s not a monthly turn of the calendar, it is the beginning of the unofficial second half of the season, so I assembled another Runs Prevented workbook to assess the progression of MLB pitching performances. The instructions are in the workbook, but basically I used Baseball Prospectus team average and individual pitcher Park Factors, as well as Baseball Reference Three Year and Single Year Park Factors, and basic MLB Runs Allowed per Game, to construct an average of Runs Prevented across the league. Runs Prevented is an important statistic not because it is predictive or attempts to say anything about underlying performance (for that I use Deserved Run Average [DRA] to construct a Runs Prevented “counterfactual”), but because Runs Prevented can simply be plugged into the context of each team in order to assess the actual distribution of runs allowed on the field. Basically, this is everything messy and contextual about the game that ends up on the scoreboard: who receives the best fielding support? Who receives the best bullpen support? Questions like these impact Runs Prevented, but since the game is typically won according to outscoring opponents, I like Runs Prevented as an actual estimation of a pitcher’s real time performance quality.

Since most teams are approximately 100 games through the season, I added a new feature to this workbook: Rotational Averages. Thus far, MLB teams have employed 242 “regular” starters and 36 emergency (“One Game”) starters, which basically averages to more than nine starting pitchers per MLB team. If you were questioning the Brewers rotation during the off season, and continue to question their quality throughout the season, preparing for this war of attrition is indeed the strength of the club; MLB teams have around sixty games remaining and have already required throngs of starting pitching. GM David Stearns’s brilliance for the offseason came in constructing a seemingly mundane rotation that fit the quietly exceptional fielding unit, and could be seamlessly shuffled between roles (or MLB and Triple-A Colorado Springs) to provide starts whenever necessary.

So what does an MLB rotation look like? That depends on what you value. Below, I’ve constructed two tables: the first table assesses MLB rotational roles by Games Started (under the theory that a Number One starter pitches the most rotational turns, and each spot slots in behind that pitcher); the second table assesses MLB rotational roles by Runs Prevented (under the theory that a Number One starter is actually the best starter on the club, and each spot slots in behind that pitcher).

What is interesting about this table is that Runs Prevented are rather evenly distributed, between good and bad pitchers, according to Games Started category. Here a Number One starter is Justin Verlander (30 Runs Prevented) and Clayton Richard (-9 Runs Prevented), and so on. The value here is filling rotational turns, and recognizing that MLB teams need those rotational turns filled.

By Runs Prevented, on the other hand, a so-called Ace is closer to what I believe fans mean when they talk about Aces. But the bottom really falls out on the rotation:

Here, Justin Verlander is clearly a Number One starter, and Clayton Richard is something like a Number Eight or Number Nine starter, even though both pitchers have taken the most turns for their respective clubs.

Each of these rotational assessments demonstrates the shortcomings of analyzing an MLB rotation. Fans and analysts alike prefer to conceive of a rotation as “Five Turns,” following the traditional “five-man rotation” that operates in the MLB, but the trouble is that that classification only suggests a “rest” cycle. One could also use pure scouting grades to categorize each pitcher’s arsenal, command, mechanics, etc., and that might get us closer to a No. 1 / No. 2 / No. 3 / No. 4 categorization; here the trouble is that No. 1 pitchers really don’t exist, then, and most MLB teams are defined by how well they scout and prepare a group of No. 3 / No. 4 starters to “play up.”

This should help to frame the dissonance, and brilliance, that is the Brewers rotation:

By scouting profile, there is nothing close to a No. 1, or even a No. 2, in the Brewers rotation. Currently, Junior Guerra might reach the best grades based on his splitter, which could legitimately be the best pitch in the rotation; based on 2017, one would clearly expect Chase Anderson to serve as the top rotation hurler in terms of pure stuff, but that has not materialized in 2018 (showing the true difficulty of consistent mechanical adjustments by MLB pitchers). In scouting terms, Jhoulys Chacin, Brandon Woodruff, and Zach Davies would probably fight for the purest “No. 3 starter in a good way” classification, although Davies’s injury and Woodruff’s usage pattern would certainly impact that. Otherwise, it’s not even clear what type of MLB roles these guys should be given: Freddy Peralta is a bizarre type of “all-floor” pitcher (meaning, take him as he is, from deception to fastball movement to command profile), and Brent Suter could probably be scouted the same way.

