Brandon Woodruff made it to the big leagues without one of his old friends. He dramatically upped his game when he reintroduced that old friend to his arsenal. The results speak for themselves.

Woodruff debuted with the Brewers in August 2017 after logging a solid but unremarkable 4.30 ERA with Triple-A Colorado Springs. The righty then put up a 4.81 ERA and a 4.37 FIP in 43 innings after reaching Milwaukee. Respectable, but once again unremarkable.

The career-altering reunion happened midway through the ensuing season; a coming-out party of sorts took place down the stretch. With the Brewers chasing a playoff berth, Woodruff made seven September relief appearances and allowed just a lone one run in 12.1 innings. His October performance was every bit as good. In an identical number of innings, the former Mississippi State Bulldog surrendered two earned runs over four postseason outings.

Last year, Woodruff moved into Milwaukee’s starting rotation and fashioned a 3.62 ERA and a 3.01 FIP. Moreover, his 10.6 strikeouts per nine innings was the best of his professional career. Piggybacking on his previous postseason success, he proceeded to pitch four-innings of one-run ball in the National League Wild Card game.

This spring, I asked the 2014 11th-round draft pick about his ascent. Read the rest of this entry »

Drew Hedman’s title with the Arizona Diamondbacks is Major League Run Production Coordinator. The 33-year-old Pomona College graduate was promoted to that position in January 2019 after spending the previous 12 months as a pro scout. His backstory is interesting, in part because he bypassed business school along the way.

Hedman played four seasons in the Red Sox organization, and while he topped out in Double-A, that alone qualifies an accomplishment. A total of 1,521 players were selected in the 2009 draft, and only three of them went later than Hedman. As a 50th-round pick, the writing was on the wall by the time the ink dried on his first contract. Not that he didn’t give pro ball the old college try.

“I certainly knew the odds weren’t in my favor, but with that being said, I always tried to be stubborn enough to think I’d be the exception,” Hedman told me. “I did everything I could to put myself in the best possible position to make it. Obviously it didn’t happen.”

Staying in the game beyond his playing days was a goal even before his release. The question was, in which capacity? A front office role made sense — Hedman has a B.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, with a focus in Economics — but his alma mater wasn’t yet the baseball breeding ground it’s become. Over a dozen Pomona alums have gone on to work for MLB teams since Guy Stevens, who now runs the Kansas City Royals’ R&D department — broke the ice in 2013. Hedman was cut loose in spring training that same year.

“Back then it wasn’t really a path that people [at Pomona] were exploring,” Hedman told me. “It wasn’t something I really knew existed, or knew how to approach if I wanted that to be a reality.”

A coaching role at the collegiate level ended up being Hedman’s “impactful first step” toward a return to professional baseball. In August 2013, he was hired as an assistant to Tim Corbin at Vanderbilt. Read the rest of this entry »

The first time I interviewed Keston Hiura was over the phone. This was a few months after he’d been taken ninth overall by the Milwaukee Brewers in the 2017 draft. Hiura was playing for the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, and he called at the assigned time from a Midwest League ballpark after batting practice. I don’t recall which ballpark.

I was in Lowell, Massachusetts at a New York-Penn League game that had already started. It was loud at LeLacheur Park, so I talked to Hiura from the relative quiet of a stairwell down the left-field line. The interview went well. I found the former UC Irvine Anteater to be both forthcoming and articulate.

The second time I interviewed Hiura was at the Brewers spring training complex, four weeks ago. Standing face-to-face — closer than the six-foot distance now deemed necessary — I accused him of being boring.

Truth be told, the pertinent ground had already been covered. In our earlier long-distance conversation we’d gone over the toe tap into a high leg kick, the inside-out swing with a high finish, the way he kept both hands on the bat. For good measure, we’d touched on his patience-paired-with-aggression approach.

