But the book has not closed on Melvin’s time at the helm. Some of the players he brought in, the guys we had all written off, may have a little more to contribute before they ride off into the independent ball sunset. Tyler Thornburg looks like one such player. The one-time top prospect, who had seemingly fizzled out without ever achieving much of anything, has done pretty well to kick off 2016. With a 2.47 DRA and 73 cFIP over his 13.0 frames — each better than Zach Britton and Kelvin Herrera, among others — he’s turned himself into a pretty valuable reliever.

Thornburg’s quasi-breakout didn’t come completely out of nowhere. He showed some potential at the end of 2015 after returning from a number of injuries. Over the final two months of the season (a total 24.2 innings), he struck out 26.0 percent of his opponents and walked just 9.0 percent. While the latter hasn’t shifted much, the former has spiked — he’s posted a 38.9 percent strikeout rate in 2016. Thornburg still has some problems with control, but his ability to overpower hitters compensates for any other shortcomings.

So what’s allowed Thornburg to break out? Well, another offseason to heal certainly helped. He explained to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal‘s Todd Rosiak that his elbow now feels fully recovered, which has helped his fastball velocity to surge back to normal:

And Thornburg has deployed his heater in a different manner this year — as Kyle Lesniewski broke down over at Brew Crew Ball, the four-seamer has gone much lower in the zone, which seems to have made it more effective. But the biggest difference comes from movement, particularly on his slower offerings. Note how Thornburg’s curveball has started to distinguish itself from his other two pitches:

With horizontal movement, the four-seamer has become less straight (which Lesniewski noted); with vertical movement, the curveball has dropped a lot more. Out of 110 pitchers who have thrown at least 50 curves in 2016, Thornburg’s 10.0-inch dip ranks sixth. Most of those curveballs, shockingly, have scraped the plate, and hitters haven’t done very well against them.

The changeup, like the four-seamer, has benefited from the curveball’s transformation. Thornburg has seen the whiff rate on his cambio jump to 26.5 percent, primarily because it’s darted toward the left upper side of the plate. (A little extra velocity couldn’t hurt, as the first graph indicates.) Altogether, Thornburg’s offspeed pitches have formed a powerful one-two punch — an adversary has to expect a curveball that he’ll likely swing over the top of or a changeup that will jam him inside.

Thornburg still has some work left to do though before the Brewers can trust him completely. He’s given up four home runs this year and hitters have made solid contact against him 46.4 percent of the time, one of the highest clips among qualified relievers. His changeup and curveball account for three of the four long balls; he hasn’t commanded the latter especially well and the same concern applies to the former, albeit to a lesser degree. This may just come with the territory — Thornburg is still working to shake off the rust after such an extended period out of action. He’s once again showing his ability and if he can polish his offerings up fully, he’ll improve even more.

One successful reliever obviously doesn’t negate Melvin’s numerous other failings. It would have been nice if Thornburg could have developed into a reliable middle-of-the-rotation starter (which, in fairness, could still happen). As a middle reliever, though, Thornburg seems to have carved out a niche for himself in Craig Counsell’s bullpen. His bumpy road has finally smoothed over, and he looks as though he’ll push on.

Back in 2011 and 2012, Braun was on top of the world. He clubbed a .345 TAv in the former year and a .327 TAv in the latter, both of which ranked fourth among qualified hitters. His efforts on offense netted him an MVP trophy and two Silver Sluggers; for Brewers fans, he looked like a franchise player and potential Hall of Famer. Then came the setbacks, some of them unfortunate (the oblique strain and recurring hand injury) and others self-inflicted (the PED suspension, as well as this whole debacle). From 2013 to 2015, he fell to a .290 TAv — certainly a respectable level of offense, but not that of a phenom.

In 2016, Braun has put all of that behind him. Through his first 75 plate appearances, he’s crushed his way to a .367 TAv. In every regard, his offense seems to have returned to — or surpassed — his peak:

What has Braun done differently to get here? Can he keep it up? Let’s start with the walks and strikeouts. During his two-year run of dominance, Braun brought a moderately patient approach to the plate, swinging at 31.5 percent of pitches outside the strike zone and 65.3 percent of pitches inside it. He combined that with a satisfactory swinging-strike rate of 9.3 percent to create the above figures. When he fell off the pace, he swung more often at everything —his O-Swing rate spiked to 35.4 percent, while his Z-swing rate jumped to 66.0 percent — and made less contact, which led to an 11.4 percent whiff rate.

