Those narratives will undoubtedly carry into 2018 guided by the very same contradictions: Milwaukee will indeed be developing many young players at the MLB level (including Lewis Brinson, Josh Hader, Brett Phillips, and Brandon Woodruff), while the team also has several opportunities to improve with established players (either through trades involving their prospects, through free agency signings, or both).

To put it another way: GM David Stearns can take the roster in several directions, and certainly has the resources available to contend while continuing to develop some players.

One way to assess player value, and therefore roster needs, is to estimate the surplus value that each player (and their contractual situation) provides the team. Value is assumed to be production and scarcity, recognizing that a player is not simply valuable to a club based on production, but also based on cost and the general availability of that skill set within the MLB. Surplus is the difference provided between a player’s production and their contract, recognizing that these aspects can be double-counted (a team simultaneously receives a player’s production on the field and their production gauged against their contract). Based on these assumptions, I tracked the surplus value of the Brewers 40-man roster (as of October 20, 2017) by using harsh depreciation to reduce each player’s maximum value (recognizing that a player’s performance typically declines over time save for rare cases).

The following chart tracks changes in surplus entering 2017 to entering 2018, while also assigning an Overall Future Potential (OFP) role for each Brewers roster member:

What these surplus numbers can suggest, in the abstract, is the difference between “the number of the wins above replacement” a player will produce during their contract and the OFP a team might receive if they traded the player at this point in time (alternately, they might suggest a contract range; for example, if the Brewers offered Neil Walker a $30 million contract, they would likely retain some surplus value during that contract).

Using the extremely interesting and difficult case of Jonathan Villar to interpret this table, his 2016 campaign and contract control years still loom large enough to suggest that the Brewers should not move the infielder for cheap; but the shortstop-turned-bench/utility option does mean that Villar’s ultimate role is trending downward, meaning that if Milwaukee believes that role decline is real and will continue to materialize, moving Villar for less than his top value could offset the issues of rostering a declining role. This should outline the difficulty of making roster decisions: in the case of Villar, there is not necessarily a right answer.

I should add that surplus value is abstract in the sense that there is a point at which additional surplus does not provide a team transaction value. Scooter Gennett and Chris Carter should be the most specific examples of this phenomenon in recent Brewers memory, as both players retained solidly positive surplus value entering 2017, but were essentially unwanted on the trade market and therefore expendable for nothing. Following this example, a rule of thumb might be to expect any type of roster move once a player’s surplus value dips below $20 million (or, less than three wins above replacement). Looking at the table of the Brewers roster above, this fact should seem intuitive with many of the names on the list (for example, it is highly unlikely that the Brewers would be able to move a player like Andrew Susac or even Eric Thames for their maximal surplus value).

By averaging each player’s 2017, 2018, and OFP surplus value, and comparing that to their change in value over time, a rather intuitive 2018 roster emerges. In this case, I excluded each player with a Negative-50 percent change in value (ex., a 50 percent decline), which produced need at Catcher, Second Base, and Right-Handed Pitcher, with additional question marks about the Utility roles. This is a rather succinct picture of the actual needs for the 2018 Brewers, and it also shows that if a few key free agents are retained, or similar free agents from outside the organizational signed, the Brewers can assemble quite a good roster:

These tables need not force an analyst to rely on numbers alone in order to validate roster decisions. Compare the following descriptions of potential role upgrades for the 2018 Brewers with those players’ statistical trends, and find nearly 20 roster spots (on the 40-Man) that can be upgraded for 2018:

The benefit of this exercise is that additional roster functions can be analyzed, either through descriptive or analytical means. For example, one could compare some of the best Rule 5 Draft Roster Protection candidates with the players above in order to find the most salient moves for the future value of the organization. Via Brewerfan.net:

Once again, this should exhibit a rather intuitive process of evaluation. If the future value of a catcher such as Jacob Nottingham is better than either Stephen Vogt, Andrew Susac, or Jett Bandy (or all three players), it should not hurt to lose one of those players in order to roster Nottingham. Each of these catchers are good candidates for contractual non-tenders for this reason (and, indeed, catcher is a position that the Brewers can upgrade in terms of depth behind/alongside Manny Pina). Similarly, allowing Matt Garza to walk via free agency and rostering Marcos Diplan, Freddy Peralta, or Devin Williams in that place should improve the pitching surplus of the roster. Where it gets more interesting is considering a player like Mauricio Dubon, and whether he simply takes the spot of free agent Eric Sogard, or overtakes Villar or Hernan Perez.

Using these analytical approaches should validate the fact that the Brewers are in a unique position entering 2018. They are a good team, indeed, that also features many up-and-coming players to develop at the MLB level and many declining roles that can be replaced. Where surplus value becomes useful is targeting particular trades, or simply determining when a player should be released or non-tendered.

A player like Keon Broxton, Perez, Susac, or Vogt should demonstrate this difficult decision-making process, and perhaps cause fans to realign their expectations that these types of players can receive impactful trade returns to Milwaukee. Given the packed outfield for 2018, the Brewers could conceivably release a player like Broxton should trade partners refuse to bite with a 45-to-50 OFP / quality depth trade (matching Broxton’s $11.5M-to-$19.8M surplus), for the trouble is that Broxton’s expected role is indeed declining (and any particular trade partner will also know that). This should not simply be viewed as picking on Broxton, as the point exists for Vogt and several other players on the roster.

“Slingin’ Stearns” earned his nickname for wheeling-and-dealing on the trade market during his first offseason in Milwaukee, but that reputation has calmed over time (not surprisingly, as the club completed their rebuilding process). Stearns did not show any hesitation in aggressively using waiver claims and releases to define his 2016-2017 offseason, and now the GM’s reputation may be defined by how effectively he clears roster space for what’s next: refined future development and improved MLB roles to contend in 2018.

The 2017 season proved that these goals can align and coexist within the same roster, so there are no excuses for failing to improve this strategy by learning from the 2017 progression.

Photo Credit: Jim Young, USAToday Sports Images.