Everything that was true then is true now. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no baseball right now. Heck, there’s no anything right now; Joe Buck is offering to do play-by-play of domestic chores:

I have good news for you –
While we’re all quarantined right now without any sports, I’d love to get some practice reps in. Send me videos of what you’re doing at home and I’ll work on my play-by-play. Seriously! https://t.co/txAGBLPBGz

— Joe Buck (@Buck) March 22, 2020

But if you’re in the mood for some baseball, you’re in luck. Brad Johnson of RotoGraphs has organized a 30-person Out Of The Park league with human managers for every team. Partially, some of the fun will be providing updates and talking about team strategy. Candidly, we’re all looking for something to write about, and describing the machinations of our very own team is too good to pass up.

But we can do more. I’m managing the Milwaukee Brewers. Rather than simply tell readers what my team is doing, I’m opening it up to the crowd. We, as a FanGraphs community, will be running the Brewers. Maybe it will work well. Maybe it’ll be a disaster. Either way, though, I think it’ll be a lot of fun.

I’m going to lay out a few ground rules. You’re not getting to vote on whether we should trade Christian Yelich for a bag of nickels. We shouldn’t. There’s no point in taking a vote on that. And we’re not going to legislate the overall direction of the team — we, the Brewers front office, are going to operate under budget constraints while attempting to make the playoffs in a competitive NL Central. Read the rest of this entry »

Jarred Kelenic is No. 11 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list, and his bat is the main reason why. As Eric Longenhagen wrote in the 20-year-old outfielder’s scouting profile, “[H]e’s been one of the — if not the — best hitters his age from the time scouts began to see him.” The New York Mets selected Kelenic sixth overall in the 2018 draft out of a Waukesha, Wisconsin high school, then shipped him to the Seattle Mariners in the seven-player mega-deal headlined by Robinson Cano.

Kelenic possesses marquee potential. In 500 plate appearances last year, split between three levels, he slashed a healthy .291/.364/.540, with 23 home runs. Moreover, Kelenic spent the final three weeks in Double-A, a heady accomplishment for a prep-draftee playing in his first full professional season.

I caught up to the fast-tracking youngster two weekends ago as he was taking part in big-league camp. Our conversation began with one of my favorite ice-breaker questions: Do you view hitting as more of an art, or more of a science?

“I think it’s an art,” answered Kellenic. “It’s something that’s developed over time. Kind of like a painting. It takes time to get all of the detail. Hitting is the same way.”

Kelenic credits much of his development to his father, Tom, and to a former minor-league catcher who throws him batting practice back home in Wisconsin. The latter owns STIKS Academy and Sports Training, and according to Kelenic, Sean Smith knows his swing just as well as he does.

Longenhagen called Kelenic’s left-handed stroke “short to the ball,” and the player himself had much the same description when asked to describe his M.O. at the dish. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Justin Dunn, Justin Grimm, and Tyler Mahle — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

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Justin Dunn, Seattle Mariners

“I had a curveball before I had my slider. I learned it from my dad at 12 years old. He used to play in men’s leagues, and while he never played at a real high level, he loves the game. He’s a student of the game.

“Essentially, I take a two-seam grip and put my thumb underneath, finger through the lace, pressure to the ball.When I was younger, he would tell me to just throw it like a football, to never turn my wrist down. It would be big, loopy, and slow. As I got older, I started to throw harder and understand finger dexterity and about pulling the ball down. I learned that I could pull a little bit more with my middle finger and get it a little tighter, and sharper. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s pretty easy to see the Brewers locking up Christian Yelich through the 2028 season as a win-win. (Indeed, we might even be able to add an extra win for Brewers fans.) Christian Yelich gets a high salary for a long period of time and the Brewers retain one of the best players in baseball for nearly a decade. Jay Jaffe went through the contract yesterday, noting the very good ZiPS projections for Yelich as well as the lack of spending on players in their 30s in free agency over the last few seasons. The three seasons Yelich had remaining on his previous deal meant he wasn’t going to get the $300 million contract he would have if he had been a free agent now, but the Brewers’ $215 million commitment (roughly $175 million beyond his previous deal) represented a good compromise. Just how well the contract plays out depends on how Yelich plays in his 30s. So let’s see how players like Yelich have fared in the past.