This year, the planets have aligned for Braun. Like most of his teammates, he’s chased less often, compressing his O-Swing rate to 24.7 percent. Unlike his colleagues, though, he hasn’t sacrificed aggression in the zone — his Z-Swing rate has held steady at 68.2 percent. Simultaneously, he’s missed the ball less frequently, which has shrunk his swinging-strike rate to 6.9 percent. He’s managed to cut down his strike rate, called strike rate, and swinging-strike rate; in other words, he’s attained the plate-discipline trifecta.

With the swinging strikes, there are several noteworthy developments. Through the ups and the downs, one thing has generally stayed the same for Braun — he’s had a soft spot against high pitches:

In 2011 and 2012, Braun swung through 11.4 percent of pitches in the top two-fifths of the zone. That mark stabilized at 11.0 percent from 2013 to 2015. But come 2016, the weakness has basically vanished:

Braun’s whiff rate on those high pitches has dropped all the way down to 3.5 percent. That’s not the only thing he’s changed, either. When he entered his three-year slump, Braun started whiffing at pitches low and inside a lot more; so far this year, he appears to have emerged from that spiral as well.

In terms of pitch types, Braun hasn’t fared much differently against breaking balls. He’s instead taken a step forward against hard and offspeed pitches:

Back in 2014, Stuart Wallace argued that Braun’s hand malady had led to “slower bat speed and erratic swing path, making the swing longer than desired”; in turn, he theorized, that prevented Braun from catching up with harder pitches. With his hand fully healed in 2016, Braun can now turn on fastballs like never before — in addition to the plummeting whiff rate, he has a .364 average and .636 slugging percentage off fastballs. Together with his return to normal against offspeed offerings, this has given him the contact skills of an All-Star.

The plate discipline is trickier. Most players won’t pair a high Z-Swing rate with a low O-Swing rate, as Braun has done to this point. In 2015, out of 300 hitters who saw at least 1,000 pitches, only 11 were above 66 percent in the former and below 26 percent in the latter:

An eye this discerning doesn’t come around very often. That isn’t to say, however, that Braun can’t sustain this. The uptick in swings during Braun’s down period could have stemmed from his poor health — without the power he once had, he might have pressed at the plate. After getting back surgery in the offseason, he’s recovered well; despite taking a day off on Tuesday, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel‘s Todd Rosiak that he’d “been very pleasantly surprised with how good the back has felt and responded”. If his clout is truly back, then the plate discipline could stick around as well.

So the question then becomes, will Braun’s power stick around? At first glance, it looks a little fluky. From 2011 to 2012, he put the ball on the ground 42.6 percent of the time, while tallying a hard-hit rate of 36.7 percent. Over the subsequent three years, he continued to make solid contact, doing so 35.5 percent of the time, but he stopped elevating the ball — his ground ball rate inflated to 48.9 percent. This season, he’s maintained that grounder rate (48.1 percent) and hasn’t improved on his hard-hit rate (37.0 percent). If he hasn’t put the ball in the air like he used to, and he hasn’t managed to square it up more often, what’s behind this explosion?

The answer lies in his batted-ball distribution. Braun pulled 34.1 percent of his balls in play during his MVP years, after which he kept his pull rate at 32.9 percent. In other words, he hit pretty evenly to all fields, no matter what the results were. He’s abandoned that strategy entirely in 2016, by yanking the ball to left field 46.3 percent of the time. That’s the area of the field where he has his highest career wOBA — .485, compared to .429 to center and .444 to right. And this change has happened because Braun has been more selective on inside pitches:

In the offseason, I covered Braun’s opposite-field power, which he tapped into by swinging more often at pitches outside. The opposite mindset has helped him pull the ball — on pitches in the inner two-fifths of the zone, he used to swing 52.2 percent of the time, and now he swings 48.4 percent of the time. Braun still hits well going the opposite way — on 29 balls hit to center and right field, he’s hit .482 and slugged 1.034 (not a typo). He’s just decided to capitalize on the pull field, and it looks like a wise decision to this point.

The power section comes with more caveats. Of course, Braun’s current BABIP won’t last; once that settles down, it’ll sap a lot of his current prowess. And his power will probably fall off as well — even with all of these pulled balls, a ground ball hitter’s ISO will probably top out in the .230s or .240s. Still, he seems to have regained his stroke, and even if he regresses after this, his overall line should be pretty impressive: PECOTA expects him to finish the year with a .309 TAv. After three years wandering the injury-plagued desert, Milwaukee’s prodigal son has returned home to claim his throne.

