Milwaukee Adds Anderson

Milwaukee has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of the league’s austerity on the free agent market in recent seasons. A damp market gave the Brewers an opportunity to sign Lorenzo Cain to a team-friendly five-year deal in January of 2018, and their new center fielder’s 5.7 WAR campaign proved instrumental in a season Milwaukee won the NL Central by a single game. General manager David Stearns turned an even tidier trick last winter, inking Yasmani Grandal and Mike Moustakas to one-year pillow contracts in January and February respectively. Both made the All-Star team and they combined for 8 WAR as the Brewers again narrowly clinched a playoff berth.

Critically, the Brewers haven’t succeeded by aggressively courting free agents, but rather by waiting out the competition and swooping in with palatable offers to desperate players at the dawn of spring training. Cain surely entered his recruitment period thinking a nine-figure offer was a strong possibility, and neither Grandal nor Moustakas hit the market hoping for anything less than a multi-year deal. As prices fell, Milwaukee pounced. In capitalizing on a cool market, the Brewers were able to meaningfully augment their ballclub without incurring significant costs, and the result was a rare breakthrough to the playoffs.

Milwaukee won’t be able to run it back with the same strategy in 2020. As we’ve covered elsewhere, the free agent market has rebounded significantly this offseason. Unlike in recent years, many of the marquee players are already off the board, and for pretty big money, too. The league has already committed approximately $1.5 billion to players: That’s nearly a billion more than this time last year, a free agency period that ended with around $1.8 billion in total commitments. With plenty of mid-tier free agents still on the board, the pattern has been established: Good players are getting more money and more years than they have over the two previous seasons.

That’s good news for the players and probably the league as a whole, but it does mean that the Brewers will need to operate differently, particularly given the talent they’ve lost this off-season. In addition to Grandal and Moustakas, pitchers Zach Davies, Jordan Lyles, Chase Anderson, Junior Guerra, Jimmy Nelson, and Gio Gonzalez will also ply their trades elsewhere in 2020. Late last week, Milwaukee took a first step toward addressing their pitching shortage, signing Josh Lindblom to a three-year deal and Brett Anderson to a one-year contract worth $5 million, with up to $2 million more in incentives.

Anderson, the second most interesting left-handed pitcher you’re reading about today, is coming off of a surprisingly productive season in Oakland. The southpaw has battled through various injury problems for a decade now but he managed to make 31 starts in 2019. He tossed 179 innings, posting a 3.89/4.57/4.79 pitcher slash, good for 2 WAR in total.

Underneath the hood, Anderson is one of the strangest pitchers in baseball. In an era characterized by the three true outcomes, Anderson is one of the few hurlers who can credibly claim to pitch to contact. He struck out just 4.60 hitters per nine innings last season, which was not only last among qualified starters, but last by a lot:

The key to Anderson’s success is his ability to make hitters put the ball on the ground. He has a career groundball rate of 57%, and somehow crested 66% back in 2015. Last year, he coaxed a grounder 54.5% of the time batters made contact, which puts him in good company league wide:

As you’d expect, he primarily induces grounders with a sinker, although everything in his repertoire is capable of generating them. His sinker has an average spin rate of 1799 rpm, which is among the very lowest rates in all of baseball. The sinker isn’t the only key to his success — hitters actually slug .476 on it when they connect, so it’s a bit of a feast or famine offering for him — but the pitch’s movement pairs well with his change, his bread and butter for getting a whiff against opposite handed hitters.

In many ways, Oakland was a perfect fit for Anderson. With defensive stalwarts Marcus Semien and Matt Chapman manning short and third, the lefty was able to throw strikes with confidence, knowing that most balls in play would hug the ground, slapped into the teeth of one of baseball’s best infields. Pitching in a big park also helped mask some of the inevitable problems with pitching to contact in 2019; even with a 54% groundball rate, he still surrendered more than a homer every nine innings, a number that likely would have been higher in a different environment.

In a way, this contract is a bet on positioning. The Brewers, as much as anyone else, field a very modern infield defense. They shift more often than most clubs and have experimented with guys in different positions, most notably when they plugged Moustakas or Travis Shaw — third basemen by trade — at the keystone. This is a team that gets creative defensively, and by signing Anderson, the Brewers are essentially gambling that they can place their defense, and particularly their infielders, well enough to compensate for the lack of strikeouts.

It’s an interesting fit given their infield setup. Time will tell how often Ryan Braun plays first, but that position may be the least of Milwaukee’s worries. Keston Hiura will again play second and the best thing to be said about his glove is that he has a really good bat. The arrival of Luis Urías and a few pointed words from Stearns about Orlando Arcia’s lack of production suggests that the import will have a chance to win the job at short. If he does, he could add considerable thump to the lineup, but at the expense of one of the better defensive shortstops in baseball. It’s easy to imagine a scenario where Anderson pitches just as well as he did last year, but allows more runs through a combination of a hitter-friendly home park and an infield defense unable to hoover up as many grounders as Semien and Chapman.

None of this is to say that this is a bad fit, necessarily. Were this 2010, we’d be wary of Anderson, a pitcher who outperformed his peripherals without missing many bats. But both that and his injury record have been accounted for in the price of the agreement; whether $5 million or $7 million, this isn’t a bank-breaking move. If all Anderson does is soak up innings while making most of his starts, it’s a deal that will work well for both parties. There’s upside from there too; for what it’s worth, Steamer projects a 4.54 FIP, 143 innings, and 1.7 WAR.

With the acquisition of Eric Lauer, and the signings of Anderson and Lindblom, the Brewers have remade their pitching staff on the fly and on a budget. Given the money off the books from Grandal and Moustakas, they presumably have enough cash on hand to enhance their lineup; they’d be wise to make use of it. In a tight NL Central, Milwaukee’s window to contend for the division crown remains open, particularly given the lack of upgrades from Chicago and St. Louis thus far. Even after losing plenty of talent to free agency this year, the right additions can propel the Brewers to the playoffs for the third time in a row for the first time in franchise history. Anderson’s signing fits into that strategy. As the winter progresses, we’ll see if the Brewers can top off the rest of their roster and position themselves to stay competitive.