New Runs Prevented Workbook || Runs Prevented Primer

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KBQ19VcMZ4g7oW1jkGiYwxCadqjw3rYXkqN200f4lHc/edit?usp=sharing

This is not even some “to-be-expected” regression, as even if one wishes to look at Deserved Runs Average (DRA) throughout the season as a “true” measure of the Brewers talent (which should be cautioned), the Brewers would have been expected to allow anywhere between 23 and 30 fewer second half runs than they actually have allowed.

This is unforeseen and catastrophic.

The blame can be spread around to everyone, from the post-forearm injury Junior Guerra (10 IP, 9 runs on July 24 & 29), injured reliever Matt Albers (1.7 IP, 10 R), former? closer Corey Knebel (9.3 IP, 8 R entering Sunday), and even rookie rotation depth Freddy Peralta (19 IP, 17 R since the break). Worse yet, there is a sense of adding insult to injury, as newly acquired Joakim Soria hit the disabled list promptly after surrendering a grand slam home run in a devastating loss to San Diego, and quietly effective Taylor Williams hit the disabled list with an elbow injury. While fans will feel less sympathy for Matt Albers, who had a couple of different bouts of ineffectiveness surrounded by separate disabled list stints, the veteran righty was crucial to early season success (25 IP, 4 R through the end of May) and each day his injury status and effectiveness is not answered is a day that manager Craig Counsell must carefully ration Jeremy Jeffress and Josh Hader with little back-up. The same goes for Williams, and now Soria; while Jacob Barnes was previously an impact reliever and boasts solid peripherals and a 2.99 Deserved Run Average (DRA), his runs prevention performance in 2018 has not been to the level of that injured trio, and now it’s Barnes, Corbin Burnes, and Jordan Lyles trying to nail down the quietly effective support roles.

It’s as simple as this: the Brewers’ bullpen has two truly fantastic options in Jeffress and Hader, and those options will be great regardless of their surrounding cast. For the purposes of contending, however, this duo is amplified when Stearns’s excellent depth picks (Albers, Williams, even Corbin Burnes), closer (Knebel), and additional acquisitions (Soria) are performing well. Jeffress and Hader cannot do it themselves.

Injuries have also trimmed the rotation, as Brent Suter’s torn elbow ligament and Zach Davies’s back ailments have limited the Brewers’ effective rotational depth. Using Baseball Reference Three Year Park factors, both Suter and Davies combined for 18 Runs Prevented over 273 innings in 2017, offering excellent middle and replacement rotation depth. That level of impact depth performance will not be matched by the duo in 2018. Additionally, even if one could have argued that the club might not have expected Jimmy Nelson to return from his shoulder injury in 2018, having that materialize as a likely injury-scenario reality in 2018 is quite another ballgame. Consider this as Freddy Peralta meets a likely innings limit, Chase Anderson continues an uneven season, and Brandon Woodruff finds himself without a rotational role: #TeamDepth is now basically #TeamNecessity in terms of rotation building.

There’s no need to state it any other way: as much as one would like to criticize the Brewers pitching staff, and GM David Stearns for his failure to build a staff, the club is now to the point where injuries are diminishing even his strongest moves. The Soria trade looms loudest here, as the Brewers grabbed a legitimate high leverage, veteran reliever at the trade deadline and did not get six innings from his right arm before he hit the DL with a groin injury; Albers and Williams could be fan whipping posts when they were ineffective, but the Albers free agency deal looked like a brilliant low-cost gamble early in the season while Williams seemed poised to catapult himself into the high leverage workload discussion (Williams worked a 17.3 IP, 5 R stretch, Holding three leads, from June until the All Star Break).

Citing injuries to the pitching staff is not an “excuse” for the poor performance.

It would have been enough to deal with this group of recent injuries and setbacks, but the Brewers also simultaneously were gifted with a set of role reversions on the pitching staff. Corey Knebel’s descent from excellent closer in 2017 cost the Brewers a chance at a truly elite relief corps; according to Baseball Reference Three Year Park Factors, Knebel prevented nearly 25 runs in 2017. Even a 50 percent regression from that performance level would fit nicely with Jeffress and Hader, who have both been consistent Top 25 pitchers in the 2018 MLB. Add in the aforementioned struggles of Peralta, Barnes, and a bit of stalled usage from the shuttled Houser (he’s only worked two MLB appearances from July onward), and Counsell’s strategic options are looking much more thin while they are also being exasperated by some ineffective starts.

Beyond these role question marks, it is worth questioning the timing of the inclusion of Jorge Lopez in the Mike Moustakas trade. Since Lopez has served the season as an up-and-down member of the Triple-A / MLB “shuttle team” relief squad, discussions of the quality of Lopez’s performance were largely nonexistent at the trade deadline (I’m also guilty of this charge). But, it is worth emphasizing that as a back-roster depth strategy, the “shuttle team” prevented runs at a solid clip, especially when one considers the nature of this replacement role and the likely quality of other replacement pitchers to be acquired in their place.

In fact, these shuttle relievers combined to produce near-average aggregate performance for the Brewers, which leads one to question why Stearns traded Lopez and simultaneously decided to keep Brandon Woodruff at the Triple-A level to serve as replacement starting pitching depth. With Lopez in the Royals system and Woodruff now serving as starting pitching depth, the revolving door relief strategy is effectively dead at what could be the worst time of the season. Given that Woodruff boats a 3.55 DRA at the MLB level to accompany a 52 percent ground ball rate, while also demonstrating an average DRA at Colorado Springs with a consistent ground ball rate there, it is worth questioning why Stearns has not simply replaced Peralta with Woodruff (on the one hand) or simply promoted Woodruff to a steady MLB relief role (on the other hand). According to Brooks Baseball, the relief role is agreeing with Woodruff, who is throwing a sizzling 95-to-96 MPH fastball with more armside run than his 2017 variation, complete with steady change up and slider usage (both with more whiffs than in 2017, too).

This is not a bottomless pit (yet). That the Brewers remain the 12th best pitching staff in the MLB, within one standard deviation of the 10th spot, and sixth best pitching staff in the National League, should demonstrate just how good the club has been for most of the year. Indeed, this pitching staff has fallen off, and it’s important to underscore that it’s not simply “regression,” but a bad combination of regression, injuries, and strategic missteps at the worst possible time. But there could be a quick way out of this issue for the club:

• Get Zach Davies healthy, without any further setbacks, and use him to replace Freddy Peralta in the rotation.

• Develop an MLB role for Brandon Woodruff; preferably this would be a rotational role to spell another ineffective starter down the stretch (or add a sixth man for September), but even a well-defined one-inning bullpen role could be extremely helpful at the moment.