Braun has made it clear that he wants to stay with the Brewers, no matter how much David Stearns stripped the club. In the offseason, as player after player hit the road, the Journal Sentinel‘s Tom Haudricourt reported that Braun “expects to be around as the team regroups”.  That coalescence will probably take a year or two; when it does come to fruition, though, the aging star could still be able to hold his own. The next strong core of Milwaukee position players could have an all-time great as their mentor.

With that said, “all likelihood” doesn’t cover every scenario. In the 2009 offseason, the Brewers traded for a scrawny outfielder who had never hit for power — he’d posted a lifetime ISO of .114 in the majors and .100 in the minors. But after a few years of development, Carlos Gomez started to smack the snot out of the ball. During his five-plus seasons in Milwaukee, he earned an ISO of .186. This leap, while uncommon, does happen from time to time, and we may witness a similar transformation with Scooter Gennett.

In the minor leagues, Gennett did not take walks. Across five seasons and 2,336 plate appearances, he worked his way to a free pass 5.6 percent of the time. In the major leagues, Gennett had not taken walks. Over his first three seasons in the show, he had gone to bat 1,095 times, 4.0 percent of which ended in a walk. This, it seemed, was simply Gennett’s profile — an aggressive, low-walk hitter.

2016 has destroyed all of that. Thus far, Gennett has racked up nine walks in 47 plate appearances, for an incredible 19.1 percent walk rate. Is there any precedent for this in his past? I’ll let this amazing graph answer that question:

Gennett has played in all 12 games in 2016, so this graph looks at his 12-game rolling average unintentional walk rate throughout his major-league career. Not only has he never done this before, he’s never come close to doing this before. Prior to this season, his highest 12-game clip was 9.8 percent, back in August 2013. To put it another way: There are 321 of these 12-game chunks (since he’s played in 332 games total). In 62 of those periods, he took zero walks  — that’s almost one out of every five! Suffice it to say that Gennett has never experienced anything like this.

So what’s behind it? Perhaps because of his three home runs (!) which lead the team (!!!), Gennett has a 47.3 percent zone rate in 2016, per FanGraphs’ data. That’s a moderate dropoff from his previous zone rate of 48.7 percent, and it probably has something to do with the spike in walks. But the biggest reason for his improvement is what you’d suspect — he’s chasing a lot less often. Gennett swung at 42.3 percent of pitches outside the strike zone before this season, the fourth-highest level in baseball. To this point, he’s cut that down to 27.1 percent, which ranks 83rd out of 197 qualifiers. In terms of discipline, Gennett has gone from the bottom of the barrel to the middle of the pack, a change that has inflated his walk rate.

Gennett has made the most progress in one particular area: outside pitches. Let’s look at some numbers from Baseball Savant. From 2013 to 2015, 166 left-handed batters saw at least 1,000 pitches in zones 11 and 13 (here‘s the zone from the catcher’s perspective). On average, they offered at 29.8 percent of those pitches; Gennett swung at 35.3 percent, placing 137th. Now we’ll move ahead to 2016, in which we’ll lower our threshold to 40 pitches, giving us a 120-player sample. Where does Gennett slot in among these hitters?

Much higher. Higher than Carlos Santana (19.7 percent); higher than Joey Votto (26.2 percent); higher than, well, pretty much everyone. And this change reverberates elsewhere in Gennett’s offense. Since he swings less often at pitches away from him, that means he swings more often, comparatively, at pitches close to him; this has increased his pull rate to a career-high 42.9 percent. As a hitter who does much better when hitting to right field — he has a lifetime pull wRC+ of 164, compared to 119 to center and 118 to right — Gennett benefits from this adjustment in more ways than just walks.

The big question here, as is always the case with April breakouts, is sustainability. Most of the time, when a Gomez-type player starts hitting for power, or when a Gennett-type player starts taking walks, it’ll vanish pretty quickly. But the underlying plate discipline changes add some credence to his case — those are on a per-pitch basis, as opposed to per-plate appearance, so they’ll stabilize much quicker. While Gennett won’t sustain a Bonds-esque 19.1 percent free pass rate, a higher walk rate should be in order. Before the season, PECOTA projected 25 walks in 592 plate appearances, for a rate of 4.2 percent. Now, it predicts a 5.1 percent clip in his remaining 548 trips to the dish. The longer Gennett keeps this up, the more the projections will come around to his side.

Gennett’s transformation has epitomized that of his team. Once a squad full of free swingers, the Brewers have become one of the more patient clubs in the majors, for better or for worse. For Gennett, though, the change certainly seems like a worthwhile one. The old Gennett swung at everything, and that approach generally didn’t pay off; the new Gennett has swung a lot less, especially at bad pitches, and that’s made him one of the best Milwaukee hitters. Every major leaguer tweaks his game constantly, looking to correct his flaws and reach his potential; maybe Gennett can now fulfill his.

