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August 2008 - Posts
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I hesitate to do this, but here goes anyway..... As of the close of business on Saturday August 30th, the Brewers record stood at 79 and 56, which was good for a 5 1/2 game wild card lead over both the Cards and the Phillies, who were both 74 and 62. What does that mean, really? - If the Brewers go about .500, lets say 13-14 the rest of the way that would give them 92 wins and 70 losses. If that happens, to tie the Brewers one of those teams would have to go 18-8 and 19-7 to win outright.
- If the Brewers go 16 and 11 the rest of the way, that gives them 95
wins and one of those other teams would have to go 21-5 to tie or 22-4
to finish ahead of them.
If you're thinking "well, but there are two teams and one of them could very well get that hot" consider this: - If it is the Phillies that go on some amazing run like that, it is very
likely that they would instead win their division and that the Mets
would be at least a few games behind, if not more. Lets say in that first case above where the Brewers go 13-14 and the Phillies go 18-8, the Mets would have to go 17-9 in that same time to make the Phillies or Mets WC contenders as opposed to division champs.
- In reality if the Brewers hold serve around .500, there is almost no chance that the loser of the NL East is going to be in the Wild Card race as well. That really just leaves the Cards to worry about in terms of a "late charge"
Ok, so how are the Brewers going to get into that 13 to 16 win range that would make it tough to be caught? - The Brewers play 16 games at home and 11 games on the road.
- They play 10 games at home against the Padres, Pirates and Reds the rest of the way.
- They play 4 games on the road against the Pirates and Reds.
- They also play 6 games at home against the Mets and Cubs and 7 games on the road at Philly and in Chicago.
How will the Aces line up?
- As it sits right now, CC Sabathia and Ben Sheets are in line to start at least 12 of the 27 games if they are needed, though you may see some juggling late if
possible that would reduce the number or they could move some starts up
to increase the number if they need to.
- CC is in line to face the Pirates, Padres, Reds, Cubs, Reds and Cubs again.
- Ben Sheets is in line to face the Mets, Padres, Phillies, Cubs, Pirates and Cubs again.
If that wasn't enough consider that: - The Cubs will likely be in position to either set up their postseason rotation in that last series at Miller Park or in a tight enough race with the Brewers that we can reasonably assume that both teams are far enough ahead of the third place team that simply "making the playoffs" is no longer a consideration. That would almost certainly mean that they either won't see Zambrano, Harden or Dempster the last two days of the season or simply making the playoffs is a done deal.
Does that make anyone feel more at ease about the Brewers postseason chances? Me neither.
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The acquisition of CC Sabathia has the Brewers knocking on the door of the playoffs for the first time in over a quarter century. Without him, they're contenders, but not favorites. It's tempting to give CC the lion's share of the credit for this accomplishment, but the truth is that the Brewers have mostly been built from the ground up in the draft. CC himself was aquired in large part because the Brewers turned a draft pick into a top prospect, Matt LaPorta. Anyone reading this doesn't need a list of the players drafted and developed by the Brewers to know how important they are to the team. Being in Milwaukee in the current incarnation of the game means that for the Brewers to have success on the field, they need to have success developing their own stars, because they simply cannot compete for top end free agents and even in the middle market they have to be very selective.
While the benefits of contending with cheap homegrown talent are obvious, it may be even better than originally thought. From Buster Olney's ESPN.com blog (sorry, you need to be an insider to read the whole thing):
A general manager speaking on background last week used an interesting
phrase to describe the recent phenomenon of veterans quickly descending
from productive players into something much less than that: "False
echoes."
He was referring to players who, in retrospect, probably
were users of steroids or human growth hormone or amphetamines or some
other substance that greatly enhanced their performance. And now that
there is greater scrutiny of PEDs, by Major League Baseball and by
federal investigators, some of those players are probably clean and are
suddenly much less productive.
...
Many executives are reassessing the logic of giving long-term
deals to players over 29 or 30 years old, having come to believe that a
lot of players -- "including some I would have never suspected," said
one GM -- were hitting and pitching effectively well into their 30s in
large part because of drug use. ....
"You've already seen the industry shift to an emphasis on
younger players," said an AL GM. "Teams are focusing on draft picks,
and on acquiring younger players. We saw that at the trade deadline.
The whole sport is getting younger.
"And the long-term deals almost never work; there's no doubt about that. Never.
A guy becomes a free agent at 30 to 32 years old, and you give him big
money over four or five years and count on him to be productive to 35
or 36 years old? That's crazy talk now."
