A year ago, Jesús Aguilar took the starting first base job in Milwaukee away from Eric Thames, hitting 35 homers and posting a 135 wRC+ as the Brewers rolled to a division title. This year, Aguilar’s struggles opened the job back up for Thames; Aguilar has been relegated to the weak side of a platoon. A strong month of July in part-time duty wasn’t enough to play him back into a starting role with the Brewers, but it was enough to get the Tampa Bay Rays interested and willing to part with a pitcher the Brewers can use for their own pennant drive. As firstreported by Jeff Passan:
For the Rays, the need for a right-handed bat is obvious. The left-handed Austin Meadows and Nathaniel Lowe have been getting starts at first base and designated hitter against lefties, with Ji-Man Choi only playing against righties and catcher Travis D’Arnaud getting time at first as well. Aguilar and his righty bat should be able to relieve some of the poor matchups the Rays have found themselves in. Aguilar has bad splits against lefties this season, but that’s more likely a product of generally hitting poorly and some randomness than weird reverse platoon splits. And while his 2019 performance has been wanting, with an 82 wRC+, he’s shown some signs of putting things together over the last month, as the rolling wRC+ graph shows.
The Brewers and Pirates agreed to a minor trade on the Trade Deadline’s Eve-Eve, with Jordan Lyles heading to the Milwaukee Brewers for Double-A starter-turned-reliever Cody Ponce.
There’s little question that the Brewers are sorely in need of an additional starting pitcher for the stretch run. The rotation wasn’t exactly a source of strength for the team even before losing Jhoulys Chacin and Brandon Woodruff to abdominal injuries over the last week. With those two not expected to return quickly — Chacin isn’t expected until mid-August and it may take Woodruff into September — and the trade deadline approaching, the Brewers don’t have much margin for error. It would have been a phenomenal risk for the team to hope that the respective rehab stints of Brent Suter and Jimmy Nelson go extremely well, allowing them to arrive dramatically like Marshal Blücher at Waterloo.
Now, is Jordan Lyles the pitcher you want to bring in as your emergency replacement? That I’m less sure of. But I’m not as instantly dismissive as I normally would be of a pitcher sporting a 5.36 ERA. Lyles was actually quite effective for most of the season, his ERA not rising over four until his first start in July. His pummeling has been largely limited to three atrocious starts in which he allowed a total of 19 runs over 6 1/3 innings. He’s been bitten by both home runs (eight homers in four starts) and by BABIP (.556) and while he’s no doubt pitched poorly, he’s been that combination of lousy and unlucky. I’m not sure batters would have a .556 BABIP off a five-year-old pitching with the wrong hand.
For the season, Lyles has a 4.38 xFIP and ZiPS, which doesn’t just assume high home run totals are a fluke but looks at the detailed hit data, thinks he has allowed five more home runs than he ought to have based on those stats. StatCast’s data agrees with this, giving Lyles an xSLG against of .438, well below his actual .514. Read the rest of this entry »
Even before it began, the 2019 season seemed poised to become the year of the rookie hitter. That seems true every year nowadays, but it seemed especially so this year. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Fernando Tatis Jr. had a ton of anticipation surrounding their debuts, but there were other big names ready to introduce themselves as well. Eloy Jimenez was about to unleash his prodigious power upon the big leagues for the first time, Victor Robles was embarking on his first full season of showing off his game-changing speed in the majors, and Nick Senzel was going to finally try to put his injury problems behind him and show why he was the second overall draft choice in 2017. National prospect lists consistently laid out the excitement surrounding the next generation of great hitters, with our own Top 100 list featuring nine hitters in the top 10 prospects, and 17 in the top 20 (along with one two-way player).
