Archive for Milwaukee Brewers

Last year, the Brewers resurfaced after a rebuilding period that saw them purge basically all the top players from their last good season. With a strong pitching staff and a maturing crop of prospects, Milwaukee surged, presenting a threat to Chicago’s North Side club for the division crown. On this day a year ago, the Brewers were a half-game back of the Cubs. While they inevitably came up short, the Brewers started to see returns from a top-10 farm system they had spent years assembling.

During the offseason, they sought to address their weaknesses in the outfield, consolidating prospect gains for the inimitable Christian Yelich. They also signed Lorenzo Cain to an affordable long-term contract, providing them with greater protection from variance and much improved production. While those two acquisitions haven’t been the only factors to have propelled the Brew Crew to contention, such additions have led the organization to find themselves 1.5 games back of the Cubs for the division this season, holding the first Wild Card spot. FanGraphs’ own playoff odds give them (read: Milwaukee) a 60.2% chance to make the playoffs. Last night, David Stearns inched that figure a bit higher.

Late Friday evening, the Milwaukee Brewers moved to augment their roster for a postseason push, acquiring Mike Moustakas from the Kansas City Royals.

As reported first by a self-described Wisconsin sports fan, here’s the trade in its entirety:

Brewers get:

• 3B Mike Moustakas

Royals get:

• OF Brett Phillips
• RHP Jorge Lopez

For the Royals, it’s a pretty bittersweet move featuring one of their longest-tenured players. Kansas City drafted Moustakas with the second overall pick all the way back in 2007. He’s spent his entire adult life with the organization, ascending the minor-league ladder, enduring growing pains, making a World Series, and then winning a World Series. Or, as Royals manager Ned Yost puts it:

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Brent Suter succeeds in atypical fashion. The Milwaukee Brewers rookie throws his four-seam fastball roughly 70% of the time, and not because he lights up radar guns with it. He doesn’t. Suter’s (ahem) heater averages 86.3 mph, which is comfortably near the bottom of our velocity chart.

Nonetheless, batters have a hard time hitting it. As Jeff Zimmerman pointed out in a recent RotoGraphs piece, Suter gets a lot of swings and misses with his signature pitch despite its unhurried path to the plate. More importantly, he gets a lot of outs. In 76.2 innings this season, the deceptive southpaw has a 3.29 ERA.

Along with being sneaky fast, he is also smart. The Brewers drafted Suter out of Harvard, where he earned a degree in environmental science and public policy.

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Suter on how he gets hitters out: “I pitch a lot with my fastball. I trust it. It has a little bit of late-cut movement to it, plus I have kind of a hunched-over delivery, so I hide the ball a little longer and get some good extension on it. I feel like my fastball kind of plays. It gets on guys a little earlier than they expect.

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Travis Shaw had arguably the biggest hit of Milwaukee’s season yesterday. With his team on the verge of a crushing 10-inning loss, Shaw stroked a two-run, walk-off home run that helped keep the Brewers in the playoff hunt. A defeat wouldn’t have buried the surprise contenders, but it would have pushed them closer to the brink. They badly needed the win, and the Red Sox castoff provided it.

Even without Saturday’s heroics, Shaw has been a godsend for David Stearns and Co. Acquired over the offseason (along with a pair of promising prospects) for Tyler Thornburg, he’s contributed 31 long balls and an .877 OPS while solidifying the middle of the Milwaukee lineup. Last year in Boston, those numbers were 16 and .726.

The 27-year-old third baseman attributes his breakout to two factors: He’s playing every day, and he’s not stressing about things he can’t control.

“My mindset is a lot different,” Shaw told me earlier this week. “After what I went through last year, I needed to take a step back. There were some things I didn’t agree with, and there were some things I took the wrong way. I didn’t handle them very well

“I tried to play GM. I started reading into stuff — wondering why they’re doing this, why we’re doing that — and it ate at me. I worried about things I shouldn’t have worried about. In the second half, when I got to play, I felt like I had to get two or three hits to stay in the lineup. That didn’t bode well for my mental state, and it obviously didn’t work results-wise.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jed Bradley was honest when I talked to him in January 2013. A first-round pick by the Milwaukee Brewers 18 months earlier, the left-hander admitted his velocity was down, and that he’d been experienced “a big learning curve.”

He was also thoughtful and realistic. The Georgia Tech product spoke about how most fans don’t understand “the pathway you have to take to get to the big leagues,” and about how the high minors are populated by veteran players who are supporting families and “putting everything on the line just for a shot.”

Bradley got his shot last September, appearing in six games, and hurling seven innings, for the Atlanta Braves. Last week, at age 26, he bid baseball adieu.

When I asked him why he retired, the former ACC Honor Roll student was every bit as honest and thoughtful as he was four years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

The fact that Parker Berberet has a 0.77 ERA and has struck out 10.8 batters per nine innings isn’t particularly meaningful. Not only has he thrown just 11-and-two-thirds frames, he is 27 years old and pitching in low-A. He’s a long shot to reach Milwaukee, or any other big-league city.

That doesn’t mean he hasn’t come a long way. The Oregon State product spent his first six professional seasons behind the plate, and while he’s been a fringe prospect, he’d reached Double-A and played a smattering of games in Triple-A. But the writing was on the wall, and Barberet could see it. The view is plain as day from a perch at the end of the bench.

