Milwaukee Brewers Blog - Between the Green Pillars : Ben Sheets

Offering Sheets Arby the Correct Call

Ryan Topp — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:04:03 GMT

The Brewers have offered Ben Sheets arbitration, ensuring either two top 60 or so picks or another year of Sheets at a somewhat discounted rate. It's really a win-win situation for the Brewers:

If Sheets elects to turn down the offer, the Brewers will get the signing teams first round pick, unless they finished in the bottom half of the league or sign a better free agent (according to Elias), in which case the Brewers would get the next unprotected pick. They would then also get a pick in between the first and second rounds (commonly referred to as the "sandwich round") based on the Elias rankings.

If he elects to stay with the team and play on a "prove your worth" one-year deal, then the Brewers will get him for a decent sum, but only for a one year commitment. This is ideal, because it would help bridge the gap between the current rotation and some of the impact arms who are at least a year or two away while not tying the team down to a long term commitment. If the past is any indicator, Ben Sheets isn't likely to give you a CY young caliber season or pitch 200 innings, but he is a solid bet to give you 120+, well above league average innings.

It's somewhat unlikely that Sheets will accept the offer and if he does he's probably going to get a raise from his current annual salary, which is sure to ruffle the feathers of a few detractors. There is also a good possibility that he could end up signing with a team whose first round pick is protected, which would mean the Brewers end up with picks comparable to those they received for Scott Linebrink or Fransisco Cordero last year. Still, this is move that represents little risk and offers several possible likely rewards.

The outlook is similarly rosy on both sides for their offer of arbirtation to lefty specialist Brain Shouse. Sure, they're only in line for a pick between the second and third rounds should he decline, but that's still not bad. Should he accept, the Brewers are probably on the hook for a couple million dollars for one year, which isn't bad for a guy who does still totally shut down left handed batters. Still, if I'm kinda rooting for Sheets to accept the offer, I'm also somewhat rooting for Shouse to turn it down. His inablity to be anything better than awful against right handed batters puts the manager in tough spot on a regular basis when navigating the late innings.

Oh, and CC Sabathia was also offered arby too. Surprised?

Just Like It was Drawn Up

Ryan Topp — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 04:48:11 GMT

When the Brewers traded for CC Sabathia back in July, the brain trust had to be imagining a situation like this presenting itself:

The team plays pretty well and gets out to a nice lead in the wildcard by early September. Then the luck changes a little bit, a bad run happens and a losing streak is under way, putting the hard work of the last 5 months in jeopardy. Then CC and Ben Sheets step in and pitch two gems to put the team back on the winning track and help stabilize a potential free fall situation.

Of course, that is exactly what happened on Friday and Saturday for the Brewers against the San Diego Padres. It's rare that something like the CC acquisition plays out exactly like it's supposed to. He has been utterly dominant in nearly every start he's made. He's helped a good team jump up a notch and become a very good team. He is in position to receive a huge contract on the free agent market this winter....

Of course that is something we'll have to just worry about later.

Doug Melvin deserves a lot of credit for correctly reading his team, it's potential and it's needs and taking this risk. I wasn't totally sold on the deal at the time, mostly because I wasn't confident that the rest of the players on the team were quite ready to justify the risk of trading a guy of Matt LaPorta's ability. I'm very happy to be wrong about that, because whatever happens from here on out it was the right move.

Now, the team just needs to take care of business and give itself some space before the road trip to Philadelphia and Chicago next week.

Four Things To Watch

Ryan Topp — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 08:50:02 GMT

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.

Burning Out the Aces?

Ryan Topp — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 15:48:11 GMT

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.

Ben Sheets, We Hardly Knew Ye

Ryan Topp — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 03:59:00 GMT

Ben Sheets told Tom Haudricourt that he's pretty much dead set on testing the free agent waters after this season. Before the season started, General Manager Doug Melvin made his decision to wait out the year before negating a new contract with Sheets public. At the time, few would have argued with his decision. Sheets has made more than a half dozen trips to the disabled list since singing his 4 year, 42 million dollar deal in 2005 and that has somewhat soured most people's outlook on him. This year Sheets has been what Brewer fans hoped he would be the whole contract. His performance has him near the top of most early lists for the CyYoung award.Of course, the year is still less than half gone and there is still time for an injury to happen, but so far, so good.

Sheets repeated injuries put the Brewers in a tough position in terms of what they were going to do with him. To have made a the kind of offer it would have taken to keep Sheets before the season would have been a very high risk and potentially high reward decision. Now it looks like Sheets will be on the market and taking the highest bid to acquire his services for 2009 and beyond. Assuming he stays reasonably healthy the remainder of the year, the Brewers will have to outbid the big markets for Sheets services. That almost certainly means that the cost will exceed what the Brewers would be willing to spend to keep Sheets, though it doesn't guarantee it.

With the Brewers right in the thick of the playoff race at the moment, it wouldn't make sense to trade Sheets for prospects at this point. Perhaps if they fall totally out of the race, but that becomes less likely with each passing day and win. This leaves the Brewers with only one real choice at this point: let him play out his contract this year and then take the compensatory draft picks at the end of the year if they're outbid, which they almost certainly will be.

Moving forward this year, the Brewers need to look long and hard at several good starters who may be on the market this year but who will not be free agents at the end of the season. Rich Harden of the A's and Eric Bedard of the Mariners would both provide a boost to this years rotation and help soften the blow of Sheets departure next year. It is true that the Brewers will almost certainly have Yovanni Gallardo back in the fold, but the rotation will still be a bit thin if they don't make another move.

It'll be sad to see Sheets take his dominating stuff elsewhere, but the reality is that he will probably get more than this team can afford to risk on him. The best thing that can happen now is for the rest of the squad to pick up their games and give him one hell of a send off.