By Runs Prevented profile, however, the Brewers have done what could have been expected of them during the preseason analysis cycle. Many people misunderstood the value of how the Brewers were constructing a rotation, but basically the runs saved by keeping a truly bottom-of-the-league, replacement-style Runs Prevented pitcher out of the rotation would boost the lack of an ace; coupled with the fact that the Brewers were reasonably expected to have several middle of the rotation types, truly serviceable arms, that advantage of not “bottoming out” could be exponentially exploited with each turn in the rotation. For designing a team to withstand a baseball season, even a playoff series, is all about how one distributes risk profiles (and therefore, Runs Prevented): by flattening the risk of a truly awful start almost every single time through the rotation, the Brewers “play up” from their expected scouting roles, DRA underlying profiles (thanks to the defense), and therefore distribute quality Runs Prevented for the team. This is a systemic pitching staff.

Is Junior Guerra an Ace?
I’ve written extensively about the lack of aces in the past (here too), in order to emphasize that a pitching rotation need not be conceptualized by top-tier talent. Furthermore, given the variance at play in MLB pitching from season to season, the simple fact is that very few pitchers, so few pitchers so as to be impossible to categorize, work the consistent, year-in, year-out Runs Prevented profiles that match what fans and analysts (seemingly) mean when they talk about “Aces.”

Now, however, it is worth asking whether Junior Guerra may become a true “Ace” if his 2018 campaign continues. For Guerra prevented approximately 22 runs during his unprecedented 2016 breakout season, and now the righty is holding steady at approximately 10 runs prevented throughout the 2018 campaign. This is really, really good: if the top 10 percent of MLB starting pitchers is demarcated by approximately 16 runs prevented, Guerra is threatening to reach that threshold in two of his last three seasons. This is an excellent occurrence for the Brewers, who stuck with Guerra through a difficult 2017 campaign, and (presumably) allowed the righty to once again work throughout the winter in order to iron out his mechanics. Thus Guerra is clearly establishing himself as some type of globetrotting rotation leader, a workhorse who does not stop pitching year-round and flashes his splitter across the Americas.

If Guerra keeps this up, he’ll simply be #BrewersAce, Ace Guerra, not #2016BrewersAce or #2018BrewersAce. Which should be a great lesson for Brewers fans: aces need not hail from praiseworthy draft profiles or big International bonuses, or nine figure free agency contracts; sometimes they’re just waiting there, on the waiver wire, in need of a mechanical adjustment or a simple chance to pitch.

Correct for the Wrong Reasons
In the offseason, I wrote about Jeremy Hellickson as a potential free agency target for the Milwaukee Brewers rotation. The veteran righty was coming off of a poor surface statistics season that nevertheless featured fantastic underlying performance metrics and very clear areas for improvement in pitch selection. Summarizing Hellickson’s potential surplus value and areas of improvement, I compared the veteran righty’s arsenal and approach to Chase Anderson, using Anderson’s development from 2016 to 2017 as a potential model for Hellickson. I am writing about this now, though, because my words on Hellickson have the privilege of appearing correct, but for the wrong reason; I suggested that the concern with Hellickson was between the balance in his fastball and change up usage, as his cutter was looking for a comfortable place within his arsenal. The implication was that if Hellickson could find a balance somewhat akin to Anderson’s 2017 development, the veteran’s quality change up could return.

By contrast, Hellickson went entirely in the opposite direction, by decreasing his primary fastball, secondary fastball, and cutter usage in order to select his change up and curve more frequently than any other pitch (!!!).