Except the pitching would indeed prove to be a problem for the Cubs, one that fully defined the club’s descent from “great team bordering on dynasty” to “just another very good team.” The distinction is crucial, for the Cubs slip left the door wide open for an upstart Brewers club that chased their big market foes deep into September; the two clubs played an extremely close series in Milwaukee in September that allowed the Cubs to finish the Brewers’ divisional aspirations, but the Brewers pushed the Cubs as hard as they could. The Cubs rotation would nearly be shambolic compared to its 2016 version, if fans were to forget that 14 runs prevented from the first four starters in a rotation is quite solid.

On the other hand, the Brewers entered the season with a rotation full of question marks. Ace Guerra would be returning for his second career season, after taking the world by storm as an age-31 rookie in 2016. He could not make it through his first start before the Brewers needed their first depth option. Wily Peralta came on strong to close the 2016 season, but quickly showed that those results were a mirage. That the front office kept Matt Garza around could lead one to question just how “analytical” this club is, as the righty’s first three years in Milwaukee proved his release at $12 million+ would be worth more than his spot in the rotation. Brent Suter emerged as a valuable up-and-down, swingman type in 2016, and expanded that role in 2017. Chase Anderson and Jimmy Nelson looked like low rotation innings eaters, at the very least, until mechanical changes in delivery timing (Nelson) and pitch sequencing adjustments (Anderson) catapulted both starters to the top of the National League.

If the Cubs opened a -90 run door for the Brewers, Milwaukee entered that door with a 35 run improvement of their own, closing some of the gap between the clubs (the remaining gaps would be largely explained by the exceptional Cubs offense, but the Brewers stuck around thanks to their equally exceptional bullpen).

In the middle of the season, I studied 2011-2016 runs prevented progressions for National League rotations, and found that a typical pitcher working in two consecutive seasons would see their production fluctuate by approximately 57.0 Innings Pitched and 12 runs prevented. Granted, this was only the average fluctuation; more extreme fluctuations like those from Jon Lester or Jimmy Nelson would not necessarily be uncommon even if they were surprising. At the very least, the 2017 season demonstrated how rotational fluctuations can help to define the fate of a ballclub simply when the same cast of characters are kept around (again, these rotational fluctuations are calculated without any consideration to additions or subtractions in personnel).

For the Cubs, they likely learned a lesson that their large payroll capacity can readily solve, and pending free agency from a couple of their declining options will help them make that decision. Chicago largely began answering this question when they unloaded prospects for the midseason acquisition of Jose Quintana (84.3 IP, 6 runs prevented in Lakeview). Milwaukee, on the other hand, must heed the warning of the 2017 Cubs, and look at their own internal fluctuations for clues about building a successful 2018 rotation.

• First, were the positive steps of Anderson and Nelson missed entering 2017, or were the pitchers expected to take steps forward? This will be a crucial test of the club’s pitching approach with their internal analytics and their on-field coaching staff. If the Brewers were working with both pitchers on adjustments and did not expect either to move forward, the club must investigate these lessons to make better forecasts for the 2018 rotation.

• Second, were the overall forward steps of the rotation worthwhile enough to keep the same staff around? The Brewers already have a rotation spot to fill due to Jimmy Nelson’s shoulder injury (which the club is expecting to eat into a significant portion of the season), and they also have a decision to make about Matt Garza’s option. But, it is worth asking whether the club can expect to move forward by opening rotation spots for pitchers like Brandon Woodruff (43.0 IP, -1 Runs Prevented in his first taste of MLB action) or even Suter (who could serve as a season-opening 5th man while advanced minors options make their last adjustments before promotion).

Beware those fluctuations, and heed those forward steps by Anderson and Nelson: the Brewers contended in 2017 solely on the strength of their above average pitching staff. So the question remains, what will be the next step for this pitching system?

Photo Credit: Benny Sieu, USAToday Sports Images

Milwaukee enters the hitting paradise of Coors Field as a pitching-first ballclub, which is quite a paradox given recent seasons’ strengths and the general adage that the Brewers are a bat-first organization. What’s fascinating is that adjusted for park factor, the Rockies have a below average offense within the National League, and they too are having a successful 2017 on the strength of pitching. So, the clubs are both playing to their strengths for this series, as the Brewers arms have a chance to retire a below average offensive club, but the Rockies arms are several stages ahead of those in Milwaukee and therefore will be assumed to have more firepower to hold the Brewers in check.

The full series will be driven by pitchers that are ostensibly due for corrections between their Earned Runs Average (ERA; which gauges earned runs per nine IP) and Deserved Runs Average (DRA; which scales a pitcher’s expected performance according to park, batted ball type, weather, fielding, and other factors). For a series at Coors Field, this could lead one to draw hasty conclusions, as the wicked park dimensions and altitude could alter mechanics, stamina, and stuff to an extent that is not necessarily representative of a pitcher’s overall performance level.

In this series, it is worth questioning whether rookie Brandon Woodruff and breakout Chase Anderson will thrive due to their lack of curveballs. Anderson’s arsenal does feature a curve, but he also has had solid success with his change up in 2017, which he throws slightly more frequently than the hook and nearly as effectively (.171 Batting Average against (AVG), .293 Slugging Percentage against (SLG) for the change, as opposed to .159 AVG, .254 SLG for the curve in 2017). The righty also features a gang of fastballs and a hard slider/cutter that can walk a tightrope between limiting hits on batted balls in play (slider/cutter), drawing groundballs (“sinker” / hard running fastball), and generating whiffs (“four seamer” / true rising fastball). Woodruff has become a fan favorite due to his minor league stats and prospect status built on the sturdy foundation of a middle rotation fastball / slider / change set, and the slider is basically a sharp nickel curve that could conceivably weather the altitude more effectively than a big breaker.

Highlighting team offenses, it is striking how much the Brewers are built on depth, and a direct comparison with the Rockies demonstrates that what Milwaukee lacks in star power they more than reclaim in quality and cross-roster parity. Take a look at each club’s bats with 0.9 WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player) or more. I also added Total Average (TAv) to help discern which players might be bat-first and which might be glove-first:

The Brewers’ biggest stars of Travis Shaw, Orlando Arcia, and Ryan Braun (the only 2.0 WARP [or better] players) lack the punch of Nolan Arenado, Charlie Blackmon, and DJ LeMahieu. Outside of that trio for the Rockies, however, the Brewers have a much stronger roster on the merits of simply not “falling off a cliff” in terms of useful roles and potential production outside of the stars. Milwaukee actually appears to be exploiting the concept of replacement depth somewhat, by riding superutility Hernan Perez through an absurdly flexible role, rotating Eric Thames between 1B and the OF in order to land Jesus Aguilar additional PA, and also adroitly using the waiver wire to add Eric Sogard (Stephen Vogt is not far behind at 0.7 WARP, and the lefty catcher bat will add more versatility to the club by returning to the roster in Colorado).

