Yesterday, Henry Druschel, my colleague at Beyond the Box Score (and a writer for BP Wrigleyville), took a look at the wide gap in projections for the Rays. BP thinks they’ll win 91 games, based on PECOTA; FanGraphs combines ZiPS and Steamer to give them an 81-win projection. After bringing up the 10-win gap, he casually noted the following:

[T]he next-largest difference in win percentage between FG and BP is .038, for the Brewers, which translates to a mere six games.

The size of the disparity aside, this blog covers the Brewers, so I thought I’d take a closer look at this. Why does FG predict a 72-90 season and BP a 78-84 one?

The difference stems from both offense and defense, as PECOTA takes a more bullish outlook on the Brewers’ run scoring and run prevention:

On a macro level, there aren’t too many disagreements between the two systems. We’ll look at where each position ranks in the major leagues, instead of comparing wins above replacement straight-up, since the two sites use different definitions of replacement level. The projections really diverge in four places:

BP thinks more highly of Jonathan Lucroy, Jonathan Villar, and Ryan Braun than FG does. In the starting rotation, Wily Peralta gets the biggest boost; the rest comes from disagreements about playing time (FG thinks Matt Garza will appear pretty often, and BP thinks Zach Davies will replace him a bit more).

We’ll begin with Lucroy. He had a horrible 2015, and FG and BP don’t know if he’ll bounce back. The dispute, as you might have guessed, comes down to defense. The former pegs him at 2.3 runs above average, whereas the latter thinks he’ll give Milwaukee 14 runs. Even though his framing fell off a cliff last season, Lucroy’s impressive and lengthy defensive resume gives me confidence. In each of his first five major-league seasons, he surpassed 14 runs with the glove, and I’d bet on him doing it again in year seven.

Now let’s move on to Braun. According to fWAR, he gave the Brewers 2.7 wins over 568 plate appearances last season. FG projects him to again post 2.7 fWAR in 2016, but in 635 trips to the dish. By contrast, BP thinks he’ll double his 2015 production: He accrued 2.4 WARP last year, and he’ll theoretically accumulate 4.8 this year. Theory and practice are two different things, though. PECOTA’s hopefulness boils down to defense — it predicts a six-run campaign in the field. Given that Braun cost the Brewers 11.6 runs defensively in 2015 and has cost them 24.6 runs over the course of his career, I’d expect him to fulfill that.

Then there’s Jonathan Villar. He has 658 lifetime plate appearances, over which he’s earned -0.3 fWAR and 2.0 WARP. That’s a massive gap, which explains why PECOTA likes him more than Steamer and ZiPS do. As with Lucroy and Braun, the difference comes from defense — UZR says Villar has been worth -20.4 runs, and FRAA says he’s been worth -0.3 runs. We can’t easily mediate a rift that massive; simply because of the messiness of aging curves, I’ll take the under here, but you can just as easily think he’ll remain an average defender.

On the pitching side of things, Peralta also had a down year in 2015, with a middling 4.72 ERA across 108.2 innings. PECOTA projects a 4.44 ERA, while ZiPS and Steamer combine for a 4.54 mark. I discussed Peralta’s breakout potential earlier in the offseason; if he can regain the velocity he lost last year and hold onto the movement he picked up, he’ll have a good shot of meeting the PECOTA projection. Then again, velocity tends to stay away once it leaves, so I wouldn’t bet on it.

In the end, the evidence seems to support the FG side of things. 2016 just doesn’t look like the Brewers’ year. Braun’s stardom has come and gone, Villar’s defense won’t get any better, and Peralta likely won’t reach his potential. But that isn’t to say that the season will be a wash. Even if Milwaukee doesn’t win as frequently as BP suggests, the younger players it tries out will bring hope for the future. Perhaps in 2017 and 2018, the projections will take a more unanimously optimistic view.

For whatever reason, I wrote the team preview essay for the Brewers in this year’s Annual. Although the piece broadly analyzes the nature of innovation in baseball as a whole, the nominal topic is bases on balls, something which Milwaukee has lacked in recent years. Over the four seasons since Prince Fielder left via free agency, the Brewers rank 26th in the majors with a 7.0 percent walk rate. This alone hasn’t doomed them to obscurity — just read the damn essay already, if you want to know why — but it hasn’t helped their cause.