• Re-evaluate depth roles for Ariel Hernandez, Jordan Lyles, Alec Asher, and Aaron Wilkerson, and make any necessary waiver trades to boost the pitching staff. E.g., is Jordan Lyles the right arm to work in the shadow of the successful Triple-A shuttle crew? Is now the best time to make a potential long-term development play for Ariel Hernandez?

• Reconsider Adrian Houser’s shuttle role in favor of a regular one-inning role.

With the assumption that some combination of Soria, Albers, and Williams can get healthy for the stretch run, and that some of the “role regression” pitchers can make adjustments at the MLB level once again, this is a pitching staff that can improve quickly and regain its flexible frontier of roles and runs prevention that were celebrated in April and May. With Zach Davies healthy, a waiver trade acquisition (or two), and potentially prominent roles for two righties that can rush it up there (Woodruff and Houser), this pitching staff can rebound. Now we wait and watch.

Taylor Williams appeared in two games over the weekend; in two innings pitched, he allowed seven runs on nine hits and three walks with two strike outs, while his Earned Run Average (ERA) jumped a full run. Williams is primarily a fastball/slider reliever, with the fourseam fastball as his primary pitch. Against left handed hitters, he starts off hitters with a fastball, then increasingly is willing to throw the slider, maxing out his usage rate for the pitch when the batter has two strikes, throwing it out the zone to generate swings and misses. When facing righties, there isn’t a particular sequence, other than that Williams prefers the fastball if he falls behind in the count. Overall, Williams is looking to keep the ball low and away from the middle of the plate to sustain his success. So what happened over the weekend?

Williams had some trouble with his location. On both plots, there are too many pitches up and over the middle of the strike zone. Considering he threw twenty sliders over the two outings, there are not enough pitches buried low. Interestingly, even with the lack of feel on the pitch, only two of the hits came against sliders which caught too much of the strike zone. Batters have swung at 44 percent of his pitches this season, yet in these two games they swung at 51 percent. The movement on his fastball also slightly changed. He got a little less horizontal break and a little more vertical break, which could explain why he was hitting so much of the plate on his pitches.

There was certainly some luck involved in each outing. Poor defensive play and an infield shift created runs out of two balls in play which should have been routine. The Dodgers also got some good swings on well-located fastballs, which is unfortunate but something that happens in baseball. In between his two terrible innings, it’s worth noting that Williams pitched a scoreless inning with two strike outs on ten pitches. It won’t provide much comfort to fans reeling from the past few weeks of baseball, but we probably don’t need to worry about Taylor Williams.

Wade Miley started on Friday night, the first game that Williams blew. In his second start since being activated from the disabled list, Miley pitched six innings, allowing one run on four hits and two walks, while striking out two batters. The low strike out numbers is buttressed by the anemic whiff totals, which are below his season (to date) numbers. Miley’s whiff rate for his career is only 21 percent, and his six percent whiff rate on Friday is not sustainable.

After using it sparingly in his first start off the disabled list, Miley brought back his cutter on Friday and used it more than any other pitch. However, it was only his featured pitch against right handed batters. Against righties, he had no fear with the cutter, using it most frequently when the batter was ahead, the count was even and with two strikes. However, against left handed hitters, he used his four seam fastball on more than half of his pitches and paired it with his slider, which he barely threw to righties. It’s not clear whether this is a new overall approach, or just a choice he made for the Dodgers’ lineup because he hadn’t pitched like that earlier this season. It’s also not clear whether Miley can sustain pitching with this approach. By Friday’s game plan, Miley was basically two pitchers: with a fourseam fastball or cutter paired with a slider or changeup as his primary options. Maintaining a feel for all of his pitches against an unbalanced lineup could be difficult. There’s also the pressing question of whether a pitcher with the lack of a proven track record should be experimenting with so many pitches rather than focusing on executing two or three. Regardless, for one night this worked, and it’ll be interesting to see how he game plans in the future.

The Brewers have a full slate of games this week. They play Washington in three games at Miller Park before heading to the west coast for four games in San Francisco. The Nationals have disappointed relative to preseason expectations, and they’ve underperformed their Pythagorean over/under by 3.6 games, which is 27^th in MLB. The Giants are 31-19 at AT&T Park, which is the third best home record in the National League, coincidentally a half-game ahead of Milwaukee.

Baseball Prospectus: Milwaukee Brewers Team Audit

Make no mistake about it, Brewers fans and analysts, this is a trap. It’s so easy to polish off phenomenal expectations at a time like this, and rejoice that the Brewers get to play an apparently easier stretch of schedule entering the break. But the team is experiencing some injuries of attrition in the field, just as the offense has finally produced a stretch of 30 games averaging better than 2018 NL / Miller Park runs scored (more on that later). The rotation has done a fantastic job, as has the elite bullpen, which are only getting attention due to a couple of recent blow-ups and blown leads….mostly occurring in games where the batters still cannot get it together.

So in honor of this schedule, which is certainly a trap, let’s have some fun with 21 statistics that are neither here, there, nor anywhere for what will certainly Attrition Central for #TeamDepth. If the Brewers can escape this stretch of play with a 9-12 record, that’s probably correction enough for the run differentials and a sign that the war of attrition did not go terribly wrong.

Ten
Ryan Braun is having a somewhat tough year balancing some new fielding assignments, relatively part time play, nagging injuries once again, and hard-hit batted balls with relatively bad luck. But it’s not all bad for the face of the franchise: in 9.7 percent of his plate appearances, Braun has hit for extra bases (12 doubles, one triple, and eight home runs). By comparison, the average National League bat hits for extra bases in approximately 7.6 percent of plate appearances.

Twelve
For the season, much has been made of the Brewers batters’ ten shutouts. In fact, this is quite an important number for Milwaukee batters, as the total Runs Scored “zero” has appeared more frequently than all but one run total: two runs.

For the 2018 campaign, the Brewers have scored two runs more frequently than any other outcome by the offense. What’s worse is that this number is not really accompanied by very good run totals, either; five runs is very nice, and it’s good to see that number tied with “0” for second place, but after that both of “3” and “1” are below average run totals.

Sixteen
For all the criticisms that Brewers baserunners have faced for their aggressive style over the years, it seems that the exceptional baserunning performance of Milwaukee has mostly escaped fan consciousness. Undoubtedly this is due in part to the fact that the Brewers are not scoring runs at an average clip. But, according to Baseball Prospectus Baserunning Runs, the Brewers are the third best team in the MLB in terms of baserunning production. Translating this to stolen bases, Lorenzo Cain leads the team with 16 steals in 19 attempts, ahead of Jonathan Villar (10 / 12), Christian Yelich (9 / 10) and Ryan Braun (7 / 9). In fact, Milwaukee is the second best team in the National League in terms of stolen bases (58 of 71 attempts). Run, run, run!