What’s most fun about this series is that not only are the Brewers in the playoff hunt deep into August, they’re fighting for their contention shot against another Senior Circuit upstart in the Rockies. While many expected the Rockies to be a good club entering 2017, certainly more than those expecting the same for the Brewers, Colorado is also experiencing their first contending shot in seven years (they remained within a few games of first place deep into September in 2010). Between 2011 and 2016, the Rockies received a reputation as a type of neverbuilding limbo team, and their emergence after hiring GM Jeff Bridich in October of 2014 firmly plants the Rockies in playoff arrival mode within three years of his hire. This is ahead of both the much venerated Cubs (2012-2015 from hire to playoffs under new front office) and Astros (also 2012-2015), which raises questions about whether the scorched earth version of the rebuild under a new management team is as effective an MLB franchise building strategy as fans make it out to believe. Or as necessary a strategy as some believe.

David Stearns also has his Brewers arriving early thus far, but 2017 is simply a test run for 2018 at this point, which will be his third year in Milwaukee. Stearns has an opportunity to challenge the Cubs and Astros as well, reaching the playoffs three years from his hire date, which is particularly satisfying given his direct pedigree (his previous stint coming in Houston) and the divisional competition and geographical proximity with the vaunted Hall of Fame Cubs. In this regard, the Rockies are as much a building model as the oft-cited Cubs and Astros, for they are revising a clear industry standard (rebuild-to-playoffs in four seasons) without the hype or branding of the more “popular” rebuilding efforts in the league. Stearns will already have time to prove he can follow suit by accomplishing a playoff run in 2018, but this west coast trip will have a substantial say in whether he is successful in fully bucking that industry trend.

Photo Credit: Benny Sieu, USAToday Sports Images

As I did last month, I will look at stabilization points based on Russell Carleton’s research from the plate appearances and innings pitched for Brewer hitters and pitchers, respectively. Of course, stats haven’t truly “stabilized” in the way we might usually think of it, but some statistics have begun to trend toward being predictive of rest-of-season performance and true talent level.

With regular position players in the 175-200 plate appearance range and starters with around 50 innings pitched, walk rate for both hitters and pitchers has started to become more predictive, and that might give us some ideas about the rest of the season performance for Milwaukee.

• Eric Thames is (plate discipline) God

Through the end of May, Eric Thames had a 17.1 percent walk rate in his 199 plate appearances. That puts him just behind Mike Trout, and two spots ahead of Joey Votto. Understandably, Brewers fans were all enthralled with Thames’ power output at the beginning of the season, and though injuries possibly took some of the air out of his 74-homer pace, the on-base skills haven’t gone anywhere.

After a 17.5 percent walk rate in April, Thames followed that with a still-outstanding 16.7 percent walk rate throughout the month of May as he struggled with only three home runs and a .221 batting average. Through the first two months of the season, Thames placed fifth in all of baseball with his walk rate.

If you’re a Brewers fan, or maybe just a dork, you might even be more excited by this development than Thames’ Wisconsin state fair-worthy freak show of round-trippers.  The walk rate is truly elite and bodes well for his current value to the team and beyond, regardless of what’s happening with his homer totals or batting average.

• Lefty hitters haven’t been abnormally hard on Brewer pitching

Without a consistent southpaw presence in the bullpen, some have questioned whether the Brewers would be more susceptible to left-hand heavy lineups or in high-leverage situations. So far, though, that hasn’t really been the case.

Against left-handed hitters, Brewer relievers have been pretty much league average through May, placing 20^th in baseball in walk rate against lefties and ninth in strikeout percentage. Somewhat surprisingly, the pen ranks fifth in xFIP against wrong siders. It doesn’t appear to quite be a small sample size issue leading to more variance for the Brewers, either, as the opposing teams have at least attempted to take advantage of the platoon, um, advantage. The Brewers bullpen has faced the second-most lefty batters, trailing only the also righty-heavy Marlins.

The team’s passable performance against lefties in due in large part to the dominance of Corey Knebel and Jacob Barnes, who have been fantastic compared to the rest of the pen. But for the much-discussed and anticipated moves that David Stearns and the front office may or may not make for a playoff push, a LOOGY isn’t the requirement that perhaps many of us thought it might be.

• The starters have limited walks

Through May, the Brewer starters were solidly in the bottom third in the majors in walk rate. Matt Garza, in particular, has been impressive in limiting walks so far, with a 5 percent walk rate over 40 innings pitched. In keeping with the spirit of this series, it’s prudent to note that he still falls below the 50 innings pitched where walks typically become more predictive. However, for a pitcher whose career walk rate is closer to 8 percent, this is a development worth monitoring as the season moves forward.

The starters ranked 19^th in baseball in strikeout rate through May, so there is some room for the pitching staff to grow there, but limiting the free passes have certainly kept the rotation competitive.

So, although it’s still early and there’s plenty of baseball left to be played, the Brewers have shown promise in some of the statistics that back up their performance so far as first-place club. Brewer fans are hoping they can end June the same way as more rates stabilize as predictors of future performance.

In his seven starts since coming off the DL, Garza has been a revelation for a team in need of league-average pitching.  His 4.06 DRA and 99 cFIP are not special, but they are roughly average and are a massive improvement over the past two seasons.  That 4.06 DRA is the best mark on the team for anyone who has thrown as many innings as he has (40.7), thus exemplifying how big a boost he has provided.  The only starter ahead of Garza on the list is the recently returned Junior Guerra (3.27 DRA in two starts), which also goes to show just how important Guerra is to the club.