Things could change in 2016, however. According to the most recent iteration of PECOTA, the Brewers should garner free passes at an 8.0 percent clip — which would catapult them to 14th in all of baseball:

Milwaukee hasn’t ranked in the top half of the majors in walk rate since 2010, which would make this a pretty big development if it happened. But will it? Can the Brewers fulfill this projection, or will they fall short?

Well, these figures are incomplete — they don’t include pitchers. If Jimmy Nelson, Wily Peralta & Co. maintain their 1.9 percent walk rate from 2015 (which placed 13th in the National League), the Brewers will tumble a few spots in the major-league ranks. So perhaps we should temper our expectations a bit. Still, the players Milwaukee has acquired in the offseason, along with those they’ve sent away, suggest a legitimate change in approach.

Last July, Doug Melvin traded star center fielder Carlos Gomez to Houston. While the decision obviously hurt, it helped the team’s plate discipline. In his Brewers career, Gomez walked only 6.2 percent of the time. Meanwhile, the major-league-ready outfielder that the deal brought back, Domingo Santana, has the opposite skill set. Across his 145 Milwaukee plate appearances last season, Santana walked 12.3 percent of the time, after doing so in 10.8 percent of his chances as a farmhand. With Santana indirectly replacing Gomez, the Brewers should earn a few more bases on balls (and cost them many runs elsewhere, of course, but that’s beside the point).

After the season, David Stearns started some wheeling and dealing of his own. One of the players he sent away, first baseman Adam Lind, actually took a lot of walks last year. His 11.5 percent free-pass rate finished 21st among qualified hitters. That didn’t match up with his past accomplishments, however — before 2015, he’d walked in just 7.3 percent of his plate appearances — which explains why PECOTA projects a mere 8.5 percent figure for 2016.

Chris Carter, who should man the position in 2016, has a much rosier outlook, at least in terms of walks. PECOTA expects him to cruise down to first in 11.2 percent of his plate appearances, which jives with his career clip of 11.5 percent. While Carter clearly has his offensive flaws, of course, he possesses the ability to lay off pitches, which means he should take his share of free passes.

Perhaps the most intriguing piece of this puzzle came to the team in the Rule 5 Draft. Utility player Colin Walsh has even more warts than Santana or Carter — that explains why he’ll be a 26-year-old rookie this season, and why the Brewers were able to acquire him in the first place. Based on the direction of this article, you can probably guess where he excels. The extent of it, however, might surprise you.

Walsh has gone to the dish 2,452 times in his minor-league tenure. A total of 377 of those — or 15.3 percent — ended with a base on balls. For comparison: Joey Votto walked 13.4 percent of the time when he was in the minors. Obviously, Walsh won’t hit at that godlike level, nor will his plate discipline reign supreme above his contemporaries (and frustrate mythical executives). In fact, PECOTA thinks he’ll accrue only 98 plate appearances in 2016. If he does receive more playing time, though, he could make it count. For a club that has struggled to accumulate free passes, a 13.3 percent projected walk rate looks quite appealing.

We should make the distinction between taking walks and reaching base. PECOTA currently thinks the Brewers will rank 22nd in the majors with a .308 OBP, chiefly because they won’t earn too many hits (it predicts a 24th-place finish in batting average). Like many of their teammates, Santana, Carter, and Walsh each have problems with strikeouts, which have somewhat negated the walks and kept them from becoming truly valuable players.

With that said, a few more bases on balls do have some worth, especially for a franchise that has sorely missed them. Many fans would love it if, facing off against Jon Lester or Adam Wainwright, Brewers hitters took a more patient approach. The team has fallen behind the curve to a degree, but they still have time to catch back up.

When I don’t write about Brewers baseball at BP Milwaukee, I cover all things baseball at Beyond the Box Score, SB Nation’s sabermetrics site. One of my recurring series there has been Mediating Projections, where I look at disagreements between Steamer and ZiPS — FanGraphs’ two projections. (Click here for the latest installment of that series, starring Justin Turner of the Dodgers.) When poring over the forecasts for Milwaukee hitters, I noticed that Steamer was quite pessimistic toward Carter, whereas ZiPS expressed more optimism:

Carter has a wide range of possible outcomes for 2016, and Steamer and ZiPS cover the breadth of them pretty handily. According to these systems, he could hit as well as 26 percent better than average, or as poorly as seven percent better than average. For the sake of comparison: Ryan Braun posted a 129 wRC+ in 2015, and Domingo Santana notched a 109 wRC+. The gap between those two is pretty significant, which should drive home the magnitude of the Steamer-ZiPS disparity. (It should be noted, though, that Braun’s .298 TAv and Santana’s .299 TAv complicate this notion a bit.)