To find players like Yelich, I looked at outfielders going back to 1969 with between 20 and 30 WAR between the ages of 24 and 27 years old, with Yelich’s 25.4 in the middle. I took out the players who weren’t within 25 runs of Yelich’s -5.4 defensive runs. Then, I removed players with fewer than six wins in their age-27 season to keep them in range of Yelich’s 7.8 WAR season last year. Here’s how those players compare to Yelich, from 24 to 27:

Read the rest of this entry »

Keston Hiura hit 38 home runs last year. There are qualifications to that statement, sure — 19 of those home runs came in the homer-happy PCL, and the majors weren’t much better when it came to mass dingerization. But still — Keston Hiura, who hit 13 home runs in 535 plate appearances in 2018, hit 38 home runs in 2019. What did he do to become such a great power hitter, and should we expect to see it again in 2020?

The first place you’d generally look, when considering an outlandish result like this, is for something wildly unsustainable. Maybe he turned half of his fly balls into home runs, and we can just point at that and move on. Indeed, Hiura’s HR/FB% was a juicy 24.1% in the majors last season, and an even more preposterous 36.5% in Triple-A.

Let’s throw out the Triple-A numbers for now. The combination of a new stadium in San Antonio and a wildly changed offensive environment makes putting those home runs into context difficult, so we’ll simply focus on the major league numbers. Non-pitchers hit home runs on 15.4% of their fly balls in 2019. Lower Hiura’s 24.1% to average, and he would have lost out on seven home runs. Easy peasy, let’s get lunch… right?

Well, yeah, not so much. I prefer to look at a different denominator: balls hit with between 15 and 45 degrees of launch angle rather than “fly balls.” That adds some line drives, which are potential home runs, and removes balls hit at too high of an angle to get out. Hiura had 83 of those in 2019, and turned 22.9% of them into homers. The league turned roughly 15% of theirs into dingers. Still the same seven home runs.

But batters aren’t all average. They have control over their home run rates, far more so than pitchers. Regress Hiura’s results in 2019 back towards the mean, and they suggest a true talent home run rate around 20.5%. That would still give him 17 home runs in the majors, not too much worse than his actual production. Read the rest of this entry »

Christian Yelich has emerged as one of the game’s elite players while playing under a very club-friendly contract. Now it appears as though the Brewers’ right fielder will be paid like the superstar he’s become, even while staying put in the game’s smallest market. According to The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal (with a substantial assist from the New York Post’s Joel Sherman), the Brewers and Yelich are nearing agreement on an extension that will cover nine years and be worth around $215 million, with a mutual option for a 10th year.

Yelich won NL MVP honors in 2018 while leading the Brewers to a division title and helping them come within one win of a trip to the World Series. He hit .326/.402/.598 with 36 homers and league bests in batting average, slugging percentage, wRC+ (166) and WAR (7.6), then followed that up with another MVP-caliber campaign that featured even better numbers, including a slash-stat Triple Crown (.329/.429/.671), 44 homers, and again league bests in both wRC+ (174) and WAR (7.8). Alas, on September 10, he fracture his right kneecap by fouling a pitch off of it (OUCH), ending his season and, as it turned out, his MVP hopes; he finished second to Cody Bellinger, over whom he had a slight statistical advantage at the time of the injury.

Including his 2016 and ’17 seasons, which were worth a combined 10.0 WAR, Yelich has been the majors’ third-most valuable player over the past four years. You can probably guess who’s first and second:

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Milwaukee Brewers needed a torrid run over the last month of their season in order to sneak into the playoffs, it was the pitching staff that stepped up and made it happen. During that stretch, perhaps nobody in the organization pitched better than Freddy Peralta. He threw 9.2 innings in relief during that month and allowed just two runs while striking out 20 batters and walking two. That works out to an ERA of 1.86 and a FIP of -0.30 — yes, a negative FIP. He made one dominant appearance after another, like when he struck out five in two shutout innings against the Cubs, or when he struck out four over two shutout innings against San Diego.

In September, he was one of the most overpowering relievers in baseball. In August? He got shelled so badly in six games that he was demoted to the minors for two weeks. This is the Freddy Peralta conundrum. And the Brewers are betting they can solve it.

According to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the Brewers are expected to sign Peralta, 23, to a five-year contract extension, which would buy out his arbitration years and give the team a pair of club options on the back end. Read the rest of this entry »