Twenty
Only the New York Mets have attempted fewer sacrifice bunt attempts than the Brewers in 2018. Milwaukee has attempted 20 bunts thus far, with successful sacrifices 14 times; this is good for a success rate that is higher than the league average. Ironically, for the lack of runs scored, Milwaukee is not only a great base running team, but they are also posting average or better situational hitting statistics according to Baseball Reference. This occurs across categories: sacrifice bunts, productive outs, baserunners scored, and advancing baserunners (with less than two outs at third base and zero outs at second base). The problem for the Brewers is simply that they do not get enough batters on base frequently enough…

Thirteen
….and when the Brewers do get baserunners on, their tendency to hit ground balls results in the highest percentage of ground ball double plays in the National League (13 percent of GIDP opportunities). This is notably worse than the NL average of double plays produced in ten percent of opportunities. So much for strike outs being a bad thing!

Four
One wonders if the defensive flexibility of the ballclub might actually explain some of the troubles the club has in terms of scoring runs…the Brewers only have four players with more than 50 starts at one position (Lorenzo Cain and Travis Shaw lead as the most regular regulars with 70 starts, followed by Villar (55) and Arcia (53) in the middle infield). Jesus Aguilar does not even have 50 starts at first base this year; Christian Yelich’s most regular position is left field…for 32 games, and catcher and right field have also been impacted in the games started department (probably due to the respective performances of Manny Pina and Domingo Santana more than strategy).

I was certainly in the camp that expected defensive flexibility to be a strength for these Brewers, and I certainly do not think it is a downright liability given the performance of the fielders. But given the performance of the offense, I think it is worth questioning whether flexible defensive roles have an impact on batting performance for these players.

Nine
Why are the Brewers pitchers so good? Their groundball percentage is fading to the middle of the pack, minimizing their ability to produce double plays as well. However, Milwaukee arms excel at limiting fly balls, and their 9.46 percent pop-up rate is the best in the MLB according to Baseball Prospectus.

Five
For all the rumblings about the Brewers relief pitching hitting their regression to the mean, it’s worth noting that the pitchers are not terribly far above average in some stats to begin with. For instance, the Brewers rank fifth in the National League with 32 percent of their Inherited Runners Scored, despite inheriting fewer runners than the league average (100 versus 106 for the typical NL team). This is an indication of how the club is quite good with inherited runners scored, but not necessarily perched atop the league.

4.3 at 23
It’s too bad that the Brewers pitchers are not yielding more ground balls, because Orlando Arcia remains one of the best shortstops in baseball despite his lack of playing time. Arcia has the fewest games played of any SS in the Top 10 for Fielding Runs Above Average. Yet, the 23-year old glove-first fielder ranks sixth in FRAA with his 4.3 mark. Another statistic worth remembering: at 23, Arcia is tied for Carlos Correa as the youngest elite defensive shortstop, and among shortstops with at least 60 games only Ahmed Rosario of the Mets is younger (but he’s nowhere near as good defensively). If you like more straightforward statistics, according to Baseball Reference Arcia remains one of the very best MLB shortstops with 10 Defensive Runs Saved; only Freddy Galvis and Addison Russell are better in the NL.

Second Best at .336
Jesus Aguilar is having a fantastic season, boasting a .336 True Average (TAv) and 1.4 FRAA. That offensive performance is second only to Freddie Freeman among first basemen with 60 or more games played.

One
For their fantastic pitching staff, the Brewers only have one player in the top ten percent of all MLB, in terms of Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP). That player is lefty high leverage reliever Josh Hader, ranked as 40th (!) with 1.54 WARP. No full-time reliever ranks higher, and only one pitcher better than Hader is younger (Jack Flaherty).

Ten
Many Brewers fans are suggesting that the club needs an ace in their pitching rotation. When I host chats on BPMilwaukee Twitter (@BPMilwaukee), the most common questions since the off season typically concern the quality of the MLB rotation. Throwing out the extremely advanced stats, let’s look at games started and ERA+ (a contextual assessment of Earned Runs Average). Here we are, half way through the season, and only ten clubs have at least three starters with 10 GS and an ERA at or above league average: the Red Sox, Cubs, Cleveland, Tigers, Astros, Angels, Mets, Cardinals, Nationals, and Brewers.

Seventeen / 40 Percent
If you’re interested in an ace, though, using the colloquial definition of someone who can lead a rotation in terms of performance and starts, who would be better than Jhoulys Chacin? Sorting all MLB starting pitchers by games started and ERA+, Chacin meets the strongest definition of good performance in a heavy workload.

Of course, including advanced contextual statistics, it is worth questioning whether the club will see some course correction from the starting pitchers. Here, Junior Guerra’s 4.69 DRA is the best among Brewers starters with at least 60 innings pitched. That’s good for 71st in the MLB. Yet, once Guerra is working between the lines, his splitter remains one of the best in the game at inducing swings-and-misses; thus far Guerra is yielding nearly 40 percent whiffs-per-swing on the split (only slightly lagging his 2016 performance that put that pitch on the map).

Thirteen / Forty-Three
Overall, the Brewers pitching rotation forms quite a strong unit: the club’s starting pitchers have 13 Runs Prevented as a group. This performance helps the team maximize a phenomenal bullpen, as the Brewers can frequently keep the game close. With a bullpen that has prevented 43 runs, the starting pitchers are often handing close games to relief pitchers that are ready to help convert those games into wins.

Six
When is a better than average offense not really that good? Over the last 30 games for the Brewers, it turns out! Those big ticket runs totals against Philadelphia have gone a long way toward improving Milwaukee’s season long offensive figures….

….but for all that, over the last 30 games the most frequently Runs Scored total for the Brewers has declined from the season leading 2 RS. Twenty percent of the Brewers’ games since they returned from Minnesota have ended with 1 RS for Milwaukee. If you missed seeing 2 RS, do not worry, for that remained the second most frequent run total over that time.

Seventeenth in Right
Domingo Santana is a tough player to figure out right now. If someone had told Brewers fans that the right fielder would have -2.6 FRAA roughly halfway through the season, most would have expected that he would be in the running for one of the most valuable right fielders in the MLB. Alas, in True Average (TAv), Santana’s mark of .259 (i.e., roughly league average) ranks 17th of 24 MLB RF with 60 or more games played.

Fourteen
Perhaps Lorenzo Cain is able to produce so many stolen bases in part because he’s on first base so frequently: the Brewers Center Fielder is drawing walks in 13.8 percent of his plate appearances!

Nineteen (Two)
Without park adjustment, across the 2018 MLB the Brewers’ offense currently ranks 19th in terms of Runs Scored. Their pitching staff currently ranks 2nd in terms of Runs Allowed.

Photo Credit: Jeff Hanisch, USA Today Sports Images

Stepping into speculative histories of MLB players, I’ve been thinking about what I’d expect from players like Burnes or Peralta if they reached the MLB in 2018. Both pitchers provide extreme challenges to the observer, and for different reasons.