How will Carter’s batting line look come season’s end? Let’s dive into the four areas of offense listed above — strikeouts, walks, isolated power, and batting average on balls in play — to see which projection has a better chance of coming true.

Strikeouts

These are, and always will be, Carter’s calling card. During his three years as a regular in Houston, he went down on strikes 33.7 percent of the time, more often than any other qualified player in baseball. He’ll produce for Milwaukee only if he can get this under control, as ZiPS thinks he can. If he fails to do that, which Steamer foresees, he won’t have much in terms of offense. What should we expect?

First of all, we should note that regression to the mean will probably have some effect here. In all likelihood, an event as extreme as Carter’s strikeout rate will become more normal in a larger sample. So right off the bat (no pun intended), we get some evidence in ZiPS’s favor.

Second of all, and more importantly, Carter has done worse than his background statistics suggested in recent years. Using the formula from my post on Adam Lind in October, we get an expected strikeout rate of 31.5 percent from 2013 to 2015, 2.2 percentage points below the aforementioned mark. In 2015 specifically — the sample in which I analyzed Lind — Carter had a strikeout rate of 32.8 percent and an expected strikeout rate of 30.5 percent, about the same level of difference.

Of course, if Carter has underperformed in the past, maybe he’ll keep it up in the future. As we did with Lind, we should look at his rates of looking and swinging strikes by count, to see if he has the peripherals to back this up:

In two-strike counts, Carter has fared much worse than average, by both called and swinging strikes. This would seem to support Carter’s high strikeout rate — although he doesn’t appear to have deserved it, a closer look reveals its legitimacy.

Still, it’s hard for pitchers to fan anyone that often. While Carter will certainly strike out a lot in 2016, I think his clip of those will fall in line with what ZiPS projects. Even given the lack of peripheral strength, a lower strikeout rate will probably be in the cards.

Walks

Like many high-strikeout players, though, Carter takes free passes now and then. He earned an unintentional walk in 10.9 percent of his plate appearances as an Astro. Both Steamer and ZiPS see him improving upon that level of play, but to different extents. Can he pump up his on-base percentage to negate those punchouts?

It’s important to note Carter’s three distinct Houston campaigns. During the middle one, he walked far less often than he did in the two sandwiching it, and we can easily see why:

Pitchers didn’t change a thing in 2014, but Carter clearly did. His more aggressive approach meant he chased more often, which brought him fewer bases on balls. A glance at his zone plot shows where those extra swings occurred:

The 2013 iteration of Carter swung at 22.1 percent of pitches on the outer fifth of the plate. He spiked that to 28.1 percent in 2014, before bringing it back down to a more reasonable 22.7 percent in 2015.

This increase in swings wasn’t just a flukish blip on the radar. We’ll see below that Carter’s power outburst coincided with his uptick in aggression, and we can’t just ignore the results of that. If Carter returns to his unstable ways in 2016, hoping to grind out a few more dingers, he’ll see his walk rate plummet.

Even so, I think he’ll maintain his composure. The old Brewer regime — which cultivated a volatile free-swinging attitude — is no more. With it gone, Carter should have the freedom to adopt a more passive strategy, one that could help him sustain this high walk rate. Two times out of three, Carter has done what ZiPS predicts he’ll do, and I’d imagine he’ll make it three out of four.

Isolated power

Now we come to the area of the most significant disagreement between Steamer and ZiPS. Depending on whom you trust, Carter will follow up his .241 ISO for the Astros with progress or decline. Which forecast holds water?

Let’s start with the aforementioned middle year. Carter posted ISOs of .227 and .228, respectively, in 2013 and 2015. He blew those away with a .264 ISO in 2014, which the Brewers would certainly appreciate having. As noted above, however, he accomplished that only by sacrificing his plate discipline. If he continues to avoid aggression, as I think he will, the prosperity of 2014 won’t return.

