In the cases of both Woodruff and Burnes, the answer is quick and easy, “no” and “no.” Neither pitcher has the combination of raw stuff, command of that stuff, and mechanical execution that renders those 70 or 80 Overall Future Potential (OFP) grades (since OFP operates on a scale of 20 to 80, the top grade is obvious ace territory, and the 70 grade usually runs a “1/2 pitcher” description that makes that grade worth including in “ace” territory). Of course, in the case of Woodruff and Burnes, both pitchers were not even listed as Top 5 arms within the Brewers system by Baseball Prospectus entering 2017. The duo fell behind Top 10 rankers…

• LHP Josh Hader (55-60 OFP, #3 SP or #4 SP / high leverage relief)
• RHP Luis Ortiz (50-60 OFP, #3/#4 SP)
• RHP Cody Ponce (45-50 OFP, average starter / late inning relief or #4/#5 SP or solid relief)

…as well as “Others of Note” RHP Devin Williams (“classic projectable righty”) and RHP Marcos Diplan (“probably future relief” but has “polish and command”). In fact, it is arguable that even with the top five arms in the system, the Brewers do not have an ace.

There is certainly an argument to be made that scouting is an imperfect science, and that perhaps the BP scouting team did not properly price Woodruff’s secondary stuff progression in Class-AA Biloxi, or that they underrated Burnes’s draft day pedigree and almost immediate professional ball impact. Yet, since the BP team bases their scouting approach upon an on-the-ground team that values actual looks, and arguably has more aggressively realistic future prospect grades than other outlets, it is difficult to see the exclusion of either Woodruff or Burnes from the 2017 Top 10 (and “Others of Note”) lists as mistakes. Similarly, accurate “useful middle to back rotation” scouting profiles might indeed “rank” lower than 15th in this Brewers system, but (more importantly) that ranking is not an insult to either player because useful MLB player should never be viewed as a slight on a prospect report.

To complicate matters, even the “accurate” ace grades do not always work out. Perhaps the best current case for this is RHP Lucas Giolito, who ranked atop the White Sox system in 2015 and landed the coveted 70 / 80 OFP (elite starting pitcher or #1/#2 starting pitcher). Giolito was a projected “ace” for many reasons:

“fastball easily works 93-97; can reach back for more; big arm-side run in lower band (93-95); explosive offering; can already throw to all four quadrants; curve shows deep two-plane break; power pitch; adept at replicating arm slot and disguise to fastball; high confidence in offering; will use at any point in the count; commands to both sides of the plate; already plus to better; elite potential; flashes feel for change; turns over with a loose wrist; displays fade with late drop; early makings of strong pitchability.”

Obviously, fans are inclined to take the good without the bad, and running with that Giolito grade also required the downsides: “Lot of body to control; can drift during landing and open early; diminishes fastball command at times; still in the early stages of building stamina; some effort in delivery wears him down; stuff can get loose and sloppy deeper into outings; velocity trails off third time through; will wrap wrist when delivering curve from time to time; change has gap to close to reach on-paper potential; loses action when throws too hard; doesn’t presently command pitch well; leaves up in zone due to early release.” Giolito was the ace in 2015, but even though he’s since dropped in rankings, the new Giolito remains a rarity in a farm system (a 60 OFP, #3 starter).

This exercise could go on and on. As far as 70 OFP aces go, recently there’s Zack Wheeler, Dylan Bundy, Taijuan Walker, Jonathan Gray, and Alex Reyes to consider. These pitchers have had their ups and for the most part remain coveted arms for nearly an organization insofar as few rotations would reject these contributors. But even with great performers like Michael Fulmer, the equation is tough; Fulmer was a 55 OFP with questions about injury and consistency that could potentially impede a #2 type starter. There is no exact science to aces, and picking one is hardly even an artform.

Even Yovani Gallardo, “an outstanding pitching prospect,” missed the ace label and was hit with “#2 and occasional All-Star” as OFP. Should 20.3 WARP signify a #2 arm, that designation would probably serve Burnes, Hader, and Woodruff quite well (and I gather Gallardo’s career earnings justify that, as well).

My standby comment to respond to Burnes / Hader / Woodruff ace talk, or the Brewers system in general, is to comment “aces do not exist.” This is not a throwaway comment, either. Aces do not exist, in the sense that from a scouting profile the grade is so rare as to basically be obsolete within the minor leagues; in the sense of performance, it is categorically true that few pitchers can be great, especially consistently so. The fun with Brew Crew Ball leader and BPMilwaukee Prospect Editor Kyle Lesniewski’s #2016BrewersAce coverage of RHP Junior Guerra is that it hit on something quite central to baseball: even in the most unorthodox historical package, Guerra emerged to dominate batters in 2016. Guerra prevented 22 runs in 2016, a feat hardly matched by a dozen arms in the NL; his splitter was one of the most effective of all time in terms of Brooks Baseball tracking, meaning that Guerra had the stuff to back up the moniker. It was both immensely fun and funny for Guerra to serve as ace, funny in the sense that the Brewers missed front rotation potential in several drafts, but landed it in the form of an age-31 rookie claimed off waivers.

In the sense that Guerra was an ace, I suspect many Brewers fans believe Burnes or Woodruff or Hader could be an ace. This is an interesting problem to discuss because it runs deep beyond semantics. It is not merely semantics to say that a “scouting ace” and a “statistical ace” are different; the difference could land the Brewers a pennant. The trouble with this determination is that it is no easier to define the dominance of a statistical ace. For example, can an ace be one-off? Could an ace have a one-and-hopefully-not-done season, perhaps like Guerra’s 2016 campaign, or does an ace require multiple (consecutive, even!) years of success in order to be termed “an ace”? But in this sense, someone like Kyle Lohse becomes an ace, which is certainly not how many fans (especially not Brewers fans) use the term; but Lohse was a fantastic pitcher from 2011-2014, posting four consecutive better than average runs prevented campaigns.

One might call this the classic, “Is Yovani Gallardo an ace?” question. Obviously this stuff is more than semantics, because we still are inclined to talk about it in 2017. It matters to fans to say, while discussing Burnes or Hader or Woodruff, someone like Gallardo might not be an ace but was a very, very good pitcher, perhaps the next level immediately behind ace (a true #2 starter, perhaps). The table above is obviously just one captured moment in time, as it excludes 2009 and 2010 campaigns in which Gallardo was phenomenal (2.98 and 3.49 Deserved Runs Average (DRA) respectively, with 185+ IP both years) and Lohse was in transition and recovering from injuries. In either case, perhaps neither Lohse nor Gallardo are “aces” in the aspirational sense of the term, but both pitchers were among the top Senior Circuit starters for an extended period of time.

Data:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FeW8mCqDqzf6e6OGlq4SwP0tmIYlT2cpcG288mLQCDw/edit?usp=sharing

But, it’s worth chasing “aces,” and certainly a definition as such. I dove into my runs prevented data, kept annually from 2009-2011 at Sportsbubbler and Bernie’s Crew (unfortunately 2009-2010 are lost), 2012-2015 at Disciples of Uecker, and 2016 personally (officially unpublished). Analyzing a set of 845 individual pitching seasons reveals quite stunning variance that underscores the difficulty of defining acehood.

The big data are not thrilling; a 16 runs prevented season does not strike the “acehood” sense quite like Clayton Kershaw or Zack Greinke when they reach 50 runs prevented in a season. Yet, isolating those 85 pitching seasons above the 16 runs prevented threshold is quite interesting. Indeed, Junior Guerra was an ace in 2016, and by quite a bit (22 runs prevented being significantly better than 16); Gallardo and Lohse are definitely aces; so was Ian Kennedy, Jair Jurrjens, Dan Straily, Doug Fister, Kris Medlen, Wade Miley, Jhoulys Chacin, Henderson Alvarez, and of course Bronson Arroyo. What is striking about this list is the lack of regulars; only 20 pitchers in the 2011-2016 National League reached 16 runs prevented in two (or more) seasons:

This, if anything, should underscore the rarity and strangeness of acehood. Madison Bumgarner has reached 16 runs prevented exactly twice, and in this definition would be exactly as much an ace as Tanner Roark. What’s intriguing about this argument is that by constructing the counterpoint that there is more to being an ace than preventing runs, such as pitching consistently throughout multiple seasons, or consistently serving as a workhorse, acehood once again becomes something that is quite murky and ill-defined. In order to argue that Tanner Roark is not an ace but Madison Bumgarner is, one is required to shift slightly away from peak performance, and search for criteria that will ultimately dissolve the definition of an ace.

Incidentially, only 20 starters in the 2011-2016 NL worked at least 200 innings more than once, although the list diverges quite a bit from the 20 runs prevented aces above. Here, again, Yovani Gallardo answers that ace question with years of consistency:

Combining innings pitched and runs prevented, one can truly see the amount of variance that is inherent in pitching performance, which should be the last nail in the coffin of “acehood” and thus (hopefully) relieve the pressure on the Brewers to develop “aces.”