As to Garza, though, the Brewers have to make a decision in the next two months about how they want to handle this season.  They are currently in first place in the NL Central, although just 1.5 games ahead of the Cubs and Cardinals.  At 27-24, they are the worst division leader in the majors, and they are also behind the Dodgers and Diamondbacks in terms of wild card standings.  The reality of the situation is that while first place on Memorial Day is fun, the playoff position is precarious.

The NL Central itself is quite packed.  The Brewers are just 3.5 games ahead of the last-place Pirates, and all five teams can fit between the gap between first-place Washington and second-place Atlanta in the NL East, as well as between third-place Arizona and fourth-place San Francisco in the NL West.  Even though the Brewers have played well, they haven’t banked a large division lead that the Cubs (or Cardinals or Pirates, I suppose) will have to overcome.  During their surprising 2014 run, the club was in first place by four games on June 1.  As was mentioned above, the Brewers don’t even have that large a lead over the team in last place.

All of that is to say that the Brewers aren’t in great position to make the playoffs.  The Baseball Prospectus playoff odds give them a 25 percent chance of making the playoffs, which ranks third in the division behind both Chicago and St. Louis.  However, that also doesn’t mean that the club should automatically trade Garza just because they are still long shots to make the postseason.

First, as BPMilwaukee’s Kyle Lesniewski is fond of pointing out, at some point the team does have to try and start winning, and trading veterans for prospects merely for its own sake is no longer the correct approach.  The Brewers may not necessarily have expected to compete this year, but they will probably have expected that their window would open next year.  This is unlikely to be a fluke in the long-run; the club has good players who are performing well, and they are a young team who would be expected to improve in the coming years.  Therefore, if Arcia is better earlier than expected and Eric Thames is actually a true middle-of-the-order threat, it’s entirely plausible that the team is at least ready to compete for a wild card position earlier than expected.  Trading Garza simply to accumulate prospects doesn’t make a ton of sense given this position.

Second (and probably more importantly), Garza is unlikely to have a ton of trade value.  He is coming off of his terrible seasons and is 33 years old, so he is on the downside of his career.  He has also thrown over 1600 career innings after making his debut at age 22, so his arm has taken a heavy beating.  Given this track record, it’s unclear which—if any—contending teams would be interested in trading for him.  He is also a free agent after either this season or next (depending on the option), so it isn’t as if a trading team would have some additional control.  The general principle is and should be that no one is off limits, but it’s hard to imagine a good team being so desperate for starting pitching at the trade deadline that they decide that Matt Garza is the answer to their problems that they make a massive offer.

And finally, if the Brewers are going to make a playoff push, it looks like Garza might be a key component of that run.  The rotation has been underwhelming, and if Garza continues to be a league-average pitcher, he can really help the team.  With Junior Guerra back and Chase Anderson and Jimmy Nelson both pitching halfway decently (101 and 93 cFIPs, respectively), Garza provides some additional depth should Zach Davies (6.79 DRA) continue to struggle.  The Brewers have some potential minor league reinforcements in, among others, Paolo Espino and Brandon Woodruff, but Garza has been a good major league pitcher for a long time and if he continues to pitch well then he will likely stay in the rotation.

Ultimately, I believe that the Brewers should not and will not trade Garza.  He probably doesn’t have a ton of trade value anyway, so there isn’t much benefit in actively attempting to move him, and keeping him allows the Brewers to try and push for a wild card spot.  The wild card situation is not that intimidating, as the Rockies and Diamondbacks are off to good starts but weren’t expected to be this good, and the rest of the competition is just as flawed as Milwaukee.  Things could certainly head south in a hurry for the Brewers, but that possibility isn’t a good enough reason to cut bait on Garza as soon as possible.

On Saturday, Matt Garza turned in his strongest start of the season. He pitched seven innings, allowing one run on eight hits, no walks and four strikeouts. Through three starts, his 1.89 DRA is tops amongst Brewers starters. Looking at some underlying numbers, this may not be a complete fluke. First off, Garza’s BABIP is .308, which is lower than his past two seasons in Milwaukee, but still well above his career average of .291. He’s lowered his ground ball percentage to 48 percent, much closer to his career norm of 45 percent than his 57 percent in 2016.

If one wanted to point to an ominous number out of line with Garza’s previous output, it’d be his BB/9, which is currently sitting 1.5, less than half his career rate. His lowest BB/9 for a full season occurred back in 2013, and even then it was 2.4, almost a full walk per nine innings more. Garza isn’t throwing more pitches in the strike zone (only 0.1 percent difference from 2016). However, batters are swinging at more of his offerings, with the primary difference being in swings on pitches out of the strike zone. Right now, swings on balls is 35.7 percent, which would be a career high. Obviously three starts is a tiny sample, but these numbers bear watching and will have a big impact on whether Garza sustains this success, or reverts back to his 2015 and 2016 form.

On Sunday, Travis Shaw led off the 4^th inning with a home run off a Tyler Glasnow fastball. The ball was away and up, which can be considered a sweet spot for some hitters. However, for Shaw, that home run, which he hit so hard it almost left PNC Park, was an anomaly.

That chart represents Shaw’s MLB career and measures his slugging percentage by zone. Shaw collects most of his big hits on low pitches, even going below the edge of the zone to get to balls. The Glasnow pitch looked to be in that top left portion of the strike zone, an area where Shaw struggles. While Brewers fans would probably be happy if he didn’t take too many big cuts on high balls, it’s always fun when a player makes a positive contribution that runs counter to his weaknesses.

I forgot to add a Thames fact last week, which fills me with shame. Luckily, he hit a homer on Sunday, his first in nine games. Those nine games were a real rough patch, as Thames only had one extra base hit. He walked seven times and struck out ten in this period. Since this streak roughly coincided with the turn of the calendar into May, I wanted to look to see whether pitches had changed their strategy against Thames.

And… nothing. No real adjustment in terms of types of pitches. To save everyone from looking at endless charts, there does seem to be some change in location of pitches faced. This plot looks at April, and this plot has the small sample size of May. Thames is still getting pounded away, but it looks like pitchers are aiming higher in the zone against him. If this is the new strategy, then it’s Thames’ turn to adjust.