According to Bill James, a junkball pitcher is one who throws a change up “first,” i.e., more than any other pitch, and I like that definition because it attributes junkball status more to pitch selection than velocity (hence my favorite sometimes-junkball pitcher, the fire throwing Edinson Volquez). But if a pitcher throws a change up more than any other pitch, what of a pitcher who throws a change and curve more than any other pitcher? I enter 2018 Jeremy Hellickson as the vaunted “Double Junkball” pitcher, a pitcher who gives you the blues thrice over because he throws a change up more frequently than any other pitch, a curveball more frequently than any pitch but the change, and he was available for nothing more than a minor league contract despite exhibiting underlying traits worthy of nearly $30 million in depreciated surplus value.

But Brewers fans can’t be picky, as this is the organization that made Junior Guerra work (twice!), signed Jhoulys Chacin as their rotational front piece over the offseason, is currently making Wade Miley work, and skipped Fastballer Freddy Peralta over the much-more hyped (and much clearer scouting role) Corbin Burnes to round out the back end of the rotation. Wanting to add Hellickson to that mix is just greedy, but oh what a rotation it could have been, what one with some of the slowest fastballs and most unsuspecting command profiles in the MLB combining to prevent runs like their lives depended on it.

Here, I’m revisiting my past work on Hellickson in order to understand why I was wrong, and to demonstrate the fickle nature of scouting profiles. A perceived fix to a glitch in a pitcher’s arsenal can run in many directions, and it is worth using probabilistic thinking to clearly demarcate and analyze each of those potential directions. Probabilistic thinking means designing a thinking process that thinks through the potential outcomes in a given scenario, including reasons for those potential outcomes and (ideally) assigning weights or probabilities to those potential outcomes. This is the type of thinking that can be applied to difficult-to-quantify areas such as pitching profiles, where data are assembled but can move in multiple directions due to strategy. In the offseason, I thought Hellickson needed to balance his fastballs and take back his change up a notch in order to reassert its success; it turns out that that could mean diminishing fastball use all together, and playing up the curveball to reassert a successful profile.

Background Reading
CSAA
Pitch Tunnels
Two ways to Tunnel
Modeling Questions

Zach Davies might present the best motivation for using these statistics. The pure 50 OFP, back end starting pitching prospect never had a scouting report that jumped off the map, and anyone looking to hang a relief judgment on the young righty could use Davies’s size or stuff to plead their case. Yet, Davies immediately proved effective for the 2015 Brewers, making adjustments in his stuff and approach during a short call-up, which foreshadowed the righty’s exceptional first full season (3.5 WARP, 3.47 DRA, and a 3.55 strikeout to walk ratio). Looking at Davies, it is clear that the righty will need to succeed by using his own approach, never deviating, and gaining every advantage possible. It so happens that Davies ranked as the very best CSAA percentage pitcher in the 2016 MLB: no one in the majors gained a higher percentage of called strikes for their team than Davies.

Tunnel statistics paint a different picture of Davies. Here, the righty does not have a Tunnel Differential that jumps off the map (that’s “how far apart two pitches are at the Tunnel Point—the point during their flight when the hitter must make a decision about whether to swing or not”), nor does he have a wicked Post Tunnel Break, which “tells us how much each spin-induced movement is generated on each pitch between the tunnel point and home plate.” Yet, despite numbers that don’t jump off the map here, Davies ranks among the top third of the league in Post Tunnel Break, and is better than sixty percent of MLB pitchers in terms of Tunnel Differential. Following the assessment of Kyle Hendricks that helped motivate discussion of these pitches, it is quite clear how Davies excels despite lacking overpowering stuff: elite command, pitches that are relatively difficult to discern from the batter’s perspective, and pitches that have relatively strong break after the batter makes their swing decision. One might use these statistics to suggest that Davies can get ahead in the count, deceive batters, and induce weak contact with strong break.

Entering Spring Training, Zach Davies is the best pitcher on the 40-man roster, or among spring training invites. In order to assess the full staff, I looked at CSAA, Tunnel Differential, and Post Tunnel Break for any pitchers that had more than 5.0 MLB innings pitched on Milwaukee’s roster (these statistics are not yet available for minor leaguers).