For this aspect of analysis, I constructed a times series involving every 2011-2016 NL pitcher who appeared during consecutive seasons in the rotational rankings (excluding “emergency starters,” who by definition only worked one start). If you’ve ever imagined that pitching performance varies a bunch on a seasonal basis…indeed it does! When faced with the criterion of working in at least two consecutive seasons from 2011-2016, 216 NL starting pitchers produced 724 pitching seasons, and their performances varied wildly on an annual basis. On a yearly basis, each pitcher might be expected to add or subtract 57 innings and add or subtract 12 runs prevented. To put this in perspective, given that 10 runs is typically understood to be worth “One Win” to an MLB club, each of these pitchers might be expected to either add or substract at least one win on average when they worked in consecutive years. 57 innings is a season’s work by a replacement starter, further demonstrating the importance of understanding variance inherent in starting pitching.

One might expect some outliers to exist, but once again, searching for “consistent” pitchers (pitchers who varied less than the average starter during consecutive seasons) piles doubt on a clear definition of “acehood.” Searching for pitchers with variance reasonably close to the +/- 12 Runs Prevented and +/- 57.0 IP marks reveals fourteen pitchers that started during consecutive years from 2011-2016 while doing so with consistent performance:

[Really, it’s even worth arguing whether Bumgarner, Gio Gonzalez, Mike Leake, or even Tom Koehler and Jon Niese should appear on this list, because 14-to-16 runs prevented is notably higher than 12 runs prevented.]

Once again, the usual suspects are near some quite unusual arms in terms of “ace” discussions. Few would classify Jon Niese or Tom Koehler an ace; when Marco Estrada was traded to the Blue Jays, Brewers fans did not readily call him an ace when they waved goodbye (would one be happy if Burnes or Woodruff or Hader produced Estrada’s career?). However, this list should show the value of the “middle rotation” or #4/#5 scouting designation, as certainly there is room in MLB for arms like Niese, Koehler, and Estrada. Perhaps this list even casts some light on the Arizona Diamondbacks trade for Shelby Miller; maybe a pitching strapped club was not entirely shortsighted when they traded for a 15 runs prevented starter with extremely low variance between seasons (alternately, perhaps they should have looked into the other shoe dropping). Each of these points demonstrates why one should not be concerned with the ranking of the Brewers’ young prospect pitchers, and instead simply await the variance they will produce and hope for the best convergence of variance-cycles during contending seasons.

Aces do not exist. Aces do not exist in terms of scouting, where pitchers can receive ace designation as prospect and “back up” in terms of stuff, face injuries, or even hit banal developmental hurdles. Aces do not exist in terms of runs prevented, where very few arms are able to prevent runs or even work high innings pitched totals in multiple years. Finally, aces do not exist in terms of consistency, for very few National League starters demonstrated the ability to work consecutive seasons with better than average variance between 2011-2016, and many of the arms that are consistent are not “elite” performers that invoke the ideal ace. None of this should be surprising, for pitching is truly difficult, perhaps the most difficult mechanical exercise in all professional sports. This is the logical and empirical conclusion, which should drive a moral conclusion opposed to hanging “ace” tags on pitchers like Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, or Josh Hader. Each of these arms might meet one of the markers used in this article to draw ace-like comparisons at the MLB level, but the overwhelming odds are they don’t; but that alone should not be construed as a bad outcome, for there are bountiful career options without the designation of “ace.”

Data:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FeW8mCqDqzf6e6OGlq4SwP0tmIYlT2cpcG288mLQCDw/edit?usp=sharing

Photo Credit: Caylor Arnold, USAToday Sports Images

Platoon splits have always existed, and teams have always tried to exploit them. In the epoch of sabermetrics, though, the sport has gained a greater understanding of the mechanisms underneath splits. One of the larger things we’ve seen is that (most) all pitchers will fare better against same-handed batters. This means that a club wants its righties to face righties and its lefties to face lefties — in other words, it wants to have the platoon advantage. Some teams succeed in this quest; others fall short. As of late, the Brewers have succeeded.

In 2015, the average major-league team had the platoon advantage for 46 percent of its batters faced, per B-R. Milwaukee had the advantage 53 percent of the time, the highest rate in baseball. This continued a trend for the Brew Crew: In 2014, they also led the majors; in 2013, they ranked third; and in 2012, they ranked sixth. (Disregard the fact that they finished 22nd in 2011, as that goes against the narrative.) For some time now, Brewers pitchers have had a leg up on the competition.

Some of this stems from the nature of the pitching staff, which tends to skew right-handed. Teams without many southpaws will have the platoon advantage more often:

On the bottom left of the graph (which shows teams from 2015), we see the Chris Sale/Jose Quintana/Carlos Rodon-led Chicago White Sox, who ran out a righty for only 41.9 percent of opposing plate appearances. Since most batters are righties, this meant they largely lose out on the platoon advantage. By contrast, batters faced a right-handed Milwaukee pitcher 91.0 percent of the time, the third-highest rate in baseball. Having more righties on your staff means you’ll perform better against righty-heavy squads — which is to say most of them — and means you’ll have the platoon advantage pretty frequently.

But the lack of lefties on the Brewers doesn’t account for everything. The team’s righties also tend to face right-handed adversaries. Last season, the average right-handed pitcher on the Brewers saw a same-handed batter 54.2 percent of the time. That’s notably higher than the MLB average of 52.6 percent. And it wasn’t just one pitcher, either — several of the big names got in on the action:

Nelson and Fiers each beat the average by a significant margin, while Garza, Lohse, and Jungmann hung right around it. Only Peralta had to deal with a lot of lefties, and even then he wasn’t in too bad of a situation. They also received some success from their notable southpaws in this area — Will Smith pitched to 43.9 percent lefties and Neal Cotts did so 40.5 percent of the time, compared to a major-league average of 29.8 percent for left-handed pitchers. In the end, it’s not surprising that Milwaukee had the platoon advantage so often.

Why do these pitchers get to take on (relatively) easy competition? For most of them, it’s because they’ve played pretty indiscriminately to this point. Only Nelson and Peralta have significant platoon splits. Garza and Fiers have no career platoon splits; for the most part, neither does Jungmann, although his is an odd case. While Lohse has something of a weakness against lefties (.283 multi-year TAv, compared to .263 for righties), it’s not too significant. In 2015, the team’s pitching sucked — but it sucked evenly, against righties and lefties. Teams haven’t had an incentive to stack their lineups with opposite-handed hitters, so they haven’t.

So can the Brewers keep this up? I certainly don’t see why they wouldn’t. According to PECOTA, right-handed pitchers will consume 87.8 percent of their 2016 innings, which would again rank among the major-league leaders. And while they won’t have Fiers around anymore, Chase Anderson (career righty rate of 54.2 percent) should fill in for him nicely. With all of the younger arms throwing from the right — only Sean Nolin comes to mind as a developing lefty — this team should continue to rely on right-handers, and take the platoon advantage, for 2016 and beyond.

On Monday, the Brewers will kick off the season against the Giants. Wily Peralta will take the mound versus Madison Bumgarner, and we’ll focus more on home runs and strikeouts than on silly peripheral statistics. Still, things such as the platoon advantage matter — the little upgrades can separate the bad teams from the good, and the good from the great. Although the 2016 Brewers will most likely fall into the former group, they should sustain their excellence in this esoteric regard.

This system lasted just four years before it was replaced with something similar to the system in place today, in which any compensation or forfeitures come in the form of amateur draft picks, not players. By the 1985 Collective Bargaining Agreement, owners reverted to an old system of draft-pick compensation, the old Elias Type A/B/C system, which lasted until the current qualifying offer system was put in place in during the 2012 offseason.

This system is sold as another method meant to help redistribute talent to the small market franchises, much like revenue sharing, the luxury tax, and the various caps on spending in the international and draft markets. But what actually happens? As I’ve been asking with revenue sharing and small-market rhetoric this entire offseason, who is actually helped by this system?

Let’s take a look at the Brewers and their history with draft compensation. First, the picks they’ve received (all data from Baseball-Reference):

It’s an extremely underwhemling group. Kelly Wunsch went on to finish fifth in Rookie of the Year voting in 2000 with the White Sox after leading the American League in games out of the bullpen; Odorizzi was a key piece of the Zack Greinke trade; Coulter or Haniger could still reach the majors. But largely, this is bust city, and that’s just how things go with draft picks coming in the 20-50 range. Only one of these players, Todd Dunn, has even made the Brewers, and he put in 130 plate appearances of exactly replacement-level performance between 1996 and 1997.

The CC Sabathia situation in particular shows how much of a crapshoot this system can be for teams losing free agents. Because Mark Teixeira ranked first among all free agents after the 2008 season, when the Yankees signed both Teixeira and Sabathia, the Brewers received pick number 73 from the Yankees and the Angels instead received New York’s first-round slot, number 25 overall, where they drafted Mike Trout. The Brewers weren’t the only ones screwed by the Yankees’ spending spree — the Blue Jays wound up receiving only pick number 104 (third round) from the Yankees after they plucked A.J. Burnett from Toronto’s rotation, as he ranked behind both Teixeira and Sabathia in the Elias rankings.

Meanwhile, the Brewers have only dared to dip into the free agent compensation market four times, listed here:

Mixed results. Slaton was a key relief piece on the American League Champion 1982 squad and was well liked after his previous stint in Milwaukee. Howell struggled throughout his Brewers career, hitting just .253/.307/.377 (95 OPS+) over four seasons. Parker had his one All-Star season before the Brewers traded him for Dante Bichette, who was flipped for Kevin Reimer the next season. Reimer promptly tanked, hitting .249/.303/.394 (87 OPS+) after producing a 113 OPS+ or better in each off the previous three seasons in what turned out to be a disaster of a deal. And finally, there’s Lohse, who was a solid part of the rotation in 2013 and through the Brewers’ attempt at contention in 2014, but completely lost his game in 2015.