All data as of Monday, April 18.

One of the recent acquisitions who intrigues me the most happens to be a reliever. While left-handed pitcher Nick Hagadone doesn’t carry the pedigree of any of the aforementioned names, he’s succeeded recently — and how. In 2014, he posted a 2.70 ERA and 3.07 DRA, along with an 86 cFIP. Even over a mere 23.1 innings, those kinds of numbers will make a lot of relief pitchers jealous. How, then, did the Brewers manage to pick him up?

Well, his 2014 campaign really diverged from the others. For his career, Hagadone has an ERA of 4.72, a DRA of 4.07, and a cFIP of 103. It’s the classic flash in the pan — an otherwise-mediocre player explodes briefly, then regresses, then spends a lot of time trying to return to that peak. All Milwaukee can do is hope that Hagadone succeeds in that task.

On a basic level, Hagadone has one reliable pitch: a slider. It’s been worth 9.8 runs over his career, per FanGraphs, and it didn’t really get much better in 2014. The difference came on his four-seam fastball: A -4.5-run pitch overall, it broke even at 0.0 runs in 2014. And the greater success of the heater probably had something to do with its distinction from the slider:

When Hagadone broke out in 2014, he did so with a large slider-fastball velocity differential. It seems that the gap got too big for its own good last season, which sank both the slider (0.4 runs) and the fastball (-3.0 runs). Packing a little more heat back on his slider, to reach that sweet spot, could help him ascend once more.

The bigger factor, however, is pitch usage. Hagadone kept things pretty steady for the first four years of his career, but Year Five saw him swap out the slider for a cutter:

Hagadone discussed the change with Cleveland.com in May, explaining that he wanted another pitch “to keep [hitters] off-balance.” While his logic there appears sound — a three-pitch arsenal is generally better than a two-pitch arsenal — the results say differently. If Hagadone wants to avoid the struggles he endured in 2015, he might want to bring back the pitch mix that brought him prosperity in 2014.

With fixes this simple, why wouldn’t Hagadone make them? This analysis doesn’t take everything into account. For one thing, Hagadone faced really easy competition in 2014: The TAv for his opponents was just .252, compared to .259 for his career as a whole. There’s also the fact that hitters may have adjusted after he broke out, as they tend to do at the major-league level; perhaps his 2015 decline was inevitable. And the sample size-issue always pertains to cases like this — 23.1 innings does not a full season make. The velocity and pitch usage may only be ably to go so far.

Hagadone has some upside — he proved that in 2014. He still throws a superb slider, and his fastball brings the heat. He just hasn’t put it together convincingly yet, and at age 30, he doesn’t have much time left to do that. The Brewers are in a position to give him some reps this season, in Triple-A or the majors, so we’ll have to see what he accomplishes. The spark he had two years ago could come back, but the odds are that it won’t.

Matt Garza’s 2015 struggles are no secret. He utterly collapsed, posting the worst ERA (5.63) and DRA (5.33) in his career as a full-time starter. I’ve argued that he shouldn’t start for the Brewers in 2016, and while some may reasonably disagree with that #hottake, Garza undeniably has a shaky future at the major-league level. A large part of that stems from his exploding walk rate: After walking 7.3 percent of the batters he faced from 2010 to 2014, Garza issued free passes at an 8.6 percent clip in 2015, which would have been the 11th-highest in the majors if he’d qualified for the ERA title. Without control on his side, Garza looks pretty hopeless.

But beneath the surface, Garza didn’t get that much worse last season, or worse at all. According to BP’s PITCHf/x metrics, he threw 47.2 percent of his pitches in the strike zone, compared to a lifetime Zone rate of 46.3 percent. Even though he didn’t amass many chases — his O-Swing rate fell to 29.7 percent, from 30.9 percent for his career — he still managed to avoid balls. Per Baseball-Reference, 65.3 percent of his 2015 pitches went for strikes, a rate that topped his career mark of 64.0 percent. Garza also had a higher in-play-strike rate (32.4 of his 2015 strikes, compared to 29.5 percent for his career), which helped to keep plate appearances curt.

So what should Garza’s walk rate have been? In 2013, Rotograph’s Mike Podhorzer created an expected walk rate equation. It uses three statistics — strike rate, in-play-strike rate, and strikeout rate — to tell how many bases on balls a pitcher theoretically should have had. With an adjusted r^2 of .752 in the sample Podhorzer analyzed, this equation seemed to excel at that task. And for Garza, well, it paints a pretty clear picture:

141 pitchers accumulated at least 100 innings last season. These are the top 10 in bad luck, as measured by difference between walk rate and expected walk rate. Among all of them, Garza tops the list; this metric suggests he should have walked a mere 6.2 percent of his opponents. So this means that, if his poor luck turns around in 2016, he’ll limit his free passes and improve overall — right?