This table features some fascinating, surprising, and supportive results. If one thought that Jimmy Nelson had command issues (which could previously have been assessed through mechanical tests and Brooks Baseball analysis, among other sources), CSAA amplifies that finding, as Nelson is the opposite of Davies for the Brewers staff. On the other hand, Taylor Jungmann has that big herky jerky delivery, and sure enough, that righty does not fare well in Tunneling his pitches, but he compensates with exceptional Post Tunnel Break. That splitter truly works for Junior Guerra, who also does not have strong command, but Guerra compensates for that lack of command with solid Tunnel Differential and Post Tunnel Break; basically, one might suggest that Guerra’s pitches are slightly difficult to discern, and they have solid late break. Command is also an issue for Jorge Lopez, but the righty showed solid Tunnel Differential and Post Tunnel Break during his brief 2015 stint, which forms a foundation for judging a successful 2017 should the mechanics remain in tact.

Perhaps the best surprises on the list were Wily Peralta and Chase Anderson. Peralta’s late season surge arguably saved his rotation spot, and arguably earned him a place in the 2017 rotation. The righty succeeded because of fantastic command; Peralta was only slightly behind Davies in terms of adding called strikes to the Brewers. Interestingly enough, the righty also does a moderately good job of Tunneling his stuff, which leads one to question whether he can succeed by playing up his fastball and slider combo. Anderson’s results are simply stunning: the metrics love the righty for command, difficult to discern pitches, and late movement. This leads one to gather that other aspects of Anderson’s pitching strategy are hindering the righty. A late season shift in his arsenal helped Anderson reclaim his season, and the suite of excellent Tunnel and Command statistics leads one to be bullish on the righty entering 2017.

Among relievers, Corey Knebel boasts the best command and movement combination, perhaps foreshadowing the youngster’s move into a higher leverage role this season. Tommy Milone and Brent Suter should be considered rotation darkhorses and potential relief surprises in 2017, as their combination of Command and Tunneling makes them southpaw variations of Davies. With maximal pitch arsenal strategy, these two southpaws could surprise observers as foundations of the pitching staff. Of all the non-roster invitees, perhaps Ryan Webb boasts the best profile, as the righty uses a strong combination of command and Tunnel deception out of the pen (only Tommy Milone is better).

These statistics cannot tell the whole story for the Brewers staff, but they can offer hints about where a pitcher has strengths that can drive other areas of their game, or where a pitcher absolutely needs to improve to keep a job. If the Brewers blend considerations of Command, Deception, and Late Break with their performance metrics, they can maximize a relatively low-cost and unassuming pitching staff that could be ready to succeed in the right circumstances.

“I don’t want to be the next Michael Jordan. I only want to be Kobe Bryant.”

Over the past year and a half, a narrative of deep relief has been palpable among the Milwaukee faithful. Since David Stearns took the reins of the front office the Brewers have made grand, albeit remedial, strides to catch up with the rest of baseball in how the organization is run. That the farm system currently ranks as one of the consensus top four in all of baseball, less than two years into Stearns’s grand project, is a promising development, let there be no doubt.

But, as everyone on this planet who has tasted even the smallest sample of success can attest to, copying other successful models can only get you so far. Champions are born not from imitation, but from innovation. Last year, the Cleveland Indians brought back the old-school-style fireman reliever that we haven’t seen in generations, deploying Andrew Miller in a varying but heavily-leveraged role that reacted to the position the team was in. Several years prior, the Cubs became one of the first teams to make international signings a key cornerstone of their minor-league system. Without jumping out on those respective ledges, neither team claims a pennant this prior fall. It’s not enough to simply repeat what took the last guy to the top.  Teams need to bring something fresh and new to the table, something that nobody else has ever seen before.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to explore a few potential strategies which, in 2017 and maybe even beyond, the Brewers could pursue which will range from “rather unorthodox” to “completely unprecedented.” In some cases, these proposed strategies might make tradition-worshiping baseball fans cringe. But though they might brush up against convention, though they might initially jump out as nonsensical, each of them could give Milwaukee just enough of an edge to push ahead of the rest of the pack in the coming years.