• Burnes provides a challenge because the righty’s quick ascent to the advanced minors has out-paced the non-proprietary information available about the pitcher, which manifested itself during the 2017 season in the form of widely varying fastball, slider, and delivery reports. From early in the season, when on-the-ground reports placed Burnes as a potentially high reliever-risk profile who could make it work as a middle rotation starter, to late in the season when delivery adjustments and improved fastball reports began leaking out, fans and analysts were essentially given several different pitchers’ worth of information. Entering 2018, then, it’s worth asking whether Burnes is the fastball / slider reliever with middle rotation question marks, the middle rotation arm who could decrease reliever risk by continuing to refine his delivery, or the surging pitching prospect who simply continues to redefine roles by refining mechanics and therefore allowing his stuff to take the next step. All of this can happen with Burnes, or none of it; thus the righty prospect is an acute example of information asymmetry.

• Peralta faces different questions about his stuff and profile, especially due to his diminished stature (compared to Burnes) and his pitching approach (he’s not quite a command-and-deception guy, but he twists and turns his fastballs in order to help his stuff “play up”). In one sense, Peralta is much more conventional than Burnes, insofar as Peralta will be lauded as “the small framed righty who proved everyone wrong” should his frame stick in a functional mid-rotation role. On the other hand, given the frame and lack of a strong fastball, it is worth questioning how Peralta’s arsenal and command will play as he advances in the system. The significance of the righty’s pitch sequencing and location will not be understated. It’s tough to say whether Peralta faces “reliever risk” in the same sense Burnes does, as Peralta’s top role is even murkier than his Advanced Minors teammate.

So, if Burnes and Peralta reach the MLB in 2018, what will their potential roles be? What performance levels might fans expect? With Counsell looking at both pitchers as potential midseason reinforcements for the staff, it is worth digging into potential production expectations.

Role risk will be nothing new to the 2018 Brewers; role risk is all over the roster, even beyond the rookie class. But, in attempting to form expectations about Burnes and Peralta, I turned to other rookie pitchers that are on the MLB roster or in Spring Training camp as non-roster invitees. By my count, these rookies comprise (in order of height) Peralta, Taylor Williams, Marcos Diplan, Jorge Lopez, Aaron Wilkerson, Erik Davis, Burnes, Luis Ortiz, Adrian Houser, Brandon Woodruff, Tyler Webb, and Jon Perrin.

• Several of these arms are already established as MLB relievers or very likely to have relief roles in 2018 (see Williams, Lopez, Davis, Houser, and Webb).

• A few of these arms are organizational depth with questionable futures in terms of organizational plans (see Diplan, Lopez, Wilkerson, Davis, Ortiz, and Perrin).

• Finally, there’s a deep group of potential rotation depth, in terms of starters who could work as rotational replacements or MLB emergency starters in 2018 (Peralta, Diplan, Lopez, Wilkerson, Burnes, Ortiz, and Perrin).

• Woodruff is likely the only pitcher here who is a rotational lock in 2018 (and even writing that leads me to raise some questions, as “There is no such thing as a pitching prospect,” there is no such thing as a surefire pitching role).

Available PECOTA projections (March 2, 2018) for 2018 Brewers rookies (Erik Davis and Jon Perrin projections unavailable). This table features IP projections, as well as Runs Allowed and Runs Prevented figures drawn from projected Deserved Runs Average. Runs Prevented figures are drawn from an average of the 2016-2017 Miller Park / National League. PECOTA strike outs, walks, and WARP are also featured.

With these dozen pitchers, I’ve already laid out extensive role risk simply by categorizing these arms. So, in order to form potential expectations for 2018, I turned to speculative history: namely, how many pitchers in the MLB expansion era matched these arms’ precise height, weight range, handedness, and age as rookies? That is to ask, if these pitchers reach the MLB as rookies in 2018 (e.g., their precise 2018 age), how does their physical profile fare (e.g., their handedness, height, and weight?).

To answer this question, and engage in this speculative exercise, I used the indispensable (and highly recommended) Baseball Reference Play Index to search comparable expansion era players. I searched the expansion era because it is a largely integrated era that also includes a relatively similar form of baseball over the decades in terms of pitching arsenals or prototypes (it tracks the diminishing knuckleball, rise of the splitter / forkball, rise of the fastball / slider profile, etc.). Additionally, as I attempted to search other time frames, I found the reasoning to be rather arbitrary (e.g., if I search the Wild Card Era, should I simply search the Contemporary PED era? If I only search the expanded Wild Card Era (2012-present) will I have a large enough group of players to analyze? And so on).

Using the expansion era, here are the search results from Baseball Reference Play Index. For each player, I searched exact height, handedness, age, and rookie status, while also searching a five percent range in weight (there are some issues with using listed weight). The “Comps” column shows the number of historical rookie comparisons for each potential 2018 Brewers rookie.

This table shows the basic summary of the searches that I conducted using the Play Index tool. What immediately surprised me was the lack of comparisons for some players (like Peralta, Diplan, and Webb), and the large number of comparisons available for “prototypical” starting pitching frames (particularly Lopez, Burnes, and Woodruff). Alternately, for a supposedly “old” prospect, the number of comparisons available for Perrin also surprised me, which suggests to me that there has been a path in MLB history for righties of his size and draft pedigree to reach the MLB, even if it takes a while.

Meandering through the comparisons, there are simply some fun and interesting names that appear.

• 2018 rookie Jon Perrin would reach the MLB at the same time as 2012 rookie Yu Darvish, who shares Perrin’s handedness, age, height, and basic weight range; among older comps, Doug Brocail and Todd Worrell are my favorites for Perrin.

• A few names jump off of 2018 rookie Brandon Woodruff’s spreadsheet, like Corey Kluber (!), Ryan Vogelsong, and (of course), Tim Worrell.

• Corbin Burnes has Michael Fulmer and Steve Bedrosian, Houser has Kevin Quackenbush, while Neftali Feliz and Shelby Miller belong to Luis Ortiz. Fulmer is a fascinating comp for Burnes not because of his excellent MLB performance, but because he shared Burnes’s information asymmetry in terms of advanced minors scouting roles and MLB adjustments to exceed expectations. Feliz and Miller are interesting comps for Ortiz, for as the righty faces questions about innings workload and relief risk, it’s good to remember that successful arms have also shared the righty’s frame, height, and age as rookies.

• The lone comps for Diplan and Peralta? Peralta matches 2000 rookie Byung-Hyun Kim (!), while Diplan matches 1965 rookie Dick Selma.