Plus, even if Carter starts swinging for the fences again, we can’t guarantee that his power will return. A deeper dive into that campaign reveals the smoke and mirrors behind it. Carter didn’t hit more fly balls in 2014, nor did they travel further:

That explains why, in the second season, he severely overperformed his expected home run total. He actually hit 37 round-trippers, but based on his peripheral metrics, Baseball Heat Maps predicted he would hit 21. The resulting difference — which led the majors — isn’t the sort of thing that we should expect him to repeat.

Carter bashed a lot of home runs in 2014, which gave the baseball world a glimpse of his tantalizing potential. To regain that, he’d have to make some ugly changes, if he could do it at all. Given that ISO tends to decline once a player reaches his late 20s, we should anticipate something around the level of Steamer.

Batting average on balls in play

Carter has never notched a high average, and although strikeouts bear most of the blame for that, a subpar BABIP has made matters worse. In Houston, he garnered a hit 27.6 percent of the time he put the ball in play. Steamer envisions that level of play in Milwaukee, and ZiPS believes he’ll perform a little better. What should we think?

Carter’s BABIP has trended in the wrong direction as of late: He went from .311 in 2013 to .267 in 2014 to .244 in 2015. In theory, regression to the mean offers some hope; in practice, he probably won’t return to his previous glory. His hard-hit rates have dropped, respectively during those three seasons, from 39.5 percent to 38.3 percent to 36.7 percent, suggesting he’s earned this fall. And as a heavy fly ball hitter, he needs to make solid contact regularly for his balls to go for hits.

Perhaps most important is batted-ball location. Carter owns career BABIPs of .314 to left field, .298 up the middle, and .161 to right field — in other words, he succeeds when he pulls the ball. With those in mind, take a look at how he’s altered himself:

More balls to the opposite field has caused disaster. With a 39.6 percent pull rate in 2015 — more than ten percentage points below his 2013-14 level — he understandably saw his BABIP fall off a cliff. Less hard contact, and less yanked contact, equals a terrible Carter.

Balls in play are always tricky — they can go for hits constantly one year and vanish the next, all while the hitter’s skill level remains the same. Neither projection system expects Carter to stay in the .24os, and neither should we. At the same time, we definitely shouldn’t get our hopes up, because Steamer has the likelier prognostication here.

Conclusion

According to this unscientific exercise, the Brewers’ newest addition should:

• Have a (relatively) healthy strikeout rate.
• Pile up the walks
• Fall short of his power potential
• Struggle to get hits

Does this add up to an elite player, or even an average one? Not in the slightest — that’s why Milwaukee was able to pick him up. A stop-gap first baseman nevertheless has some value, which the Brewers could take advantage of at the trade deadline. If Carter does what ZiPS says, he’ll bring back a handsome reward in a deal. If he instead goes with Steamer’s prediction, well, the Brewers won’t have lost much.

At the end of the day, people typically want to see what they want to see out of the projections. This doesn’t only apply to the PECOTA projections but to most projections in sports. It’s typically an exercise in confirmation bias. If PECOTA says your team is going to do well, then you agree with it. If PECOTA says your team is going to be bad then you’re probably going to feel like PECOTA is wrong or flawed and will simply dismiss the results you see. This is generally speaking, of course.

PECOTA, though, is a fun tool. It usually comes out right before the season starts. It often times signals that after a long winter baseball is coming, and it’s a way to get the conversation started — the conversation of how your team is going to fair and how your favorite player is going to do. It’s a way to get baseball fans thinking and pumped up for the upcoming season.

But, the season now has come and gone. The temperature is dropping, the leaves are changing, and you can already feel the cold winds of winter coming.

The Brewers have had an unsuccessful season. If you’re reading this you probably already know this. You probably know this better than me; hell you probably know this so well your sick of knowing it. So, let’s look at how PECOTA did when projecting the Brewers this past year.

Before we dive into the players, let’s acknowledge that PECOTA thought the Brewers were going to be an average team. They had them projected for an 81-81, season, which would have had them finish third in their division and miss the playoffs.