For some bonus Thames numbers, I already mentioned that Thames has dramatically lowered his swings on pitches outside the zone (he’s hovering outside the top 10 om MLB with 20.2 percent). His discipline and batting eye has also produced his lowest swinging strike percentage, getting down 9.6 percent swinging strikes from 13.5 percent in 2012.

Looking Ahead: Today, the Brewers have their first day off since April 27, then will open their interleague schedule with the Red Sox coming to Milwaukee for three games. It’s Boston’s first visit to Milwaukee since 2003, and will be their second series ever at Miller Park. Luckily for the Brewers, they’ll miss Chris Sale after he started on Sunday in Minnesota. After the Red Sox series, the Brewers have three more games at home, against the Mets.

Just under one quarter of that $51 million will be going to starting pitcher Matt Garza, who will earn $12.5 million in the final year of a four-year contract. Garza’s contract will go down as one of the more unfortunate free agent decision’s in club history, as much for Garza’s subpar performance (4.57 ERA, 87 ERA+, minus-1.4 WARP) as his generally awful personality and attitude.

“I’m going to pitch for me,” Garza told MLB.com last season at the Brewers’ annual On Deck fan event. Garza has made his opinion on playing for rebuilding teams painfully obvious in the past. He wants to play for winners, and the difference in his attitude on the mound is visible when he’s playing for teams like the last two Brewers squads that have no chance of contention.

Garza had his chance to pitch his way out of Milwaukee last summer. His season debut was delayed to June by a lat injury, but he came out of the gates hot. Through his first three starts, Garza allowed just five runs over 144 innings, including six shutout in a June 19 start against the Dodgers. A good July could have seen Garza become an asset worth acquiring at the trade deadline, even if the Brewers would have had to eat his salary to receive any real value.

Instead, in six July starts, Garza won just once, a five-inning, one-run effort July 31 against the Pirates, too late to have any sway before the trade deadline. In his first five July starts, Garza allowed 26 runs (22 earned) over 26.1 innings, was tagged for four homers and a .504 slugging percentage, and struck out 16 batters against 11 walks, a brutal 1.45 K/BB.

Garza was able to finish strong in 2016. Over the final two months, he posted a 3.81 ERA and allowed just six home runs in 10 starts. There isn’t a team in the league, contenders included, that couldn’t use a starter of that level. Garza’s velocity is still strong; at 92.7 MPH, he was only a fraction of a mile per hour off the league average. But at 33 years old, Garza is at an age where teams understandably want to see more proof that he’s physically capable of contributing with consistency.

The 2015 season ended with Garza shut down due to his poor performance and the club’s desire to give playing time to younger pitchers instead. If Garza wants to ignore a repeat of that shameful scenario to end his Brewers career — or a chance to play for a winner in 2017 — he’s going to have to start strong. He has one more chance to pitch his way out, and if he runs with it, the Brewers should have no issues saying good riddance.

It's called abstinence, a word that has been forgotten amongst this generation… it's the best contraceptive… #juatsaying https://t.co/OgKg1qQmln

— Matt garza (@Gdeuceswild) January 13, 2017

Predictably, there were some loud responses: Some people agreed with Garza, and others disagreed. But there was also a third category of responses, which was to ask why we should care. The theory here is presumably that Garza is one of many citizens of this country and is entitled both to his own beliefs and the right to share them. And while this is true, I believe it misses the point, because sports and politics are linked.

As a major league baseball player, Matt Garza has a platform. He does not have that platform because his opinions have been deemed particularly noteworthy, but he has a platform nonetheless and so what he says matters. Professional athletes’ opinions do not exist in a bubble; fans of the team and the sport see these quotes, and articles are written in response to these statements.

Sports and politics are not separate. We cannot just pretend that sports exist on their own. We may prefer that they did, as having sports as a true escape would be nice, but the reality is that the two are inextricably linked. The NFL taking money from the Department of Defense is the most recognizable example of this, but it is present everywhere. The NBA moved their All Star Game from Charlotte in response to North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” European soccer leagues have been trying to address racism for decades, and MLB and the MLBPA just agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement that will functionally serve to shift money out of the Dominican Republic.

There is also an obvious point that I have not addressed yet, which is that the United States of America just elected a celebrity as president. One of the reasons that Donald Trump was able to get his campaign off the ground is that he had a built-in audience of people who already knew who he was. His platform mattered. I am not going to pretend that Matt Garza has the same influence as President Trump did even before he began his campaign, but the overall point stands: platforms matter.

And because Garza has a platform, his words matter. We cannot pretend that Garza’s opinions have no impact, and so people can and should speak out in response. His statements were not uttered in a vacuum. His tweet came directly in response to a change in America’s health care policy, and that change will impact the lives of many millions of people. Some of those people—women who cannot afford birth control without insurance—have had their lives irreparably changed, and recognizing those consequences are important. When Matt Garza belittles that by simply advocating abstinence, it is good and necessary to comment on it.

Sports and politics are linked. We cannot pretend that the political events occurring in America will not affect sports. The recent immigration executive order has cast doubt on Los Angeles’s ability to host the 2024 Olympics. The NBA has reached out to the State Department for guidance on whether its two Sudanese basketball players would be able to come back into the country after playing the Toronto Raptors. In what is hardly a far-fetched scenario, the Bucks could make the playoffs, finish seventh in the Eastern Conference, and be slated to play second-seeded Toronto in the first round. Will Thon Maker be able to return to the U.S. after the first two games of the series?

As Daniel Brim wrote at Dodgers Digest, baseball is an international sport. The World Baseball Classic was proposed by MLB in an attempt to grow the game around the world and expand it to as many countries as possible. MLB teams have players from 18 different countries, and immigrants remain a part of the fabric of this sport and this country. Changed immigration laws will impact that; today, the named countries do not happen to be ones that produce professional baseball players, but that does not have to be the case going forward. Two of Latin America’s biggest sources of baseball players—Cuba and Venezuela—do not have the strongest relationship with the United States. I don’t anticipate these immigration restrictions expanding that far, but who can know?

