Here at BPMilwaukee, Andrew Salzman surveyed Schoop’s season and the roster factors related to the arbitration-eligible veteran, and also analyzed Schoop’s batting elements in early August. Salzman noted the declining aspects of Schoop’s plate approach, which resulted in a general profile of weak contact involving groundballs and pop-ups (both headed in the wrong direction). Paul Noonan offered a thorough critique of the logic of the trade during the deadline press cycle. Noonan illustrated the confusing logic of using Schoop in potentially interchangeable roster strategies at second base (including a potential platoon scenario), and highlights the difficulty of the second baseman fitting into the batting order.

Evaluating Schoop according to his Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) progression complicates the matter. While Schoop undoubtedly declined in 2018, his stature as an arbitration-eligible player and his exceptional 2017 season impacts almost any pricing mechanism of his performance. If the Brewers take Schoop through the arbitration process, they cannot decrease his salary according to his performance (as salaries are protected through the arbitration process, which values service time more than performance). In terms of overall career progression, Schoop’s production remains close to a $11 million per season value, which is his estimated arbitration salary according to Cot’s Contracts; other estimates are similar, assessing approximately $10 million in 2019 salary for Schoop.

The following table estimates Schoop’s three-year surplus value, which roughly means evaluating Schoop’s production and scarcity (or, production and cost), and derives one-year contracts from those models. A “harmonic mean” contract is used to balance overall 2014-2018 surplus values with the highest possible value from that time period; this is an attempt to even out the roughest edges of these value estimates.

It’s not hard to see a scenario in which Schoop is worth $10 to $11 million; in fact, balancing high- and low-value figures for Schoop places his ideal contract in that neighborhood. Even if Schoop is not “truly” worth $10 million or $11 million, it should not be difficult to see a League Championship Series caliber team overpay a player if they believe they can yield the best possible performance from that player. The difficulty is determining whether Schoop fits that logic.

An additional difficulty is that because Schoop is so young, the “Aging Curve Logic” suggests that he should be working in a prime season, and therefore produce quality performances. Yet, relying on an aging curve to promote a bounce back season from Schoop is somewhat dubious, as there are numerous disagreements about peak age, evidence that season-over-season statistics become less volatile once a player reaches age-26, and a recognition that different types of players age in different ways, anyway (Silver 2015, 81-86). There is a very real sense that Schoop already “is who he is.”

As of March 30, 2018, PECOTA picked Bret Boone, Howie Kendrick, and Jeff Kent as the age-26 comparable players for Schoop. Kendrick is an interesting pick, as his 2010 season fell backwards from a 2009 breakout, but Kendrick eventually recovered to produce better offensive value. Kent is an interesting pick because at age-26 he was not yet “Jeff Kent,” and there were some real doubts about what he might become. Boone is more interesting still, as the young phenom fell back during 1995-1997 campaigns, and produced fringe average seasons prior to breaking out again during his early 30s. These last two comparisons should be kept in mind, as it could be possible that Schoop takes several years to continue developing aspects of his plate approach, and that his 2018 and 2019 season have little to no bearing on what Schoop eventually becomes. This may not appear to be a likely scenario, but it’s a possibility worth keeping in mind given the long and often unpredictable twists of player development.

The simple point is that projecting and pricing 2019 Schoop is not simply a binary exercise; his future is not one basic either/or scenario.

With these caveats in mind, I investigated MLB seasons with at least 300 plate appearances in their age-24, 25, and 26 seasons during the Wild Card Era (1995-present) with the intention of finding players similar to Schoop’s extreme plate discipline and power approach. This is a biased sample in several ways, most importantly in the sense of seeking out “starting roles,” which I roughly designated as players with 300 or more plate appearances (which reasonably excludes players with catastrophic injuries, fringe players, and many bench players). Additionally, the sample is confined to the institutional, player development, and game constraints of the last generation, which means that this survey is in no way representative of some “true population” of age-24, 25, or 26 players throughout baseball history. Additionally, by excluding minor league players of the same age groups, I am not fully assessing Schoop’s development and plate discipline against potential replacements or other developmental trends in the game, which is another limitation for assessing players by age. Given these biases, I am reasonably asking, “Who are relatively recent MLB starting players who approach the game like Schoop?,” and “How did these players age?”; since this is not any sort of sample representative of a population, I am using this to describe development trends rather than predict Schoop’s path in 2019.