When I broke down the candidates for Milwaukee’s starting rotation a few weeks ago, one reader was inspired to suggest in the comments that the Brewers capitalize on their deep, but largely starless, stock of pitchers and employ a piggyback-style starting rotation during 2017.

For those who have yet to come into contact with the term, a “piggyback” rotation usually employs just four different starters, but each of the four starters is on a short pitch count, usually just 75. Additionally, either three or four pitchers are employed as a rotating crew of first men out of the bullpen, so to speak, working usually with a pitch count of around 50 or so. In a seven-man piggyback, the four starters and three long relievers are usually kept separate in their roles, with the starters working deeper and the relievers working more to essentially achieve a balanced workload. In the eight-man version pitchers are paired off into tandems, usually with the strategic aim of teaming together two wildly contrasting styles and repertoires. The two partners in a tandem will alternate between starting and relieving.

There’s also a partial version that some teams employ, as well. Eighty percent of the starting rotation functions as usual, but the fifth spot is filled by a piggyback tandem who alternate their starts. This means that five is no longer the upper limit to the number of “starters” you can find work for. There’s a structural setup to accommodate six, seven, or eight pitchers. Any more than that, though, and the bullpen goes from “shorthanded” to “catastrophically shorthanded.”

The piggyback rotation is already common in the lower levels of the minor leagues. It’s standard to have sox-to-eight starters to a team at those levels, and the piggyback setup allows the big-league team to get an extended look at every last one of them, rather than being forced to cull to just five. That far out from the big leagues, when none of your pitchers are a sure thing and even the best “prospects” need significant development yet, such a setup is obviously preferable. And for all of the crap I’ve posthumously shoveled on the Doug Melvin front office during my tenure here at BP Milwaukee, I’ll freely admit that Melvin wasn’t out-of-touch in every regard. For one example, he did implement a piggyback system in the organization up to the Class A level as far back as 2010.

As you climb the minor league ladder, though, priorities change. Some of those iffy starters fall off, or become bullpen arms, and at the same time the remaining starters need to build up their stamina. Because of this, you don’t see piggyback rotations at the AA level or above too often. Back in 2014, when the Astros were in their “flaunt tradition by any means necessary” phase as an organization, they piggybacked their entire minor-league system for a brief period. As it turned out, they weren’t engaging in the final round of testing before unleashing The Starting Rotation of the Future on the big leagues en route to the top of the standings. They were just overloaded with starting pitchers at every minor-league level, and the piggyback rotation was the most practical was to get everyone enough work. As their AAA pitching prospects trickled up to the big leagues, the Astros quietly abandoned the AAA piggyback system, but that wasn’t because it failed. The glut of starters at that level had just cleared out, so the traditional five-man look became the more practical option for them.

At the Major League level, the piggyback rotation has been used by at least one team. In 2012, the Colorado Rockies’ pitching woes, well documented going back to the franchise’s birth, probably hit their ultimate low. The team was 18 games below .500 on June 20th with a starting rotation that had put up an unbelievable 6.28 ERA to that point. Using the logic of “doing nothing would be a far greater offense than trying something unorthodox,” the Rockies went to a seven-man piggyback rotation. The results were relatively better, but still not great, and the piggyback rotation has not been seen in the majors in any official capacity since then.

Is the piggyback rotation a better means of organizing a pitching staff if you’re looking to win games? We really don’t know. Russell Carleton broke down the implications of such a strategy several years ago for Baseball Prospectus, eventually arriving at a conclusion of “there is a set of circumstance in which you could argue that this system could actually turn a profit–but is that profit worth restructuring the entirety of how a pitching staff is conceptualized?”

I would argue that the Brewers have arrived at exactly the set of circumstances Carleton described. The Brewers are coming into Spring Training with a dozen or more starting pitchers vying for roster spots, none of whom are truly “established.” Even Junior Guerra and Zach Davies, the guys I classified as “mortal locks” to start the season in the rotation, were both rookies in 2016. Neither of them is the type of player who can claim to be “above” such an experiment.

