Archive for Brewers

Happy Draft Weekend everyone! The draft broadcast begins at 1 p.m. ET today, with the first four rounds scheduled for Day 1. Then, tomorrow, the draft resumes at 11:30 a.m. ET for rounds 5-20.

As always, FanGraphs has you covered with everything you need to know before, during, and after the draft. Eric Longenhagen, Brendan Gawlowski, Michael Baumann, and Meg Rowley are in Philadelphia providing coverage throughout the weekend. You can find all of our draft coverage here, or by using the navigation widget at the top of our homepage and in our draft pieces. Eric and Brendan’s updated draft rankings are available on The Board, where you’ll also find players’ scouting reports and tool grades. You can read Eric’s draft preview here, and his first mock draft here. Provided he has enough new information to merit one, his second mock draft will run today before the first round, so be on the lookout for that, too. Meanwhile, Michael wrote three excellent draft features, which you can read here, here, and here. Also, be sure to join our Day 1 draft chat, where the FanGraphs crew will be answering your questions and providing updates and analysis beginning at 1 p.m ET.

That’s the last you’ll read about the draft in this mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about Pete Crow-Armstrong, Aaron Ashby’s propensity for wins, and games with the highest rates of true outcomes for one team. Plus, I’ll provide the answers to last week’s trivia questions about baseball stats featuring the number 250. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

After wandering for years, Jake Bauers has found himself in Milwaukee as one of the top hitters of 2026.

I first learned about Bauers because of a stat I made up sometime in 2019, around when Baseball Savant began publishing the attack region perspective of the strike zone. Rather than labeling pitches as simply in or out of the zone, Savant drew the distinction between meatballs, borderline strikes, and various distances beyond. Analysts had made similar observations for as long as PITCHf/x had been around, of course, but this was the first time (to my knowledge) the data was easily searchable, sortable, and available to download. No longer was the concept of plate discipline limited to walks and strikeouts, or even simple chase rate, but we could now look at which players were actually swinging at the right pitches within the zone, too.

At a high level, batters should only swing at pitches in the heart region. At a more granular level, this isn’t entirely true, as things like the count, situation, and swing profile change the calculus from pitch to pitch. But as a general rule, the players who swing at the right pitches are the ones who swing at heart pitches and lay off everything else. This gives us some fairly simple math: Read the rest of this entry »

Jackson Chourio got a late start to his season. A fractured metacarpal in his left hand, suffered during the run-up to the World Baseball Classic but not definitively diagnosed until three weeks later, knocked him onto the injured list just hours before the Brewers’ Opening Day game, and he didn’t make his season debut until May 4. Since then, the 22-year-old outfielder has not only been one of the majors’ top hitters, he’s shown notable improvements in a few key areas while helping to propel the Brewers into first place in the NL Central. He’s becoming the star the Brewers hoped he would when they signed him to an eight-year, $82 million extension in December 2023, before he’d even debuted in the majors.

On Wednesday night against the Guardians, Chourio hit his 10th home run of the season, turning a high cutter from Gavin Williams into a two-run opposite-field shot that helped the Brewers to a 9-4 win:

Read the rest of this entry »

On April 21, Grant Anderson inherited a hot mess. With the Brewers ahead 3-0 in the fourth inning, starter Kyle Harrison lost his feel. He walked Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson in two uncompetitive plate appearances, then gave up a rifled line drive on one of his slowest fastballs of the day, a center-cut cookie to Hao-Yu Lee. Pat Murphy called Anderson in from the bullpen to face the bases loaded with no one out.

Anderson delivered nearly flawlessly. He got Javier Báez to ground into a first-pitch double play, then struck out pinch-hitter Kerry Carpenter to escape the inning with only a single run allowed. That run, of course, went on Harrison’s ledger. Anderson got credit for a scoreless inning, no more or less.

On May 16, Chase Silseth tried to pull off the same trick. José Soriano fought through five strong innings against the Dodgers, but he didn’t have it in the sixth. After an inning-opening groundout, he walked four of the next five batters and hit the fifth, driving in two runs and leaving the bases loaded. Silseth came in to put out the fire – but he might as well have poured kerosene on it. He hit the first batter he faced, then gave up a two-run single immediately after, pushing the score to 6-0. He finally got the last two batters of the inning – which meant that in the game’s official log, he pitched two-thirds of an inning and didn’t allow a run.