• Obviously, there is a world of gray area here, as these comparisons say nothing about a player’s draft or international development status, stuff, place in the minor league system, etc. Moreover, for my search, I did not use these comparisons to create trends or aging curves, so what I am attempting should not be read alongside the (much more methodologically sound) PECOTA system.

From these searches, a batch of 257 rookie comparison seasons resulted. In order to analyze potential performance markers in environments comparable to the 2016-2017 MLB, I indexed each season according to Runs Allowed per Game (RA/G), and sampled post-Strike rookies that played during a season with a run environment within 5 percent of the 2017 RA/G. This analysis produced a sample of 85 rookie comparison seasons. The following table shows the basic production range for this 85 rookie population:

For this analysis, I focused on Innings Pitched and basic league-level Runs Prevented (I did not investigate historical park factors for this analysis). To compensate for the lack of park factors, I produced a range of runs prevented estimates. Overall, this group of pitchers did not average high innings pitched totals (presumably due to their rookie status, in many cases), with the average pitcher in this sample working nearly 39.0 innings.

This sample can be further categorized to focus on each specific Brewers rookie’s physical profile. In the next table, a range of runs prevented (RnPrv, LowRnPrv, and HighRnPrv) accompany Innings Pitched and Runs averages and standard deviation (IP, IP_StDev; Rn, Rn_StDev).

This table undoubtedly demonstrates a wide range of potentialities for these Brewers rookie pitchers. The innings pitched variance alone suggests that these players could range anywhere from “Did Not Play” to 70-to-80 IP seasons. It’s easy to get excited about some of these results; for example, 75 innings pitched and five runs prevented from Corbin Burnes, or 56.3 IP and six runs prevented from Taylor Williams would represent excellent rotational and bullpen support for Milwaukee.

Yet, the basic averages might provide some hint as to why the Brewers front office has remained quiet on the pitching free agency market thus far: even averaging around 35 innings and providing moderate runs prevented totals, this group of pitchers has a physical pedigree that suggests competent replacement depth can come from rookie ranks. Of course, it is impossible to fully extrapolate from these historical rookie comparisons to the Brewers 2018 pitching staff; this is not a correlative relationship. Yet, through this speculative historical analysis, one can find that Milwaukee has some solid physical characteristics with plenty of historical counterparts (especially Lopez, Burnes, and Woodruff); there are also some nearly one-of-a-kind profiles (see Diplan, Peralta, and Webb). Ultimately, these dozen rookies present Milwaukee’s front office and field management with an array of options to collect outs and prevent runs, even if they’re a group of wide-ranging replacements.

Baseball Prospectus. 2018 PECOTA (March 2, 2018) [CSV]. Retrieved March 4, 2018 from baseballprospectus.com.

Baseball Prospectus. “More PECOTA” (Player Cards). Retrieved March 4, 2018 from baseballprospectus.com.

Baseball Reference. Play Index. Sports Reference, LLC., Sports Reference LLC, 2000-2018. Searches conducted March 3, 2018 from baseball-reference.com.

Following the end of the 2017 regular season, the team allowed ace setup man Anthony Swarzak to hit the open market despite a stated desire to return to Milwaukee. They made a halfhearted bid to retain him, but in the end their offer was outbid by a measly $3 million from the New York Mets. Middle reliever Jared Hughes was projected for a $2.2 million salary in his final year of arbitration after arguably the best season of his career, but was non-tendered. Jeremy Jeffress would’ve suffered the same fate as Hughes had he not agreed to take a steep pay cut in arbitration and sign a club-friendly deal with not one, but two team options.

While quality relievers like Swarzak, Juan Nicasio, Brandon Morrow, Bryan Shaw, Steve Cishek, and others were flying off the board during the early portion of the offseason, David Stearns sat on the sidelines. He has added three veterans to the bullpen mix over the course of the winter but again, only on cheap, low-risk deals: a non-guaranteed $2 million commitment to Yovani Gallardo, $1.875 million with a club option/buyout for Boone Logan, and $5 million for Matt Albers spread out over two seasons. A few notable vets, like JJ Hoover, Erik Davis, and Mike Zagurski, will also be in camp on non-roster invites.

So should we as fans be concerned with Stearns placing a low priority on shoring up the relief corps this winter? No, or at least not in the eyes of PECOTA. As BPMilwaukee editor-in-chief Nicholas Zettel dug into earlier this week, the projections think that the Brewers still ought to have a highly productive bullpen with the group of players currently in-house. According to PECOTA, the top-five relievers in Craig Counsell’s pen project to be Corey Knebel, Josh Hader, Jacob Barnes, Oliver Drake, and Logan, with each member of that group projected to churn out an ERA below 3.86 and produce close to 4 WARP cumulatively. The numbers for Albers, Jeffress, and Gallardo peg them as more of roster filler-types than difference makers in 2018, but if the projections are to be believed then there should be two prospects nipping at their heels for spots in the bullpen within short order.

Taylor Williams and Adrian Houser are a pair of promising right-handers that have both spent a short amount of time in the big leagues and both have a Tommy John procedure in their recent past. Williams was a 4th-round pick by the club back in 2013 and was put on the map during Spring Training in 2015 when Ryan Braun compared his stuff to that of Craig Kimbrel. Unfortunately Williams went under the knife shortly after garnering such praise and missed all of the 2015 and 2016 seasons. Houser was considered the fourth piece in the 2015 Gomez-Fiers blockbuster with Houston and made his MLB debut with Milwaukee that September. He was pitching in AA in 2016 when his elbow gave out in July and forced him to hit the operating table.

The Brewers stuck by both hurlers during their recoveries, though. Williams was added to the 40-man roster in November of 2016 despite not throwing a regular season pitch in two years, based solely on what he was able to show during that year’s Fall Instructional League. After a carefully managed workload in AA last season (where he posted a 3.09 ERA/100 DRA- in 46.7 innings), Williams joined the big league club as a September call-up and made five appearances down the stretch, allowing one run with two walks and four punchouts in 4.7 innings. Houser, meanwhile, kept his spot on the 40 man roster even while he was down and out but was able to get back on the mound much more quickly than his cohort. Just 12 months after undergoing UCL surgery, Houser was in Maryvale making rehab starts with Milwaukee’s rookie-level affiliate. He made eight appearances between Maryvale and Appleton and in 17.2 innings, he compiled a 1.02 ERA with 27 strikeouts against just four free passes. Houser was then assigned to the Arizona Fall League, where he impressed scouts with his stuff and physicality on the mound coming off of the surgery.

PECOTA doesn’t project large innings totals at the MLB level for either pitcher next season, but if one were to extrapolate their expected numbers out for a full-season each would be a significant contributor in the bullpen. The soon-to-be 27 year old Williams is forecasted for a 3.65 ERA with 10.7 K/9 and 3.9 BB/9 in 2018; only two pitchers on the staff, Knebel and Hader, project for a lower earned run average in the coming year. Williams’ four-seamer averaged 96.1 MPH during his brief stint in The Show last season and he can get swings-and-misses with his plus slider, as well. That profile fits in perfectly with the philosophy that Stearns and company have employed while building up their pitching depth throughout the winter.