All of this is to say that sports do not exist in their own world, and so we must care about what our athletes say. They are public figures who can influence opinion, and their voices are heard in ways that others’ voices are not. Sports fans who do not otherwise engage in politics can see Tom Brady say that he “[hasn’t] paid much attention to what’s going on [with the world],” and they may get the sense that the Trump administration’s ban on immigration from seven primarily Muslim countries is not that significant. On the other hand, they can see Steve Kerr, Gregg Popovich, and Stan Van Gundy speak out forcefully against the ban while standing up for what they believe in, and those same fans would have an entirely different understanding of the consequences.

Not everyone’s voice carries the same weight. It is a fundamental truth of today’s culture, but it is not unique to modernity. Throughout human history, some people have always been more influential than others. And in 2017, that issue is at the forefront of politics.

People of color are tremendously underrepresented in American politics, as Congress itself is 81 percent white despite the American population being just 62 percent white. Sports, though, provide some of those people with enough influence to make their voices heard, such as when LeBron James endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in October. Someone being good at sports means that people will listen when they otherwise may not have, and it means that athletes have a lot of power.

Kerr, Popovich, and Van Gundy used their platform to advocate for the rights of those less privileged. It should not be too much to ask that others do the same. Athletes have platforms. It is important that they recognize this privilege, and it is important that we hold them accountable for what they say. Today’s political issues are not a joke.

This year’s Brewers, like every Major League team, will break camp with five starting pitchers holding down a spot in the rotation. Who those five will be however, is a topic that has yet to be settled. And even when it settles, its implications might take months to work themselves out. Last Spring, Zach Davies was not expected to earn a roster spot out of camp, and he did not. But he pitched well, impressed the Major League coaches and scouts, and it took less than a month for a spot to open up for him. Davies took the job, never looked back, and he comes into this Spring in a completely different role–as one of the front-line starters all but assured of job security.

Let’s break down all the potential starters.

1-Star Tier (The Dark Horses)

These pitchers are all likely to end up pitching for Biloxi, Colorado Springs, or a bullpen job at the most. But they’re candidates to start games at some point if they earn it, or things get desperate.

Taylor Jungmann

As Wily Peralta and Matt Garza proved down the stretch last year, you can always bounce back from pitching really, really terribly. But unfortunately for Jungmann, he might have lost too much ground to make up in the organizational pecking order. To put it bluntly and simply: the kind of blow-you-away spring that he would need to show to win a job, he’s just not good enough to pull off. I’m not saying he’s done as a Major League pitcher, I’m just saying the smart money is on that next big-league start of his coming in an Angels or Marlins uniform.

Andy Oliver

Oliver was a top-100 prospect in 2011. Back then, the common refrain on him was “electric, top-of-the-rotation stuff, if he can learn to control it.” That never happened. But Oliver is left-handed and he’s always been able to blow minor-league hitters away. In 2016, pitching for AAA Norfolk, his BB/9 rate plummeted to 3.7, the best mark he’s posted as a professional since 2010. He’d be a less improbable reclamation project than Junior Guerra, for what that’s worth. And he’s worked both as a starter and in relief throughout his career. Long relief is a more likely use for him unless the starting rotation is really victimized by injuries.

Tommy Milone

Milone spent the past two seasons shuttling back and forth between the Twins and their AAA squad in Rochester. Like Oliver, he throws left-handed. Unlike Oliver, he’s a soft-tosser who relies on inducing soft contact to get outs. Milone’s 2016 numbers weren’t great, and he doesn’t have a single “out” pitch, but he’s been a passable Major League swingman in the past. He’s another guy who might be more useful as a long man out of the bullpen.

Taylor Williams

The Brewers selected Williams’s contract this past November along with Ryan Cordell, Lewis Brinson, and Josh Hader, leaving several young pitchers exposed to the Rule 5 draft (including Miguel Diaz, who went first in that draft). Williams hasn’t pitched since 2014, when he popped up on prospect radars with a 2.36 ERA for the Timber Rattlers while hitting 98 on the radar gun, but he missed all of 2015 with elbow trouble, and all of 2016 rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. Now Williams is 25 years old and hasn’t pitched above A-ball, but David Stearns saw fit to protect him over several highly-touted arms, which makes . He’ll likely be ticketed for AA, and if he can pick up where he left off three years ago the team likely won’t be shy about ushering him up the ladder. I put him here, after the other three one-stars, because I’d almost classify Williams as a 1.5-star on this list. He’s got more upside and youth than the rest of the dark horses, but he’s too much of an unknown quantity at this point to really be a 2-star guy.

2-Star Tier (The Zach Davies Memorial Tier)

This tier is also full of players unlikely to start the year with the big club. But these guys are already regarded as important parts of the team’s future, so if they pitch well in the spring they could catapult themselves into consideration for a job down the line. And if either one sets Arizona ablaze this March, well, it’s not like the Brewers front office wants to keep them out of the starting rotation. Both of these guys are in a position to force the team’s hand this spring, but it’s probably more realistic to expect that they set themselves up for an opportunity later on this season.

Luis Ortiz

Ortiz was #68 on last year’s BP 101, and he should be even higher this time around. He loves to mix speeds with his fastball, bringing it in as steady as 92 and as quick as 97, and he compliments this array of looks with a plus slider in addition to a changeup and a curveball that he’s got command over. It’s an impressively polished arsenal for such a young pitcher. But, on the other hand, his health has been a repeated concern throughout his minor-league career, from both a “he can’t log innings consistently” perspective and a “he’s got a bad case of Body By Bartolo” perspective. Ortiz has never thrown more than 91 innings in a pro season, which makes him an interesting case–it’d be easier to look at that and turn him into a reliever, but Ortiz’s four-pitch mix screams “starting rotation.”

I have nothing but questions when it comes to how he will be handled. How many innings will the team feel safe giving him this year? Where should those innings be? He pitched well at AA, well enough to earn a promotion… but do we really want to sail such a rickety ship through the Bermuda Triangle that is Colorado Springs? If he’s ready for the big leagues, when do you use his innings? If his stuff is ready but his stamina isn’t, and maybe at some point we need to replace ineffective/injured big-league starters, what do you do?

I’m thinking the Brewers play it conservative with Ortiz this year. They’ve got more than enough other options. Why bring him up, if you’re not sure he’s ready? The thing is, his stuff might be ready. If it is, it’ll be awfully hard to keep him shut out of the rotation.