These two pitching performances went quite differently. Anderson had a tougher task and performed better. But the two of them each got credit for a clean sheet. This is far from the only problem with the way we calculate ERA, but it’s one that stands out to anyone following. Anderson and Silseth didn’t deserve the same counting statistics there. Likewise, Soriano got tagged for three runs, while Harrison got tagged with only one. But that didn’t reflect what happened to them – both of them lost it and had to be removed from the game because of all the runners they’d allowed. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many of us, Jake Burger is tuning in to as many World Cup matches as his schedule allows. The Texas Rangers first baseman is a big fan of “the beautiful game,” and has been for well over a decade. Moreover, it isn’t just the US national team that captures his attention. Burger is an ardent supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, one of the more prominent sides in the English Premier League.

How and when did the 30-year-old St. Louis native come to embrace a team based in North London?

“I became a Spurs fan probably around 2011-2012,” Burger told me. “Gareth Bale and Luka Modrić were my two favorite players. It kind of started with me playing [the FIFA video game] and knowing a lot of those names. Modrić was a wizard out there. Bale, too. Then, obviously, Harry Kane came over to Spurs and I became a big fan of his. They kind of went on a run when Mauricio Pochettino came in [as manager], so following them just became more a part of my life.

“In 2019, I got to go over there to the new stadium and watch a game,” Burger added. “They played Bournemouth and won 3-2. I went over with Ryan Burr and Jimmy Lambert, who were in the White Sox organization with me, and we saw a few other matches, as well. Lambert is a Liverpool fan, and Burr a Man City fan, so along with the Tottenham game we went to a Manchester Derby and a Merseyside Derby; we saw Liverpool play Everton.”

Being a Tottenham fan this past season was anything but easy. Had they lost their final match, they would have been relegated from England’s top league for the first time in nearly 50 years. Much to the relief of Spurs supporters everywhere, they defeated Everton 1-0 to remain safe. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a busy time for sports right now. The NBA Finals have been incredible. The Stanley Cup Finals have been nearly as good. The World Cup just started; Team USA is playing tonight. With this embarrassment of entertainment riches, regular season baseball might seem to temporarily lose a little bit of its luster. But even if you want to watch those other great spectacles, I implore you to set aside a few hours of your life this weekend for baseball. For a limited time only, they’re playing on the moon.

OK, fine, maybe not the actual moon. There are any number of logistical and physical challenges involved in that. But the first half of the six-game Las Vegas series has been the next best thing, and before the A’s play the Rockies this weekend, I’m hoping to convince you to watch it. I wouldn’t want my baseball to always look like this, but in small doses, it’s absolutely captivating.

The Athletics, currently playing in the minor league stadium of the Sacramento River Cats, have taken up an even briefer temporary residence in the stadium of their Triple-A affiliate, the Las Vegas Aviators. It’s a preview of sorts – in advance of their scheduled 2028 move to Sin City, the team is playing a six-game series there. And boy, does the ball carry in the desert.

Las Vegas sits only 2,000 feet above sea level. That sounds like nothing – Coors Field, the archetypical high-altitude ballpark, is famously a mile high. But the major league stadium at the second-highest altitude is Chase Field in Arizona, and it’s only 1,000 feet above sea level. That elevation helps the ball carry, but it’s only one of the many reasons that offense is high here. For one thing, it’s hot. High temperatures are forecast to exceed 100 degrees this weekend, with lows in the mid-80s providing little respite even at night. The air is as dry as it gets; Las Vegas has a lower average relative humidity than any big league city, and it’s particularly dry in the middle of summer. It’s an outdoor park, so there’s no escaping the hot, arid conditions. The PCL was the homer-happiest minor league in 2025, and Vegas was the homer-happiest park in the PCL. Read the rest of this entry »

Shane Baz features a five-pitch mix: a four-seam fastball and a knuckle curve being the most prominent in terms of usage. The Baltimore Orioles right-hander also throws a cutter, a curveball, and a changeup. And then there is the offering that reluctantly remains in his back pocket. Baz would love to one day unleash his knuckleball on major-league hitters.

“I threw one when I was a kid, up until I was probably 13 or 14,” explained Baz, who was a big Tim Wakefield fan while growing up in Tomball, Texas. “It was my only off-speed pitch up until then — I was just fastball/knuckleball — so I’ve got a lot of experience with it. I actually try to throw it in every bullpen [session]. I’ll definitely get it into a game, eventually. I just have to convince [pitching coach Drew] French to let me throw it. Maybe next spring training I’ll be able to mix some in and show him what it looks like in a game. I mean, it’s pretty good.”

Baz went on to say that that he threw his pet pitch with a three-finger grip — “fingers on the horseshoe, right by the label” — in his younger days, but once his hands got bigger he went to “the traditional two-finger knuckleball.” And while he basically stopped throwing it in games once he matured and developed more pitches, he’s never lost his affinity for baseball’s butterfly.