Can we really say this compensation system is helping the Brewers? They have received next to nothing in return for their free agents, barring a major surge from Clint Coulter over the next few years. The Sabathia situation was a particular disaster, as part of the Brewers’ plan in dealing Michael Brantley and Matt LaPorta to get Sabathia was that they would be receiving a first-round draft pick when he left, all to see that go up in smoke because the Yankees could afford to sign both of the top free agents in the league.

But I think the more revealing problem here is how draft-pick compensation actually works to price teams like the Brewers out of the midsection of the free-agent market. We already know teams like the Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers are going to sign the top free agents, aside from anomalies like Arizona’s signing of Zack Greinke this offseason. But by forcing teams to give up a high draft pick to sign mid-level free agents like a Kyle Lohse (or this year, a Dexter Fowler) it actively discourages teams like the Brewers from pursing these players. And even if, in many cases, these players wouldn’t have pushed the Brewers over the top, having the option of signing them to mid-level, long-term deals would have allowed the Brewers another option to build their core besides simply waiting and hoping for draft picks to hit.

So in reality, instead of making life easy for the Brewers by ensuring they get something in return for their prized assets, the compensation system is making it harder for the Brewers to acquire said assets in the first place. And since the draft pick penalties don’t hit teams like the Yankees nearly as hard, they have no problem taking the hit of giving up a draft pick, allowing them to re-enter that market again and again with progressively lesser penalties every time.

The Brewers clearly liked Kyle Lohse back in 2013; they were interested in him all offseason and may have made an attempt to sign him even without his market tanking as a result of the qualifying offer. Without the draft-pick compensation, they may not have been able to get him — his market may have reached higher than, for example, the four years and $52 million Edwin Jackson received that offseason. But the current system put the 2013 Brewers, a team with an extremely strong core between Ryan Bran, Jonathan Lucroy, Carlos Gomez and Yovani Gallardo, in a position where they had to either look forward and waste their stars’ peak years or sacrifice the future in the form of a top draft pick. And with the other recent changes to the CBA, the Brewers can’t make up that advantage in talent by going over slot in the draft or over the cap in the international market — the taxes are too prohibitive, in ways they aren’t for large-market teams.

And so the Brewers are left where they are now, in tanking (or tanking-ish) purgatory, waiting again for another wave of prospects to hit and left with little else to do but sit and wait for next year. It’s not just because the team is limited by small-market resources, but because the only way for such a team to stretch above its means is to sacrifice its future. And so again, I ask: Who is this system really helping? Because it sure doesn’t seem like it’s helping anybody who wants to see good baseball in Milwaukee.

Stuff

We saw earlier that Nelson took the cake in terms of velocity, while Pena’s movement paced the team. On the other end of the spectrum, there was no such divide — one pitch had both the lowest velocity z-score and the lowest total movement z-score:

For a curveball, below-average vertical movement isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the average such pitch already moves negative. Indeed, the fact that Fiers led all starters in curveball drop last season would seem to work in his favor.

Of course, all the dive in the world won’t count for anything if the pitch has no velocity. Only Jered Weaver, Mark Buehrle, and Julio Teheran threw their curveballs slower in 2015, and it showed. Fiers’s curve went for strikes just 43.0 percent of the time in Milwaukee, and when he put it in the zone, hitters such as Tyler Moore made him pay:

View post on imgur.com

Those kinds of dingers made Fiers’s curve worth -1.61 runs below average on a rate basis. The Brewers will miss Fiers overall in 2016, but I for one am glad that his curveball will stay with the Astros.

Run Values

Interestingly enough, though, Fiers’s curve didn’t finish last when it came to Linear Weights. Another starter, who remains on the team, held that distinction:

Peralta’s 2015 regression fell squarely on the shoulders of his sinker, which traveled nearly a mile and a half slower than it did in 2014. That meant the pitch often resulted in this sort of treatment, courtesy here of Curtis Granderson:

View post on imgur.com

But a run value alone doesn’t really do Peralta justice. For his case, we’ll look at something else.

TAv

Using the same samples from the velocity and whiff rate z-scores, I found the average and standard deviation for each pitch’s resulting TAv. These created TAv z-scores, to better reflect how hard batters hit an offering. They certainly clobbered Peralta’s heater:

How bad was this? The next-worst pitch, Tyler Cravy’s four-seamer, had a TAv 1.75 standard deviations over the mean. Only Vidal Nuno and Sean O’Sullivan allowed opponents to abuse them more than this. Let’s throw in another GIF of this atrocity, for good measure:

View post on imgur.com

I discussed Peralta’s meltdown in December, noting that the movement of his pitches actually improved in 2015. Let’s hope for his sake that he regains his velocity, because if he doesn’t, the 2016 campaign will bring more of the same kind of pain.

Whiffs

When it comes to swinging strikes, things get complicated. Unlike Fiers’s curveball and Peralta’s four-seamer, this pitch actually held its own in 2015:

Blazek didn’t earn many whiffs with the curveball, yet it still gave him 1.99 runs above an average pitch (per 100 appearances). That’s because it accrued its strikes a different way:

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Matt Carpenter and his fellow batters took the curveball for a called strike 30.7 percent of the time, an incredible amount. An exercise like this has limits, as Blazek demonstrates — no one metric can really capture all the value of a pitch.

That isn’t to say, however, that Peralta’s four-seamer didn’t struggle, or that Fiers performed well with his curveball. We can pretty conclusively deem one of those two the worst Brewers pitch of 2015. Hopefully, 2016 will bring more pitches like the ones we saw on Thursday (although, if the team continues this rebuild, we won’t witness great pitching for a few years).

Click here for a complete spreadsheet of all 39 pitches.

Beyond that, pitchers make a better target for sabermetricians, as we can quantify so many elements of their game. Thanks to PITCHf/x, we can now look at pitch usage, velocity, movement, release points, locations — and, most importantly, individual result breakdowns for each offering. This can lead us down any number of analytic rabbit holes, which is where our story begins.

Because we still have a few weeks until baseball returns, I’ve decided to pass the time by constructing arbitrary “best-of” lists. Most of them wouldn’t appeal to any sane person, but I feel that many fans of the Brew Crew would like to know the answer to this question. Of the many pitches we had the pleasure of viewing last season, which stood out above the rest? A question that broad doesn’t have one right answer, but it’s an entertaining exercise regardless.

To accomplish it, I looked at pitches that appeared at least 200 times, isolating myself to those that occurred when the player was in Milwaukee. (In other words, this won’t include Mike Fiers’s time in Houston or Jonathan Broxton’s work for St. Louis.) This gave me a sample of 39 pitches to work with:

Whose quiver contained the deadliest arrow? Well, we can look at the issue a few different ways, each of which has its own merit. I’ll run through them all, with fun GIFs and full explanations, then return with a final summary.

Stuff

When evaluating the quality of a pitcher, we can focus, broadly speaking, on two things: the process (think cFIP) or the results (think DRA). The same general logic applies to the pitches themselves. We’ll begin with a few metrics that will tell us how well the pitches theoretically should have performed in 2015; from there, we’ll then move to the measures of how well they actually performed.

For a pitch to blow away the opponent, it generally has to have either velocity or movement. We’ll thus begin our journey with these two categories. For this, I used the BP PITCHf/x leaderboards to find pitchers (separating starters and relievers) with 200 of each pitch type in 2015. I then found the average and standard deviations of each sample, from which I constructed velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement z-scores for all 39 offerings.

The pitch with the most power behind it might seem familiar:

Nelson’s curveball, which ranked above Sonny Gray and Jacob deGrom in terms of velocity, left hitters such as Aramis Ramirez guessing:

View post on imgur.com

For movement, I took the sum of vertical and horizontal z-scores, to get a rough measure of overall bite. Although the top offering here might not be your first guess, it certainly deserved its spot:

Pena’s four-seam fastball didn’t have much heat, but man, could it dance. Watch how it rises and tails away from Kyle Schwarber:

View post on imgur.com

Nelson saw more action than Pena did in 2015, which may explain why his curveball feels more familiar. Still, each of these offerings stood out in its own regard. As the Brewers experiment with their rotation in 2016, we’ll probably see a lot more of both the heater and the curve.

Run Values

With that said, velocity and movement alone don’t make a pitch. A better line of thinking would look at the actual production of a pitch, and for that, we have a unique metric.

Pitch Type Linear Weights measure the count changes by each pitch, as well as the result when the offering ends a plate appearance, and expresses it as runs above or below average. This metric generally achieves its goal, and its selection for top Brewers pitch (on a per-100 pitch scale) probably wouldn’t get too much blowback:

Rodriguez won this contest by a wide margin — Michael Blazek’s curveball came in second, at 1.99 runs above average. Darin Ruf would probably agree with that verdict:

View post on imgur.com

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Rodriguez’s cambio made his 2015 resurrection possible. In fact, the changeup was worth more (by this metric) on a rate basis than any other pitch, of any kind, in all of baseball. Taking note of that a few months back, Mark Simon crowned it the best pitch in the majors. Sadly, K-Rod will pitch in Detroit this season, so this changeup will no longer work in Milwaukee’s favor.

