Stuff

We saw earlier that Nelson took the cake in terms of velocity, while Pena’s movement paced the team. On the other end of the spectrum, there was no such divide — one pitch had both the lowest velocity z-score and the lowest total movement z-score:

For a curveball, below-average vertical movement isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since the average such pitch already moves negative. Indeed, the fact that Fiers led all starters in curveball drop last season would seem to work in his favor.

Of course, all the dive in the world won’t count for anything if the pitch has no velocity. Only Jered Weaver, Mark Buehrle, and Julio Teheran threw their curveballs slower in 2015, and it showed. Fiers’s curve went for strikes just 43.0 percent of the time in Milwaukee, and when he put it in the zone, hitters such as Tyler Moore made him pay:

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Those kinds of dingers made Fiers’s curve worth -1.61 runs below average on a rate basis. The Brewers will miss Fiers overall in 2016, but I for one am glad that his curveball will stay with the Astros.

Run Values

Interestingly enough, though, Fiers’s curve didn’t finish last when it came to Linear Weights. Another starter, who remains on the team, held that distinction:

Peralta’s 2015 regression fell squarely on the shoulders of his sinker, which traveled nearly a mile and a half slower than it did in 2014. That meant the pitch often resulted in this sort of treatment, courtesy here of Curtis Granderson:

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But a run value alone doesn’t really do Peralta justice. For his case, we’ll look at something else.

TAv

Using the same samples from the velocity and whiff rate z-scores, I found the average and standard deviation for each pitch’s resulting TAv. These created TAv z-scores, to better reflect how hard batters hit an offering. They certainly clobbered Peralta’s heater:

How bad was this? The next-worst pitch, Tyler Cravy’s four-seamer, had a TAv 1.75 standard deviations over the mean. Only Vidal Nuno and Sean O’Sullivan allowed opponents to abuse them more than this. Let’s throw in another GIF of this atrocity, for good measure:

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I discussed Peralta’s meltdown in December, noting that the movement of his pitches actually improved in 2015. Let’s hope for his sake that he regains his velocity, because if he doesn’t, the 2016 campaign will bring more of the same kind of pain.

Whiffs

When it comes to swinging strikes, things get complicated. Unlike Fiers’s curveball and Peralta’s four-seamer, this pitch actually held its own in 2015:

Blazek didn’t earn many whiffs with the curveball, yet it still gave him 1.99 runs above an average pitch (per 100 appearances). That’s because it accrued its strikes a different way:

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Matt Carpenter and his fellow batters took the curveball for a called strike 30.7 percent of the time, an incredible amount. An exercise like this has limits, as Blazek demonstrates — no one metric can really capture all the value of a pitch.

That isn’t to say, however, that Peralta’s four-seamer didn’t struggle, or that Fiers performed well with his curveball. We can pretty conclusively deem one of those two the worst Brewers pitch of 2015. Hopefully, 2016 will bring more pitches like the ones we saw on Thursday (although, if the team continues this rebuild, we won’t witness great pitching for a few years).

Click here for a complete spreadsheet of all 39 pitches.

Beyond that, pitchers make a better target for sabermetricians, as we can quantify so many elements of their game. Thanks to PITCHf/x, we can now look at pitch usage, velocity, movement, release points, locations — and, most importantly, individual result breakdowns for each offering. This can lead us down any number of analytic rabbit holes, which is where our story begins.

Because we still have a few weeks until baseball returns, I’ve decided to pass the time by constructing arbitrary “best-of” lists. Most of them wouldn’t appeal to any sane person, but I feel that many fans of the Brew Crew would like to know the answer to this question. Of the many pitches we had the pleasure of viewing last season, which stood out above the rest? A question that broad doesn’t have one right answer, but it’s an entertaining exercise regardless.

To accomplish it, I looked at pitches that appeared at least 200 times, isolating myself to those that occurred when the player was in Milwaukee. (In other words, this won’t include Mike Fiers’s time in Houston or Jonathan Broxton’s work for St. Louis.) This gave me a sample of 39 pitches to work with:

Whose quiver contained the deadliest arrow? Well, we can look at the issue a few different ways, each of which has its own merit. I’ll run through them all, with fun GIFs and full explanations, then return with a final summary.

Stuff

When evaluating the quality of a pitcher, we can focus, broadly speaking, on two things: the process (think cFIP) or the results (think DRA). The same general logic applies to the pitches themselves. We’ll begin with a few metrics that will tell us how well the pitches theoretically should have performed in 2015; from there, we’ll then move to the measures of how well they actually performed.

For a pitch to blow away the opponent, it generally has to have either velocity or movement. We’ll thus begin our journey with these two categories. For this, I used the BP PITCHf/x leaderboards to find pitchers (separating starters and relievers) with 200 of each pitch type in 2015. I then found the average and standard deviations of each sample, from which I constructed velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement z-scores for all 39 offerings.