Well, no. Misfortune does bear some of the blame for Garza’s inflated walk rate last season, but it can’t account for everything. We need to look a little bit deeper, because for all the benefits of that expected walk rate equation, it ignores one crucial factor: sequencing. That’s why, in 2015, Alex Chamberlain followed up on Podhorzer’s work, creating a new expected walk rate equation.

How did Chamberlain attempt to correct the flaw? In addition to strike rate, in-play-strike rate, and strikeout rate, he added 3-0 count rate: the percentage of all plate appearances that, at some point, contain a count of three balls and no strikes. While this doesn’t perfectly model sequencing — as Chamberlain explained, its multicollinearity isn’t especially strong — it does pump up the adjusted r^2 to .821. 3-0 count percentage clearly has some predictive value, and for Garza, that isn’t a good thing.

Here, again, are the ten biggest underperformers. Garza appears on this list too, but this time with considerably more luck:

The new expected walk rate equation dings Garza a lot more, because 3-0 counts defined him last season: He began 6.4 percent of his plate appearances with three straight balls. That’s much higher than his 4.7 percent lifetime 3-0 count rate, as well as the 2015 MLB average of 4.4 percent. Garza didn’t really struggle in 3-0 counts themselves — 60.2 percent of them ended in a free pass, which was below the 62.4 percent major-league baseline — but the fact that he got in so many of them held him back.

For 2016, Garza has a number of things to work on if he wants to earn his keep. He’ll have to arrest his declining strikeout rate, which really hurt him last year, and he’ll need to keep the ball in the yard. Making progress on his walk rate would also aid his case, and to do that, he must stop himself from falling behind hitters so often. Garza still throws strikes and keeps at-bats short; if he can just sequence things correctly, perhaps his walk rate will improve to its earlier form.

It’s an interesting trade because, in all probability, the Brewers primarily wanted to acquire two of the three players they received in the trade. They targeted Anderson in the hope that he can become an adequate back-of-the-rotation starter or a usable swingman in the bullpen. It’s hard to think of a 28-year-old pitcher as still having time to tap into his full potential, but as has been discussed here before, Anderson still has an outside chance of doing that. Then there’s Isan Diaz who’s quite an intriguing prospect. Diaz performed poorly in his first season in professional baseball but produced a “herculean” slash line (.360/436/.640) in 2015.

Then there’s Aaron Hill, who the Brewers, more than likely, begrudgingly accepted in the deal. The Diamondbacks sent $6.5 million to Milwaukee in the deal to offset much of Hill’s contract, but ultimately the Brew Crew decided it was best to shell out $5.5 million in order to obtain Diaz and Anderson. One could argue that David Stearns secretly hopes Hill bounces back so he can flip him for a middling prospect this summer; however, this portion of the deal was solely about Arizona’s willingness to part with a high-end prospect in order to offload an unfriendly contract.

With that said, Hill has had a very intriguing career. As a prospect Hill, John Sickels described him as a well-rounded player who could tap into some home run potential while playing solid defense at either second or third base.

Hill, throughout his career, did all of those things, but at different and inconsistent points. He had two very good seasons and one great season. But what’s interesting about Hill is that those seasons occurred sporadically. In fact, none of those very good performances came in back-to-back years. They were always followed with at least one season of a precipitous decline in performance. In essence, there was a lot of year-to-year variance in Hill’s performance.

From 2005 to 2015 the league standard deviation of BWARP has been 1.91 BWARP (if I include pitchers, so BWARP & PWARP, the standard deviation lessens to 1.74). Hill’s BWARP standard deviation is 2.25. To be clear, standard deviation is a measure of variability, so the lower the number the less variability. The 11-year veteran has been far more volatile than the average big leaguer.

Hill’s best year came in his first full season with Arizona (2012), where he produced 6.8 BWARP. That season, however, followed two very poor seasons including the worst season of his career, in 2011, where he was below replacement level. In that year, Hill didn’t do anything well. He didn’t hit for average, he didn’t get on base, he didn’t hit for power, his defense was subpar, and his base running was average at best. Suuddenly, that all changed. Hill found his hitting stroke again in 2012, slugging .522 – a career high – and producing the best defensive season of his career. He also compiled the best on-base percentage of his career, which culminated in more than a seven BWARP increase from his 2011 season.

