You think about a playoff-contending team that really needs help at shortstop, and your mind immediately goes to the Detroit Tigers. Jose Iglesias‘ shin injury took him out of the mix before the season even started, and since Detroit never did go and get Stephen Drew before he returned to Boston, they’ve attempted to get by with a collection of odds and ends. They tried the ancient Alex Gonzalez, who quickly proved he was past his sell-by date. He gave way to Andrew Romine, acquired from the Angels during camp, with a touch of Danny Worth now and then. Romine’s wRC+ of 49 is the highest of that trio, so earlier this month they DFA‘d Worth and went with Eugenio Suarez, who has impressed in limited time and should hopefully prevent them from any further thoughts of asking first base coach Omar Vizquel to come out of retirement.

Maybe Suarez works out. Maybe he doesn’t, and the Tigers end up going out and getting Jimmy Rollins or Everth Cabrera or Ben Zobrist or Didi Gregorius or whatever shortstops become available. Either way, when the trade deadline gets a little closer and you start thinking about team needs, you’re likely going to think about the Tigers and their shortstops.

What you’re probably not going to think about are the Milwaukee Brewers, because they have a 24-year-old shortstop who made the All-Star team last year. They have playoff hopes, and they have Jean Segura. What they also have is a considerable issue.

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As we creep up on the beginning of May, the Milwaukee Brewers have the best record in baseball. At 19-7, they’ve thrust themselves squarely into playoff contention, even if the pre-season projections mostly saw them as a third wheel in a difficult division; their early success combined with the struggles of their direct competition have opened the door for the Brewers to make a real run at the postseason. As Jeff noted two weeks ago, it doesn’t even matter all that much that our projections still aren’t that bullish on their future performance, because the cushion they’ve created with a strong first month of the season gives them plenty of room to regress and still be in contention.

Which is a good thing, because there’s almost certainly some pretty harsh regression coming the Brewers direction; one of the core foundations of their strong start has been a remarkable performance from their bullpen.

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Maybe the most annoying thing you could say is that the Brewers are going to regress. They’re not going to keep winning 83% of their baseball games. They’re not going to end the season with a +378 run differential. They’re not as good as a 1.80 team ERA, and they’re not going to keep running a .250 BABIP against. They’re on a nine-game winning streak, but they’re going to lose, and they’re going to lose, inarguably, dozens of times. The Brewers, in truth, aren’t close to this good. No kidding. This year’s Brewers aren’t literally the best team in the history of baseball.

But every hot streak is unsustainable, just as every cold streak is unsustainable. Any team that wins nine in a row and any team that wins 10 of 12 will have contributing factors you can’t expect to keep up in the long run. What’s important isn’t determining whether or not the Brewers will keep winning at this clip. They won’t. What’s important is determining where the Brewers stand now, relative to where they stood a couple weeks ago before the season was underway.

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Pitch-framing research isn’t really new anymore. I mean, in the grander scheme of things, it’s only been a blink of an eye since the work first debuted, but we’re beyond the discovery stage. We’re at the point where the work is going into refinement, and earlier this week Baseball Prospectus published the latest update. The research was good, and the effort was extraordinary, but ultimately the piece offered a lot of confirmation. The guys we suspected were good are still good. The guys we suspected were bad are still bad. With framing, researchers are almost all the way there.

So, we know about framing, and we know about the numbers. We’re also on the outside, looking in. Whenever this comes up, there’s always the question: so, how is framing actually valued right now within the industry? For example, Jose Molina might be the face of the whole field of study. By the end of 2015, he will have played four years with the Rays for a total of less than eight million dollars. The framing numbers would suggest he’d be worth that much in a month or three. Teams just must not believe in it, right? Or they’re at least being super-cautious.

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Last week, Colin Zarzycki reviewed the Milwaukee Brewer bullpen on RotoGraphs. The projected bullpen included the likes of Jim Henderson, Brandon Kintzler, Tom Gorzelanny, Michael Fiers, and Will Smith, among others. The 12 names on the depth chart combined for 12.009 years of MLB service time, with Gorzelanny accounting for half of that total. The depth chart contained some intriguing upside, but was certainly lacking in experience. Enter Francisco Rodriguez, again.

