Top Play (WPA):
Matt Garza ran into trouble immediately. He allowed the first three Pirates batters to reach base. Adam Frazier led off with a single, Josh Bell walked, and Andrew McCutchen hit a double that scored both runners (.144). While Garza recovered to retire the next three batters, the Pirates did not lose the lead for the remainder of the game.

Bottom Play (WPA):
There was a tie!

The first worst play occurred in the fifth inning. Pirates starter Steven Brault gave the Brewers plenty of opportunities. He gave up a hit in each of his four plus innings, and at least one runner reached second base in every innings. In the fifth inning, the Brewers had an opportunity to get back into the game. Jonathan Villar led off with a walk then stole second base. Orlando Arcia hit a single which advanced Villar to third base and chased Brault from the game. Up came Chris Carter, who grounded into a run scoring double play on the first pitch (-.108).

Wade LeBlanc was brought into the game to start the sixth inning for the Pirates. After a walk, a fielder’s choice, and a single, there were runners on first and second with one out and Martin Maldonaldo was at the plate. He saw four pitches: fastball, changeup, fastball, changeup. Unfortunately, that last changeup was off the plate and Maldonaldo hit into a double play to end the inning (-.108). The Brewers only had one baserunner the rest of the game.

Tyler Cravy Auditions for 2017
Tyler Cravy has not allowed a run since his appearance on August 16, his first after a stint in the minors. Here’s a look at his season stat line, split into two parts: April and post August 15^th (and in full disclosure, I’m ignoring his spot start on May 6^th):

Brooks Baseball shows that he has increased usage of his four seam fastball from around 45 percent to 69 percent, while almost completely ditching his sinker. That increase also ate into his changeup and slider usage (10 percent and 5 percent respectively). He’s also increased his curveball usage from 4.5 percent to almost 8 percent.

However, when looking at the outcomes of the four seamer, there doesn’t seem to be a noticeable improvement. It’s inducing less swings, less whiffs, and less balls in play. Batters are fouling more per swing (increase from 14.81 percent to 23.08 percent), but when they hit the ball, they’re hitting fewer grounders and fly balls, and more line drives. While I want to look at the data for his other pitches, the second most pitches he’s thrown since his recall is sliders, and he’s only thrown a slider 22 times. That’s shaving things a little too thin to read anything into those outcomes.

Unfortunately for Cravy going forward, the answer for his current hot streak seems to lie in BABIP. While current sabermetric orthodoxy cautions against looking at BABIP and immediately drawing a conclusion regarding regression, the numbers here don’t lie. His BABIP on his four seamer in April was .333. Since August, it’s .120 for the four seamer, and .000 for every pitch other than his changeup. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to say those rates are not sustainable.

Cravy got an inning of work last night. Andrew McCutchen led off and seemed to drive the ball, but it went right to Jake Elmore in left field. Gregory Polanco made solid contact to right field and got a single, but it looked like Domingo Santana could have caught the ball with a little more effort. Then Cravy struck out the next two batters, a feat he’s only done twice since his recall. One strike out was on a changeup, and the other via a four seamer.

While normally one would prefer greater strikeout numbers from a back of the bullpen piece, this team did just use Jeremy Jeffress as a closer when he only had a 7.05 K/9. There will be BABIP regression, but his current run is certainly putting him a position to make the team next year. If you’re a Brewers fan looking at things to watch which may have implications for 2017, then keep an eye on Cravy.

Up Next: The series continues with another game against Pittsburgh tonight. Jimmy Nelson starts for the Brewers. Last week against the Cubs he pitched six innings, allowing three runs on eight hits and two walks while striking out seven. The Pirates will send Chad Kuhl to the mound. He last pitched in a 15-2 victory over the Phillies. He completed six innings and allowed both Philadelphia runs, while striking out five. Kuhl also pitched against the Brewers in late August, going 6.3 innings and also striking out five batters and allowing two runs. First pitch is 7:10.

THE PLAY:
It was Jay Bruce. It has always been Bruce, and it always will be Bruce. This time, it was a first inning at bat following a sacrifice fly that opened the scoring. With runners on first and second and one out, Bruce blasted the first pitch he saw from Anderson high into the right field bleachers for a no-doubter that gave the home team a 4-0 lead (+.180 WPA).

That Bruce is a Brewer killer is not a secret. Still, the numbers are staggering. With 21 home runs in 209 at bats against Milwaukee at Great American Ballpark, he’s averaging a home run every 10 at bats, so you can basically count on him for one per series – he’s not gone an entire series without at home against the Brewers since 2014. Bruce has 34 career home runs against the Brewers (477 PA), 14 more than against any other team and more than twice as many as he has hit against the entire American League (541 PA). Jay Bruce is a demon long dead with nothing left to lose, and his sole purpose on this plane of existence is to rend asunder the hopes and dreams of the Brewers faithful.

MILWAUKEE’S SHOT:
This is relative, because the Brewers never cut the Reds’ win probability below 95% after Brandon Phillips’ two-run clout in the second inning made the score 7-0. In the eighth inning, Jonathan Villar sparked a two out rally with a walk in front of Alex Presley, who hammered his second home run of the season to cut the Reds’ lead to four. Ryan Braun followed with a single to keep things going, but Lucroy lined out to right field to end the inning.