The pitch with the most power behind it might seem familiar:

Nelson’s curveball, which ranked above Sonny Gray and Jacob deGrom in terms of velocity, left hitters such as Aramis Ramirez guessing:

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For movement, I took the sum of vertical and horizontal z-scores, to get a rough measure of overall bite. Although the top offering here might not be your first guess, it certainly deserved its spot:

Pena’s four-seam fastball didn’t have much heat, but man, could it dance. Watch how it rises and tails away from Kyle Schwarber:

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Nelson saw more action than Pena did in 2015, which may explain why his curveball feels more familiar. Still, each of these offerings stood out in its own regard. As the Brewers experiment with their rotation in 2016, we’ll probably see a lot more of both the heater and the curve.

Run Values

With that said, velocity and movement alone don’t make a pitch. A better line of thinking would look at the actual production of a pitch, and for that, we have a unique metric.

Pitch Type Linear Weights measure the count changes by each pitch, as well as the result when the offering ends a plate appearance, and expresses it as runs above or below average. This metric generally achieves its goal, and its selection for top Brewers pitch (on a per-100 pitch scale) probably wouldn’t get too much blowback:

Rodriguez won this contest by a wide margin — Michael Blazek’s curveball came in second, at 1.99 runs above average. Darin Ruf would probably agree with that verdict:

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This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Rodriguez’s cambio made his 2015 resurrection possible. In fact, the changeup was worth more (by this metric) on a rate basis than any other pitch, of any kind, in all of baseball. Taking note of that a few months back, Mark Simon crowned it the best pitch in the majors. Sadly, K-Rod will pitch in Detroit this season, so this changeup will no longer work in Milwaukee’s favor.

Whiff rate

But we shouldn’t stop there, because Linear Weights aren’t perfect. Aside from the fact that they don’t necessarily reflect true talent (which we’ll discuss in due time), they treat all changes of count the same way. In the eyes of Linear Weights, a swinging strike to begin an at-bat is the same as a foul ball, since each puts the pitcher ahead 0-1. That doesn’t testify to the quality of the offering, though — whiffs are clearly better than fouls, meaning the best pitches will usually maximize the former.

For that reason, we’ll move to swinging-strike rate. Here, it’s important to take into account the different baselines, as each pitch fools hitters to different extents. To level the playing field, I created some more z-scores, using the averages and standard deviations of the whiff rates from the aforementioned velocity samples. As with the Linear Weights, the winner here won’t shock anyone:

Here, too, the leader dominated the competition: The runner-up — Neal Cott’s cutter and its 15.7 percent whiff rate— only topped the mean by 1.24 standard deviations. Based on this hilarious A.J. Pierzynski swing, I can’t argue with that:

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I covered Smith’s transcendent slider back in June, and although Smith himself faded a bit down the stretch, this pitch didn’t miss a beat. Unlike Rodriguez, Smith should stick around, so this glorious breaking ball will continue dominating for the Brewers.

In the end, Nelson’s curveball, Pena’s four-seamer, Rodriguez’s changeup, and Smith’s slider disrupted plenty of hitters last year. These standout offerings gave us something to look forward to in an otherwise dismal campaign. (On that note: Later in the week, I’ll use this methodology to find the worst Brewers pitches of the 2015 season. Until then, we’ll simply have these masterpieces to keep us warm.)

Of course, Melvin didn’t always struggle in this facet of management. The first five years of his tenure (2003-2007) saw the Brewers draft Ryan Braun, Yovani Gallardo, Rickie Weeks, and Jonathan Lucroy, among others. Those players combined with Prince Fielder and Corey Hart, J.J. Hardy, and Bill Hall — whom the team had selected in the pre-Melvin seasons — to form a strong nucleus that helped the club make playoff runs in 2008 and 2011.

After that, however, the prospect well dried up — such that, for five years running, the Brewers have placed in the bottom five of BP’s organizational rankings:

[Note: These rankings began in 2008.]

With the aforementioned core heading to the Major Leagues, Milwaukee sorely needed to replenish its system. Melvin responded with the opposite due to the club’s competitive window. In deals for CC Sabathia, Zack Greinke, and Shaun Marcum, he sent away Matt LaPorta, Zack Jackson, Rob Bryson, Michael Brantley, Lorenzo Cain, Jake Odorizzi, Alcides Escobar, Jeremy Jeffess, and Brett Lawrie. Some of those players didn’t end up accomplishing much, but the prosperity of some of them — particularly Brantley and Cain, each of whom has played at a borderline-MVP level in the past couple years — have made many fans regret the trades retrospectively.

Inadequate drafting compounded the woes of those deals. Jack noted in his piece that the club’s picks from later years haven’t yet amounted to much. Over the past few years, teams such as the Rangers have managed to maintain a solid minor-league system despite swinging big trades, and they’ve done so by constantly restocking their affiliates through the draft and international free agency. Part of that is good scouting, too, while part of that is a willingness to spend money. Melvin’s Brewers partook in the former half of the equation while neglecting the latter half, though, and it has come back to haunt them.

With that said, Milwaukee has made recent strides. BP’s writeup of the farm system stated that it possessed “talent to makes several teams quite jealous” — a massive improvement from its standing over the past several seasons. After spending the first half of the decade in the minor-league cellar, the 2015 Brewers have taken the necessary steps to move back up to the top half.