At 96.1 mph, Baz’s four-seamer is above average for velocity, but while extra oomph is advantageous for heaters, that isn’t the case for low-spin floaters.

“I can get it up to about 80, but those aren’t as good,” Baz said. “I think it’s best when it’s like 70 to 75. That’s when I have the best control of it and can keep the spin really low. When I’m trying to throw it hard, it starts spinning more and not having as much knuckle effect.”

His overall understanding of the pitch is impressive, and that includes spin properties. Read the rest of this entry »

As the caretaker of the ZiPS projection system, I answer a lot of questions about both how it functions and the numbers that it spits out. One question I get a lot is why the system has consistently underrated the Milwaukee Brewers, which it has over the last five seasons and by a significant margin. While I’ve talked a little bit about this issue, mostly in offhand remarks in chats and on social media, addressing that question in detail is probably necessary at this point. Of course, ZiPS isn’t alone in underrating the Brewers. But as the system’s sole developer for nearly a quarter of a century, I have a responsibility to both be as transparent as possible and improve the model as much as I can.

So, how has ZiPS done with the Brewers historically? Well it turns out that since the system was first developed, worse than it has with any other major league franchise! Here are the results for ZiPS vs. Reality since 2005. I’ll note the columns don’t precisely add up, as ZiPS projects full 162-game seasons (or a 60-game one in the case of 2020) and there are a bunch of times that teams played 161 or 163 games:

One source of error that’s really difficult to control for is what a team does at the trade deadline. Many of the teams that have overperformed their preseason projections have added talent during the season; conversely, underperformers have a tendency to trade talent away. That’s challenging to model, since it involves trying to project players who aren’t currently in the organization as part of the team, even though we have little idea who those players will actually be four months in advance. I actually created a model based on team quality, age, payroll, recent record, and trade history to get an idea of the likelihood a team will be a buyer or seller in an upcoming season. But while it sort of works, its accuracy isn’t up to the level where I’d include it as part of a projection.

Historically, the Dodgers and Yankees have been two of the league’s most aggressive buyers, so it isn’t surprising to see them atop the list of the biggest ZiPS misses. But while the Brewers have made some big in-season moves — the biggest arguably being the CC Sabathia trade in 2008, which was one of the most effective trades of this type ever — they aren’t on the buy side as frequently as some of the other underprojected teams. So, what’s going on here?

First, here’s an overview of how the percentiles for team projections have worked out. Ideally, you want 10% of teams to exceed their 90th-percentile projection, 20% of teams to exceed their 80th, and so on:

ZiPS does a pretty good job in the aggregate. To put it simply, the basic job of a projection system is to know the range of possible outcomes, and be wrong by the appropriate margins the proper number of times. It would be easy to say “Hey, projections work as they’re supposed to in the aggregate, and some team is inevitably going to have the worst projections of the 30, so whatever,” but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t investigate these issues and assess whether there’s something systemic that the model is missing. Especially so in a case like Milwaukee, where nearly two-thirds of the 21-year error comes from the last five seasons (417 projected wins vs. 463 actual wins).

The ZiPS projected standings have two components: the projections themselves and the estimates of who actually ends up with playing time. To get an idea of how much of the ZiPS misses are errors in projection compared to errors in playing time, I will frequently re-project team wins using the actual playing time for each player after the season is done. Re-projecting the 2021-2025 Brewers using their preseason projections but the players’ actual playing time makes the issue a lot clearer:

Knowing each player’s actual playing time doesn’t eliminate the errors, but it whittles the missing 46 wins all the way down to 12. In other words, ZiPS isn’t doing a bad job with the projections; Dan Szymborski has done a poor job guessing which players will end up with playing time for the Brewers! Injuries are sometimes a reason for playing time discrepancies, but they typically result in teams underperforming their projections as regulars miss time. Not only have the Brewers overperformed, they’ve done so while not being particularly good at avoiding injuries; they’ve actually lost slightly more wins than the average team due to IL stints over the last five years.

Instead, what appears to be happening is that the Brewers have been extraordinarily successful at giving more playing time to players exceeding their projections. For example, there were 62 hitters who had seasons with at least 200 plate appearances for the Brewers from 2021 to 2025. As a group, ZiPS only underestimated them by 1.5 points of wRC+ in the aggregate (104.7 actual vs. 103.2 projected). But of the 33 hitters who exceeded their projected wRC+, 28 of them received more plate appearances than I had as my baseline expectation. The same is true for pitchers, especially relievers. Now, there’s a natural tendency for teams to give more playing time to players who are outperforming their projections and less to guys who are underperforming, but the Brewers have been notably more successful at this than the rest of the league. From 2021 to 2025, 81% of their qualifying players who outperformed their expected wRC+ or ERA+ got more playing time than I expected as a baseline. To put that into context, the league-wide rate was just under 61%, and no other team was above 70%.