Think of teams that gave out huge 5+ year deals to players in their late 20's and early 30's; are they starting to wonder what they've gotten themselves into? It isn't necessarily that any one particular player or players were using, but that the widespread use created unrealistic expectations of what the new "career arc" was going to look like and contracts were given on these false assumptions. Chances are good that some very tough lessons are going to be learned in the next few years by teams that built around those sorts of contracts. If it is true and players are going to have shorter peaks and swifter declines out of their peak production, it will only increase the value of home grown players. Teams that control players in the pre-free agency period of their careers will now hold a larger percentage of that players career VORP in control, leaving a lower percent for the player to sell and be bought on the open market. If that holds true, teams that rely on building by acquiring players at or near the end of their team control years will be getting less production, on average, than they used to. That would mean that the competative advantage of holding a players pre-free agent years is and has been increasing.
The Brewers need to develop players because they cannot afford to build around a core of market-value deals and compete consistently. If all of this turns out to be true, the Brewers method of team building will be even more benficial in the future than it was in the past.
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...but the bullpen isn't what it used to be.
In his last 12 appearances (dating back to July 12th), Guillermo Mota has allowed 1 ER in 11 2/3 IP, which gives him an ERA of 0.77 in that time. Eric Gagne has turned into Derrick Turnbow circa 2007, holding teams scoreless in 12 of 16 games since coming off the DL in early July, though two of those unsuccessful outings resulted in 3 and 4 runs to score. Since his long break (he didn't pitch from July 31st to August 11th) brought on by a very effective rotation, David Riske has a 1.69 ERA in 5.1 IP. If you go back to when he came off the DL in June, Riske has a 3.38 ERA in 18 2/3 IP. These may be somewhat modest improvements from what these guys did before the time frames given, but they are definite improvements.
Closer Salomon Torres and setup lefty Brain Shouse are largely holding steady with what they've done most of the season. Neither is infallible, but they are effective far more often than not. On the flip side, while Carlos Villanueva still has very good numbers (2.09 ERA in 43 IP) since joining the pen, he has struggled lately. In his last 4 appearances, CV has allowed 6 hits and 3 walks in 5 innings, 2 HR and 3 runs to score. The runs number would almost certainly be higher but for Mota's Houdini act in the top of the 12th on Sunday, when he bailed CV out for loading the bases with no outs. Since his last start on July 21st, Seth McCung has only pitched 6 times, allowing 7 ER in 7 1/3 IP, which goes a long way to explaining why he's not seeing more action. So what's the point? Simply that a bullpen is a very fluid thing, mostly. A month ago, most people would have preferred a McClung or Villanueva to be in to hold close leads and hand them to the closer and would have been terrified (or outraged) at the thought of Mota or Gagne being asked to do the same. In a few weeks, this may have all changed yet again. Manager Ned Yost has a lot of options out in the pen, but not a lot of certainty, which means he is going to have to be trusted to play the hot hand. Trusting Ned Yost isn't something a lot of Brewer fans do willingly. If the bullpen doesn't step up as a unit in the final 5 or so weeks, Yost is going to be facing a lot of heat.
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As of the close of business on August 19th, the Brewers record stands at 72 wins and 55 losses. That puts them 6 games behind the first place Chicago Cubs in the central division and 2.5 games ahead of the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League wild card race. There are 35 games remaining in the season, 20 at Miller Park and 15 on the road. Whether the Brewers will be playing in October will depend on what happens in that time, and I think that what happens in that time will be defined by the following .
- The health and productivity of the Brewers twin aces. I posted last week on Yost's overuse of Sabathia and Sheets and since then we've seen CC throw 130 pitches in what became a 9-3 win, obviously not a good sign from a useage standpoint. A lot has also been made of Ben Sheets fall from grace of late. While it is true that Sheets has not pitched as well as he did in the beginning of the season, his struggles are vastly overrated by virtue of the fact that he's having trouble getting the all important "W". In reality, he's mostly been just bad enough not to win, with a couple of exceptions. If the Brewers are going to the playoffs, these two will have to be a big part of it. I'm honestly more concerned about health than production, but both will be necessary.