(1) Schoop and Grichuk. In the last 24 seasons, there is one player who matches Schoop’s general trend of striking out more than 20 percent of the time, walking less than 6 percent of the time, and homering more than 3.5 percent of the time during each of his age-24, 25, and 26 seasons. Interestingly enough, that player is also a contemporary of Schoop, Randal Grichuk. Even within these general parameters, Grichuk is quite different than Schoop, as his walk totals are sometimes closer to that 6 percent threshold, and the strike outs are also much higher; Grichuk is more of a “Three True Outcomes Hitter” (relying on strike outs, walks, and homers) than Schoop, who is more of a bizarre type of contact hitter.

It is startling that even given the general acceptance of strike outs over the last generation, and the proliferation of home-run based batting approaches, baseball simply does not produce batting profiles like Schoop. This could be a good thing for the Brewers, as the club certainly seems comfortable working with unorthodox plate approaches; for example, another recent Stearns era player with an unprecedented approach is Keon Broxton; additionally, another unprecedented role on the Brewers’ roster is Hernan Perez. It certainly cannot be said that Stearns is squeamish about working with relatively oddball player profiles, and that trait probably helps to explain his ability to quickly turn around the Brewers franchise by assembling a bunch of high-floor players with extremely prominent scouting flaws. The only question now is whether Stearns will pay $10 million for that privilege.

(2) Examining “low walk” players (Schoop and Salvador Perez). Working with the parameters defined above (1995-present survey), Baseball Prospectus CSV provided 29,397 players overall, which whittled down to 6,495 players with 300 (or more) plate appearances; when searching for players with at least 300 plate appearances in each of their age-24, 25, and 26 seasons, I constructed a batch of 246 players for analysis (thus the above caveats for sample bias). This is quite an interesting group of players, and as one might expect from the present biases, it’s a very productive group of players:

Within this group of players, the most striking and promising trait for comparison with Schoop was walk rate, which was a good indicator to separate comparisons and descriptions of development from big walk, big strike out, big home run players. For Schoop’s intriguing trait is generally huge power (and indeed, he consistently produced better-than-median power for this group) without corresponding high walk totals. Thus, it wouldn’t do much good to compare Schoop to Mike Trout, Adam Dunn, Prince Fielder, Edgardo Alfonzo, and other age-26 walk monsters; those players are doing something different at the plate to reach their prodigious power. So, I isolated a group of 37 low-walk total players that posted an additional 300 (or more) plate appearances during their age-27 campaign, in order to describe an age-26 to age-27 aging pattern for these players. This is quite a fun group!

Here, the top table shows the change in category performance from age-26 to age-27 season, while the bottom table shows the basic age-26 production for Wins Above Replacement Player, Plate Appearances, True Average, and Strike Outs / Walks / Home Runs.

By plate discipline (K / BB / HR), the most comparable player to Jonathan Schoop on this table was Salvador Perez. Perez was able to cut down the strike outs and tap into more power during his age-27 campaign, which provided a boost back to league average batting production for the catcher. Jedd Gyorko was the best of these players at age-27, but did so by completely retooling both walks and home run power; this is a demonstration that large scale plate discipline changes can occur on a season-over-season basis. What is striking is that even among players who are comparable to Schoop in terms of low walk rates, there are very few that strike out as much as Schoop, or hit for big power. Hence the lack of comparable players, save for Randal Grichuk.

Schoop has his work cut out for his age-27 season, as the middle infielder can retain value through his power if his strike outs and groundball / pop-up fluctuations do not impede that power. He’s a strange $10 million gamble for a front office, as the general ideal of age-27 seasons from players with 4.0+ WARP seasons on their resumes suggests bright futures rather than large question marks. Yet, there could be reason to suspect that Schoop may age differently than other prime age middle infielders, both due to his consistently better than average power and due to his extreme plate discipline. Nobody hits like Schoop, and in some sense this ought to result in a vote of confidence from GM Stearns when the opt-in is a one-year gamble. But the lean months of 2018 speak loudly, where the power was rendered empty by low batting averages and the lack of another offensive carrying tool when that one vanished. So here we are, fixated on a relatively marginal roster deal, looking for excellent production in the middle of the diamond.

Citation

Silver, Nate. 2015. The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t.. Penguin.