Whiff rate

But we shouldn’t stop there, because Linear Weights aren’t perfect. Aside from the fact that they don’t necessarily reflect true talent (which we’ll discuss in due time), they treat all changes of count the same way. In the eyes of Linear Weights, a swinging strike to begin an at-bat is the same as a foul ball, since each puts the pitcher ahead 0-1. That doesn’t testify to the quality of the offering, though — whiffs are clearly better than fouls, meaning the best pitches will usually maximize the former.

For that reason, we’ll move to swinging-strike rate. Here, it’s important to take into account the different baselines, as each pitch fools hitters to different extents. To level the playing field, I created some more z-scores, using the averages and standard deviations of the whiff rates from the aforementioned velocity samples. As with the Linear Weights, the winner here won’t shock anyone:

Here, too, the leader dominated the competition: The runner-up — Neal Cott’s cutter and its 15.7 percent whiff rate— only topped the mean by 1.24 standard deviations. Based on this hilarious A.J. Pierzynski swing, I can’t argue with that:

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I covered Smith’s transcendent slider back in June, and although Smith himself faded a bit down the stretch, this pitch didn’t miss a beat. Unlike Rodriguez, Smith should stick around, so this glorious breaking ball will continue dominating for the Brewers.

In the end, Nelson’s curveball, Pena’s four-seamer, Rodriguez’s changeup, and Smith’s slider disrupted plenty of hitters last year. These standout offerings gave us something to look forward to in an otherwise dismal campaign. (On that note: Later in the week, I’ll use this methodology to find the worst Brewers pitches of the 2015 season. Until then, we’ll simply have these masterpieces to keep us warm.)

For the first two season of his deal, Lohse faired quite well. He accumulated a 2.1 WARP in 2013 and a 1.8 WARP in 2014. Lohse is also a well-established FIP-beater. While FIP is generally a useful stat when trying to isolate a pitcher’s true skill set, there are some hurlers who consistently out produce their FIP numbers. Chris Young and Johnny Cueto, two current free agents, come to mind in this department. Matt Cain was another until his arm functionally fell off. These types of pitchers will typically compile consistently low BABIPs. The idea is that they are able to consistently produce weak contact. Chris Young is able to do this by creating a lot of infield pop flies from pitching high in the zone and using his extreme length to his advantage on the mound.

For Lohse, though, all that changed this year. He couldn’t keep his on-field run prevention below his FIP, creating one of the worst seasons of his career, if not the worst. It was also his worst season with Milwaukee. In fact, it was one of the worst pitching performances in Brewers history. Lohse, who represented consistent solid performance for much of his Brewers career, suddenly became an albatross.

So now, let’s put Lohse’s 2015 performance into Brewers historical context. For some refreshing, Colin Anderle also did this to a certain extent. He asked the question as to whether Lohse was the worst opening day starter in Brewers history. In short, the answer was no. While Lohse’s 2015 performance was bad for Brewers opening day starters, it was not historically terrible. Instead, that title was given to Mark Knudson, who finished the 1991 campaign with an 8.64 DRA in 35 innings pitched. This to say, for the following study don’t expect Lohse to have the worst pitching season in Brewers history, but adding some historical perspective will give us a chance to appreciate just how bad it was.

The visual bellow will incorporate three parts. The main being the PWARP of the pitcher, which is on the Y-axis. Therefore, the lower down the circle the worse the pitcher performed that year, and the higher up the circle the better the pitcher performed that year. The color is dependent of the DRA-. In DRA- lower is better, or, in this case, green is better. The greener the color, the better the DRA- the redder the color the worse the DRA-. Finally, innings pitched is determined by the size of the circle, minimum of 50 innings pitched.

Since the Brewers became a franchise in 1969, with the inception of the Seattle Pilots, a total of 453 pitchers have pitched at least 50 innings in a single season for the organization. A total of 103 pitchers have posted a negative PWARP during that time, and as one can tell from the graph, Kyle Lohse’s 2015 performance was one of them. This isn’t surprising as Lohse’s struggles in 2015 have been well-documented. What you perhaps did not know is that Lohse had the 15th worst PWARP season in Brewers history at -1.07. Lohse’s DRA- only ranked 42nd worse in Brewers history, but since Lohse pitched a healthy amount of innings (as can be seen with the size of his circle), he ended up raking up the 15th worst PWARP in Brewers history.

Kyle Lohse, though, evidently wasn’t the worst — thankfully for him. That undesirable award goes to Jose Cabrera in 2002 (he’s the small red dot at the bottom middle of the graph). Cabrera was acquired by the Brew Crew before the 2002 season from Atlanta. The Brewers were mired in a prolonged rebuilding phase — they were coming off ten-straight losing seasons — but the trade and the use of Cabrera still signaled flaws in their analysis. Cabrera was coming off a year where he achieved an ERA of 2.88 but throughout his career Cabrera always posted sub-par FIP numbers. Let’s not even get into his DRA numbers. He displayed a poor ability to strikeout hitters while giving away too many walks. In some ways, if Cabrera was a pitcher in today’s age, he probably wouldn’t have gotten the same opportunity. The biggest bugaboo for the Brewers was that they let him start 11 games when he had never started a single game prior to the 2002 season. They also let him pitch a career high in innings with 103.3. All these elements ended with him accumulating a -1.9 PWARP, the worst in any single Brewers season. It also was part of a culmination of factors which contributed to the worst Brewers season in their history, as they lost 106 games in 2002 — their only season with more than 100 losses.

On the brighter side, this visual also shows us the best single-season pitching performance in Brewers history. You see that big green circle at the middle top of the graph? That’s the 1988 season pitched by Ted Higuera. Higuera was purchased in 1983 from the Indios de Ciudad Juárez of the Mexican League. He made his Major League debut in 1985 at the age of 27 and proceeded to play his entire career for the Brewers.

Higuera was an instant success when joining the Brewers. The lefty always pitched more than 200 innings, limited home runs, and had low walk rates. In 1988, he put it all together, pitching his usual 200 innings (227.3 to be exact), producing a low walk rate, and compiling quality strikeout numbers. Mainly, though, it was his ability to limit hard contact that made him so successful. In 1988, he only allowed opponents to have a .214 TAv against him. This all culminated in his 7.53 PWARP, which is the best in Brewers history. Unfortunately, the vanguard for sabermetrics hadn’t arrived yet and Higuera. Even though he posted the second best PWARP of any pitcher in the Major Leagues that year, didn’t get any Cy Young considerations. He didn’t even make the All-Star team.

The biggest crime for that season though was that Roger Clemens finished 6th in Cy Young voting, losing out to Frank Viola. Clemens in 1988 finished with a 10.02 PWARP, which was by far the best in all of baseball and one of the greatest single-season pitching performances in Major League history. It was 2.49 PWARP better than Higuera who again finished in second in that department. Viola who won the Cy Young had a 6.35 PWARP, which isn’t even close to Clemens and is more than a full win under Higuera.

Unfortunately for Higuera, he would never again reach the heights of 1988. His career was then hampered by a slew of injuries, the main one being a torn rotator cuff in 1991. He missed all of the 1992 seasons, and only saw limited time in 1993 and 1994 where his performance declined significantly. The 1994 season proved to be his final season in the big leagues.

In the midst of my research, I noticed something interesting. Here are the 10 best single season DRA- in Brewers history (min 50 IP):

I’m sure by now you’ve noticed a few familiar names. Yes, Higuera’s 1988 season ranks third, which is amazing considering the number of innings he pitched. But, I’m talking about the Francisco Rodriguez’s 2015 DRA- at second place and Michael Blazek in seventh place. Rodriguez who was just traded to the Tigers for Javier Betancourt and a player to be named later, posted one of the best relief pitching years in Brewers history. Considering Rodriguez posted a couple of solid but not great seasons for the Brewers, it’s easy to overlook just how good Rodriguez was in 2015. He has lost a lot of velocity on his fastball, but his changeup is now as good as ever and he’s using it a ton. We don’t exactly think about Rodriguez with the likes of Kimbrel and Chapman, but in 2015 he posted a better DRA- than both pitchers and had a very similar PWARP to Chapman’s, which was notably better than Kimbrel.

As for Michael Blazek, I’ve already discussed how great his rookie season was. His 58 DRA- represents the greatest rookie relief pitching performance in Brewers history. It’s also just as good as Chapman’s DRA- and significantly better than Kimbrel’s 71 DRA-. Blazek also finished with a better PWARP than Kimbrel. cFIP does like Chapman and Kimbrel better going forward, with good reason. They’ve both been great for a while and they both throw a lot harder than Rodriguez and Blazek. That being said, for just 2015, both Blazek and Rodriguez were better than Kimbrel, and when it comes to Rodriguez, he produced an equivalent performance to Chapman’s. The biggest difference is that both Chapman and Kimbrel get all of the attention while Rodriguez and Blazek get pegged as solid relievers who had a good year. They are both solid reliever but, no, they didn’t have good years, they had great years.

With everybody tied for first place, it’s easy to clutch tightly to a sense of optimism, even if that optimism isn’t entirely rational. Zero and zero is a record that teems with promise of things to come. After a long, patience-testing offseason, that first taste of optimism is intoxicating.