- The health and productivity of Ryan Bran and Rickie Weeks. Obviously, people look at Braun as more critical to the teams success, and that is correct. This rib cage thing needs to be taken care of because the offense needs his power in the middle of the lineup. Weeks has taken a lot of heat for everything from his batting average (too low) to his strikeouts (too frequent) and his ability to turn double plays (shaky, at best). Still, the fact remains that when he was hurt, Weeks was performing well with the stick and that his loss moving Ray Durham to the lineup everyday hurts the depth of the bench quite a bit. This team's best chance to win lies in both Durham and Weeks being available.
- The bullpen's ability to get outs in close games. The pen has had a lot of time off from pitching in close games of late, because the starters are going deep into games often and the offense has been providing breathing room in a good number of wins. There is going to come a time in this last 35 games where the bullpen is relied on to extend a winning streak or to stop a losing trend. Davis Riske, Carlos Villanueva and Eric Gagne will need to hand over some slim leads and Salomon Torres will need to convert them into wins. How reliable these guys are down the stretch will go a long way towards determining this teams path.
- It would really help if another player of great ability got really hot. Right now, Sabathia is carrying the team in a lot of ways. Chances are good that his current level of performance will not hold for the rest of the year, just because it is so exceptional and few have ever been able to be that good for long stretches. Someone else stepping up with a run would go a long way towards locking up a playoff spot.
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The Brewers remarkable run of starters going deep into games and often completing them continued on Saturday night with Ben Sheets domination of the woebegone Washington Nationals offense. In a sense, this is a good thing. Obviously, having your starting pitcher shut down an opponent is a very good thing. Starters finishing off games also helps to keep the bullpen from being overworked (tackling the question of whether or not a bullpen can suffer from under-use is a topic for another post at another time) and overuse is one of the biggest problems bullpens face.
The problem is that the Brewers have been routinely asking their co-aces Ben Sheets and CC Sabathia to throw a lot of pitches, and the research that had been done on this shows that, in general the more pitchers throw the greater the chance of injury at some point.
Since the trade, Sabathia is averaging 110 pitches per outing, which is a very heavy workload and not something you can reasonably expect him to be able to sustain without a serious dropoff in performance. Sheets is averaging just under 102 per start (taking out the start he left early due to injury) which is a lot, especially when you consider his injury history. 10 years ago, Rany Jazayerli of Baseball Prospectus devised a system that evaluates how hard a pitcher is worked called Pitcher Abuse Points. While it is far from a perfect system, mostly because we don't yet know enough about what causes pitcher injuries to devise a perfect system, it does accumulate some important data and put it in a usable context:
For this, I have created a system designed to award pitchers points - Pitcher Abuse Points, or "PAP's" for short - based on the number of pitches they throw in each start. It's not perfect, but it's a start. These points are cumulative: a 115-pitch outing gets you 20 PAP's - 1 for each pitch from 101-110 (10 total), and 2 for each pitch from 111-115 (10 total). A 120-pitch outing is worth 30 PAP's, while a 140-pitch outing is worth 100 PAP's - more than 3 times as much. This seems fair; a pitcher doesn't get tired all at once, but fatigue sets on gradually, and with each pitch the danger of continuing to pitch grows.
According to the current rankings, Sabathia is 3rd in pitcher abuse points in all of baseball and Sheets is 6th.
So how is this a problem? Well, since neither is likely to be here past this year the long term ramifications of this use are probably not problems for Brewers fans. Still, the Brewers have a lot invested in this year and they are best served by keeping these two healthy and productive for the stretch run and hopefully the playoffs. Many people think that Sabathia's jump of almost 50 innings pitched from 2006 to 2007 played a part in his struggles in the postseason last year. It's hard to know if that was the case for sure, but do you want the team taking that chance?
In the end, the ideal situation for the Brewers would be to use CC and Ben just as much as necessary to make it to the postseason, and hopefully give them some intentionally short starts in September should the opportunity present itself in the form of either blowout wins or a large lead in the WC race. In the meantime, it will be up to manager Ned Yost and pitching coach Mike Maddux to decide how far to push these guys. The games Friday and Saturday both presented reasonable but not obvious opportunities for giving a starter an early exit to save on wear and tear. Neither game was "locked up" but the Nationals offense is such that it is hard to see them mounting a 5 or 6 run rally after being dominated for 7 or 8 innings, so the opportunity for an early exit was there. My fear is that Yost is allowing the old baseball tradition of letting the starter have a chance to finish off a shutout and fan pressure (Yost was booed lustily when he removed Sheets from a start earlier in the year based on pitch count) to interfere with the long term best interest of the team.
Yost needs to start finding ways to limit the workload of his twin aces or the consequences could be dire for this squad's playoff aspirations.
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