The way I see it, the ultimate success or failure of the Brewers season is going to depend on the following factors, in no particular order:
1. Will the defensive realignment live up to its billing?
According to some metrics, the Brewers have improved their defense by 2 to 3 wins simply by acquiring Mike Cameron to play center, moving Hall to third where he was decidedly average in his career and moving Braun to Left, where he can do considerably less damage. The team also acquired Jason Kendall who comes with a much stronger defensive and pitcher handling reputation than his predecessor, Johnny Estrada. If these changes play true to form, they should not only help the pitching staff keep runs off the board by converting balls in play into outs, but also by allowing the better pitchers to throw fewer pitches which allows them to pitch longer.
2. How deep can the rotation can go into games?
A critical failure of the 2007 Brewers was the rotation's inability to consistently navigate the middle innings to hand leads to bullpen in the 7th inning and beyond. No pitcher epitomized this problem like Claudio Vargas, who recorded outs after the 6th inning twice, in 23 starts. Chris Capuano, Jeff Suppan and Dave Bush also experienced problems getting through the middle innings. A defensive improvement should help on this count. Both Bush and Suppan will have to pick up their games a bit, because the young starters (especially Parra and Gallardo) will likely be on stricter pitch counts that may limit what they can be expected to do. Their ability to effectively navigate the middle innings will take some stress off of the bullpen and allow Yost to use his better relievers more often in critical situations, and not to just eat innings.
3. How will the rebuilt bullpen hold up?
General Manager Doug Melvin deserves credit for assembling a lot of options for Manager Ned Yost to deploy and for doing so without trading important pieces or committing to large, long term deals. What remains to be seen is how they will sort themselves out and how effective they can be. As was noted earlier on this blog there are reasons to wonder if the man expected to step into the closers role, Eric Gagne, is ready to take on that duty. The team has other options, but Gagne will get the first look. The ability of the middle relieves David Riske, Guillermo Mota and Salomon Torres to eat up innings with quality work may actually be more important, though less high profile. The problems for the Brewers bullpen last year had more to do with navigating the middle innings than the 8th and 9th. Best of all would be for those guys to be called on to pitch as little as possible, but if they are able to answer the bell better when called upon than their predecessors, that would be a big step forward for this team.
4) Can the young players improve their plate discipline?
The Brewers figure to have no trouble slugging the ball this year. Last year they led the majors with 231 home runs and finished second in the NL in slugging percentage. That would lead one to suppose that the Brewers scored a lot of runs, which is somewhat true, though the team only finished 5th in the league in run scoring. So what was it that kept them out of those top spots? The team finished 11th in the National League in on-base percent. The team did, almost certainly, upgrade in this department by acquiring Mike Cameron and Jason Kendall. The real drive to improve in this area will need to come from the young players, most specifically Ryan Braun, Corey Hart and JJ Hardy. All three have significant room and ability to improve in this area. Rickie Weeks and Prince Fielder are already reasonably good at drawing walks and Bill Hall's walk rate is what it is, and his OBP will be more dependent on his batting average. As a team, they will need to take more walks and work pitchers more to take the next step up from being a powerful and scary offense to a run producing machine.