From 2005 to 2015, only six players had a bigger increase in year-to-year BWARP, and only one of those players (Aubrey Huff) was below replacement level in the previous season. Interestingly enough, the biggest increase from year-to-year BWARP between that time was Bryce Harper’s 2014 season to 2015 season, which had a 9.3 jump in BWARP.

But the most fascinating aspect of Hill is that after the first three seasons of his career he became a very different hitter. While scouts suggested that Hill had some power potential hidden in his bat, that didn’t come to fruition until his third season in the big leagues, where he hit 17 home runs. It was the first time Hill hit more than ten in a season.

The following season (2008) was mostly a forgotten one for Hill. He dealt with concussion issues all year and only played 55 games. What people don’t talk about, though, is that Hill started doing something very different. For the first three years of his career Hill wasn’t known as a fly-ball hitter, predominantly keeping the baseball on the ground. In 2008, Hill had a ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio of 0.74. Since that season, Hill has transformed into more of a fly-ball hitter and only had one season since 2008 where he hit more grounders than fly balls.

This change in approach played huge dividends in 2009 when Hill hit a career-high 36 home runs and had an ISO of .213. The approach, however, did cause a slight drop in BABIP, but if you’re hitting 36 bombs, then you can probably cope with the slight BABIP drop. Perhaps the approach went to Hill’s head, however, as he took it to an extreme in 2010, with a 0.65 ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio. This inevitably played a major factor in Hill’s .196 BABIP, as grounders usually help in having a higher BABIP. This caused Hill to have one of his famous drop-offs in overall performance.   

At least Hill’s fly balls still went over the fence in 2010. He finished the season with 26 homers and a 10.8 percent home-run-to-fly-ball ratio. In 2011, Hill tried to rectify his approach at the plate, with a .87 ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio, but he didn’t hit anything hard and his home run to fly ball ratio plummeted to 4.2 percent. Hill also dealt with a hamstring injury, which admittedly may have played a factor in his poor season and his altered approach.

That next season Hill was traded to the Diamondbacks. The change in scenery and ballpark may have spawned his 2012 season, as it was the best of his career. Hill had a more balanced approach at the plate and had the best defensive season of his career. Since then, Hill’s performance has declined at almost every level. He’s striking out more and walking less. His BABIP keeps dropping even though he’s hitting more grounders than fly balls. In 2015, his BABIP was at .253 and hadn’t been that low since his 2010 season.

Hill will be 34 when the year starts and is probably washed up. While his career has had a ton of variance, it’s unlikely that he’ll produce another great season. Sure, the Brewers can hope that he figure’s things out again, but none of his stats seem to be trending in the right direction. At this point, Hill is probably just a placeholder, clinging on to his last years as a professional baseball player before another young and talented prospect climbs through the ranks.

In terms of pitch mix, they have one key thing in common as well. Adam McCalvy wrote an interesting story on Thursday about the changeups that each pitcher throws. This piece made me want to scrutinize the issue further. Just how similar are the cambios that Anderson and Davies employ? Will the latter excel with his, like the former has already done?

Let’s begin with the characteristics of the pitches themselves. Anderson has used his changeup 22.1 percent of the time in his career, while Davies called upon his changeup for 24.9 percent of his pitches in his brief 2015 tryout. In terms of velocity, Anderson (82.2 mph) beats Davies (78.7 mph) significantly. Raw velocity doesn’t mean much, though, when talking changeups. Since Davies has a slower arsenal across the board than Anderson does, they have about the same amount of distance between their fastballs and changeups: Anderson throws his heater 10.1 mph faster, while Davies’s four-seamer travels 10.6 mph above his changeup. The average pitcher has about a nine-mph fastball-changeup differential, and because a larger gap is better, as long as the arm speed and arm slot are similar, this bodes well for both Anderson and Davies.

When it comes to movement, a difference begins to emerge. Anderson’s changeup has sunk an average of 9.9 inches, while running 6.6 inches. In 2015, its vertical and horizontal movement each ranked ninth among the 91 starters with at least 200 pitches, so it really distinguished itself with its bite. Davies’s changeup, by contrast, tallied an average drop of 8.7 inches and run of 4.4 inches; if he had qualified, those would have ranked 29th and 55th, respectively. Not only did it travel slower, it had more mediocre movement in both directions.