The Brewers instead finished with a 68-94 record and, needless to say, missed the playoffs. Mainly, PECOTA thought the Brewers were going to be a decent offensive team with decent fielding. In both cases, PECOTA was wrong, especially in the hitting department, as the Brewers finished with the third worst True Average (TAv) in all of baseball.

A few notes before beginning. The player’s stats for those who played for multiple teams this season only includes what they performed while they were with the Brewers. Also, I only looked at players who PECOTA had projected to be with the Brewers this year. Meaning that a player had to start the season with the Brewers.

Let’s now look at how PECOTA did with the position players.

PECOTA was especially wrong with Jean Segura. It thought Segura would produce plus defense, which according to FRAA he did, with an average bat. Segura did not have an average bat this year, unfortunately for the Brewers. His .218 was the worst of his career and ranked 41st out of 55 shortstops.

PECOTA, though, didn’t just have optimistic projections for Segura, but for most of the Brewers core players. It was actually too high on Braun, Gomez, Gennett, and Davis. For most of the group, PECOTA overestimated how well they would hit. For Gomez, however, the projection system overestimated his base running and defensive performance. It thought Gomez would finish with a BRR of 1.8; instead he finished with a BRR of zero. Gomez, though, as was the case for most of the Brewers core, dealt with many injuries throughout the year, which is probably a major factor in them underperforming their projections.

Adam Lind, on the other hand, considerably outperformed his projections. It has been well noted on this site and on others how Lind has had a quality season. He’s been able to stay relatively healthy all year and has provided good production on defense. A task that few knew he could accomplish. But, what has made Lind so successful this year is his continued excellence against right-handed pitching, which has allowed him to well over perform his PECOTA projections and make himself a desirable trade chip this winter.

Let’s now look at the pitching side.

The big two that PECOTA really overestimated was, to no one’s surprise, Kyle Lohse and Matt Garza. Both pitchers posted some of the worst numbers of their career’s including ERA’s well over five. And considering the current pitching environment, the Brewers simply can’t have that type of production from one, let alone two of their main starters. Lohse, near the end of the season, actually found himself in the bullpen. Garza, on the other hand, was allowed to finish the season away from the team — although the Brewers might look to move him and his contract next year.

The other starter that really hurt the Brewers was Willy Peralta. PECOTA wasn’t exactly high on Peralta to begin, but it didn’t envision him posting a negative WARP. His season was mostly hampered due to a strained left oblique, which caused him to miss almost nine weeks of the season. But Peralta’s biggest and continued problem has been his inability to strikeout hitters, this year averaging 4.97 SO/9. Usually, while pitchers who throw with higher velocities tend to strikeout more hitters, this isn’t the case for Peralta and needs to become the case if he wants to have continued success in the big leagues.

The Brewers’ pitching staff was truly awful at the beginning of the year, but key young pitchers started making considerable strides as the season progressed. Mainly, Jimmy Nelson and Taylor Jungmann who both outperformed their PECOTA projections.

Nelson was called up last year, and in his 69.3 innings pitched, he struggled to find his footing as a big league starter. This year, he’s made significant improvements, adding a curveball, but more importantly increasing the movement on his slider. These types of adjustments have allowed Nelson to significantly outperform his PECOTA projections, more than any other pitcher on the Brewers.

As for Taylor Jungmann, the main problem with his projections was that he didn’t pitch in the big leagues in 2014. This allowed him to sneak under PECOTA’s, and most Brewers fans, radar. It also allowed him to become one of the best stories in 2015. A top draft pick that was often seen as an afterthought in the Brewers farm system rose up and had one of the best pitching rookie seasons in 2015.

As for the bullpen, the one that clearly stands out is Michael Blazek. The Brewers, in years past, have had bad bullpens. It was often seen as a wrench in the team’s success. This year, however, it became the Brewers’ biggest asset and Blazek’s emergence was one of the main reasons why.

In reality, the problem for the Brewers wasn’t simply that three of their main starters underperformed their projections, although it certainly didn’t help. The core of their offense underperforming their projections was actually the biggest culprit in the Brewers poor season. Most of those players got injured or got off to bad starts and then were never able to recover in time for the Brewers to turn thing’s around.

That being said, this might all be for the best. Another mediocre season could have prompted the Brewers to stand pat and do nothing. Now, the Brewers appear to have a clear and coherent plan to rebuild, and the organization can finally move forward with a new chapter.