As far as Houser, PECOTA sees him capable of 3.83 ERA along with marks of 9.9 K/9 and 3.6 BB/9 in 2018. If he can match that output, it would place him among the top run preventers that Milwaukee has in their bullpen mix. According to Eric Longenhagen of Fangraphs, Houser was sitting between 93-97 MPH during AFL action and he also graded Adrian’s 12-6 curveball as a plus pitch. The 25 year old will also utilize a cutter and changeup, helping to lead Keith Law of ESPN to conclude that Houser still has the potential to be a league-average starting pitcher. But, as Longenhagen notes “if Milwaukee plans on fast-tracking him as a reliever, all the ingredients are already here.”

Milwaukee figures to have a strong bullpen once again in 2018 led by the triumvirate of Knebel, Hader, and Barnes. While David Stearns may have gone the economical route with the signings he has made to help raise the group’s floor, perhaps he only did so out of the belief that he already had more high impact arms in-house. If Adrian Houser and Taylor Williams can meet or exceed the projections laid out for them, Milwaukee will become that much more of a threat to break their six-year postseason drought.

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.

The trade deadline and whether the Brewers will sell in a meaningful way will be an omnipresent and, likely, irritating discussion over the next two-and-a-half weeks. Twitter will be aflutter with tweets about players increasing or decreasing their trade value based on 25 plate appearances, a trio of relief appearances, or a pair of starts. Player values are established by this point. The only things that will change a player’s value over the next two weeks are his health and price tag.

Still, the upcoming 16 days will hint at the long-term direction of the franchise, whether the club is willing to engage in a full rebuild or simply try to remain fringe-relevant in hopes of making a low-probability run at the postseason. It will only hint at the team’s blueprints for the future, though, as holding many of their most valuable trade chips does not necessarily indicate an unwillingness to sell. The winter’s trade market may prove more larger and more profitable for the Brewers, if they ultimately wait to shop guys like Carlos Gomez, Jean Segura, and Jonathan Lucroy.

At the same time, I do think the upcoming trade season can serve as a barometer, on some level, of the team’s direction. Some rumblings about owner Mark Attanasio’s unwillingness to engage in a full tear-down of the club have bubbled to the surface over the last three months, and perhaps there is some truth in those rumors. I also believe that, as a businessman, Attanasio has legitimate qualms about an intensive rebuilding project in Milwaukee. Unfortunately, though, a quiet trade deadline doesn’t guarantee that the Brewers are unwilling to thoroughly rebuild the roster. The upcoming offseason will be the true litmus test.

Just don’t expect that latter fact to stop most people from panicking, if the team fails to make many moves before July 31.

(2) Will Taylor Jungmann continue to show a level of command that’s unprecedented in his career?

Through seven starts, Taylor Jungmann has won four decisions and posted a 2.15 ERA. His 2.45 DRA (Deserved Run Average) further indicates that his success is reflective of true talent, rather than a stretch of good luck. Watching a few of his starts — particularly his recent complete-game gem — it’s obvious that he’s on top of his game. He’s spinning the breaking ball better than he had in the minors and is relying on his sinker to generate a 55.5 percent ground-ball rate. Moreover, he’s pounding the strike zone better than ever before.

That has been central to my hesitation on Jungmann’s future role with the club and why I’m not ready to consider him as anything more than a potential fifth starter or swingman. It’s not a BABIP-based argument that cites his .252 BABIP and naively calls for that to regress to the mean, though that seems likely since he’s only had a BABIP under .300 once in his four minor-league seasons. Instead, I’m skeptical that Jungmann can continue to throw strikes at this high of rate.

In general, players do not suddenly perform at career-best levels after making the most difficult jump in professional baseball, from Triple-A to Major League Baseball. Jungmann has somehow altered his profile, from a ground-ball specialist who struggled to pound the zone to a ground-ball specialist who has a stellar walk rate.

It’s certainly something that could have happened. I mean, Dallas Keuchel had a career ERA over 5.00 before magically becoming a legitimate ace. But, again, it’s about probability. When projecting future performance, should we bank on Taylor Jungmann being an anomaly who suddenly (and unexpectedly) figured it out in the majors? There’s a small chance that’s the case. I’m just not ready to put my money on that.

(3) Can Jeremy Jeffress step up and claim the “closer of the future” title?

After getting shipped from Milwaukee to Kansas City to Toronto, former first-round pick Jeremy Jeffress has returned to the Brewers and has transformed himself into a quality reliever. That’s hardly the end-goal when drafting a prep right-hander with the 16th-overall pick, but a useful relief arm seems to be a desirable consolation prize for the organization.

Jeffress has compiled ERAs of 1.88 and 2.95 over the past two years with the Brewers, respectively, continuously gaining the trust of Ron Roenicke (then) and Craig Counsell (now). He has seen the most high-leverage appearances of any Brewers reliever, aside from K-Rod, and has the second-most shutdowns (13) on the club. Although Will Smith and Jonathan Broxton are the team’s co-called “set-up men,” the Brewers have actually employed Jeffress in key situations more often.

The 27-year-old’s emergence has wholly been tied to his improved control. Prior to his second stint with the Brewers, Jeffress had not posted a big-league walk rate below 4.35 BB/9 and was only two years removed from walking 8.78 batters per nine innings. With the Brewers, though, those walk rates have been nearly cut in half to 2.20 BB/9 and 3.18 BB/9, respectively. He features a heavy mid-90s fastball nearly 80 percent of time, so realistically, he mostly needs to fill up the zone with his two-seamer and get the opposing hitters to pound the ball on the ground — which can be seen by his 61.5 and 58.9 percent ground-ball rates over the last two years.

Another issue that plagued Jeffress early in his big-league career was an inability to throw his curveball for strikes, which allowed hitters to sit on the fastball. Even a mid- to high-90s fastball can be crushed if opposing batters know it’s coming. As a reference point, Jeffress had never thrown more than 31 percent of his curveballs for strikes. The past two years, that mark has increased to approximately 40 percent. That additional threat is one of the reasons why his swinging-strike rate on his curve has jumped to 18.1 percent. Hitters now must honor it as a legitimate offering, instead of not swinging whenever they recognized the “hump” and spin of the curve.

With relievers, though, it’s difficult to determine whether such improvements are sustainable or whether they’re just a small-sample illusion. The second half of the 2015 will go a long way towards solidifying the answer to that question.

(4) Is Ryan Braun back?