Granted, horizontal and vertical movement can only tell a partial story. Davies’s changeup may not move as much, but its deception is superb. Coming out of his hand, it looks exactly like his fastball, which means the amount of movement needed to make the pitch effective is lessened. We can see this in terms of swinging strikes — often considered the definitive pitch-quality metric — because Davies actually wins out. Hitters whiffed at his changeup 27.6 percent of the time; they’ve swung and missed for only 19.1 percent of Anderson’s cambios. Davies didn’t net quite as many strikes (64.2 percent) as Anderson has netted (69.0 percent), but the whiff advantage makes up for that.

It should also be noted that Davies took a very distinct approach with his changeup during his 2015 cup of coffee. More than every other pitch in his repertoire, he buried it:

A total of 62.7 percent of Davies’s changeups went to the lower-fifth of the zone — nearly double the 33.6 percent rate of his other offerings. When hitters didn’t flail helplessly at it, they put it on the ground, giving the pitch a 66.7 percent ground-ball rate. That no contact/weak contact combination made the changeup a blessing for Davies last season.

Anderson also targeted a different area with his changeup — he shifted the whole thing to the left:

There’s a slight downward trend here: 33.2 percent of Anderson’s changeups fell below the strike zone, compared with just 22.2 percent of his other pitches. It’s nowhere near the same amount as Davies, though. Anderson’s offering has much more horizontal movement on it than Davies’s does, which may mean that he slides it horizontally. Whatever the cause, Anderson’s pitch has a great deal of value, but it still seems to lag behind Davies’s.

Two final differences emerge between the two pitches, regarding their situational usage. Davies utilized his changeup far more often against righties than Anderson has, and he’s relied on it more heavily with two strikes. In other words, it’s his out-pitch.

Changeups can carry reverse platoon splits, so pounding same-handed batters with them presents some risk. Likewise, a pitcher will generally reserve his best pitch for the putaway opportunities. Despite his inexperience, Davies seems to trust his changeup immensely, and the results bear that out. While Anderson has some faith in his, his play might improve if he leaned on it a bit more.

In the 2016 Brewers prospect writeup, BP gave Davies’s changeup a future grade of 70, meaning it could become elite someday. Should it maintain its 2015 production, it’ll certainly rank among the game’s best pitches. Anderson has a superb cambio as well, but his younger counterpart appears to have him beat. As the two continue to pick each other’s brains in camp, maybe Anderson will reach Davies’s level — and maybe Davies will get even better. One elite pitch does not a top starter make; for these hurlers, though, the changeup can be a ticket to a regular job.

We should first draw a distinction between past and future accomplishments. Right now, Nieuwenhuis has 2.4 career WARP to his name, making him about an average player. fWAR and rWAR feel the same way, pegging his performance at 2.5 and 2.4 wins, respectively. But that optimism doesn’t carry over to the coming season, as both PECOTA (0.3 WARP in 442 plate appearances) and the FanGraphs depth charts (0.5 fWAR in 331 plate appearances) project a drop-off.

The main cause for concern with Nieuwenhuis, as with many fringe players, is his tendency to strikeout. Opponents have fanned him in 31.5 percent of his plate appearances; among National League hitters with at least 600 plate appearances since 2012, only Drew Stubbs and Jarrod Saltalamacchia have gone down on strikes more frequently. Nieuwenhuis has the rare and undesirable call/whiff combination: Per Baseball-Reference, he’s taken a looking strike 19.4 percent of the time and a swinging strike 13.8 percent of the time, compared to respective major-league averages of 17.5 and 10.4 percent. Even with some positive regression aiding his case, PECOTA expects this trend to continue, projecting a strikeout rate of 28.7 percent.

On the other side of the plate-discipline equation, Nieuwenhuis has fared a little better. He’s walked in 9.1 percent of his chances, which has helped him reach base at a respectable .306 clip despite a .232 batting average. An O-Swing rate of only 27.6 percent has brought him those free passes, albeit at the cost of some looking strikes (he’s also posted a 59.4 percent Z-Swing rate). PECOTA predicts Nieuwenhuis will maintain that patient approach, projecting an 8.6 percent walk rate that would fit right in with his new team.

So if PECOTA thinks Nieuwenhuis will improve with regards to strikeouts and stay the same in terms of walks, why does it foresee a decline overall? That comes down to contact. Nieuwenhuis owns a career ISO of .157 and a BABIP of .326. With most of his playing time occurring in pitcher-friendly stadiums — he has a career batter park factor of 96 — those marks look pretty good. They’ve provided most of the support for his lifetime TAv of .261, a marginally above-average level of offense.