Josh Hader

Hader ranks three spots ahead of Ortiz in this year’s BP Top Ten for the Brewers. He’s the number one left-handed pitching prospect in baseball according to MLB Pipeline. And he did this despite a 5.22 ERA in 14 starts at Colorado Springs. (This is an indictment of Colorado Springs, not of Hader.)

When I profiled Hader approximately a year and a half ago, the Chris Sale comparison was mostly a byproduct of similar deliveries. But Hader’s return to Biloxi early last year blew the cover off of expectations–a 0.95 ERA, 11.5 K/9, and just one home run allowed in 57 innings. Even walks, which have long been Hader’s bugaboo, didn’t pose much of an issue, although he did struggle with control more frequently in Colorado, enough that you can’t just blame it on the thin air. The base on balls might yet relegate Hader to a bullpen role.

But before that happens, the left-hander with the funky delivery will almost certainly get to show his stuff as a starter sometime in 2017.

3-Star Tier (The Hunger Games)

The mathematically astute among my readers will notice that there’s an asymmetry brewing: the Brewers have five starting rotation spots to play with, there are four pitchers in this coming tier, and we still have two tiers left to play with. Someone out of this group is not going to make the cut. These guys aren’t castoffs or still-ripening prospects; we’re dealing with a group of big-league veterans, plus one prospect who has no reason to go back down to the minor leagues. That means it’s put up or shut up time–each of these players could work their way into the rotation, but it’s likely that one or more will be sentenced to hard time at Colorado Springs–or, if they’re truly lucky, long relief duty.

Chase Anderson

Chase Anderson is 29 years old. He has been a Major League pitcher for three years. He’s thrown 418 and 2/3 innings, started 78 games, and over that stretch he’s performed exactly two noteworthy feats: he’s maintained both a perfectly level 24-24 career won/loss record and a perfectly level 0.0 career WARP mark. For this off-season, at least, Anderson stands as the benchmark against which average pitching is measured–and a rare point of perfect symmetry between the old-school and new-school baseball statistics.

To be bluntly honest, that just about sums up the book on Chase Anderson. He’s average; replacement level. He’s got an underwhelming fastball, but he survives with a superior changeup and stuff like “pitchability” and “guts,” whatever you want to call it that gives you the edge in the chess match between pitcher and hitter. Unfortunately, Miller Park is not a friendly home for replacement-level pitchers with flyball tendencies trying to get by with inferior stuff, and Colorado Springs is even worse.

I could easily see Anderson turning into the “cagey veteran innings-eater” trope, the type of guy who never excels but is good enough to earn a paycheck propping up the back end of rotations well into his 30s, but I don’t see it happening for the Brewers. Miller Park is a stadium that feels almost like it was made to squeeze out Anderson’s shortcomings as a pitcher.

Jimmy Nelson

Nelson has thrown exactly 17.3 innings more than Chase Anderson in his career, a number that drops to 7.3, a single start, if you take away Nelson’s four 2013 appearances and look at each of them over a three-year span. Nelson’s 21-38 won/loss record isn’t as perfectly balanced as Anderson, but he’s in the same club of 400+ inning-tossers to balance a perfect 0.0 WARP total.

Back in November, Ryan Romano sought to explore the dissonance in Nelson’s numbers: his ERA has been acceptable, if not great, the past couple of seasons, but by DRA, he has been one of the worst pitchers in baseball. Looking at his strikeout and walk rates, one is inclined to predict a coming implosion from Nelson. Considering he’s exactly replacement level now (and was almost a win below replacement level over 2016), this could look particularly ugly.

A month later, Seth Victor took a more in-depth look under the hood at Nelson. It seems that his release point this past season was off point from where he was throwing in prior seasons. This can affect a pitcher’s command, Victor argues, and the numbers back that argument up: Nelson walked 4.3 batters every nine innings in 2016, up from 3.3 in 2015 and 2.5 in 2014.

If the Brewers can fix Nelson’s release point problems and get his pinpoint command back, he could again become a valuable asset. If not, he’s probably coming to the end of his rope in Milwaukee. As we’ve established, there’s no shortage of hungry, young, talented hurlers gunning for his job.

Jorge Lopez

If everything breaks right for Jorge Lopez, he could be one of the most fascinating stories of the 2017 baseball season. A year ago, the right hander was 23 years old and one of Milwaukee’s few pitching prospects with any upside to speak of. But when Lopez failed to crack the starting rotation of the big club, things took a turn for the ugly as he went to AAA Colorado Springs and was basically used as a pinata by opposing hitters for 17 gruesome starts.

But Lopez made some mechanical adjustments with Milwaukee’s instructional league staff this past autumn, and proceeded to set the Puerto Rican Winter League ablaze: a 1.56 ERA and 0.87 WHIP in 34.7 innings. He’s got nothing to prove at AA anymore, and our AAA club’s home stadium is the place of his nightmares. Lopez doesn’t have a spot locked up at this point, but if the mechanical tweaks he made have really fixed the command issues that plagued him as a prospect, that will change in a hurry. His ceiling is significantly higher than that of Nelson or Anderson.

Matt Garza

Both Dylan Svoboda and Nicholas Zettel have taken contrasting looks at Garza for this site in recent weeks. Svoboda argued that Garza’s second-half momentum and potential as a midseason trade chip to a contending team should get him a rotation spot for the first half of the season or so. Zettel, on the other hand, argued that Garza’s perceived trade value is overinflated and that, by keeping him around, the Brewers are paying a tremendous opportunity cost in giving innings to Garza rather than one of their up-and-coming young pitchers.

In a perfect world for the Brewers, a team with no pitching depth loses a couple of their starters to injury early on in spring training, and they can get the best of both worlds–something of value back without having to waste innings on him this season. But that probably won’t happen, so the Brewers’ front office will have to make a judgment call at the end of the spring. Can this guy pull an Aaron Hill and find some trade value up his kiester, or are we better off cutting the sunk costs and giving those innings to someone else? A lot, like, this guy’s whole career, will depend on how frisky or how finished he looks this spring.