This post was updated at 5:24 PM on November 23, 2018 to correct the figures in the Grichuk / Schoop table.

Depending on which moves David Stearns and company make this offseason, and how and where Travis Shaw fits into the equation, the middle of the infield figures to be an area of special interest. Young and intriguing players abound, with still more waiting in the wings. Highlighted below are a few of the players most likely to impact up the middle next season.

Major Leagues

Orlando Arcia, SS

Arcia arrived in 2016 shouldering high expectations. He was Milwaukee’s best prospect since Ryan Braun came along in 2007 and changed the history of the franchise. Arcia produced a very nice age-22 season in 2017, finishing with 3.4 Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) and vaulting to the top of Milwaukee’s list of talents aged 25 and under, just ahead of Domingo Santana. Times have changed.

Arcia regressed to a .214 True Average (TAv) and 0.0 WARP in 2018, losing playing time to a handful of low-profile players and heading into the All-Star Break below the Mendoza line. After some time sorting out his swing in the minors, he roared back to life in the second half, clawing playing time back from the just-imported Jonathan Schoop and helping to lead the team through their playoff charge.

Arcia is still just 24 years old, is a ton of fun to watch on the infield, and has offered fans glimpses of his offensive potential over the last two years. He’ll be starting at shortstop next spring, perhaps with a somewhat shorter leash than he had at the start of 2018.

Travis Shaw, 2B

Shaw famously crossed over to the right side of the infield at the trade deadline, freeing up the hot corner for Mike Moustakas. He’s 6’4” and 230 pounds, but showed solid glove work and good instincts at the keystone, especially for someone learning on the fly. As lines between positions blur around the league, the big man could see more time at second base in 2019.

Shaw recorded 32 home runs in just under 500 at bats in 2018, marking his second year in a row reaching that milestone. He showed a nice approach at the plate, drawing 78 walks to offset his 108 strikeouts. He also topped the 4-WARP plateau for the second straight season, making him the kind of cheap, under-the-radar star that franchises like Milwaukee need in order to sustain success.

There may be more in the tank. Shaw is still in the midst of his physical prime, and recorded an average exit velocity in 2018 that was right in line with his career norms. Even so, his BABIP dipped 70 points from 2017. Some of this can be attributed to an uptick in fly balls. But if Shaw can add back a few points to his batting average, and perhaps decrease his reliance on pulling the ball in certain counts, 2019 could be the year that he breaks out as one of the better-rounded sluggers in the league.

Jonathan Schoop, 2B/SS

Schoop enjoyed a monster 2017 in Baltimore, accumulating 4.7 WARP and whacking 32 home runs while providing surprisingly good defense at second base. 2018 didn’t go as well, particularly after the trade that sent him to Milwaukee in exchange for Jonathan Villar (still hurts), Luis Ortiz, and Jean Carmona. That’s a bit of a haul, but Schoop was hot, and he’s been a special bat in the past. Milwaukee didn’t get that player; Schoop struggled to a .202/.246/.331 line in 46 games for the Brewers.

Schoop is controllable for 2019, though it’s less clear whether Milwaukee intends to offer him a contract. MLB Trade Rumors pegs his salary at $10.1 million in his final year of arbitration, a hefty sum for a small market team to spend on a player with plenty of question marks. Never a patient hitter, Schoop relies on the quality of his contact to generate value with the bat. Worryingly, his exit velocity, launch angle, hard hit percentage, and barrel percentage were all down in 2018, per Statcast; Schoop actually outperformed his Expected Weighted On-Base Average (xWOBA).

Losing three players for a few weeks of sub-replacement performance would hurt; so would paying $10 M for a player who could end up on the bench. 2019 will be a crucial year for Schoop, no matter whose jersey he ends up wearing.

Hernán Pérez, UTIL

Pérez, 28 next Opening Day, continued to slip a little after an exciting 2016 campaign. Even so, he provided average offense (.258 TAv) and credible defense at seven different positions. There’s value in that. Pérez didn’t manage quite as much power in 2018 as he did the previous two seasons, and his K/BB ratio is as unseemly as ever. He shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a starting player on a playoff-caliber team at this point, but he’s a fine option to have around in case of injury or early-season ineffectiveness. Projected at a reasonable $2.7 million next year by MLB Trade Rumors, he’s a good guy to have around the back end of the roster.