Part of this, in fairness, happened before this year. In August, Julien Assouline analyzed the team’s drafts under Melvin, who had perhaps not received the credit he deserved. Some of Melvin’s strengths there stem from the early years, but even in the later part of his run with the Brewers, they fared moderately well. Derek Harvey commented that the club’s drafts from 2009 to 2014, under late scouting director Bruce Seid, provided them with numerous quality players that presently stock their system. Indeed, of the top-20 current Milwaukee prospects, eight — Jorge Lopez, Devin Williams, Monte Harrison, Tyrone Taylor, Jake Gatewood, Kodi Medeiros, Yadiel Rivera, and Michael Reed — came from drafts during that span, while Orlando Arcia and Gilbert Lara signed with the team as amateur free agents in that period.

Still, an improvement of this magnitude, and in this short a span, suggests something different in the past twelve months. Part of the difference stems from the 2015 draft, which has (to this point) yielded incredible rewards. Four of those top-20 prospects came to the team in June: Trent Clark, Cody Ponce, Demi Orimoloye, and Nathan Kirby. Clark stands out as the best of the bunch, but all four have intriguing upside and could continue to blossom further. New scouting director Ray Montgomery, as Harvey observed, seems to have taken off.

The team’s decision to finally rebuild has helped with that. July saw them deal away established starters Aramis Ramirez, Gerardo Parra, and Jonathan Broxton, as well as (relative) stars Carlos Gomez and Mike Fiers. Those trades — which, as J.P. Breen correctly posited, meant the team had recognized that its window has closed — brought back a great deal of prospects. Yhonathan Barrios, Zach Davies, Malik Collymore, Domingo Santana, Brett Phillips, Josh Hader, and Adrian Houser now occupy various levels of the Milwaukee system; Phillips, Davies, Houser, and Hader ranked in the top 20, while Santana has already begun to contribute at The Show. Together with Marcos Diplan, an intriguing top-20 farmhand whom the team acquired in last January’s Yovani Gallardo swap, they amount to a formidable group.

Overall, David Stearns inherited a solid amount of prospects when he became the GM in August. Surveying the trove a couple weeks before Melvin stepped down, Derek Harvey concluded that the system had gone from the bottom to the upper half of the league — a prediction that, as stated previously, we’ve likely seen come true. Stearns didn’t stop there, though. In his four-odd months atop the organization, he’s made several trades to bolster the minor- and major-league depth, further improving the system as a whole.

The first two transactions came in mid-November. Stearns swapped Cy Sneed for the Astros’ Jonathan Villar, then followed that up by shipping Francisco Rodriguez to the Tigers in exchange for Javier Betancourt and a player to be named later (catcher Manny Pina). Seth Victor described Villar at the time as “a good acquisition for a team that needs middle infield depth and flexibility,” a player who won’t make a noticeable difference yet should still provide some value. Betancourt — who rounded out the top 20 — is, in Chris Crawford’s estimation, “a high-floor prospect with a fairly well-defined ceiling.” In other words, he could become a Villar-type player a few years down the road.

After BP published its top-20 list, Stearns has made a few more moves, evidently in an effort to muck up the rankings. First came the Adam Lind trade, which brought back three young pitchers: Carlos Herrera, Daniel Missaki, and Freddy Peralta. While I can certainly see the logic in Jack’s distaste for the deal — Lind gave us something to cheer for in this dreadful 2015 season, and those players always hurt to lose — I ultimately come down on the side of J.P., who expressed cautious optimism regarding it.

Not long after that, three more prospects came to Milwaukee. The day following Lind’s departure, the Red Sox sold Garin Cecchini to the Brewers for cash considerations. BP’s Bryan Grosnick called the deal “[t]he definition of ‘buying low,'” as a disastrous 2015 had caused Cecchini’s stock to plummet. Likewise, the players Milwaukee snagged in the Rule 5 draft — Colin Walsh from the Athletics and Zack Jones from the Twins — don’t carry elite pedigrees, or much upside, for that matter.

These deals nevertheless give the Brewers plenty of options for 2016 and beyond, as J.P. outlined a few weeks ago. (Plus, the quantity acquired from these transactions only increased thereafter, when the Brewers sent Jason Rogers to the Pirates, receiving Keon Broxton and Trey Supak in return.) Overall, the solid 2015 draft, along with Stearns’s willingness to trade anything not nailed down, has translated to a complete turnaround in Milwaukee’s minor-league system.

What does this mean for 2016? Well, as J.P. pointed out, the Brewers have more routes they can take at the Major League level; although few of those will likely lead to wins, the results should give the team some clarity for 2017. More immediately, it means the Triple-A Sky Sox will presumably play better in 2016. Michael Schwarz explained how that affiliate would progress with legitimate prospects filling its roster. The biggest takeaway here, though, is general optimism. Years and years of no future, at long last, appear to have come to an end. Now, more so than at any point in recent memory, there could be hope on the Milwaukee horizon.