For all the post-PED handwringing that continues to surround Ryan Braun’s public perception, it’s possible that Braun has rebounded from suspension and injury to once again be one of the top offensive outfielders in Major League Baseball. His .835 OPS ranks 13th among all qualified outfielders, and that includes a dreadful start to the season in which he tried to break bad mechanical habits that he developed last year. If one looks at his last 66 games, Braun has compiled a .900 OPS with 11 stolen bases — an OPS that would rank sixth-best among all outfielders.

Ample statistical evidence illustrates Braun’s re-emergence at the plate. Firstly, the 31-year-old is squaring up the baseball with regularity and the power has returned. His average batted-ball velocity is 93.69 mph, which ranks third-best in all of baseball — behind only Giancarlo Stanton and Yoenis Cespedes, and just ahead of Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout. His .220 ISO is far above the .143 league-average for all hitters and the .151 league-average for outfielders. In other words, the post-PED power-outage argument has a significant evidence problem.

Secondly, Braun has re-discovered his power stroke to left field.In June of last season, ESPN’s Buster Olney explained how opposite-field oriented Braun had become at the plate, even taking a non-subtle PED jab for good measure. His nerve injury in his hand made it difficult to keep his top hand on the bat, much less pull the baseball, so the six-time All-Star adjusted and began shooting the baseball to right field. That muscle memory carried over into spring training and April of 2015, as Braun continuously shot baseballs to the right-center and right fields.

That has changed in recent months. Since the beginning of May, Braun has begun to hit for power to all fields.

This hit chart won’t show a paucity of balls being hit to right field — Braun will always be willing to use right field regularly — but it does show a half-dozen homers to the pull side of center. It shows a half-dozen doubles to the pull side of center. At the risk of being too reductionist, it shows the Ryan Braun of old.

Finally, the Brewers’ right fielder has improved his contact rate and has improved his plate discipline. One of the biggest side effects of Braun’s nerve injury was the need to start his swing earlier to “cheat” against pitches in on his hands. That resulted in less time to identify spin, location and velocity, and as one would expect, that led to more swings at pitches outside the zone, fewer walks, and a higher swinging-strike rate.

Correcting bad habits takes time, but it appears that after a rough few weeks in April, Ryan Braun has returned to his career norms. His contact rate has normalized. His walk rate has jumped significantly since last year. And while he continues to swing at more pitches outside the zone than before, it’s lower than 2014 and is truthfully a function of today’s game. In 2009, for example, the average major-league hitter swung at 25.1 percent of pitches outside the zone. This year, the average is 31.0 percent. In that context, we should perhaps expect that Braun’s number should be higher than his career norm. What’s important, though, is that Braun is pairing it with an above-average contact rate.

As far as the rest of the season is concerned, Brewers fans could treat this argument in two ways. One could argue that the remainder of 2015 will (A) serve as Braun’s litmus test as to whether he’s truly “back,” in all the different ways that can be interpreted, or (B) be an opportunity to enjoy Braun’s return to form. After all, watching Ryan Braun at his offensive peak was aesthetically pleasing and should be going forward.

For me, I lean toward the latter, but while acknowledging that the former remains valid until Braun is able to extend his body of work into a more convincing sample size. A half-season doesn’t define a player, no matter how much it feels like it at the moment. Remember when Cesar Izturis made the All-Star Game in 2005 on the basis of two strong months?

(5) How will the starting pitching develop down on the farm?

Guys like Marcos Diplan, Jorge Lopez, and Tyler Wagner have all taken steps forward in 2015 and have garnered ample attention; however, the organization needs to develop more depth within the system. Relying on mid-rotation free agents has proven undesirable and, largely, not cost effective. Cultivating homegrown talent for the rotation should be one of the primary goals for the Milwaukee Brewers over the next few years.

Right-hander Devin Williams returned from injury a couple months ago and owns a 3.36 ERA for Class-A Wisconsin, but reports on his command have been rather poor — which is also reflected in his walk rate of 4.15 BB/9. He’s a guy who has begun to fly under-the-radar because the Brewers’ have handled him cautiously. Two years in rookie ball and this season in Class-A, the 20-year-old has only thrown 157.1 professional innings in three years. Still, he remains one of the most electric arms in the system.

Taylor Williams and Miguel Diaz finished the 2014 instructional season as two of the most-exciting pitching prospects in the Brewers organization. They have yet to take the mound in 2015. Williams has dealt with forearm tightness all year and suffered a setback earlier this summer, while Diaz has been on the 7-day DL for the past two months. Injuries happen — especially with pitchers — but their absence is obviously hindering their professional development, and if Taylor Williams ultimately needs Tommy John surgery, he’s looking at roughly two years of non-production and potentially not returning to game action until he’s 25 years old. In other words, he’d be a year younger than Tyler Thornburg at this point and would have never pitched above High-A. That’s a tough profile about which to get excited.

Finally, the Brewers need their 2015 draft class to sprint out of the starting gates. Right-hander Cody Ponce has dazzled with impressive performances in Helena and Class-A Wisconsin, but Nathan Kirby has yet to pitch a professional inning and Nash Walters has walked eight batters in 10.2 innings. While the best prospect in the draft class may be outfielder Trent Clark, the Milwaukee Brewers need their early pitching selections to establish themselves as legitimate prospects, which is a process that starts in earnest this summer.

SS Orlando Arcia

Arcia has blossomed into a bona fide top-100 prospect, if not more. He’s hitting .308/.351/.448 with four homers and eight stolen bases for Double-A Biloxi, and his defense has also gotten rave reviews from scouts. He’s a well-rounded hitter with sneaky pop, which should allow him to wear out the outfield gaps with 25+ doubles per year down the road. The most encouraging piece of Arcia’s development is that he has not only handled the most arduous jump in minor-league baseball (from High-A to Double-A), but that he’s also improved in the process. The 20-year-old is hitting for more power than ever before, while keeping his strikeout rate at just 12.2 percent.

One of the other things that stands out about Arcia is his mentality on the diamond. I’ve seen the shortstop perform drills in big-league camp in spring as a teenager, and he held his own. The pressure of playing with superstars like Ryan Braun didn’t faze him. He looked like he belonged; moreover, it looked as if he thought he belonged. Arcia has a bit of swagger that one desires from prized recruits. I talked to a former major-leaguer with the Brewers a couple years ago who readily sang his praises. This isn’t to suggest that the young man is poised for super-stardom at the major-league level. It is, though, to suggest that he should hold his own in the majors — which is a massive compliment in itself for a youngster in Double-A. He has a chance to be a first-division starter, too, if everything breaks right.

