Milwaukee Brewers Blog - Between the Green Pillars : Ned Yost

Things Get Weird

Ryan Topp — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:11:36 GMT

So it's been hard to come up with something to say for the last few weeks.

It seems like a lot more, but it was only 16 days ago that I wrote this and apparently tempted fate.

Well, now things have gotten strange. The Brewers are in total free fall, the Cubs are no hitting the Astro's in Miller Park and Ned Yost has been fired with 12 games left while the team is still tied for the wildcard lead. Obviously these aren't things that happen very often.

Ned Yost is obviously a hot button topic amongst Brewer fans. I was never sold that he was the devil that he was made out to be by many, but he was clearly a deeply flawed manager. Could the Brewers have made the postseason with him at the helm this year? We'll never know, but the indicators were obviously not pointing in his direction. I'm very happy to see that he is handling what has to be a shocking disappointment with class.

So what can Dale Sveum do as interim manager over the next 12 games? In a way, he's under almost no pressure because this is someone else's mess that he's being asked to clean up. Expectations are very low. At the same time, he's being handed the keys to a team with more than a slim mathematical chance to make the playoffs. The Brewers merely have to finish better than either the Mets or Phillies, as long as Houston doesn't inject itself into the proceedings, to make the playoffs. If the Sveum managed Brewers pull that off, he instantly becomes a local hero and probably gives himself a chance to ditch the "interim" tag.

The next 12 games will also undoubtedly go a long way to determining general manager Doug Melvin's future with the team, which means the future of the franchise. Falling further could easily mean that owner Mark Attanasio decides to go a new direction and then the mandate would be change. Make the playoffs and Melvin will probably become further entrenched and his vision for the franchise will rule. Ultimately, though, those issues are for another day.

The Brewers clearly have the talent to pull this off, if a few hitters can get hot. Now all they have to do is win the games and as more than a few smart commentators have pointed out in the last 24 hours, that responsiblity now finally falls on the players and the players alone.

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.

It's Been Too Long

Ryan Topp — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:49:44 GMT

I'm not even sure where to start after such a long absence. Since I last posted a lot has happened and it seems like there is a lot to catch up on.

The Ray Durham trade was a good one. They didn't give up too much to get him and he offers a lot of flexibility for the club off the bench and as a contingency plan for Rickie Weeks. My longstanding opinion on Weeks still stands, they need to try and give him every opportunity to succeed because his talent makes him a potential monster. That being said, if Weeks is mired in one of his slumps in September, they need another option to leadoff and Durham provides that. There has been a lot of unnecessary hand wringing that Yost hasn't played Durham enough, though Weeks has been far from terrible in the last month with the bat. Still, the fact that the trade created uncertainty doesn't mean it was a bad idea. Durham is a useful player and a good option to have in whatever role he eventually ends up filling.

The Brewers have all of a sudden become real road warriors. After defeating the Reds on Wednesday, they are now 11-2 in their last 13 games on the road, an outstanding departure from their recent past. With any luck, this will persist and we can all stop talking/hearing/reading about Ned Yost's alleged inability to win on the road once and for all.

Getting swept in 4 games at home by the Cubs hurts. A lot. It's the sort of thing that can send a team into a downward spiral of losses, especially when it's followed by 6 games on the road right away. Fortunately, this team rebounded nicely with a 4-2 trip and seem to have stabilized. Sweeping the series in St. Louis gave them some wiggle room and despite some serious offensive struggles since the break the team has a 12-8 record and is in better position than they were before the break. That's not a complete success, but it's far from bad.

Yost is still misusing Carlos Villanueva and someone needs to put a stop to it. Since going to the pen, Carlos has a 1.75 ERA in 36 innings. There is no justification for using a player of that ability and production in low leverage "mop up" situations on a regular basis, especially when you consider the type of high leverage innings that have gone to inferior pitchers like Mota and Gagne. Now that Seth McClung is in the bullpen on an everyday basis, they should be able to give CV more meaningful innings, which would be a much wiser use of the given resources.

That's all for now, but it's great to be back. Now it's time to toil through all the minor league numbers of the last few weeks and prepare a Prospect of the Week feature.

A Rotation Platoon?

Ryan Topp — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:00:00 GMT

Apparently, Ned Yost is thinking outside the box again. Not that it's a bad thing. I was in favor of batting Jason Kendall 9th, after all. I'm still not quite sure why that was abandoned, exactly.

The basic idea to this latest brain storm is this: Dave Bush has been so good at home and lousy on the road and Seth McClung has been better on the road than at home, so the team is considering platooning them so that Bush would start at home and McClung on the road.

On the very surface, that sounds somewhat logical and appealing. The acquisition of CC Sabathia means that when Jeff Suppan returns from the disabled list someone will have to be moved out of the rotation. Ben Sheets, Manny Parra and Sabathia all have earned spots in the rotation. Jeff Suppan has a large contract and his track record of summer slumps suggests that if the Brewers stick with him, they will be rewarded later in the year. That leaves Bush and McClung, and both have largely pitched well of late, especially Bush. Still, someone has to go and it's going to be one of them.

Of course, once you go beyond the surface notion of creating this "super starter" out of two different guys, it gets a bit trickier:

Is it really reasonable to expect that in both cases that there are real reasons that McClung pitches better on the road and Bush is better at home? Because if it's not, then there is little reason to think that these trends can be counted on to continue. Bush has a long track record of being better at home than on the road, but not nearly at this large a differential. McClung has an ERA almost two full points higher on the road versus at home in his career. So isn't it likely he would revert back on the road anyway?
These are real human beings and they have routines they are used to. Teams do have starters make appearances out of the pen or have relievers make spot starts from time to time, of course. What they do not do all that often anymore is ask players to consistently shuffle between the two roles. It is an open question how a player being asked to shuffle between these roles would do.
It takes up two roster spots and leaves the manager short a reliever out of necessity for long stretches when you figure that a player who is being asked to potentially make a "full start" is going to need at least three days rest before and after each start if you want them to be effective and not worry about over use. That 4th day they are only going to be available for limited duty if they are coming off of a full start or are being expected to make one in 4 days. Lets take a look at how this might work over a period where they alternate starts:

Day 1: Bush starts at home / McClung fully available
Day 2: Bush unavailable / McClung marginally available
Day 3: Bush unavailable / McClung unavailable
Day 4: Bush unavailable / McClung unavailable
Day 5: Bush marginally available / McClung unavailable
Day 6: Bush fully available / McClung starts on the road
Day 7: Bush marginally available / McClung unavailable
Day 8: Bush unavailable / McClung unavailable
Day 9: Bush unavailable / McClung unavailable
Day 10: Bush unavailable / McClung marginally available
Day 11: Bush starts at home / McClung fully available

So, the only day that the one not starting would be fully available would be the day that the other is starting. Other than that, they wouldn't be available for more than some limited duty. You also end up with 4 days in 11 where neither one would be available at all, meaning any short start on one of those days would have to be covered by the other relievers on the staff.

All in all, I just don't see there being a likely enough upside to justify the definite cost.