But for some fans, Opening Day intoxication comes shortly after the first pitch, once that optimism has worn away and the emergency libations have been breached. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” — or so, the cliche goes. And there are few feelings in fandom quite as all-around awful as knowing this hell is the new normal for the next 162 games.

In theory, on Opening Day, everybody is throwing their best pitcher. In practice, “best” can mean quite a wide range of things. For a franchise like the Milwaukee Brewers, whose extended history reads like a masochist’s dream journal, the “best” starter on the roster has been objectively bad often enough to take note.

When I was ten years old, I thought the Brewers hit rock bottom with their choice of Opening Day starter. The prior year, a rookie pitcher named Rafael Roque had electrified the league in his nine starts. Well, he didn’t exactly electrify the league, but he did win four of those nine starts and posted a 0.7 WAR, which translates to approximately three wins over a full season. Roque had never been a top prospect, but the mini-breakout was enough for the team to name him Opening Day starter in 1999.

Less than two months into the season, the Brewers unceremoniously demoted their struggling opening-day starter to the bullpen, thus ending his tenure as a big-league starter. Just a year later, he bowed out of Major League Baseball, never to return. I’ve always remembered Rafael Roque as a textbook example of a bad opening-day starter, and coming into things I expected this list to feature him prominently. As it turns out, Roque’s stellar performance out of the bullpen for most of the season mitigated his awful run as a starter, and he was about replacement level for the season as a whole. Believe it or not, there’s a sizable collection of Opening Day starters who performed even worse.

As a prime example, the 2015 version of the Brewers started the season in Colorado, with Kyle Lohse on the mound against Kyle Kendrick. Lohse set the tone for an awful season with an awful first outing — he surrendered eight runs, was chased from the game midway through the fourth, and watched the other Kyle finish out a shutout for the 10-0 win. Things didn’t get any better from there, either. By August, Lohse would pull a Roque and pitch his way out of the starting rotation. He finished off the last year of his $33 million contract with a truly miserable 5.56 DRA.

Unlike Roque in 1999, Lohse’s final 2015 stat line was considerably worse than what could be expected from a replacement-level player. It can’t have been the worst in the history of the 46 year history of the franchise, though? Could it have?

3A. Jeff Suppan, 2009

For younger Milwaukee fans, Opening Day uncertainty is an unfamiliar phenomenon. For the past thirteen years, the first game on the calendar has been handled by Ben Sheets or Yovani Gallardo — with two exceptions. Those exceptions, however, have been unmitigated disasters.

In 2009, Gallardo’s torn ACL delayed the start of his season and sent Jeff Suppan to the hill in his stead for Milwaukee’s opener in San Francisco. Suppan struggled, conceding a bases-clearing triple to Travis Ishikawa in the first and a two-run homer to Aaron Rowand later. In only four innings of work, Suppan gave up six hits and six runs to the Giants.

Ken Macha’s Milwaukee managerial debut ended with the Brewers on the wrong side of a 10-6 score, Suppan taking the loss. He had been a useful mid-rotation starter for Milwaukee the previous two seasons, but in 2009 the bottom fell out. He followed up his disastrous outing in San Francisco by getting chased in the fourth inning by the Cubs, five runs deep. And though his ERA eventually sank back into the single digits, his final 2009 numbers were still really bad: a 5.29 ERA, 6.09 DRA, and 1.69 WHIP in 30 starts. Suppan struggled to get hitters out at every turn, and finished a full win below replacement for the year.

Suppan and Braden Looper were something of the 2009 Lohse and Matt Garza — two veteran pitchers acquired through free agency who crushed the team’s chances to win 40 percent of the time. The two former Cardinals were two of the four worst pitchers in all of Major League Baseball that year, measured by WAR.

3B. Kyle Lohse, 2015

So, to answer our titular question: no, Lohse’s tire fire of a 2015 is not the worst ever posted by an Opening Day starter for the Brewers. It is, however, eerily similar to the narrative followed by Suppan six years prior. Both were back-end starters in the American League before Dave Duncan made them into something in St. Louis. Both signed with the Brewers in their 30s for questionably long, high-money deals. And both pitchers were downright competent for the first two seasons of those deals, before they were called upon to take the ball for Milwaukee on Opening Day.

And just like Suppan before him, Lohse proceeded to hang a crooked number on the scoreboard before the Brewers could even get their first hitter of the season to the plate.

As we all know now, Lohse would never put it back together in a Milwaukee uniform. Like Suppan once upon a time, he posted one of the worst statistical seasons by an active starter. Lohse’s 5.56 DRA might not have been quite as unfortunate as Suppan’s, but he was a tenth of a game worse relative to the replacement level. If you go strictly by the numbers, Suppan was worse — his DRA was considerably higher, and Lohse was only a tenth of a win worse by that metric — but it’s really close. Throw in all the eerie similarities, and the fact that Lohse lost his rotation spot, and the only fair thing to do is call it a tie and bind them together for eternity.

2. Don August, 1989

It’s truly amazing how history has a way of repeating itself with this team.

We’ve already established the amazing parallels between Suppan and Lohse. But believe it or not our old friend Rafael Roque was a familiar story, too, and his 1999 misadventure somewhat mirrored a situation that took place a decade earlier.

Unlike Roque, Don August entered the professional ranks with a little bit of reputation preceding his name. He was a first-round pick in the 1984 draft, and jumped immediately to Double-A in 1985. But from 1985-1987, August’s minor-league numbers got progressively worse and he was far from a blue-chip prospect by the time he made his big-league debut in 1988. Despite this, the 24-year-old took the league by storm, racking up 13 wins while posting a 3.09 ERA and 1.25 WHIP. He was fourth in that year’s American Rookie of the Year balloting with a 16 percent share.

Today, we know that there were huge warning signs baked into August’s phenomenal rookie campaign. August was allergic to strikeouts, fanning just four batters per nine innings in 1988. More troublingly, his excellent numbers were buoyed along by an unsustainable .256 BABIP. Today, we recognize this as unsustainable.

But back in 1989, nobody had ever heard of BABIP, or even K/9 for that matter. So, naturally, the Brewers thought they had a budding ace — and pushed him to take the next developmental step, handing him the ball for Opening Day. It was an ambitious assignment, but at least in this case, the player in question had been in the Major Leagues for more than eight games.

For one night, at least, the decision paid off. Opening Day 1989 between the Cleveland Indians and the Brewers was a classic, hard-fought pitchers’ duel. August locked horns with Greg Swindell in a game that would see one total walk and both starters pitching through the eighth inning. Spreading eight hits around, August managed to limit the damage against him to a two-run third-inning double by Oddibe McDowell. But Swindell was even better, allowing just five baserunners and one run.

Still, Milwaukee’s 25-year-old starter had been impressive, regardless of the outcome. If he could keep it up, there was plenty of reason for optimism.

The issue was, August was never able to keep it up for an extended period of time. His month-by-month splits from that season are enough to cause any manager to lose sleep. April and June Don looked just like the previous year’s breakout rookie; May and July Don looked like they belonged nowhere near a big-league rotation. That July, he allowed opponents to post an OPS just shy of 1.000 against him! So, come August, August was banished to a relief role.

His 5.85 DRA means that he somehow got lucky to end up with an ERA of 5.31 that year, and his 1.64 WHIP was approximately four-tenths higher than it had been a year ago. With opponents hitting .304 on balls in play, August’s true colors showed. Don August’s 1989 season was like a tug-of-war between the two sides of him as a player. Unfortunately for the Brewers, Crappy Don won out in the long run.

By 1992, August would be out of the big leagues, and he played his final three seasons in the minors. At the top level he posted a 2.5 WAR for his rookie year, and a 0.8 WAR for his career. In short, he was the Alex Sanchez of the mound.

1. Mark Knudson, 1991

Mark Knudson was a type of pitcher who likely would have never gotten his shot in the sabermetric era. Flyball pitchers nowadays usually need to compensate for their home-run tendencies with a high number of strikouts, whereas Knudsen posted a career K/9 rate of 3.6 and a career ground-ball rate of just 44 percent. Acquired from Houston in 1986, Knudson settled into a long relief/swingman role throughout the 1980s, before a dominant 1989 season propelled him to full-time starterhood.

Teddy Higuera was the team’s ace in those days, but a torn rotator cuff left him on the shelf for the entire year. His top lieutenant, Bill Wegman, was unavailable early in the season as he finished rehabbing from elbow surgery himself. An already-weak rotation was left crippled, and Knudson was named the Opening Day starter largely by default.

All things considered, the opener could have gone far worse. Knudson surrendered home runs to Kevin Reimer and Ruben Sierra, but gave up just three runs in five and a third and the final score was 5-4 for Milwaukee. It was vintage Knudson — ugly, but effective against all odds.

Unfortunately, the smoke-and-mirrors act was about to come to an end. Knudson left his next start in the third inning with shoulder soreness. Nobody knew it at the time, but he would never pitch beyond the fifth inning of a game he started again. That shoulder soreness turned out to be an inflamed rotator cuff of his own, and Knudson bounced from the disabled list, to the bullpen, back to the starting rotation, down to Triple-A when he was ineffective. Knudson’s stuff was borderline to begin with, and the lasting effects of the worn-down shoulder would prematurely turn him into minor-league filler.