OF Michael Reed

Long-time readers know that I’ve pegged Reed as a future major-leaguer for a couple years. I’ve primarily seen his future role as a potential fourth outfielder, but the former fifth-round draft pick has taken a massive step forward this year and now has some scouts believing he could develop into an everyday player. He’s hitting .293/.379/.453 with five homers and 20 stolen bases with Double-A Biloxi and has pounded out 17 additional extra-base hits. The hope is that he can reach the double-digit homer plateau and mature into an above-average defensive corner outfielder with just enough pop to carry the position — something that is more acceptable in today’s depressed offensive era. The ultimate upside is perhaps what Jason Heyward has done the past couple years, with a few more strikeouts and less defensive value. Still, Reed has a high baseball IQ and is really hitting his stride as a professional baseball player. There’s a lot to like here.

RHP Marcos Diplan

This site has already talked a bit about Diplan — with a more in-depth article to come, actually — but the right-hander has flashed big-time stuff in the Pioneer League. His fastball runs into the mid-90s, and his curveball has above-average potential. His future success is dependent upon the development of his command, per usual, and his fringy changeup. He doesn’t have much margin for error to be successful a starter, as he only stands six-feet tall and doesn’t appear to have the build to handle a high workload; however, the early returns on the stuff have been electric. This is his first season in the states, as he pitched in the Dominican Summer League with the Texas Rangers in 2014, but Brewers fans should be elated. Expect to see much more on Diplan next week.

THREE TRENDING DOWN

RHP Taylor Williams

Last autumn, Williams capped off a banner season with brilliant performances in instructionals. One non-Brewers scout even opined that he was the best arm in Milwaukee’s system, markedly better than Devin Williams and Kodi Medeiros. The right-hander touched the upper-90s with an above-average slider and a changeup that flashed potential. The biggest concern with Taylor Williams has always been his short stature, as he’s generously listed at 5-foot-11, and the high level of stress in his delivery. It’s primarily the reason why scouts have boxed him into a reliever role, but his quality performance in the regular season last year and his much-hyped instructionals had many wondering if he could develop into something more.

It has been a lost season for Williams. He’s been dealing with a right forearm injury, which is traditionally connected to elbow problems and often is a precursor to Tommy John surgery. The latest information regarding Williams’s injury is that it’s just a forearm, and not an elbow injury, but he has yet to return to the mound. The fact that it hasn’t improved is further evidence that the true issue could reside in his elbow. If that’s the case, not only does it significantly hinder his path to the big-leagues, but it validates many of the durability questions that have plagued him. People don’t like when pitchers with quality stats and above-average stuff are denigrated for having a “bad body,” but Brewers fans have recently been through this dance with Tyler Thornburg. Pitchers under six-feet have a problem getting good downward plane on their pitches and particularly struggle with the heavy workload of starting. Even the quintessential counterexample, Tim Lincecum, has become a shell of himself in recent years. Short pitchers like Williams have many obstacles to overcome, and his injury issues indicate that a back-end relief role may be his best future position.

OF Monte Harrison

Although Harrison was the Brewers’ third selection in the 2014 draft, he came with the most excitement. Expectations rose when he hit .261/.402/.339 with 32 stolen bases as an 18-year-old in 2014. However, the former football standout hasn’t performed well this year. In 46 games with the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers (Class-A), he hit .148/.246/.247 with a massive 41.8-percent strikeout rate. The common aphorism is that one shouldn’t scout the box score, but it’s not difficult to ascertain that the Midwest League overwhelmed Harrison. Since returning to Helena, things haven’t gotten much better. He’s hitting .186/.314/.395 with a pair of homers and three stolen bases in 12 games.

It must be recognized that raw 19-year-old prospects often struggle in every organization and at every level. It’s not uncommon. Our own Michael Schwarz illustrated that beautifully in his piece last week. However, it has become readily apparent that Harrison is a long-term project and not one that will rocket up the system. Brewers fans must be patient. One scout tried to temper my optimism in the spring, saying that one really had to dream in order to see what Harrison could become down the road, as he’s far too raw. Expect his performance to improve in the Pioneer League this summer; however, the early-season optimism surrounding Harrison and his potential path to the big leagues has crashed back to earth. He remains a top-10 prospect, to be sure, but the road ahead is much longer than expected.

RHP Brandon Woodruff

Woodruff, a 6-foot-2 fireballer from Mississippi State, had a bit of helium coming into the 2015 season. He impressed scouts in the instructional league last autumn, flashing three at-least-average pitches with his fastball, curveball, and changeup. The Brewers gambled on his arm strength out of college, as he’s always struggled with command and consistency; however, his late-season performance in 2014 encouraged the organization. For this reason, the organization pushed Woodruff to High-A Brevard County this season.

Unfortunately, though, his success hasn’t carried over. Through 13 starts and 71.0 innings, the right-hander owns a 4.06 ERA with a measly 11.8-percent strikeout rate, which is highly unusual given his power profile. His two most-recent outings have been better — with just two earned runs allowed in 14 innings — but the overarching concerns don’t dissipate because of two starts. The silver lining is that Woodruff has always profiled best in the bullpen. The Brewers prefer to keep their power-relief prospects in the rotation at the lower levels of the minors, in an effort to build their arm strength and their secondary offerings, so Woodruff’s developmental path isn’t necessarily off-track. In fact, it mirrors the Brewers’ treatment of David Goforth a couple years ago — keep him in the rotation until Double-A for the aforementioned reasons, then transition him to the bullpen to specialize his development.

Placing Brandon Woodruff in the “trending down” section isn’t necessarily a reflection on his big-league potential. He’s still possesses the ability, with his fastball-curveball combination, to be a reliever in the majors. What has changed, however, is the excitement surrounding him after his performance during instructs last autumn. Some scouts and some within the organization hoped that he turned a corner. Those hopes seem to have faded for the moment.

NEWS AND NOTES

• Shortstop Orlando Arcia will represent the Milwaukee Brewers and his home-country of Venezuela in the annual Future’s Game. In the past, it has been broadcast on ESPN2 and MLB.com, so many fans will get their first glimpse at the Brewers’ number-one prospect. If he performs well in pre-game drills or during the game, his national attention should explode. That is one of the effects of the Future’s Game, after all. It places dozens of national writers in the same place to watch and hype the best prospects in the league. If a guy performs well on that given day, his national stock explodes.
• The Brewers have promoted shortstop Blake Allemand to Class-A Wisconsin. Allemand — a polished college senior — hit .365/.411/.442 with three stolen bases through 12 games. Draft experts praised the Brewers for selecting Allemand in the fifth round of last month’s draft, suggesting that he could move quickly through the Brewers’ system. That has proven accurate in just the first two weeks of his professional career. The former Texas A&M standout best profiles as a utility infielder down the road, and while that may not excite the average fan, getting that type of potential from a senior-sign who only commanded a $40k bonus would be a huge win for the organization.
• Right-hander Cody Ponce also got the call to Class-A Wisconsin. We discussed him a bit on Monday. I have yet to see Ponce throw this year, but early reports from scouts are positive.