Brewers: Josh Hader could be even better this season

Last year, Milwaukee Brewers RP Josh Hader was one of the best pitchers in baseball. This year, it’s very possible that he might be even better.

In 2018, Josh Hader took the world by storm from inside the Milwaukee Brewers bullpen. He kept both his ERA and WHIP low and struck out an insane number of batters. His season was so good that it didn’t look like he could improve on those numbers.

But then this season came along and after a small sample size of three games, we see that his performance from last season not only carried over but might even see an improvement this year.

Hader has appeared in three of the Brewers five games entering Tuesday and over the course of four innings, only allowed one batter to reach base while racking up eight strikeouts. He earned the save each time out with Corey Knebel out for the foreseeable future.

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In his first outing of the season on opening day, Hader needed just 21 pitches to get through two perfect innings while striking out four batters. In his next outing, he became just the 88th pitcher to record an immaculate inning, striking out Tyler O’Neill, Dexter Fowler, and Yairo Munoz on nine pitches.

It was the fifth immaculate inning ever thrown by a Brewers pitcher, with the last being by Mike Fiers in 2015.

Again, it’s a very small sample size, but he’s been showing a huge amount of improvement, especially when it comes to the number of pitches required to get out of an inning.

Last year, Hader threw more than 1,300 pitchers and averaged 16.2 per inning. That’s about the average and is good considering he gets more strikeouts than one or two pitch outs. Over the course of his first seven appearances of last season, he averaged 16.5 per inning, needing at least 21 pitches per outing.

This year through his first four, he’s been averaging just 11.5 per inning, getting through his first three innings on just 30 pitches. If Hader can keep this up, he should be able to increase his innings pitched this season. He threw 81.1 innings last year and if he’s more effective at pitch counts, he can tack on a few more.

A realistic expectation for Hader, assuming that he stays as their closer for most of the season is a 2.29 ERA with 165 strikeouts and a WHIP of just below 0.8.