“I went to the Brewers last year, at the All-Star break, and asked if I could do it,” Berberet said of his position switch. “I was on the phantom DL at the time, and I wasn’t getting into many games when I (was active), so I was like, ‘Let’s see if I can strengthen my arm and convert to the mound.’”

The Brewers decided to let him try. Berberet began by throwing bullpens, and he showed enough promise to be invited to instructional league, and then back to spring training. Had he not requested the move, he isn’t sure he’d be wearing a uniform.

“I was definitely close (to getting released),” opined Berberet. “I was barely getting to play, so who knows if I’d have gotten an opportunity this year?” Read the rest of this entry »

Raise your hand if you didn’t realize Matt Belisle ranks 12th among active pitchers with 603 career appearances. And don’t feel bad if you’re reading this and asking “Matt who”? That’s especially true if you’re a fan of an American League team. The 36-year-old righty has been a reliable reliever for a long time, but he’s spent the bulk of his career with small-market teams in the NL, and he has just five career saves. He’s anything but a marquee name.

You are familiar with him if you’re a Rockies fan. Belisle was a workhorse in Colorado from 2010-2014, appearing in 73 games annually. Before that he was a Cincinnati Red, and he’s since moved on to the St. Louis Cardinals, Washington Nationals, and now the Minnesota Twins.

When I talked to him late in spring training, Belisle told me he’s grateful for the career he’s had. He also doesn’t take anything for granted.

“What’s behind me is gone,” said Belisle. “I just look at today. I keep everything in front of me and do everything I can to win the way I need to win. I take care of the hours and the days, and let the months and the years take care of themselves.” Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, we ran an interview with Rockies outfielders Chris Denorfia and Charlie Blackmon on the subject of launch angles and bat paths. I’ve asked a few other players for their opinion — we’ll hear from them in the near future — as well as a few managers and coaches. Craig Counsell and Jeff Banister are among them.

“Telling a player to hit a pitch harder isn’t a very good coaching tool,” Counsell told me. “The same goes for hitting it at certain angles. But it is appropriate feedback to tell them something was a well-struck ball, when they’re in the cage: Those are balls that are going to go a long way. A hitter probably knows that, but it’s still good feedback.”

The former infielder went on to make an interesting observation. Read the rest of this entry »

Sixty-three plate appearances into his big-league career, Colin Walsh is two percentage points above batting average oblivion. A Rule 5 pick by the Milwaukee Brewers a year ago, the switch-hitting utility man logged just four hits in 47 official at bats. That computes to .085, which is as bad as it looks. Over the last 100 years, 5,842 non-pitchers have come to the plate at least 60 times, and only Enrique Cruz (.083) has a lower mark.

Walsh is a bit sheepish about his BA — he has an ego like the rest of us — but don’t expect him to lose any sleep over it. He intends to get back to The Show, and even if he doesn’t, he’s proud of where he’s been.

“No one can take away the fact that I played in the major leagues,” said Walsh, who inked a minor league deal with the Atlanta Braves over the offseason. “In and of itself, that is a great accomplishment. If it ends up being my only major league experience, it’s still something that 99.99999 percent of people who ever played baseball haven’t done. I don’t think struggling in the major leagues is something I’ll go through life being looked down upon for.”

His career was on the upswing a year ago. Blessed with impeccable plate discipline, he’d earned the Rule 5 opportunity by slashing .302/.447/.470 for Oakland’s Double-A affiliate in 2015. Read the rest of this entry »

Football — what we Americans call soccer — rules Scotland’s sporting scene. Rugby runs a distant second, while golf, which was invented in St. Andrews, probably ranks third in terms of popularity.

Baseball barely registers a blip in the country’s sporting consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t played there. An organization called Baseball Scotland is keeping it alive, with hopes of increasing both interest and participation.

I learned more from one of its members while I was in Glasgow over the holidays.

Xander Harrison, a 24-year-old financial services analyst, plays for the Glasgow Comets. Over pints of Tennent’s Lager at a City Centre watering hole, Harrison told me that Baseball Scotland was formed in 2007 by the Edinburgh baseball club, which previously had teams in the British Baseball Federation, but had become disgruntled with the league organization and costs. There had also been a recognized BBF Scotland Division, and before that a Scotland Division in the old British Baseball League.

There is no organized baseball in the Scottish school system. Harrison began playing around the age 11, when he joined a youth league formed by the Glasgow Baseball Association. His team — one of eight in the league at the time— was the White Sox. That led to his becoming a fan of Chicago’s South Side club. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, shortly before it was reported that the low-arm-angle righty would be signing with the Marlins, Dave Cameron wrote that Brad Ziegler is a Freak. Not only does Miami’s new bullpen piece induce worm-killers with an 84-mph fastball, he gets hitters to swing at a high number of changeups below the zone.

Ziegler doesn’t consider himself totally unique, but he does recognize what sets him apart.

“I don’t think I’m much different than other submariners,” Ziegler told me in September. “My sinker and slider are pretty similar to (Darren) O’Day’s. I’d say the movement is pretty standard from where I throw them. But I am different in that I have a changeup — a lot of submariners don’t have one.”

Ziegler throws “a standard circle change” from his down-under slot. It’s a pitch he’s worked diligently to perfect — primarily as a weapon against lefties — and gripping and ripping isn’t an option. Precision is essential. Read the rest of this entry »