Nearly two-thirds of the way through the season, many of those rookie hitters have shown the potential to carry the weight of a franchise on their shoulders. Unfortunately, most play for teams that won’t be challenging for postseason spots this season, so they will have to wait their turn to show off their talents in important fall baseball games. Others are playing on teams that will certainly be around in October, but they play at a spot that their organization was already doing quite well with. This piece isn’t about one of those guys, though. We’re here to talk about someone I think means more to his team’s postseason hopes than any other rookie in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been on something of a fastballs-down-the-middle kick recently. I hadn’t realized that it was possible to be so bad at hitting them until I looked intoWil Myers and his flailing ways. Then I started looking at a few underperforming hitters, and I was shocked by how many batters were missing middle-middle fastballs. Pitchers are throwing fastballs less often than ever before, and they’re designing new breaking balls every offseason. Meanwhile, some batters can’t handle a straight pitch in the center of the hitting zone. Baseball is weird sometimes!
Looking into these center-cut whiffs was baffling. There were a decent number of Jacob deGrom and Chris Sale fastballs on there, sure, but there were also plenty of replacement level relievers. Does the pitcher even have anything to do with it? Sure, Clayton Kershaw used to be great at throwing down the middle, but he’s thrown 96 pitches over the heart of the plate this year and gotten a paltry four swinging strikes. Aroldis Chapmanexcelled at it in 2016, but he’s thrown 43 of them this year and gotten only five swinging strikes. What if it’s a batter-centric phenomenon? Could it just be that batters sometimes miss because baseball is hard, regardless of pitcher?
Ha, no. Silly Ben. If you watched the 2018 playoffs, you’d already know: Josh Hader is the absolute king of throwing down the middle and coming out unscathed, and it’s not even close. Hader’s fastball is a magic trick, a sleight of hand performed on batters. In your head, he’s probably getting all his strikeouts at the very top of the strike zone or even a little above that, getting hitters to swing at pitches they can’t do anything with. That’s true, of course, but he’s also beating hitters when he messes up. Read the rest of this entry »
The last two offseasons have not been kind to Mike Moustakas.
After hitting a Royals franchise record 38 home runs in 2017, Moustakas went into free agency hoping to score a long-term deal. Months went by without a new contract. He was forced to settle in early March, taking a one-year, $6.5 million deal to return to Kansas City.
The Royals traded Moustakas to the Brewers midway through the 2018 season, ending his 12-year tenure with the organization. (Moustakas had been the Royals’ first round pick in 2007.) While he played well, his offensive production took a dip from the year prior. This was particularly true in the power department: Moustakas’ ISO fell from .249 to .208. He posted a 105 wRC+ and 2.4 WAR overall.
Due to improved defense, Moustakas was actually more valuable in 2018 than he was in 2017, but he faced similar issues in his attempt to procure a new contract. Again, Moustakas was forced to wait until late in the game to sign. A February 19 contract with the Brewers — a one-year, $10 million pact with a $7 million mutual option — to be the starting second baseman was the offer he ultimately accepted.
But now, after his second chilly free agency winter, Moustakas has stepped up his game, reaching a new level of offensive performance that we have not previously witnessed.
His numbers are better across the board. He’s already hit 22 home runs, just six shy of his 2018 season total. His 47-home run pace (per 650 PA) would result in a career-high. But in a larger sense, Moustakas has done more than just crank homers. He is getting on base at a higher rate and collecting more hits, many of which have been of the extra-base variety. His .390 wOBA would be a career-high, as would be his 140 wRC+. Moustakas has already produced 2.7 WAR, his highest total in four years and already the third-highest mark of his career. All of which is to say that Mike Moustakas has experienced an offensive surge, and I’m here to tell you why. Read the rest of this entry »
Brandon Woodruff did everything he could for the Brewers in 2017 and 2018. When the rotation needed reinforcements at the end of 2017, he started eight games. When the team needed relief arms in 2018, he filled whatever innings they needed — 10 of his 15 relief appearances went more than an inning, and he contributed four spot starts when the Brewers needed an occasional extra starter. This year, the team needs a starter again, and Woodruff has outdone himself. In 16 starts, he’s gone from solid bullpen arm to the best starter on a playoff team. If the team needs a pitcher to start an elimination game, Woodruff is probably the man for the job.