Tyler Saladino, UTIL

Saladino made some noise upon his initial promotion to Milwaukee, batting .298 in the first half of the season. But he was injured in May, missed all of June, and looked fairly awful in July and September. So in the end, he wound up with a pretty Saladino-esque line of .246/.302/.398. He’s 29 years old, and is projected to make $1.0 million next year by MLB Trade Rumors. He had a nice year in 2016, running up 1.4 WARP in half a season with the White Sox. That’s looking like the peak of his big league career at this point.

Minor Leagues

Mauricio Dubon, 2B/SS

The 2018 season could have gone very differently for Mauricio Dubon. The young infielder tore through his first 27 games in Triple-A, batting .343/.348/.574 with some nice doubles power and not too many whiffs. Then he tore through his ACL, and missed the rest of the season. It was a case of bad timing for Dubon and the Brewers; Orlando Arcia and Eric Sogard were struggling with the big club, and Dubon might have been the first man up. Instead, he’ll aim to occupy that position in 2019.

Dubon makes a lot of contact, and routinely runs strikeout rates in the low-to-mid-teens. He’s quick on the base paths, though not a tremendous threat to steal. And he’s teased some intriguing power at various points in his minor league career, though it tends to come and go. Dubon is a capable defender at shortstop, though he fits better at second base long-term. One knock on his game: He doesn’t walk much. Even so, the floor here is something like Hernán Pérez, perhaps with less ability to roam the outfield grass (though it wouldn’t surprise me to see him shagging some extra fly balls in spring training). As for the ceiling? Well…

Keston Hiura, 2B

Keston Hiura is looking more and more like a blue-chip prospect at the keystone. There’s little remaining doubt about his bat, though he’s oddly susceptible to strikeouts for someone who projects as a Grade 60 or better hitter (on a scale where 50 is average). As many of you know, Hiura combined for a .293 batting average, 13 home runs, and 34 doubles in his first full minor league season, reaching Double-A along the way. Were it not for a minor thumb injury suffered in July, those numbers all may have been better; Hiura’s performance dipped considerably in late July and August. Currently, he’s smacking the ball around to the tune of a .333 average and 30 RBIs in the Arizona Fall League. It’s been said that the man can hit.

Happily, he’s answering questions about his work in the dirt, too. Through last season and into the AFL, Hiura has looked like an average defender at second, maybe a tick below. That’s a great outcome for someone who’s missed so many reps. If Hiura continues to progress at all defensively, he should be able to handle himself just fine at the keystone.

Hiura looks like a threat to hit .300 with 20-25 home runs and a mess of doubles. Even now, he could probably muster a decent-enough slash line against big league pitching. He’ll be up soon; how long the Brewers wait on a promotion may ultimately depend on how well whoever’s making the majority of big league starts is performing.

Free Agents

There are a number of interesting names on the free agent market that could help shore up Milwaukee’s infield depth. That’s particularly true if the Brewers buy into Travis Shaw at second and cast around for upgrades at third. Mike Moustakas is a natural target there, as he performed ably for the Brewers down the stretch and quietly offers average skills on both sides of the ball. He’ll likely get a multi-year deal this time out, but the commitment shouldn’t be too costly, in either dollars or years.

Jed Lowrie, Marwin Gonzalez, Josh Harrison, and Neil Walker could all help at either second or third base. Any of those names could sign for between two and four years, with Gonzalez probably representing the best and most expensive option. But even Josh Donaldson may not be out of reach, depending on how leery teams are of his age and injury history.

Should the Brewers feel that Hiura will be ready to make an impact by mid-season, they could be tempted to simply bridge the gap with a cheap one-year deal. The most logical name, in that case, may be Ian Kinsler’s (Kinsler was also mentioned as a possible target by Andrew Salzman in a piece earlier this month.) Kinsler doesn’t offer too much with the bat anymore, but he still provides solid defense. He turns 37 next year, and will likely settle for a one-year deal.

A quick recap on roster rules: the non-tender deadline this offseason is November 30. By that date, teams have to offer a contract to all players on the 40-man roster with fewer than six years of service time. If the team does not offer a contract to a player, then he becomes a free agent. Because Jonathan Schoop has 5.027 years of Major League service time and has not signed any extension, the Brewers have until November 30 to decide if they want to retain him for next season.