Throughout all of that, Knudson appeared in a total of just twelve games during 1991, starting seven. His final WHIP that year was 1.97, a number that would make even Jeff Suppan grimace awkwardly. And his DRA for the season translated to 8.64 — somehow even worse than his horrid 7.97 ERA.

Baseball Prospectus’s player cards do not show similar players for guys who have already retired, but fortunately Baseball Reference does. Knudson’s page shows one active comparison: Dodgers reliever Juan Nicasio. Nicasio was quite useful for Los Angeles out of the bullpen in 2015, but that was only after four years of uninspiring work in Colorado’s starting rotation forced him into a relief role. Nicasio, the starter, was worse than replacement level two of those four years. As bitter as “Kyle Lohse, Opening Day Starter” might have been, there’s no objective way it measures up to “Juan Nicasio of His Era, Opening Day Starter.” Poor Tom Trebelhorn lost his job over that team, which seems truly unfair in retrospect given that his alleged best pitcher posted an 8.64 DRA.

By about May, though, when it became clear that the Brewers were not going to challenge St. Louis or Pittsburgh for the division title, the organization would have hoped that Lohse and Garza could still provide value for a club now trying to nurture a group of young starting pitchers.

Unfortunately, this did not work as planned. The two veterans threw the second- and third-most innings on the team, and they were two of the worst pitchers in baseball. Lohse and Garza finished ninth and fourteenth, respectively, in DRA- amongst all pitchers with at least 100 innings.

One could reasonably argue that because the team had no hope of competing, it didn’t really matter how good (or not) Lohse and Garza were. Of course, though, part of the reason the team had no hope to win was how amazingly terrible their rotation was.

The poor on-field performances of their two veteran pitchers could have been forgiven if they were able to serve as mentors or role models. And while it is basically impossible for an outsider to judge clubhouse or personal impact without being around the team every day, it seems difficult to imagine what lessons those two could have imparted while pitching so poorly they were each demoted. Lohse was sent to the bullpen in August, while Garza was shelved for the season at the beginning of September.

Garza is under contract for 2016, but Lohse is a free agent and unlikely to return given his poor performances and the need for Milwaukee to fit young starters into the rotation. This, however, will leave Garza as the only starting pitcher over the age of 27 on the roster—at least as it is currently constructed.

Teams have spent decades signing veterans to help mentor their younger players. These moves are often criticized as teams wasting a roster spot on someone who will not provide any on-field value, but they can be important when managed correctly. Experienced pitchers can teach younger pitchers how to maximize the usefulness of their off days or how to adjust their grips when something isn’t working right. Lohse and Garza have each certainly been in the majors long enough to fill that role.

The question will then be whether Garza as the lone veteran presence in the rotation is sufficient. With three promising youngsters who the team will want to give as many chances as possible to, it’s unlikely that the front office will sign any starting pitchers who would be guaranteed innings. Instead, they will want to give Jungmann, Nelson, and Peralta every chance to succeed.

Personally, I would expect that the three young starters will have outgrown the need for a true mentor. Each has now been in the major leagues for at least the majority of a big-league season (Peralta threw full seasons in 2013 and 2014 as well) and will know how to manage such intricacies as the big league per diem and road trips in chartered planes. While they each can obviously improve on the mound—and will hopefully continue to do so—their next big mental hurdle will probably be pitching in meaningful postseason battle, and they will simply need better teammates to be able to do that.

Interestingly enough, a specific facet of Lohse’s game hardly declined at all — he continued to collect more strikes than his peripherals would suggest:

*Among pitchers with at least 2000 pitches.

Based on Lohse’s rates of pitches thrown in the strike zone and swings outside the strike zone, we’d think he would have thrown 62.3 percent strikes in 2015. He ended up posting a 64.4 percent clip in that regard — lower than in prior years, but still above his expected level.

As my colleague Julien Assouline noted in August, Jonathan Lucroy didn’t frame pitches as well in 2015 as he had in years past. This development manifested itself in Lohse’s CSAA, which roughly measures how many runs a pitcher receives from framing. Per BP’s DRA Run Values, Lohse’s backstops granted him 0.71 framing runs in 2015, compared to 6.14 runs in 2013 and 3.46 runs in 2014. This means that Lohse had less help this year than he did before — and yet he still managed to make calls go his way.

Looking at data from Baseball Savant, we can see that Lohse didn’t change the placement of these extra strikes. This GIF illustrates his called strikes on pitches outside the strike zone against right-handed batters:

This GIF does the same, for lefties:

Against both breeds of hitter, Lohse maintained the same approach: down and away. The results he had found in the past didn’t abandon him.

Of course, we already know that Lohse’s general effectiveness did abandon him. When a formerly-solid pitcher hits a wall like this — without any loss in velocity or movement, and with no change in strikeouts but a rise in hard contact — people usually attribute it to poor command within the strike zone. This is obviously a tricky thing to measure, since we don’t know where the pitcher intends to throw, but we can still make some general statements about the pitcher. For instance, this trend most likely didn’t help Lohse:

Here, we see all of Lohse’s pitches within the strike zone over the last three years. The darker area — which indicates the location Lohse targeted most heavily — shrunk considerably in 2015, meaning Lohse didn’t distribute the ball as evenly within the strike zone to the extent that he used to. This predictability came around to bite him, as evidenced by his times-through-the-order splits:

After the first look, hitters got a better idea of where Lohse placed the ball and pounced. Lohse told MLB.com in June that he’d struggled with command; this evidence testifies to that explanation.

Hurlers such as Lohse, who rarely hit 90 with their fastballs and don’t feature many pitches (if any) with plus movement, must command their offerings sharply to thrive. Lohse pulled this off for two years with the Brewers, and to a certain degree he sustained it this year. In the end, though, it’s clear that he has fallen from his perch. Even if they live on the edges of the strike zone, no pitcher will perform well with this kind of command within the zone.

The Best Sausage Race Highlight of the Year

I’ll bet you can pinpoint the exact moment where Polish’s dreams of a comeback win are dashed against the rocks:

(original source vine from Andy MacDonald)

Athletic shorts come with a drawstring for a reason, kids. Most of us are fortunate enough to never learn that reason first-hand. Some of us learn it the hard way, in front of an entire stadium of people. Kudos to Polish for staying on his feet through the ordeal, at least. I know it doesn’t feel like much consolation, now, but trust me — you’re very, very grateful that you didn’t topple over and become a viral sensation.

Most Unpleasant Bump in the Road

As the first pitch flew for Opening Day 2015, the Brewers were given playoff odds of approximately 14 percent. Anyone saying that the team “would” make the playoffs was clearly huffing glue, but “could” was a far more common refrain — and with Adam Lind bolstering the offense of a team that missed the postseason by a hair in 2014, playoff baseball in Milwaukee was not a totally unreasonable hope.

Then, April came, and the cold boot of failure kicked those optimistic fans — and the team itself — squarely in the teeth.

The team started the season 2-13, dropping those playoff odds down to one percent just three short weeks into things. That’s a one percent chance of success with over 90 percent of games left to be played, for those keeping track. Milwaukee finished out the month of April with a .217 winning percentage to show for their efforts, and an estimated .5 percent chance of playing postseason baseball. It was clear to anyone who was watching that the team was getting tremendously unlucky, and the law of averages dictated that things would level out by October — but within one month, Milwaukee was already chasing a seven-game deficit for the second Wild Card spot.

The rest of the season, the team played like a .500 ballclub — or very close to it — but that putrid April set the tone for things and extinguished any short-term hope that the franchise held. Not to mention, it served as the final nail in the coffin of Ron Roenicke’s tenure with the franchise. While the entire season was quite unpleasant, April was the worst month, and it wasn’t even particularly close.

Underwhelming Prospect of the Year

First off, it needs to be said that it is not Monte Harrison’s fault that he slipped on a patch of wet grass and gruesomely mangled his ankle. Freak injuries are a part of the game that cannot be avoided.

Video of the Monte Harrison injury: pic.twitter.com/iQeDsQ86mQ — Julianne Dellorso (@jdellMTN) July 22, 2015

(Note: video is SFW. They didn’t catch the actual injury, just Harrison’s reaction.)

The problem is, Harrison’s injury marked a premature end to an already disappointing season for the 2014 second-round pick. Praised as a potential superstar from the draft, Harrison impressed in rookie ball last season. Encouraged by his 32 steals in 50 games and .404 OBP, the front office gave the twenty-year-old an aggressive assignment to the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers early on in the year.

Sometimes, a young player responds to precocious placement like that by elevating his game to a level neither the player nor organization thought possible. Other times, he’ll look like a pants-wetting high-school freshman thrown to the wolves in a varsity game. Harrison’s performance in Appleton was decidedly more of the latter. He slashed just .148/.246/.247, got erased on 40 percent of his stolen-base attempts and was more than a win below replacement level overall in just two short months. He was raw, he was badly overwhelmed, and the results were too ugly to watch.

BP’s Nick Faleris noted Harrison’s “underdeveloped pitch recognition” as a major weakness while talking about the team’s Top 10 prospects before the season, and A-ball pitchers feasted on this weakness. How else do you explain a .400 OBP-player suffering such a painfully precipitous drop in their ability to not make outs?