So, how do I fix the Brewers’ projections? That’s a bit of a craggy problem that I’m still working on. This offseason, I tried to be more aggressive in my assumptions about who would get playing time for Milwaukee based on the quality of their projections. As a result, ZiPS forecast the team for 85 wins. Naturally, the Brewers are on pace for 99.7 wins as of Wednesday morning. I may need to more accurately project actual front offices; if the Brewers are simply better than everyone else at evaluating their talent with information only they have access to, it’s not something I can directly correct for. Unless, of course, the Brewers decide to just give me all their internal data, which seems unlikely. Or if I, say, catch Dan Turkenkopf in a giant net and imprison him in my tool shed until he spills the beans. As much as I like improving projections, I don’t think my employer would appreciate if I did so by committing federal crimes, so I’ll simply have to keep trying. Being wrong is how we improve predictive models, and let’s just say that the Milwaukee Brewers continue to give me a lot of opportunities to learn.

When he broke in with the Brewers last season, Jacob Misiorowski was tough to miss, unless you were a hitter trying to catch up to his ridiculous velocity. The gangly 6-foot-7 righty announced his presence by reaching 100.5 mph on his first major league pitch and topping out at 102.2 mph in five no-hit innings against the Cardinals in Milwaukee on June 12. He followed that up with six perfect innings against the Twins before yielding a walk and a homer, and was named to the National League All-Star team as an injury replacement after just five starts. He soon leveled off, and finished with comparatively unspectacular numbers — he was an afterthought in the NL Rookie of the Year voting — but this season is a different story. The 24-year-old righty has dominated hitters like a true ace, and has improved in practically every important statistical category.

Misiorowski’s latest outing, once again facing the Cardinals in Milwaukee, was both a gem and an awe-inspiring display of firepower. Monday’s effort began with an unprecedented, if somewhat unproductive, barrage of six consecutive four-seam fastballs to JJ Wetherholt, each clocked at 103.0 mph or higher — but four of them were well outside the strike zone, resulting in a walk:

Misiorowsi overcame the leadoff walk, escaping the inning by throwing just seven more pitches on back-to-back three-pitch strikeouts of Iván Herrera and Alec Burleson, then a first-pitch groundout by Jordan Walker. In fact, he retired 15 straight hitters after the walk, again completing five no-hit innings before yielding a leadoff single to Pedro Pagés in the sixth. The Cardinals turned that into a run after speedster Victor Scott II replaced Pagés on a forceout, took third on a single to right field by Wetherholt, and scored on a grounder by Herrera, but Misiorowski stuck around to complete the sixth and seventh innings before departing with a 4-1 lead. The Brewers won, 5-1. Read the rest of this entry »

The best team in baseball will be without its biggest star for a few weeks.

The Braves placed Ronald Acuña Jr. on the injured list Sunday with a strained left hamstring. Acuña exited Saturday’s game after pulling up in considerable pain while running out a groundout. Manager Walt Weiss told reporters that imaging revealed a Grade 1 strain, the least severe grade. According to MLB.com, Weiss said:

“It’s not going to be just a couple days. It’s gonna be more than that, so we need to put him on the IL, and hopefully it’ll be sooner than later. No idea with these soft tissue injuries how long they’re gonna take, but I think the silver lining is that the MRI showed it wasn’t too serious.”

While many players return from Grade 1 hamstring strains in just a couple weeks, or even following the 10-day minimum, this is an injury that can linger and delay a return.

This is, obviously, less than ideal for the Braves. Acuña is their best player and was projected in the preseason as the ninth-best position player in baseball with 5.4 WAR, according to our Depth Charts. Though his performance hasn’t been spectacular thus far, with a 111 wRC+ in 152 plate appearances, his .381 xwOBA and 12.2% barrel rate — along with strong strikeout and walk rates — suggest he hasn’t missed a beat this year, coming off his bounce-back 2025 season.

Of course, last year was a comeback campaign because Acuña missed most 2024 (and the early part of 2025) after tearing his ACL. He also missed chunks of 2021 and 2022 with a torn ACL in his other knee. In 2018, he missed about a month with a mild ACL sprain. That means Acuña’s hamstring strain is his fourth lower body injury requiring IL time in his career. Read the rest of this entry »