Jonathon Schoop is the greatest young power hitting second baseman of all time. There’s a lot to unpack there, but if we wanted to measure by players twenty-six and under who have played at least fifty percent of their games at second base, he’s hit the most home runs. However, impressive raw home run totals don’t necessarily mean a player is a star; even with that fun fact to his name, Schoop’s bat completely fell apart in 2018 after showing so much promise in 2017.

As a twenty-five year old second basemen in 2017, Schoop had a .280 True Average (TAv) and produced 37.6 Value Over Replacement Player (VORP), which estimates the number of runs Schoop produced beyond a freely available minor league replacement. PECOTA pegged him for a regression with .256 TAv and 15.8 VORP, yet his numbers sunk lower. Schoop’s plate discipline remained remarkably similar. His swing rate rose four percentage points to 56.8 percent, while his contact rate (71.4) and swinging strike rate (28.6) remained virtually unchanged from 2017, so his strikeout percentage only rose from twenty-one percent to twenty-three percent. The biggest difference is that his walk rate sunk from 5.2 percent to 3.8 percent, both of which are below average. Schoop’s walk rate would have placed him in the bottom five of all qualified hitters if he’d had enough at bats.

As I noted back in August, there was no smoking gun on Schoop’s poor performance at the plate, he just wasn’t hitting the ball as well. From that article’s publication date on August 13^th, Statcast numbers only slightly recovered. Even with some improvement his barrel percentage, exit velocity, launch angle, and hard hit percentage all were career lows. His expected WOBA placed in the bottom 1 percent of all hitters.

The Brewers traded for a player they probably saw as a buy low candidate. If they elect to offer Schoop arbitration, it likely means that they see something in his 2018 performance that they believe can be corrected to get him back to his 2017 numbers.

One projection for Schoop’s potential arbitration award places him at a $10.1M salary in 2019, which would be 3^rd on the team in salary, just above Christian Yelich, in case you needed another reminder about how great that contract is for the Brewers. The only other potential second basemen on the 40-man roster, presuming that Shaw is back at third base on Opening Day, are Tyler Saladino, Hernan Perez and Mauricio Dubon. None of these players are projected as a starting caliber player on a contending team.] in 2019.

The most intriguing internal option to replace Schoop would be Keston Hiura. Our mother site’s midseason top 50 prospects list had Hiura at number five and claimed that Hiura was “basically major-league ready” back when it was posted in mid-July. If the team agrees with the assessment, then he could be the starting at second by May 1, with service time manipulation likely preventing him from starting the season with the big-league club. While he’s considered a bat-first prospect, if the Brewers could shift and game plan their way into making Travis Shaw league average at second, fans shouldn’t be too worried about Hiura.

The Brewers could also look at potential free agents who could sign a one-year deal and provide flexibility in case the team wants to wait on Hiura (or if he proves not to be ready). Ian Kinsler had a terrible post-trade run with the Red Sox capped with baserunning and fielding blunders in Game 3 of the World Series. However, he provided above average defense according to Fielding Runs Above Average (FRAA) (even if it wasn’t quite Gold Glove worthy). If you squint, his offense wasn’t terrible in 2018! From his nadir on May 28 through his trade to Boston on July 30, he slashed .286/.349/.518, which is above his career line of .271/.339/.443. One wouldn’t expect a two-month hot streak to be his baseline production going forward, but it does show he has some life left in his bat, and could serve a useful role as a bridge to Hiura.

The Brewers are lucky to be in the position where they don’t need to double down on the Schoop trade. It would hurt the front office’s external perception to write off the acquisition as a total loss after three months of poor production, but I don’t believe that’s going to factor into their calculation. Milwaukee is always going to operate on a limited budget, but if the team decides its best choices are Schoop and Hiura, two different budget issues arise. Is the team willing to keep Schoop at more than $10 M when there’s a non-zero chance he’s not worth a roster spot? If Hiura shines in spring training and proves he’s the best player for the team, are they willing to ignore service time considerations and have him start the season with the team? If not, who would cover the gap of at least two weeks? Milwaukee’s front office has a few weeks to make these decisions, but whichever direction they turn will shed light on their internal evaluations of the players in question.