If I had been asked to make a prediction about Woodruff before the season, I think I would have landed somewhere near our Depth Charts projections — 23 starts, a 4.30 ERA and FIP, and peripherals that looked worse than his 2018 relief turn, when he struck out 26.7% of batters he faced and walked 8%. Pitchers who switch from relieving to starting tend to have worse rate stats across the board, and nothing about Woodruff screamed exception. Instead, he’s improved in essentially every category. He’s striking out 29.6% of the batters he faces, and walking only 6.5%. His FIP is 0.23 lower than it was last year. Heck, he’s gained fastball velocity, something you’re not supposed to do when throwing more pitches per game.
Luckily for the purposes of our analysis, however, he’s also made some changes in approach that we can pore over. If all there was to Woodruff’s improvement was a tick on his fastball, there wouldn’t be much to say. But that’s not how Brandon Woodruff’s season has gone. He has overhauled his arsenal and approach in ways that look well thought-out and sustainable to me. Read the rest of this entry »
Before the season, the San Francisco Giants were expected to be bad, and the Milwaukee Brewers were expected to compete for a playoff spot. So far this year, the Giants are 30-39 with a -82 run differential, last in the NL West. The Brewers are 40-31 and first in the NL Central. Both teams have been more or less what we thought they were. With that in mind, you probably didn’t have much reason to watch Friday night’s Brewers-Giants clash. If you did watch it, however, you caught a singularly bizarre series of plays that highlighted the absurdity and joy of baseball.
In the bottom of the seventh with one runner aboard, the Brewers called on Alex Claudio to keep the Giants off the board. Down 3-2, Milwaukee couldn’t afford to let the Giants pad their lead any further, and the lineup set up perfectly for Claudio, a side-arming lefty with extreme career platoon splits. With Kevin Pillar standing on first, the Giants had four lefties in a row due up, and Claudio is on the Brewers more or less solely to get lefties out.
With Alex Claudio on the mound, there’s a certain minimum amount of weirdness involved in every pitch. His pre-pitch routine is hypnotizing — a few torso-and-arm shakes, an uncontrollable toe tap, and finally a corkscrewing, impossibly angled sidearm release. He looks like a kid impatiently sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room, right up until he explodes into a tremendously athletic delivery. Here, watch him throw an 84-mph sinker past Steven Duggar for the first out:
As much fun as it is to watch Claudio pitch, it would be hard to call this inning fun if he did his job and set down the three lefties in order. The Duggar at-bat made it look like that was a possibility. Even if 84-mph sinkers that strike out major league batters are fun, there’s a limit to how much fun an inning can be to watch if nothing happens. Fortunately, things were about to get weird. Read the rest of this entry »
To escape February cold and rain, many college programs head to Phoenix for their early-season games. While the weather is often quite perfect there during the day, the winter nights are still quite cold, especially once you’ve become accustomed to the heat. This creates a hilarious visual contrast among fans, as the locals are layered — a hoodie and beanie at least — while out-of-towners from Michigan, Illinois, or the Pacific Northwest are sleeveless. But there are evenings that we’d all agree are frigid — unbearable for the locals, and a source of disappointment and disgust, especially among the shivering unprepared, for those who hoped coming to Arizona in February would let them avoid the chill for a while.
San Diego’s early-season, midweek game at Arizona State was like this. I was up the third base line watching hitters, my teeth chattering, nose running. People walked past me with Styrofoam cups full of steaming hot chocolate, a ballpark rarity, and I wondered if I might eventually need one to get through what had, to that point, been a terribly played game.
My standards for cocoa are high. I’ve gone from being a double-packet Swiss Miss kid to an adult who prefers a single packet, with a teaspoon of baking cocoa and a dash of cinnamon and cayenne if I’m feeling frisky. Surely, at stadium prices, hastily mixed and diluted to meet the speed and volume of demand, it would fall short of what I wanted.
My nose kept running. I felt like I miss-timed two Adam Kerner throws down to second because my fingers had slowed down. I just wanted something warm. I turned to the napkin/condiment kiosk (my de facto box of Kleenex for the evening) and saw yet another person carrying a fresh cup of relief. As I looked to their face to ask how much it cost, I recognized Keston Hiura, who told me he had gotten the last cup of hot chocolate they had. He departed, walked down into the bleachers and sat, alone, attentive and focused on a random, local, college game on a miserable night in the middle of the week.