It could be that this new type of pitching staff works, but with the pitifully small and skewed sample of data we have already, no one can say for sure. In the meantime, we do know that a piggyback-style rotation allows teams to successfully evaluate more starting pitchers. And that, alone, might make it a better fit for the 2017 Brewers than the traditional look.

• Production: A player can be considered valuable based on how well they perform on the field. Alternately, as advanced statistics and analytical tools emerge, a player can be considered valuable based on their underlying elements — stuff, mechanics, plate approach, command, etc. Both of these metrics, traditional or advanced, judge value according to production.
• Scarcity: A player can be considered valuable based on the rarity or singularity of their performance skillset. Furthermore, a player can be considered valuable based on their contract, which at the MLB level is ostensibly a reflection of service time achievement (ex., veteran free agents earn more than reserve-controlled rookies). Here, a player’s raw production is arguably prorated against their veteran status (or lack thereof) and cost.

Related Reading:
Historical Transactional Value for OFP
40-Man Roster Surplus Values

Yesterday I hosted a Twitter chat for BPMilwaukee, and Matt Garza’s rotation spot continued to be a hot topic among Brewers fans. The veteran is the second-most expensive player on the Milwaukee roster, and certainly the least valuable in terms of total surplus: a three-year depreciation window values Garza at 0.42 WARP ($2.9M value), and depending on how one calculates the $8 million in deferred payments owed to the veteran, the righty will cost anywhere between $10.5 million and $18.5 million to the Brewers. At best, that leaves the Brewers with a total surplus of -$10.5 million, which means that the Brewers would actually gain roster value simply by cutting Garza and paying the full extent of his contract.

@BPMilwaukee 4.33 FIP, 4.16 ERA after AS break, toughest competition in NL, 4.29 DRA, 1.4 WARP in ~1/2 season, could provide trade value.

— David (@dgo151) January 23, 2017

If Garza’s performance resembles his strong second half and the righty faces more justly distributed competition — which is the best argument offered in defense of keeping the veteran righty, and one presented by Dylan Svoboda at BPMilwaukee — Milwaukee will need to spend half a season in salary to reach that point and arguably send $8 million cash to cover the deferred salary in order to return a prospect resembling even 45-to-50 Overall Future Potential. Given that the historical surplus of such a player is around $10 million total, spending at least $13 million to acquire such a prospect is quite a stretch of the term “value play.” Adding $13 million spent against, say, 1.5 WARP ($10.5M) from a great Garza first half and the $10 million surplus from the prospect return nets the Brewers approximately $7.5 million in total value — that’s a lot of effort for an extra future win or so.

Gambling on Garza to become a valuable trade chip is problematic for historical reasons, contemporary reasons, and organizational opportunity cost.

(1) Historical Value
Historically, if a player posts a replacement-value season with more than 100 innings at age-32, that player is likely at the very end of their career path. Prior to 2016, 33 such pitchers worked seasons of 100 IP (or more) with WAR between -0.1 and -1.0 during their age-32 season (similar to Garza’s campaign). Along with Garza, Edinson Volquez also pitched such a season in 2016. Those 33 historical pitchers represent a wide range of career WAR values, but almost uniformly decline or complete their careers with that bad age-32 season.

Using Baseball Reference Play Index, here are the age-32 pitchers comparable to Garza (ex., within a one win range). It must be emphasized that Baseball Reference’s WAR statistic is at odds with DRA & WARP assessments of Garza. Still, this is some historical perspective:

Among this group of pitchers, the historical average after a 100+ IP / -1.0 WAR to -0.1 WAR age-32 season is 167.0 IP and 0.7 WAR. To correct for outliers (such as Tim Belcher, and the set of pitchers that did not work whatsoever after age-32), the median is 170.0 IP and -0.2 WAR from age-33 onward. Not an inspiring group in terms of value, and this type of performance shows one particular stop on the aging curve: if a pitcher is likely to be an elite or even valuable pitcher deep into their 30s, they did not pitch a 100+ IP negative WAR season at age-32.

So, analysts cannot look to history for age-based comparisons for Garza’s 2016 in order to determine some level of future value that renders that contract valuable.