Presley has been a revelation since being recalled from Triple-A Colorado Springs to replace Keon Broxton, who never got his first major league hit after earning the starting job in center out of Spring Training. Presley is hitting .320/.379/.600 in 29 plate appearances and seems to be earning a larger share of playing time: he has started three of the last four days in right field as Domingo Santana has been dealing with sore shoulder. Presley’s no prospect: he’s 30 years old and has over 1000 MLB plate appearances. However, he’s walking at twice his career rate, which mirrors the shift up in plate discipline that the entire team has undergone.

TREND TO WATCH:
Milwaukee got plenty of chances against Reds starter Alfredo Simon, who entered the game with a 13.50 ERA in five appearances and four starts this season. Milwaukee put their leadoff runner on in five consecutive innings starting in the third, but any hope of a rally was extinguished quickly as the Brewers grounded into double plays in three of those innings. The twin killings allowed Simon to keep his pitch count way down as he enjoyed what was far and away his best start of the season, going 7.2 innings and allowing three runs on seven hits.

Milwaukee has hit into 27 double plays this season, third-most in the league. This can probably be attributed to a healthy walk rate (the Brewers rank third at 10.5%) and a top-five ground ball rate. The Brewers ability to get on base via base on balls is somewhat negated when those baserunners are consistently being wiped out on easy twin killings

COMING UP NEXT:
Tyler Cravy gets his first start of the year tonight in place of Wily Peralta, who is home celebrating the birth of his son. He’ll match up against Tim Adleman, who made his major league debut on Sunday a tossed six innings, striking out six and walking two in a 6-5 win over the Pirates.

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.)

Tyler Cravy successfully navigated the first four innings of Friday night’s game, holding the Cardinals’ offense scoreless. Things unraveled in the fifth. After Brandon Moss’s leadoff double, Stephen Piscotty hit an awkward soft liner to left field, which Khris Davis misjudged. The ball squirted past the Brewers’ outfielder. Moss scored and Piscotty strode into second base for the second double of the inning (+.131 WPA).

The inning would’ve been drastically different had Davis broke forward on the ball immediately; however, Piscotty didn’t make solid contact, and the baseball undoubtedly appeared much harder hit than it ended up being. Davis looked as if he did his best Carlos Lee impression in left field. It’s just important to recognize that it was a more difficult play than it appeared, and Davis doesn’t have the top-end speed to recover for a misplaced first step.

Still, the fifth inning represented the potential issues that Cravy will encounter in the majors. Moss and Piscotty took advantage of the right-hander doubling up on his approach the second time through the order. Cravy sequenced his at-bats in the same way he did in the second inning. Having four usable pitches, that shouldn’t happen. I’m unsure if this sequencing issue is more a criticism of Lucroy or Cravy — as it seems unlikely that Cravy is calling his own game as a rookie — but major-league hitters will take advantage of a pitcher without overpowering stuff if it’s not sequenced well.

BOTTOM PLAY (WPA)

With the game scoreless in the third inning, Lucroy drew a leadoff walk from Cardinals’ starter Lance Lynn. Braun followed up with a brutal double play that eliminated the threat, which ended up being the Brewers’ best chance to take a lead (-.082 WPA).

Lynn didn’t mess around with Braun. His sinker has a 67 percent ground-ball rate this season, and the right-hander threw five-straight sinkers to the Brewers’ best hitter. Braun grounded to the shortstop, starting the double play. Lynn has historically been tremendous against the Brewers. That continued on Friday evening.

KEY MOMENT

The awkward double to left field by Piscotty in the fifth inning may have been the key moment, but the nail in the coffin came later in the frame. Randal Grichuk, who St. Louis acquired in the David Freese trade in 2013, continued his fine run of form with a three-run homer that put the Cardinals up by six runs and put the game out of reach.

Grichuk is hitting .287/.335/.579 with 14 homers in 2015, effectively solving the Cardinals’ issues in center field. He clobbered a 91-mph fastball that split the plate in two to right-center field. Hitters started to be able to key in on Cravy’s fastball, as he had trouble throwing his offspeed offerings for strikes. In fact, the four extra-base hits in the fifth inning came against fastballs.

In a single inning, the game transitioned from a pitcher’s duel to a blowout. Unfortunately, the Brewers were on the wrong end of it.

TREND TO WATCH

Over the last two years, Lance Lynn has posted a 2.75 ERA in 331.0 innings. He’s struck out nearly a batter per inning and has only allowed 21 home runs. In essence, he’s been one of the best pitchers in the National League since the beginning of 2014. It has come with an increased usage of his fastball, too, as he’s now throwing his sinker or four-seamer 85.3 percent of the time.

I’ve mentioned several times this season that Lance Lynn against the Milwaukee Brewers is as close to a sure thing as exists in baseball. The right-hander has a career 2.36 ERA against Milwaukee over 91.1 innings. Milwaukee hast historically struggled against hard-throwing fastball/slider pitchers, and that’s proven true against Lynn.

Amongst teams Lynn has faced at least five times, he only has a better career record against the Houston Astros (2.18 ERA) and Colorado Rockies (2.30 ERA). As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that Lance Lynn handled the Brewers yet again. He feels comfortable against the Crew.

COMING UP NEXT

Jaime Garcia has struggled with injuries over the past couple years, but he’ll get the nod on Saturday evening for the Cardinals. He has a 1.98 ERA and will face a Brewers club that has uncharacteristically struggled against lefties this year. Their 74 wRC+ is far below the league’s average.

Milwaukee will send Wily Peralta to the mound, who looks to rebound from a poor effort earlier in the week. The first pitch will be at 6:10 pm CT.