For all players, baseball is a job. For a lot of them, it clearly and justifiably feels that way. But then for others, it’s a vocation. They love it and go out of their way to watch and be around it when they’re off the clock. It’s not possible to know whether or not every prospect we like and talk about on this site has this trait, which I believe to beneficial. But it seems like Hiura does.
He’s also exceptionally talented. Dominant immediately as a freshman at UC Irvine, Hiura hit .331 that year and .375/.466/.581 throughout his college career. He faced early-career questions about quality of competition (Irvine does play the bigger SoCal schools, but they don’t often face weekend pitching) and, later and more severely, about an elbow injury moved him off of second base and mostly to the outfield or DH for his summer with Team USA and his junior spring. Here is our draft blurb on Hiura, who we ranked as the No. 2 college hitter in that class:
Hiura has had elbow issues for much of his college career and has seen Dr. Neal El Attrache in Los Angeles. He’s not throwing right now, taking grounders at second base during batting practice but lobbing balls away to teammates after fielding them. He has the feet and actions for second base but there’s uncertainty about his future defensive home because of the arm. He rakes though, with one of the draft’s quickest bats and above average raw power. If his arm gets healthy he could hit and hit for power while playing an up the middle position.
The gap between the offensive bar at second base (an 88 wRC+ is the 2019 average at the position) and at DH (111 wRC+) is vast. Drafting Hiura was somewhat risky, because it was not widely known (at least, I never found out) exactly what was wrong with his elbow or if he’d need surgery, or ever be able to play a passable second base (where he might be a star) or if he’d need to be a DH/LF type (where it’d be harder to clear that offensive bar).
After the Brewers drafted him, Hiura predictably crushed lower-level pitching while playing DH until the final few games of the year, when he finally saw time at second again. He had no balls hit to him that required him to throw during that span. During instructional league in the fall, scouts finally saw what it looked like and were encouraged. We moved Hiura from a 45 FV on draft day, to a 55 FV based on confidence that he could indeed play second. He ranked No. 1 in Milwaukee’s system and 24th overall.
In 2018, Hiura reached Double-A and was, in my opinion, the second best offensive prospect in the Arizona Fall League behind Vlad Guerrero, Jr. His hands are so explosive and violent, but precise and deft, that he’s likely to hit for contact, hit for power, and play a premium defensive position better than who Milwaukee currently has shoe-horned there. Here’s what we wrote about Hiura on this offseason’s Top 100 prospect list, where we had him as the No. 13 prospect in baseball, a 60 FV player.
Hiura reached Double-A in his first full pro season, and then was clearly one of the top five or six talents in the Arizona Fall League, where he won League MVP. Most importantly, his arm strength is once again viable at second base. An elbow injury relegated Hiura to DH-only duty as a junior at UC Irvine, and he may have gone even earlier in the 2017 draft if not for concerns about the injury and how it might limit his defense. That’s no longer a concern, as Hiura has an average arm and plays an unspectacular second base. This is an incredible hitter. He has lightning-quick hands that square up premium velocity and possesses a rare blend of power and bat control. Hiura’s footwork in the box is a little noisier than it has to be, and if any of his swing’s elements are ill-timed, it can throw off the rest of his cut. This, combined with an aggressive style of hitting, could cause him to be streaky. But ultimately he’s an exceptional hitting talent and he’s going to play a premium defensive position. We think he’s an All-Star second baseman.
And now he’s a big leaguer. Hiura has been hitting .333/.408/.698 at Triple-A San Antonio. The new baseball and the PCL hitting environment has probably helped, but this is a middle of the order talent who’s ready to hit for all-fields power right now. I’m not totally buying the 2019 uptick in his walk rate. Hiura hunts early-count fastballs and I expect him to have a proactive approach, bordering on aggressive (he did beat me to that cocoa, after all), which is more palatable at second base even if it means his OBPs are closer to average, especially if it helps him hit for power by attacking pitches he can drive. He’s an entertaining, homegrown hitter who’s poised to hit in the middle of Milwaukee’s order for most of the next half decade.