To their credit, Milwaukee recognized the folly in overpromoting Harrison and sent him back down to Helena. Then, as if a switch was flipped, Harrison started performing again. His slash line jumped up to .299/.410/.474, and he was successful on fourteen of sixteen stolen base attempts in just twenty-eight games. Then, Harrison’s ankle gave out.

This is not to suggest that Harrison will end up as a bust or that this year means anything in the grander scheme of things. But an ankle injury to a speedy outfielder is never good to see, especially from a player who already suffered one developmental setback. Before the 2015 season, Harrison was graded as Milwaukee’s fifth-best prospect. After it, BP highlighted him in “A look at 10 prospects who failed to meet expectations.” He’s going to need to do a good bit of redeeming himself during his second go-round in Appleton if he wants to ascend to that position once again.

Most Mutually Beneficial Trade

We’re big, big fans of Adam Lind here at BP Milwaukee. When the franchise decided to plug him in as the solution to the first base woes that have persisted since Prince Fielder was purchased away, it was a smart and well-reasoned decision. That the team only had to give up Marco Estrada — a pitcher who opposing hitters used as a launching pad in 2014 — was the icing on the cake.

Lind, of course, delivered on his end of the bargain. He finished out 2015 with 20 home runs on a rate right in line with his career averages, and his .360 OBP was even better than expected. His 1.9 WAR was right on par with the 2014 season that saw him run out of Toronto, but he also did that without his glove being hidden by the DH rule. Offensively, Lind produced the second-best VORP of his career.

But the Toronto Blue Jays were much, much better than expected — and Marco Estrada played no small part in this. Not only did he temper the bout of gopheritis that had plagued him during his final Milwaukee season, he cut his ERA, WHIP, and hit rate all significantly. While critics are quick to point to his depressed BABIP against as the reason for this change, our own J.P. Breen did a good job demonstrating how Estrada is actually the type of pitcher capable of exercising more control than most over BABIP.

The best deals see both teams walk away better off than they started, and this was certainly one of those occasions.

Worst Transaction of the Year

What transpired on July 29, 2015 might just transcend the “year” and go down in history as one of the worst transactions of all time, for multiple reasons. That was the night that the Brewers agreed to send Carlos Gomez to the New York Mets in exchange for Zack Wheeler and Wilmer Flores, pending medical reviews.

As we all know, it was those last three words — overlooked by most as Twitter melted down from the excitement of the deadline season’s first big deal — that came to define the move when it was all said and done. The Mets allegedly found something wrong with Gomez’s hip and backed out.

On this cue, all hell broke loose.

Flores, playing shortstop for the Mets at the time, was left in their current game as the deal was not yet finalized. This led to the iconically tragic experience of watching a player find out, in front of the entire world, that the organization he had been with for eight years was getting rid of him — by way of a Tweet broadcast on a video screen. As the New York fans gave him a standing ovation, Flores broke down into tears.

Meanwhile, Scott Boras — Gomez’s agent — was denying the hip issue and bad-mouthing the Mets to the press, which led to the Mets bad-mouthing Boras in turn. And in all of this commotion Gomez, Wheeler, and Flores were left to wonder just who in the f— they would be playing for the next morning.

But that logistical failing is not the only reason this deal was so historically bad. The next day, both the Mets and Brewers set out to finish what they started, and the original trade paled in comparison to the moves both teams eventually made.

The Brewers, of course, dealt Gomez for a platter of highly-touted prospects from Houston. Flores and Wheeler are both very good, very special players. But they are also two players who will not turn a sub-.500 team into a playoff contender, especially not in the NL Central. Meanwhile, the Mets went out and struck a deal for Yoenis Cespedes, who has been so good that there’s talk of him garnering NL MVP votes after spending only two months in the league, while Gomez has struggled since landing in Houston.

Like the Lind/Estrada deal, everyone emerged from this ordeal better off. Unlike that prior agreement, however, that’s because this one fell through, only to create even greater mutual opportunities. And in the meantime, we all learned a valuable lesson about the power of social media and the humanity of ballplayers. They’re assets to be traded, but they’re also humans with real feelings and loyalties. Maybe someday we can figure out how to balance the two viewpoints.

Least Valuable Pitcher

Once upon a time, the Milwaukee Brewers signed a veteran free-agent pitcher. This pitcher had been a journeyman back-end starter for years before Dave Duncan and the St. Louis Cardinals turned him into a thirtysomething resurgence. For two seasons, the Brewers got a decent return on their investment, and their new starter even buoyed one contending team. But during the third year of his tenure in Milwaukee, the turd hit the fan.

I’m speaking, of course, about Kyle Lohse. Or it could be Jeff Suppan, actually — they both fit. But hey, who’s counting? Suppan’s 2009 season produced exactly -1 WAR; Lohse’s 2015 campaign was worth -1.1. Fortunately, that is where the similarities end. While Suppan’s contract contained a fourth year, Lohse will be an unrestricted free agent this off-season.

Milwaukee was counting on Lohse to provide a stable, positive presence on the mound. Instead, he posted a DRA of 5.56. Among pitchers with as many innings thrown as him, only Drew Hutchinson was worse. Lohse seemed to revert back to the Quad-A pitcher he was in Minnesota once upon a time, and his 1.46 WHIP was the worst mark he’s posted since 2006.

Compounding the problem was the fact that Wily Peralta or Matt Garza could have both won this award with absolutely zero controversy. In fact, I very nearly chose Garza and justified it with his petulant refusal to pitch out of the bullpen in September. Contrast that with Lohse, who accepted his demotion and actually pitched reasonably well after being removed from the rotation. Regardless, any time sixty percent of the rotation is made from some of the statistical worst starting pitchers in the league, it’s going to be a long season. As the statistics paint a picture in which Lohse is the most ineffective of the trio, he gets the prize.

The Tiger Woods Memorial Award for “Most Un-Slick Act of Cheating”

On May 21, the Brewers and Braves were tied 1-1 in the 7th inning, which meant it was Will Smith Time. Smith was, after closer Francisco Rodriguez, the Brewers’ go-to bullpen ace — the situation was perfect to deploy him. High leverage and late–that’s what Smith does best. What’s more, Atlanta was his hometown, and he wanted to impress the friends and family in attendance.

This made things all the more embarassing when Smith was ejected from the game before he could even record a single out. Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez noticed something weird on Smith’s arm and alerted the umpires. The officials and TV cameras then confronted Smith and the not-even-hidden, shimmery spot on his arm. “Caught red-handed” feels way too forcefully punny here. Let’s just say they had him dead to rights.

Will Smith don’t gotta cuss in his raps to sell records. But he does need a little pine tar to make that curve snap. pic.twitter.com/7lgQFwBgyB

— Colin Anderle (@BaseballGuyCAA) May 22, 2015

The ejection paved the way for the Braves to jack up seven runs against the lesser parts of Milwaukee’s bullpen and win the once-close game easily. Smith was given a four-game suspension for his attempted chicanery. Perhaps most importantly, the legacy of Will Smith’s 2015 was tarnished. On paper, Smith was great this year — I’ll get more into detail here later on — and his past two seasons have earned him a well-deserved reputation as one of baseball’s elite setup men. But that all comes with a big ol’ footnote now. Getting caught cheating is bad enough. Getting caught cheating stupidly is a thousand times worse.

Least Valuable Player

Martin Maldonado was one of the beneath-the-surface success stories that almost propelled the 2014 Brewers to the playoffs. The former non-prospect turned in a competent, half-win season behind the dish and allowed the team to rest Jonathan Lucroy or play him at first base without suffering for it. Almost out of nowhere, Maldonado went from Quad-A player to legitimate backup.

With Maldonado behind Lucroy, catcher was considered a strong point for Milwaukee coming into the 2015 campaign. But in the midst of that horrendous 2-13 start, Lucroy went on the disabled list with a fractured toe. He would battle injuries all season, and Maldonado was pressed into more regular action than ever — 256 plate appearances in 79 games, to be precise.

Unfortunately, that capably productive player from 2014 was nowhere to be found. This year’s version of Maldonado regressed in every facet of the game. His entire slash line went down, he hit the same number of home runs in approximately twice as many chances, and his True Average flirted with the Mendoza line all season. Maldonado wasn’t quite as bad as having a second pitcher in the lineup, but he did accumulate north of 250 plate appearances and fail to post a .600 OPS. That’s really, really bad.

Behind the plate, the story was no brighter. By the advanced metrics, 2015 was Maldonado’s worst defensive year as a pro across the board. Whether measured by framing, blocking, or receiving, Maldonado was a significantly poorer backstop than his career numbers would indicate. Though he was behind the plate approximately twice as much as he was in any prior season, Maldonado added just 32 extra strikes through framing. Contrast that to his prior three seasons — 53, 56, 53. Again, these numbers were accumulated in half the time. Maldonado was a plus-WAR defensive player in each of the prior three seasons. In 2015, that streak was cut short.

Maldonado even managed to post his worst season as a baserunner, too. He stole one base in 2012, was thrown out during a second attempt that season, then decided that maybe base-stealing wasn’t very much his thing. Those were his only two stolen base attempts before he was thrown out by the Cubs’ Miguel Montero this past May. Maybe he saw another catcher with the initials MM, and needed to establish dominance? Whatever it was, it’s not something that anybody wants any more of.

When Lucroy got hurt it was assumed that the team was in trouble, but Maldonado’s transformation into a donkey made the loss sting even more than it should have.

