Milwaukee Brewers 2016 Season Review
The Bad Stuff
Starting Rotation – As surprisingly good as the rotation was, outside of Guerra, the rotation was rough. Guys like Jimmy Nelson and Zach Davies had stretches where they were very good for a handful of starts in a row, but then they would go on stretches where they were putrid for a handful of starts. Matt Garza was fairly consistent at a 4.50ish ERA all season, finishing at 4.51. Wily Peralta was just ugly to watch pitch as he posted a 4.86 ERA.
Overall, the Brewers starters had one of the worst strikeout rates among all start staffs. On top of not striking guys out, they threw the highest percentage of balls (versus strikes) of any team in the league, with just over 38 percent of their pitches being called balls. That put extra taxing on their arms within at bats and gave the batter better opportunity to get a pitch that he needed to get a hit to move things forward for the opposing offense.
On the flip side, the Brewers were in a rebuilding mode, and they used a total of 9 starters on the year, the second least in the league, and that’s a positive thing to entrust your starters to go out their every turn of the rotation. What the team has in guys like Nelson, Davies, Chase Anderson, Peralta, and Guerra will need to be determined, however, as the next “wave” of young starters should start to hit the major leagues in 2017.
Inconsistency – In all seriousness, it’s really hard to describe what led to the Brewers being a near 90-loss team if you look at the plain numbers. Their offense was middle of the pack. The pitching was middle of the pack. The defense was rated poorly, but they were above a playoff team in defensive ratings on the season, so that alone wouldn’t have brought them down.
What really seemed to hurt the Brewers in 2016 was that they were doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing – rebuilding. They were playing a lot of young players to see what they had in them, and when you play a lot of young guys, you often get plenty of variance in play from day to day as that player adjusts to the league and then the league adjusts back, and so forth, for a few years to start the career.
As an example, a guy like Ryan Braun was a consistent performer for the Brewers this year, very possibly one of the only ones. He had a .305/.365/.538/.903 line on the season. If you look at his OPS numbers month by month, he doesn’t have a month higher than 1.015 or lower than .768. Overall he was consistent. However, when you dig deeper into his numbers, Braun hit 30 home runs on the season. He hit 10 of those home runs in August and 6 in September. So, through four months of the season, Braun had 14 home runs, but he finished with 30.
Injuries certainly led into things as well, and someone like Domingo Santana has solid numbers that were interrupted by injury. However, one of his former Astros teammates that he reunited with in Milwaukee, Chris Carter, was the definition of the inconsistency the team experienced from healthy players, as he posted a .922 OPS in April, a .686 in May, a .724 in July, and then .847 and .913 in August and September to close out the season. Carter had 40 home runs on the season, which in an even distribution over six months would be 6-7 per month. Instead, Carter finished with a flurry, hitting 11 home runs in September to hit his final tally.
When trying to win a series or put together a winning streak, a team needs consistent performances from multiple members of the lineup and the pitching staff to underscore those variant performances that would happen. A guy like Carter is just fine if you have someone that balances him out by hitting for solid production all season, even when Carter is struggling so his struggles don’t bring down the whole lineup.
Next: The Ugly