Earlier this week, I made my on-the-record guesses for what would happen with some of April’s underachieving hitters. Now we’ll turn to look at the disappointing pitchers and the potential for more helpings of crow for me to eat come October.
Last year, through the late-season shoulder problems, I counseled people not to panic so soon on Sale. He’s Chris Freaking Sale after all. When the White Sox put him in the rotation in 2012, there was a lot of doom-and-gloom about how his pitching motion and his frame meant he wouldn’t survive long as a starting pitcher. But from 2012-17, Sale was one of the most durable starters in baseball and now he drinks overflowing pints out of the skulls of those pundits.
But now, I am quite worried, especially in the short-term. He’s shown he can occasionally dial it up as he did in the Yankees matchup, hitting 96-97 through most of the game. But his velocity is generally down, severely so in most games. He went three months without a start below an average of 95 mph last year. This year he’s only had individual pitches passing this mark in a single game (the Yankees one).
If this is the Sale that we have now, I do expect him to adjust in the long-term. But the Sale of 2018 had a highly edited repertoire. He’s essentially a fastball-changeup-slider pitcher who is amazing at changing the look of these pitches. He could throw his fastball anywhere between 88-98 and have it look like five different pitches depending where it was. In 2019, he’s Pavarotti with an octave taken away. His fastball is more one-note and hitters have realized it; of every 10 fastballs that batters swing at, one in 10 of those swings-and-misses from previous years are now being hit.
“But Dan, he’s just being cautious because of his shoulder!” That makes me even more worried if 10 months later, he’s still having to pitch in a way that makes him a less effective pitcher because of a shoulder issue. Elbow problems are bad, but shoulder problems are a whole new level of scary, like going from a haunted house at an elementary school carnival to a Saw movie. I’m hopeful in the long-term, but it’s a problem for Boston getting back into the race. Read the rest of this entry »
For the first month of every baseball season, I’m a bit notorious for simply answering “April” as the convenient, one-stop-shop for questions relating to why someone’s favorite player is hitting .150. Once we start heading into May, telling people to be patient when 1/6th of the season is already over becomes an increasingly unujustifiable task. While rebuilding teams are in a place at which they can be patient, avoiding judgment is tricky for contenders, especially when every division leader is in first place by fewer than three games.
So let’s get out the guillotine and guess who can be saved and who is a lost cause.
I remain quite torn about the state of doneness of the Hebrew Hammer. On one hand, he can still hit the ball with authority as seen by the fact that his average exit velocity, dipping under 90 mph, isn’t all that different from the numbers in 2016 and 2017, years in which Braun was still a contributor offensively. If you dig deeper into his pitch-by-pitch stats, Braun appears to be going dead-red for fastballs, and despite a career-low contact rate, he is actually making contact with fastballs at better-than-career-average rates (14.6% whiff/swing rate in 2019 vs. 19.8% career). But other than fastballs, he’s making much worse contact, missing almost half the changeups and sliders he’s offered at (career rate under 30%).
It makes me wonder about Braun’s bat speed. To my naked eye, it looks like he’s trying to compensate for decreased bat speed by making contact with his bread-and-butter pitch (Braun was one of the best fastball hitters in baseball in his prime). He also suggested he was changing his swing in order to hit more home runs. It’s unfortunate that swing speed isn’t one of the things you can get easily, but Alex Chamberlain identified stats that correlate with swing speed when reverse-engineering the scanty data available a few years ago. Isolated power, xwOBA, and contact rate all have a relationship, and in each of the three, Braun is at his career’s nadir.
I think there’s still hope for Braun, but if his bat is slowing down, I wonder if he’s taking the wrong approach in trying to hit for more power. A player with slower bat speed but who is also pulling the ball more (57% compared to 38% career) seems like one trying to cheat on the fastballs. I don’t think Braun’s as doomed as some on this list, but I think that he’d be better off not trying to capture his early-career power because it’s making him a one-dimensional hitter. Read the rest of this entry »
