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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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.)

About a month ago, fellow BP Milwaukee writer Andrew Salzman took a rather in-depth look at the moves Doug Melvin has made in his tenure with the Brewers when they were sellers at the deadline. It’s quite informative and well-written, and you should read it if you haven’t.

I’m going to narrow my focus to not only more recent trades but also include ones from the winter. I also will look at trades that might not or cannot be defined as “seller” moves. This list will not be an exhaustive one, as trades for guys like Burke Badenhop won’t be useful to us in this discussion.

Dec 2010: Brewers acquire RHP Shaum Marcum for 3B Brett Lawrie
Dec 2010: Brewers acquire RHP Zack Greinke and SS Yuniesky Betancourt (shudder) for OF Lorenzo Cain, SS Alcides Escobar, RHP Jeremy Jeffress, and RHP Jake Odorizzi

Jul 2011: Brewers acquire RHP Francisco Rodriguez for LHP Danny Ray Herrera and RHP Adrian Rosario
Jul 2011: Brewers acquire OF Jerry Hairston Jr. for OF Erik Komatsu

Jul 2012: Brewers trade RHP Zack Greinke for SS Jean Segura, RHP Johnny Hellweg, and RHP Ariel Pena
Jul 2012: Brewers trade C George Kottaras for RHP Fautino De Los Santos

Jul 2013: Brewers trade RHP Francisco Rodriguez for 3B Nicky Delmonico
Aug 2013: Brewers trade RHP John Axford for RHP Michael Blazek

Dec 2013: Brewers trade OF Nori Aoki for LHP Will Smith
Jul 2014: Brewers acquire OF Gerardo Parra for LHP Anthony Banda and OF Mitch Haniger
Aug 2014: Brewers acquire RHP Jonathan Broxton for RHP Barrett Astin and RHP Kevin Schakelford

Nov 2014: Brewers acquire 1B Adam Lind for RHP Marco Estrada
Jan 2015: Brewers trade RHP Yovani Gallardo for SS Luis Sardinas, RHP Corey Knebel, and RHP Marcos Diplan
Jul 2015: Brewers trade 3B Aramis Ramirez for RHP Yhonathan Barrios

(NOTE: Just to make it a bit easier to view, the bolded transactions represent those that took place around the non-waiver trade deadline.)

Regardless of buying or selling, the Brewers haven’t done much at the deadline in recent years. As shown above, the only major trade that took place around the deadline was the Greinke trade to Los Angeles. While that trade was a significant trade for the organization, it’s important to note Greinke was poised to be a free agent at the end of the season.

The Brewers theoretically could have moved Corey Hart and perhaps Aramis Ramirez during the 2012 trade deadline, but chose to hold those assets. Part of the reasoning, at least publicly, was that each player had years of team control remaining. Hart was under contract through the next year and Ramirez through the 2015 season.

Another interesting thing to note is the other big moves were made mostly in December (or in the case of the Gallardo trade shortly thereafter). Here, we do see players with team control being moved. Nori Aoki and Yovani Gallardo both had one year left on their contracts when they were traded. Of course, it’s notable that the Brewers also had players ready to take over for them, with Khris Davis taking over for Aoki and Jimmy Nelson for Gallardo.

The Brewers recent history suggests they won’t make any big moves at the deadline. It also suggests the players moved will likely be in their final season of team control or, in the case of John Axford, performing poorly.

The Brewers moved Aramis Ramirez already. Gerardo Parra and Neal Cotts will almost surely go, since they are free agents to be. If they can move Kyle Lohse and Jonathan Broxton I’m sure they will, but neither has produced well enough or is cheap enough to make that a likely scenario. They’re a pair of veterans who could easily be moved in August after they pass through waivers.

Mike Fiers and Jean Segura have reportedly received a lot of interest from contending and non-contending teams. Both players are under team control for a long time. Fiers has four years remaining and Segura has three. Little in the Brewers’ historical trades suggest either will be on the move. Though, it should be noted that the two do have replacements in line. Taylor Jungmann and Tyler Cravy for Fiers, in the immediate future, with Jorge Lopez and Ty Wagner in a year. For Segura there is Luis Sardinas right now with top-prospect Orlando Arcia in the near future.

The real questions surround Adam Lind and Carlos Gomez. Each can be controlled through next season. The Brewers moved Gallardo and Aoki when they just had one year of control remaining. Those moves were made in the winter, but if the Brewers are going to be open to moving them in the offseason, one could argue that they should be open to moving them now.

Gallardo and Aoki had clear replacement options waiting in the minors. Adam Lind has some immediate replacements — Jason Rogers, Matt Clark, Shane Peterson — but they aren’t very promising. I think the Brewers brass could sell the casual audience on Rogers taking over, as he’s currently hitting .341/.454/.625 in Triple-A. Rogers now does remind me of Khris Davis when he was giving a full-time spot on the roster, but I’m higher on Rogers than most.

Carlos Gomez technically has replacements too: Logan Schafer now, Kyle Wren and Tyrone Taylor in the near future. However, it would be impossible to sell anyone on Schafer. He’s not a new name and hit .207/.282/.317 during his time in Milwaukee and his hitting .259/.292/.347 in Triple-A. Wren and especially Taylor are a ways off.

Based on their recent history, it’s hard to see the Brewers moving more than Gerardo Parra and Neal Cotts at the trade deadline. While I do believe there is some recent precedent for moving players with a year of control left, I’m not convinced the Brewers will give up on next season, which is essentially what they’d be doing if they traded Adam Lind and Carlos Gomez. Of the two, I think Lind has the better chance of being moved.

This all assumes the Brewers follow recent trends. Things can and do change, especially in relation to the team’s competitive window and their willingness to rebuild. With this trade market being light on bats, though, it’s possible the Brewers get some trade offers too good to turn down. Short of that, the hope for those players being moved probably lies in the offseason.