4-Star Tier (He’s a lock, well, unless that thing happens again…)

Wily Peralta

I’ve got to admit, I didn’t see this coming. Last June, after Peralta had been bad enough to go from “opening-day starter” to “minor leaguer,” I wrote a very detailed argument as to why the Brewers should consider moving him to the bullpen, where he could be more effective.

What happened since then is Peralta made some major changes, ended a year-and-a-half-long skid of mediocrity, got another shot with the Major League club, and looked like a whole new ballplayer. He might have made sense in the bullpen at the time, but things change.

Peralta got a shot at redemption in August, took back his job in the rotation, and never looked back. He posted a sub-3.00 ERA down the stretch, struck out batters at a higher clip than ever before in his career, and worked far deeper into games than he had earlier in the season. I’d like to think that maybe he read my case to move him to the bullpen, got angry, and vowed to become a better starter. But whatever happened, it’s been good.

Back in September, Ryan Romano took a look at Peralta’s surging whiff rate. The reason he was improved, Romano argued, is that he induced swings-and-misses at a rate previously untouched in his career, because he’d begun relying on his slider, his best pitch, statistically, but always a secondary offering to his fastball or sinker, far more than ever before. As such, the Peralta we saw in August and September should be closer to what we can expect going forward.

That being said, there are a couple of nitpicky, but still valid, reasons I’m not giving Peralta quite as much job security as the two guys in the next tier. The slider is a notoriously abusive pitch on the human elbow, and Peralta’s increased reliance on it also increases the chance that he’ll spend significant time on the DL. And if he runs into trouble again, and goes back to “throw more sliders” as the strategy to fix things once again, that elevates the risk further and further. But the version of Wily Peralta we watched get turned into a human pincushion on Opening Day is, for all intents and purposes, a relic of the past–and that is a good, good thing for the Brewers and their fans.

5-Star Tier (The Mortal Locks)

These two guys cemented their 2017 jobs in 2016. They were the two Brewer pitchers to be consistently good, they were responsible for the most value on the mound, and unless either one gets hurt or struggles even worse than Wily Peralta a year ago, they’re both fixtures in the starting rotation for the forseeable future. Which is just a little ironic, as both of them started last season in AAA.

Junior Guerra

I hope Guerra’s elbow is fine. I hope he was just a little sore from being used in a way he wasn’t used to, had to adjust to, and everything will be fine going forward. I really hope last season’s “elbow soreness” doesn’t become this season’s Tommy John surgery. He’s the best story in baseball, and at his age, if he makes it back from surgery, he’ll never be the same again. From May 3rd through the end of July, Guerra was a true rags to riches story: a former Italian Leaguer who had reinvented himself with the splitter and become one of the best pitchers in baseball. It would be a true shame if that short stretch was all we got of Guerra at his apex.

Because, as I broke down last May, Guerra at his apex is really good. You could argue he’s the best pitcher the Brewers have had since the days of Zack Greinke. His splitter looks every bit as sharp and big as the Yankees’ Masahiro Tanaka, and he’s shown a propensity to dial it up for big games. Guerra beat the Cubs, he beat the Dodgers, and he beat the Nationals with Max Freakin’ Scherzer dueling him on the mound. If the elbow pain is a thing of the past, the opening day start should be Guerra’s to lose coming into spring camp.

Zach Davies

When I was a kid, every single young athlete heard the famous story of Michael Jordan getting cut from his high school basketball team. If you were a bad young athlete, like I was, you heard it a lot. It was supposed to motivate you to pick yourself up and keep going, and the fact that Jordan was The Greatest Ever during our formative years further hammered home the point that, yeah, even the greatest ever used to suck, so don’t you give up!

At some point in its growth, the Internet destroyed the potency of that myth. And, as we’ve learned, Michael Jordan is the type of person who tends to lie to himself about the magnitude of minor slights in order to self-motivate. That story happened his sophomore year of high school, when he tried out for the varsity precociously. He wasn’t cut-cut, either; he was sent down to the junior varsity, like 98 percent of all basketball-playing sophomores in the country, where he led the team in scoring. In that light, it’s not a particularly noteworthy or inspiring anecdote, unless you’re using Michael Jordan’s psychotic competitiveness as your muse.

But Zach Davies, on the other hand, while lacking the prestige of Jordan, has his own version of this story, and it has the added benefit of being 100 percent true. Davies came into Spring Training 2016 with an outside shot at the rotation, but didn’t crack the first starting five. He started the season in Colorado Springs, and by fortune managed to survive his two starts there with a 2.00 ERA, earning him a call-up less than a month into the season.

Davies never looked back, establishing himself as Milwaukee’s most consistent starting pitcher throughout the season. His 3.92 ERA and 3.68 DRA suggest that, while he isn’t dominant, he’s a better-than-average MLB starter. Davies soft-tossing and baby-faced profile will never, ever intimidate a Major League hitter, but he doesn’t rely on intimidation. Davies instead relies on deception and keeping hitters off-balance, and he does it well as the numbers indicate.

Last Fall, Julien Assouline made the case that Davies, and not Junior Guerra, was the Brewers’ true “ace” of the 2016 season, and I have to second his reasoning. Going forward, it’s entirely likely that Davies is the Brewers’ number one starting pitcher. But I would still start Guerra on opening day since Wily Peralta emerged as the presumed third starter behind them. Guerra and Peralta throw at similar speeds and both rely on a hard breaking ball as their out pitch. By sandwiching Davies in between them, in the two slot, you break up that pattern with someone whose pitches look completely different. In certain series through the year, ideally, it will even break down with those three going back to back to back–your three best pitchers, in a pattern that prevents opposing hitters from ever getting comfortable. This maximizes the effectiveness of all three.

At the outset of this off-season, David Stearns told the Journal-Sentinel that it was going to be a quieter offseason. As we put January behind us on the calendar, it has indeed been quiet. But even with the low-profile additions and in-house options, competition for the starting rotation spots in Milwaukee is fierce enough to be worth watching. Last season, the Brewers allowed 4.52 runs per game last season, good for 20th in all of baseball. However, with Davies a year older, Peralta set to contribute for a full season, and players like Hader and Ortiz looking to break into the parent club’s rotation, there’s reason to hope that will improve in 2017.

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

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

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

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

— David (@dgo151) January 23, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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