PECOTA projects a similar .184 ISO, around what we might suspect, given the shallow dimensions of Miller Park. When it comes to Nieuwenhuis’s BABIP, though, things diverge from expectations. Balls in play will theoretically create Nieuwenhuis’s struggles, as PECOTA thinks he’ll plummet to .298 in that regard. Nieuwenhuis has consistently made solid contact to this point, with a 32.4 percent hard-hit rate and just 4.4 percent popups. Then again, BABIP generally trends downward with age, and with a lifetime BRR of -0.3, Nieuwenhuis doesn’t have much speed to fall back on. The forecast here seems right, meaning the .250 PECOTA TAv has a good shot of happening.

There’s also the matter of defense, which has never been an especially great area for Nieuwenhuis — across 1,308.0 innings in the outfield, he’s earned 4.1 FRAA. PECOTA still thinks he’ll fall off in 2016, predicting a -4-run performance. The aforementioned lack of speed will likely be the culprit here as well, along with the fact that Nieuwenhuis will man center for Milwaukee. Together with his uninspiring offense, this doesn’t paint an appetizing picture.

With all of that said, Nieuwenhuis has some upside. Just two years ago, he pounded out a .306 TAv and 1.0 WARP over a mere 130 plate appearances. The odds of him repeating that seem pretty slim; it would realistically make the Brewers happy if he produced at even an average level. Waiver claims don’t usually amount to anything, the Jose Bautistas of the world notwithstanding, and desiring anything notable from a free-swinging, BABIP- and defense-losing outfielder will lead to disappointment.

It is, of course, possible (and maybe even likely) that the A’s also know all of this. Nolin was a part of the return for their best player for a reason, and a half dozen poor starts with the big-league club probably would not have influenced their ultimate evaluation of him. However, as this MLB Trade Rumors article mentions, Nolin is out of options. The A’s also have a completely full 40-man roster, so they simply had no room to keep the 26-year-old southpaw.

Nolin’s profile hasn’t changed a ton since the Donaldson trade. Last offseason, BP’s prospect staff described him as a low-risk, back-of-the-rotation starter, and he probably still is. He was competent in the minor leagues, with his 2.66 ERA looking even more impressive once we consider that it came in the hitter-friendly PCL. At Brew Crew Ball, our former colleague Derek Harvey speculated that Nolin’s preseason sports hernia may have contributed to his struggles, and he missed some time at other points during the season with other injuries as well.

On that point, there is some convincing evidence that Nolin was hurt last year. His fastball velocity during his stint in the majors was about 3.5 mph slower in 2015 than it was in 2014. Even though that 2014 number is based on just 41 fastballs, velocity stabilizes much quicker than outcome-based statistics and we can get a better sense of Nolin’s true velocity than one might initially expect. Therefore, given that we have reason to expect the left-hander may very well have been hurt last year, his velocity decline and poor performance in the major leagues seems to be somewhat explainable.

Nolin is not a safe bet to make the roster, and he is most assuredly unlikely to make the rotation, as the organization has admitted. Matt Garza, Chase Anderson, Taylor Jungmann, Wily Peralta, and Jimmy Nelson are likely to get the five rotation spots, which means that if Nolin sticks with the Brewers it will be as a reliever. His aforementioned roster status — being out of options — makes this complicated, as if he does not break camp with the Brewers, he will go back on waivers.

Ultimately, taking a chance on Nolin may or may not work out, but its importance is that it further symbolized David Stearns’ approach to rebuilding. The Brewers know that, barring a miracle, they are not going to make the playoffs this season, so they have spent the year taking flyers on players with impressive pedigrees who had become freely- or cheaply-available for one reason or another. It is this philosophy that has led to the acquisitions of Chris Carter, Garin Cecchini, Rymer Liriano, and Will Middlebrooks, among others. Players of this ilk are unlikely to be stars, but each was a relatively highly-touted prospect at one point, and the Brewers are gambling that some of these players will turn into usable big-leaguers in the future.

Nolin is a similar bet. He was the Blue Jays’ fifth-ranked prospect after 2013 and the A’s third-ranked prospect after 2014. His disappointing 2015 season makes him a reasonable rebound candidate — a post-hype sleeper, if you will, even if this is the least exciting type of post-hype sleeper.

He may not work out, though! His being out of options makes keeping him on the roster difficult. If he struggles greatly in spring training, the Brewers may decide he is not worth the hassle and that his performance issues in 2015 were legitimate.

If this happens, the world has not ended. Nolin is another one of a series of gambles that the Brewers are taking this year. And if only one or two of these players works out, the experiment will have been a success. David Stearns has taken advantage of a lost year by giving opportunities to players who would not currently deserve major-league playing time. Sean Nolin is a prime example of this. Whether or not he works out, this is a bet that is well worth making and indicative of the thought processes that Stearns is utilizing.