While the series is over and done with and the team should be looking forward and planning for next season, there was one decision I wanted to revisit from Game Seven. Before the game, the pitcher usage had been fully mapped out, with contingencies built in based on what actually occurred once the game started. Thus, lifting Jhoulys Chacin for a pinch hitter in the bottom of the 2^nd inning with two outs and runners on second and third was not a surprise, nor is it a decision I feel qualified questioning. However, I think using Jonathan Schoop as the pinch hitter in that specific spot was a legitimate tactical error which contributed to the Game Seven loss.

Leverage Index is a stat which quantifies the importance of a situation in a game, where the average is 1.0 and the higher the number, the higher leverage the situation. That plate appearance had a leverage score of 1.86, making it the highest leverage plate appearance in the game for Milwaukee, yet Jonathan Schoop was the batter at the plate.

Up to that point, Schoop was 0-for-7 in the playoffs, including two pinch hitting appearances. Schoop’s performance since coming to Milwaukee had no hidden indicators that he was good selection for this spot. Other than running into a few balls, Schoop hadn’t hit in three months and spent October swinging at everything. Using Schoop didn’t even get Milwaukee the platoon advantage, so there was no old-school baseball rationale either.

Walker Buehler attacked Schoop with sinkers. He threw only nine sinkers in the game, and four were in this at-bat. Schoop only swung at two of the pitches, both of which were arguably balls, but he still grounded out the end the threat.

Domingo Santana would have been a better choice for the situation. Since his recall on September 1, Santana slashed .409 batting average /.458 on-base percentage /.909 slugging percentage in pinch hitting appearances during the regular season, and added another two hits and two walks in ten playoff pinch hit opportunities. Pinch hitting is an acquired skill and Santana had at least shown some knack for it in the past six weeks. He did get a pinch-hitting appearance with one out in the fifth inning, but the leverage index on that at bat was .97, almost exactly half of Schoop’s plate appearance.

With the aggressive use of the pitching staff, it’s slightly baffling as to why they held back their best pinch hitter and Curtis Granderson in favor of Schoop. None of them played in the field, so no defensive considerations seemed to play into the decisions, so it should have purely been the best hitter in that spot. You cannot save a better hitter for a higher leverage situation which may never come, and it didn’t in Game 7.

Jeremy Jeffress had a poor postseason, as I’ve unfortunately noted in the past two weeks. He allowed runs in three of his eight appearances and only had one game where he didn’t allow at least two baserunners. On Saturday entered the game in the 6^th inning with a runner on first and wound up giving up a backbreaking home run to Yasiel Puig which shot the Dodgers’ win expectancy up to ninety-one percent. In Jeffress’ 1 and 1/3 innings, he threw twenty pitches, none of which were splitters. It was only his third game this season where he threw at least twenty pitches and no splitters. All of those outings have occurred since September 10^th.

Starting in September, Jeffress drastically reduced his splitter usage. For the season, batters hit .209 against the pitch with only a .045 isolated slugging percentage, making it one of his most effective pitches. The splitter also had a seventeen percent whiff rate, on par with Jeffress’s curveball. However, those whiffs almost completely disappeared in September and October, with only one swing and miss on eighteen total splitters.

While it probably doesn’t fully explain Jeffress’s struggles, his pitch mix lost its balance when he stopped throwing the splitter and he started struggling. If it was a matter of feel, he has the whole offseason to regain confidence in the pitch or develop another weapon to induce swings and misses, because his results took a step back in October.

Christian Yelich had a tough postseason, but his struggles shouldn’t be a cause for concern for Brewers fans. First, the approach pitchers took against Yelich is not sustainable for a full season, unless they’re prepared to walk him at a rate comparable to Barry Bonds. Here’s the zone profile for Yelich for all of 2018:

Here’s Yelich’s zone profile during the playoffs:

While there was some effort to stick with the general plan to pitch him low and away, there’s a lot of blue in the strike zone and a lot of red bordering it. Pitchers spent three weeks staying away from Yelich, which makes sense after his second half of the season. However, pitchers will have to throw him more strikes in 2019. Yelich also maintained his plate discipline during the barrage of balls. He cut down on his swings on non-fastballs and also swung and missed less on breaking and offspeed pitches, while staying around his seasonal fastball whiff rate. By focusing on pitches in the zone, Yelich will lure pitchers back into throwing more strikes and he should pick up at the start of next season where he left off on October 1^st.