(2) Contemporary Value
In contemporary value, MLB teams started 217 pitchers that were worse than Garza in 2016 (among pitchers that worked at least 10.0 innings, which helps to cut out one-start emergency pitchers). This produces an interesting tension between Baseball Reference WAR (which grades Garza as below-replacement in 2016) and WARP (which rates Garza at 1.25 on the strength of a 4.29 DRA). Among the 138 MLB pitchers that worked at least 100 innings in 2016, Garza’s 4.29 DRA rates slightly below the median mark of 4.15 DRA.

There is a sense that Garza’s skillset is valuable insofar as he is a veteran that generally works a lot of innings, and a veteran that can make adjustments to improve his performance during a given season (as is evident by his second-half surge in 2016). Still, it is worth pushing back on Garza’s value here: that $10.5 million 2016 salary and $8 million deferred payment still are not equivalent to 1.25 WARP, or even a 4.29 DRA. Thus far the offseason has proven that such a performance does not bring trade value, which does lend some credence to the position that the Brewers must pitch Garza for at least the first half of 2016 to make a deadline deal (or perhaps float him through waivers as an August waiver trade).

(3) Opportunity Cost
The remaining issue with Garza’s contractual surplus and lack of transactional value is that the Brewers have a 40-man roster stacked with pitchers that could potentially create more cost-controlled value with a solid 2016 campaign. Chase Anderson, Jimmy Nelson, Brent Suter, and Taylor Jungmann appear to be replacement level depth to some degree, but their extended control years and generally low cost contracts mean that a turn in the right direction yields significantly more value for the club. Tom Milone is an intriguing trade value candidate himself (cf. Scott Feldman…), for if the Brewers develop a strategy with the southpaw to recoup some value from his arm, that $3.0M+ maximum contract will look solid during the trade deadline season; approximately 1.0 WARP from Milone produces better trade value than 1.5 WARP from Garza, in terms of sheer transactional surplus.

Of course, then there remain the three rotation spots that probably should be locked down: Zach Davies was the best starter for the Brewers in 2016 in terms of DRA and WARP; Junior Guerra pitched ahead of a DRA and WARP, but was still quite valuable via WARP; and Wily Peralta rode a surging second half to a strong WARP himself, making him one of the most intriguing “comeback” candidates for the 2017 Brewers. Beyond these starters, of course, are notable 40-man roster prospects such as Josh Hader and Jorge Lopez, who combine for more than $20 million in organizational surplus even if one takes the 45 OFP-to-50 OFP route for these hurlers (instead of Lopez’s 2015 top OFP and Hader’s 2017 top OFP, which immensely increases the value of these pitchers).

In terms of surplus value, the opportunity cost for each Garza start (prorated to 33 starts) is $0.3M, prior to considering the value of Milone, Jungmann, Suter, and Nelson (another $0.3M per start excluded as a group) or Hader+Lopez (at least another $0.6M per start excluded as a group, and as much as $1.1M per start excluded as a group that keeps Hader & Lopez from realizing their Top OFP in 2017). The best case scenario holds that the Brewers basically eat one win in 2017, and hang on long enough to Garza to trade him for a 45-50 OFP prospect with cash headed out the door; a more likely scenario is that the Brewers eat at least one win in 2017 due to Garza’s lack of surplus value, and those starts truncate value for another group of potential starters (to the tune of another lost win). Once one reaches into the territory of Garza (or, to be fair, several other starters on the 40-man roster) starts blocking either Hader or Lopez, there is some chance that the Brewers could eat yet another win in surplus value in that scenario.

The question here must be to what extent eating one-to-three wins is a valuable outcome for a developing ballclub. This is especially salient given that the Brewers improved in 2016, and also that Milwaukee does not have a very good development environment one level removed from the MLB (meaning that there is a sense that Milwaukee should simply start Hader and Lopez at the MLB level, which would be an incredible attempt to materialize future value). To this end, the Brewers front office will show their truest interpretation of what an “analytical” front office means. Is David Stearns ready to use the club’s $80 million revenue cushion from 2016 and 2017 to eat $18.5 million dollars in a move to materialize future surplus value?