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All along, it was suspected that Masahiro Tanaka was holding up the whole available pitching market. Teams wanted to know if they could get the best available pitcher; other available pitchers wanted to know which teams might be reduced to going after them. Wednesday, we all found out that Tanaka had made his decision. A day later, the Matt Garza domino has fallen. Out of nowhere, the Brewers swooped in and claimed Garza for four years and $52 million.

So, it’s that contract, for a pitcher going to a team that’s maybe on the fringes of the race. It’s identical to the contract Edwin Jackson signed to go to a team that wasn’t very good. It’s basically the same as the contract Ricky Nolasco signed to go to a team that wasn’t very good. None of these guys were given qualifying offers, so none of them cost any draft picks. They simply cost money, and as far as this particular move is concerned, it’s hard not to like it. I’d say it’s also hard to love it, but for the Brewers it’s a good upside play.

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The Braves are going to arbitration with Jason Heyward over $300 thousand dollars. It’s a wonderful sentence, full of so many words that could set you off in a million different directions. And so I followed those strings, talking to as many people involved in arbitration as I could. Many of those directions did lead me to denigrations of arbitration, and of the file-to-trial arbitration policy that the Braves employ. There’s another side to that sort of analysis though. Arbitration is not horrid. File-to-trial policies have their use. This is not all the Braves’ fault.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Milwaukee Brewers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay.

Batters
The computer math which informs these ZiPS projections doesn’t know that Ryan Braun was charged, during the 2011-12 offseason, of using PEDs; that he successfully appealed what would have been a 50-game suspension; that he was then named in documents belonging to Biogenesis of America; that he (i.e. still Braun) attributed the appearance of his name in those documents to how his legal counsel had retained Anthony Bosch, the clinic’s operator, as a consultant; or that he then agreed to serve a 65-game suspension last season. The figures here are based on the combination of variables Szymborski generally uses to produce projections: past performance, aging, etc. They reveal no insight beyond that.

What the ZiPS projections below do reveal, however, is how, very quickly and sadly, Rickie Weeks appears to have become a mediocre player, already. In just 2011, Weeks produced a three-win season; the year before that, nearly a six-win one. Now he’s in very real danger of losing his job entirely to Scooter Gennett — a modestly skilled player, Gennett, but without the impressive physical tools that defined Weeks at his best.

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Minor-league contracts don’t really matter all that much in baseball, no matter how much some fans might think they do. Each year, teams sign dozens of guys to non-guaranteed deals that may or may not include an invite to major league camp, and much of the time you never hear those names ever mentioned again after March. It’s not an official FanGraphs rule that minor-league deals aren’t worth covering, but it might as well be; when Delmon Young got a guaranteed contract from Philadelphia last year, there was a post about it. When the Orioles made him an NRI last week, there wasn’t.

Yet here I am, talking about Milwaukee’s decision to add Mark Reynolds to the first base mix on a non-guaranteed contract, partially because it seems likely that he will have a real impact on the team this year, and partially because of what it says about the Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

We officially learned yesterday that John Axford had a tipping problem. Specifically, the Cardinals scouting staff noticed he had been tipping his pitches nearly the entire time they had scouted him. This is actually something that Axford himself hinted at during an interview in early September, as he explained to FoxSports Ohio.

Axford, who had lost his job as the Brewers’ closer early in the season, found another reason to be glad to land with the Cardinals in his first meeting with his new coaching staff. The Cardinals gave him some pitching advice — the specifics of which he declined to discuss — that he says immediately helped his performance. “When a team has been looking at you for five years, trying to kill you every single time you’re out there on the mound, they pick up on every little detail they can — what you may be showing, or tipping, or what you’re doing different,”

Maybe this quasi-intervention was what Axford needed to get the message, because this was not the first time this issue has come up in his career.

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