Unfortunately, there’s no new series to preview this week for the Brewers. While the result fell short of what fans were hoping for, it’s important to remember the ride to Game Seven and not focus on the NLCS loss itself. This was a fun team to follow all season and is poised to repeat its performance next season while also changing expectations on what a pitching staff should be in terms of usage and the best fits of skills in each role. The organization works as one unit and made an experiment like Travis Shaw: Major League Baseball Second Basement evolve from a sarcastic joke to a legitimate option by the end of the season. Remember the fun in getting to this point and start getting excited about what team will be put together this offseason.

P.S. They’re still not trading for/signing an ace.

Milwaukee’s acquisition of Jonathan Schoop was met with hesitation in some quarters. While twenty-six year olds coming off near five win seasons aren’t regularly available for anything less than a princely sum, there are offensive and defensive issues that make the trade difficult to process. Compounding matters is that Schoop has struggled since he arrived in Milwaukee. What’s happened in 2018 and can he get back to where he was in 2017?

Schoop has never drawn many walks. Over his career, he has a 3.6 percent walk rate compared with the MLB average of 8.1 percent. This year, it’s fallen by almost half from five percent to three percent. He walked for the first time as a Brewer during Sunday’s game. Unsurprisingly, Schoop has increased his swing rate. Schoop ranks eighth in MLB in swing rate among players who have seen at least 500 pitches. Out of those eight players, he has the seventh lowest True Average (TAv).

While it’d be unfair to imply that Schoop’s swing rate is the sole determiner of his offensive success, it is notable that his best full-time season came when he cut down on his swings. Though he’s swung more, his contact rate, both in and out of the zone, and swinging strike rate have remained virtually the same, so there has to be something that’s changed in his batted ball profile to explain why he’s been less successful in 2018.

Schoop’s ground ball rate is up three percentage points, his infield fly rate has risen by almost one third, and his line drive percentage has dropped about three percentage points. While none of those rates are positive trends, nothing there is so drastic as to explain what’s happened.

Looking at Statcast, Schoop is not hitting the ball as well and as hard.

His exit velocity has decreased by 1.5 mph and his launch angle has dropped almost two degrees. His expected batting average is in the bottom eight percent and his expected wOBA is in the bottom two percent of the league. He’s actually outperforming both numbers at the moment, which indicates that his numbers should actually regress from their current depths.

Compared with 2017, Schoop is seeing fewer fastballs, and he’s seen barely fifty percent of the hard stuff since July 1. He performed well against almost every pitch last year, but is struggling against everything but sinkers and cutters in 2018. While those BABIPs look like they’re ripe for regression, Schoop is making such bad contact that a bounce back isn’t automatic.

There currently isn’t much to love in Schoop’s profile. Other than his performance against fourseam fastballs, which has dramatically fallen off, there’s no smoking gun or easily correctable flaw. It’s just a bad approach getting a little bit worse, which is producing much worse results. Schoop needs to make better contact, which leads to identifying pitches he can drive. If the team saw something they can fix, then there’s hope, but this may take time.

Jordan Lyles made his first appearance as a Milwaukee Brewer on Friday night in relief of Freddy Peralta. He pitched 2.3 innings and allowed three runs on three hits, with a a walk and three strikeouts. Prior to the acquisition, Lyles was not having a great season. In twenty four appearances, including eight starts, he had a 5.71 Deserved Run Average (DRA), which would have been his third best DRA in his eight MLB seasons.

Coming into 2018, Lyles generally threw his fourseam fastball and sinker with the same frequency. However, through May, which encompassed five weeks in the bullpen as well as a month in the rotation, he deemphasized the sinker, even throwing multiple outings in which he did not utilize the pitch. However, in his first game with Milwaukee, Lyles threw twelve fourseamers as well as twelve sinkers. He combined that approach with almost thirty-three percent curveballs.

By using his fourseam fastball less, Lyles is focusing on his two best pitches by results, as batters have not been able to make great contact with either the sinker or curve, and they also swing and miss against those two frequently. The sinker is a pitch he’s looking to put in and low on his arm side, to both left and right handed hitters, whereas the curveball breaks down and away and is his to go pitch when there are two strikes. One interesting trend to note is that Lyles has thrown the sinker with greater frequency to left handed hitters over the course of the season, and even with his increased sinker focus on Friday, he didn’t throw a single inker to a right handed hitter.