Pleasant Surprise of the Year

Domingo Santana’s 2014 Major League season might go down as the worst in modern history. Santana made seventeen plate appearances, walked once, didn’t register a single hit, and struck out fourteen times.

Still, the 23-year-old Dominican brought prodigious power and tremendous raw athleticism to the table, helping to make the swing-and-miss tendency a little more palatable. The biggest problem for Santana was the fact that the Astros already had George Springer in place — but the Brewers saw the value Springer was bringing to Houston’s lineup, and decided that adding a similar player would be a good idea. Santana’s warts were evident to anyone watching, but he was also the most Major-League-ready player in the haul that the team got back for Carlos Gomez and Mike Fiers.

Santana’s performance in Milwaukee comes with a massive small-sample-size caution, but if the young outfielder can continue to post an OPS in the .766 range, he will stick as a Major League starter. If he can become a better contact hitter and work to improve in the outfield, Santana has the ceiling of a multi-year All-Star and dark-horse MVP candidate. At the end of the day, it’ll come down to how badly he wants it. There’s plenty of good and a sizable amount of bad with Santana — Ryan Romano breaks it all down — but overall, the team has to be thrilled with how his first taste of Milwaukee baseball went.

Bittersweet Moment of the Year

Mike Fiers had been an Astro for approximately three weeks when, on August 21st, he threw a no-hitter against the Dodgers. Fiers spaced out three walks and struck out ten Los Angeles hitters, needing a total of 134 pitches to finish the no-hitter. It was the first no-hitter for an Astro since Darryl Kile in 1993. Meanwhile, the 0nly no-hitter for the Brewers was thrown in 1987.

The reaction from fans couldn’t have possibly been more mixed. Most were happy for the former player, and tried to optimistically paint it as a bright spot in a dark season. A sizable portion lamented that the Brewers had missed out on their second no-hitter by such a narrow margin — a spurious claim, but when your season starts 2-13 you can be forgiven for tossing logic out the window. There was even overlap, as people simultaneously expressed both of these sentiments.

Meanwhile, on that exact same day, Domingo Santana hit his third home run in a Milwaukee uniform as the Brewers beat the Nationals 10-3. Kyle Lohse didn’t throw a no-hitter — now that would have been something — but he did work three innings for his first career save. All in all, that made things a little less bitter and a little more sweet.

Minor League Player of the Year

In recent years, much has been written about Milwaukee’s organizational fondness for the jump to Double-A ball as a barometer of a player’s abilities. High-A to Double-A is considered the second-biggest gap in the system after Triple-A to the majors, so it’s a sensible policy to follow.

Orlando Arcia firmly established himself as the shortstop of the future for Milwaukee in 2014, hitting .289 and stealing 32 bases at High-A. This season marked the big test — and Arcia passed it easily. Dealing with the toughest pre-majors promotion a player has to conquer, Arcia hit .300 for the first time in his young career, doubled his home run output from four to eight, and still provided the kind of dynamic defense that has fueled his prospect reputation.

Both Scooter Gennett and Jean Segura have developed into capable middle infielders, but the presence of Arcia could force one or both of them out of Milwaukee sooner rather than later. Arcia continues to improve at every level he plays, and he’s one hot streak away from forcing his way onto the big league roster.

Best Transaction of the Year

If you’d rather this be the Jonathan Broxton trade, or the Aramis Ramirez trade, well, I wouldn’t fault you in the slightest. Those two moves are slam dunks where the Brewers traded something they would have been losing anyways — or didn’t really want in the first place — for something that might pan out in the long run. Those are great moves to make. But they are rarely great moves.

When New York scuttled the Carlos Gomez deal, that could have been a crushing blow for Milwaukee’s rebuilding effort. But the team regrouped, and inexplicably landed an even bigger haul than they had gotten just a day earlier. They had to include Fiers — and his eventual no-hitter — to do it, but the payoff has so far been more than worth what it cost.

Santana is the only player of the group to see Major League action so far, but he has looked nothing like the tire fire that he was in 2014. Brett Phillips and Josh Hader are both players that I’ve profiled extensively. They’ll be up in 2016 or ’17, and both stand to play key roles in the team that Milwaukee hopes will eventually bring home a championship.

Meanwhile, Gomez’s value has already taken a hit. Not only did the Mets allegedly find a hip problem, but he also missed extensive time in September with a torn muscle in his ribcage. Still, the Astros have to be thrilled. Their rental star delivered a key home run in the Wild Card play-in game. Like I said before, the best trades are the ones where everybody wins.

Silver Lining of the Year

It could be worse. It could always be worse. This season was tough to swallow for Brewer fans, but the pendulum is at least swinging back up if you look at the past couple of months. The same cannot be said about our division mates in Cincinatti.

The Reds as a whole were an unmitigated disaster zone in 2015. Manager Bryan Price started the season historically bad — with his humiliating, expletive-laced tirade against beat writer C. Trent Rosecrans — and then ended it in the same fashion, as he watched his team quit on him and finished 1-14 to slip below the Brewers in the standings.

Meanwhile, the Reds cleared out talented big-league players as well — Johnny Cueto and Mike Leake chief among them — but failed to net anything approaching the return that the Brewers saw for Gomez, Fiers, and company. While Milwaukee figures to now have one of the more talented minor league systems in all of baseball, the Reds are still pinning their hopes to a miracle one-year turnaround. Joey Votto and Brandon Phillips are both expensive, getting older, and can’t seem to agree on what approach works at the plate. And with Cueto and Leake both jettisoned, the de facto ace of the staff is Anthony DeSclafani. DeSclafani is a control pitcher who BP seems to think likely for a spontaneous combustion at some point in his career, as evidenced by his closest comparisons in the Similarity Index: Dillon Gee, Tommy Milone, Wade LeBlanc, and Jeff Locke among others. It’s hardly a confidence-inspiring list.

The National League Central is already going to be a difficult nut to crack for the Brewers’ eventual finished product. The premature demise of Votto, Phillips, and the rest of Cincinatti can only be seen as a good thing from this vantage point. They’re one less heavyweight to worry about. So here’s to you, Reds. May you retain Bryan Price in perpetuity.

Most Valuable Pitcher

When the Brewers traded Nori Aoki for Will Smith prior to the 2014 season, they did so with the intention of moving Smith back to the starting rotation. Kansas City had converted him into a reliever, and in doing so, they had turned him from a Quad-A pitcher into a valuable roster piece. For some inexplicable reason, Doug Melvin saw this as a fine reason to try Smith out as a starter again.

Fortunately, that experiment never saw the light of day — ironically enough, due to the ill-fated signing of Matt Garza. When Milwaukee inked Garza to a contract, it bumped Smith from the projected starting rotation. The team focused on finding a fit for him in the bullpen, instead, and the rest was history.

Pine tar aside, Smith’s 2015 season might have flown under the radar of almost every casual observer. But the advanced metrics reveal the truth. Deployed in relief, this guy is one of the most effective pitchers in the game, bar none. Among relievers who threw at least 40 innings for their teams, Smith’s 12.9 strikeouts per 9 innings is sixth-best in the Majors. His 1.4 WAR was tied with Jimmy Nelson for tops among players who finished the season with the team.

It might seem a bit unorthodox to give this award to a relief pitcher, but this is 2015, the Year of the Elite Bullpen. Plus, as we’ve established, 60 percent of the starting rotation pitched like animated garbage. Smith, on the other hand, wasn’t garbage. He was filthy.

Most Valuable Player

Even in the current climate of rebuilding, the only player thought to be immune from trade is Ryan Braun. Braun’s suspension for performance-enhancing drugs — and his childish antics in playing the blame-game after the fact — were a black eye on the organization and have made him a pariah throughout much of baseball. That’s before you get to his advancing age, declining health, and mammoth contract. Nobody else wants to deal with him, much less give up valuable young players for the privilege of dealing with him.

However, the Brewers and fans are desperately hoping that Braun can put it back together. He will be 32 years old next year — old, but not ancient. Still young enough to have trade value, if his name wasn’t a four-letter word around the league. A few quietly productive seasons will start to dampen that effect, though.

Braun’s 2015 season was certainly encouraging in that regard. On the one hand, while he led the team in WAR, he posted a comparable number to 2014’s total. He was far from being the 5-6 win player of his prime.

But that’s due in large part to Braun’s defensive implosion. Since being moved off of third base in 2008, Braun has consistently been a defensive positive. In 2015, though, that stopped, and the Hebrew Hammer was approximately ten runs worse than average in the field.

Offensively, though, Braun posted superstar numbers again. His slugging percentage and home runs were down, suggesting at this point that his numbers from 2009-2012 might not have exactly been organic, but he’s also growing into a more patient hitter as he ages. He has yet to lose the ability to put bat to ball. Braun stole 24 bases in 2015, too, getting caught only four times.

In the offensive facet of the game, there might not be a player more well-rounded than Ryan Braun, and that holds true even at his advanced age and with his dimished power capability. Whichever team finally decides to put together a fair offer for him will be getting a great deal out of it. And if the Brewers hold onto him instead, he could absolutely still be contributing when the team puts a contender on the field.

Ryan Braun’s 2015 season wasn’t good enough to contend for the league MVP award. But the 2015 Brewers are far from the class of the league — and in this small pond, Braun is more than fish enough to take home the hardware.