While the overall results on Friday were probably not what the team was hoping for, partially thanks to two curveballs that probably didn’t break as much as Lyles would have liked, this new approach makes Lyles an interesting addition to the team. As Matt Albers and Joakim Soria were added to the disabled list last week, the team needs more effective relievers. If Lyles can go multiple innings, he will be a valuable addition for a team whose starters do not regularly go deep into games. To be clear, Lyles has never really had sustained success at the MLB level before, but there’s a chance the team has unlocked something here.

The Brewers will play only five games this week, but they are against the teams immediately above and below them in the Central Division, and they’re all on the road. The Brewers have lost all four games they’ve played at Wrigley Field this year and the Cubs have the second best home record in the National League. While their pitching has been mediocre, Cubs hitters are third in MLB in TAv. The Cardinals have crawled back into the playoff picture with a 9-2 record in August. They are 16-9 overall since Mike Matheny was fired, though their recent five game winning streak has come against two of the four worst teams in MLB.

The fact is that Jonathan Schoop has a lot of problems, and even if those specific problems don’t materialize, he’s an extremely poor fit in the current Brewers’ lineup. Let’s start with the Baseball Prospectus Annual 2017 commentary on Schoop:

“Of the 140-plus seasons that make up baseball history, there have been only 16 in which a player had at least 60 extra-base hits but an OBP south of .300. The thing has only been done 21 total times. Yet, four players did it in 2016 alone. Schoop was among them. His extreme impatience at the plate actually helped hold down his previously problematic strikeout rate, but it still put a ceiling on his offensive value. It’s hard to say how viable his hitting profile is. He relies on power for value, but doesn’t hit the ball that hard (171st of 213 qualifiers in average exit velocity). He doesn’t pull the ball or hit it in the air at an exceptional rate. Any time now, he could go from a hair above average for a second baseman to below average for just about anyone.”

What we have here is a player who doesn’t walk and doesn’t hit the ball hard. He has a knack for hitting home runs for the moment, but this profile strikes me as one that pitchers will figure out pretty quickly, and that, along with simple regression, is probably why his OBP tanked from .338 last season, to .273 this season. .273 is absurdly low even for Schoop, but it’s also closer to his career norm than .338.

 Some might argue that even a pre-2017 version of Schoop, typically a one WARP player, would be an improvement over what the Brewers were getting offensively at shortstop and at the keystone, but that’s not necessarily the case. For one thing, the Brewers could use a right-handed bat. Between Yelich, Shaw, Thames, and Moustakas, the majority of offensive pop on the team comes from the left side. Schoop is, technically, a right-handed bat, but he happens to have odd reverse platoon splits both this season, and over the course of his career.

Schoop 2018:
V. LHP – .652

V. RHP – .706

Schoop Career:
V. LHP – .697 OPS

V. RHP – .758 OPS

This means that he can’t actually serve as a platoon partner for Travis Shaw at second base, and while you can theoretically play him at shortstop, that defensive alignment is terrifying. Schoop isn’t a shortstop, and the dropoff defensively from Arcia to a career second baseman is staggering. If you were looking for someone to serve as the short side of a platoon with Shaw, you already had this guy:

Villar 2018

V. LHP – .956

V. RHP – .666

Villar Career

V.LHP – .767 OPS

V. RHP – .701 OPS

Theoretically he could be an upgrade for Arcia as Arcia’s offense has been absolutely putrid this season. The Brewer pitching staff is flyball-heavy, and shifting reduces the need for fielders with good range. That is all quite possibly true. It’s also the case that against left-handed pitching, Hernan Perez is almost certainly a superior option both offensively and defensively, as he has posted an .832 OPS against lefties this season, and unlike Schoop, has played some shortstop recently and competently.

The only place he theoretically fits into the lineup is at shortstop against right-handed pitching, but the lineup doesn’t really need help against righties, and plugging that square peg into this round hole just to get a minor same side platoon offensive boost while sacrificing huge amounts of defense, is a whole lot of bother with very little benefit.

Hopefully Schoop turns it around as he seems like a nice enough player and it’s no fun to see anyone on the team struggle to this extent, but Schoop has a weird, easily defeatable skillset and doesn’t fit neatly on the current team. They still could use a right-handed bat, and if one happens to pass through on waivers, it could be a short stay for Schoop.