Batless in the Battery
The National League Divisional Series went to Atlanta and never came back.
In baseball, the best offense can’t be a good defense.
The Milwaukee Brewers 2021 campaign ended with a bat on the shoulder Tuesday night, a not-quite-fitting conclusion to the campaign — that would have been a topped ball in play, resulting in a dribbler to second for a routine put out — but apt enough.
The pitching, though? A club-all-time-best starting rotation and a rotating cast and crew of relievers kept this team at the top of the NL Central and allowed the Brewers to clinch a division title with a week left to spare in the regular season. The pitching got them to this point.
The bats, though, were the question mark. And for a team that coasted and perhaps sputtered to the finish to face the Atlanta Braves was not the most auspicious way to embark on the postseason.
The Braves-Brewers pairing was about as well-matched as possible, which placed extra pressure on Brewer pitching to overcompensate for woeful bats. Setting aside blowout games (five or more runs either way), the Brewers run differential in 2021 resulted in a 55% Pythagorean winning percentage. Any hiccup from the pitching would result in that probability swinging the other way. Not an implosion, not a pitcher going full Ankiel. Just a wrinkle.
And they got two: one from Adrian Houser and another from Josh Hader, one a running dropkick, the other a coup de grâce.
In the absence of offense — Brandon Woodruff gave up three runs in Game 2, but he also has been withheld the benefit of any appreciable run support all season, so nothing to see here — two pitches torpedoed the Brewers’ postseason aspirations.
When the Braves announced Joc Pederson as the pinch hitter in Game 4, I told my wife he would hit a home run.
Houser will be unfairly remembered as giving up Pederson’s massive homer, but he put it exactly where Omar Narvaez called for it. That spot, chest high, above the zone, pearl-height, just inside from the middle of the plate? According to Fangraphs, it’s the one spot in his slugging profile where Pederson mashes above the zone:
The pitch before, a chased fastball up and away, Houser had Pederson on the ropes. Narvaez made a bad call and Pederson made the Brewers pay. Narvaez’ improved defense came at the cost of greatly reduced offense. And how there is not yet a stat for catchers and bad pitch calls is beyond me, because Houser only did what he was instructed to do.
A side note too important to leave as a footnote: Remember when Omar Narvaez was slashing a 1.000-plus OPS early this season en route to an All-Star appearance? He ended the season toward the very bottom of the league in exit velocity and hard hit percentage, with an xBA almost at league average. And when his offense scuffled, the improvements on defense suffered as well. There’s a reason the Brewers retained Manny Piña, and should continue to.
Tuesday night, Craig Counsell asked Josh Hader to go for his first Sutter of 2021.1 Bringing in Hader in the 8th was problematic on its face beyond the fact that he hadn’t done this all season (and we’re letting alone Devin Williams’ absence from the postseason roster); the pitcher’s spot at lead off for top 9 — Hader either gets double switched or pinched or becomes an easy out. Counsell painted himself into a corner by exposing his closer before he had to.
Brandon Woodruff made himself available for Tuesday and put in effective work: four critical outs in just over an inning, yielding only a hit. He only threw 12 pitches. Hader is a strikeout machine and was effective all season, but Woodruff has to at least work into the 8th and let the offense — 9 spot, Kolten Wong, Willy Adames, Christian Yelich — have a chance to break the tie or let Hader do his thing to force extra innings. That was a failure of nerve on Counsell’s part. There were several in this series, and multiple in this fateful Game 4 alone.
Josh Hader has a devastating slider-fastball combination, but if you check his Statcast metrics, his slider occasionally has a reverse horizontal break — where the pitch should go from left to right (facing home plate), occasionally, the physics on the pitch will draw the ball back toward the plate. In 2021, this usually was a few inches and harmless.
The slider to Freeman had just such a break, but to the tune of six inches, leaving it essentially center cut to an MVP and likely Hall of Famer who has been raking since June and ambushed it into left-center field seats. It was a classic October matchup won by the hitter, but let’s be clear: the pitcher shouldn’t have been there in the first place.2
The outcome after the 8th was to be expected, though how we got there was not: Eduardo Escobar singles up the middle, giving Brewers fans a glimmer of hope. Wong then, against everything the Brewers believe in, bunted (!) a curveball (!!) into the air (!!!!!!!!), which softly landed in Travis d’Arnaud’s glove. One pitch, one out.3
Adames put up a decent AB, holding off on some tempting sliders from a vulnerable and overworked Will Smith. (Come to think of it, Brian Snitker leaned on the same guys from the bullpen all series: Luke Jackson, Jesse Chavez, Tyler Matzek, Smith. The fact that the Brewers couldn’t make them pay is breathtaking.) But the pitch he held off on at 1-1 he couldn’t at 3-2.
Plate discipline has been an issue plaguing the Brewers all season, amongst the worst in the NL in strikeouts. But the worst strikeout was yet to come.
Christian Yelich has the laser focus of Brewers fans, now that he has a sizeable extension about to kick in and coming off two seasons where he wasn’t his MVP-caliber self. Lefty-lefty matchup:
Low and away for a called strike one.
Low and away check swing, strike two.
Low and not quite as far away, actually, one could not unreasonably say it was a mistake left over the plate. Yelich has made decent contact where the third pitch was located. He’s even put some power on pitches there.
The bat stayed on the shoulder. Strike three.
Game over. Series over. Season over, with a whimper.
The Brewers fattened up against lesser opponents for three months (June-August) and found themselves struggling playing teams (Cardinals, Mets, Dodgers) that were yet playing for something at season’s end. Their hitting woes were masked by wins earned through dominant pitching, and anesthetized by those blowout wins against lesser opponents throughout the summer. When the hitting dried up — likely because the league effectively stopped throwing them anything except offspeed stuff, and it’s hard to pull and launch offspeed stuff — they were dead in the water. They also had the moxie to call it resting for the postseason. They had to know better.
Also of note: every team that has already advanced to the league championship series round has an OPS of at least .698. Pitching gets you into October, but hitting keeps you there.
To be sure, no one should be content with simply making it to the postseason. Teams play to get here (excepting the Pirates, whose ownership is apparently confused as to why professional baseball games are played) and they win those games so they can win here. The Brewers have done something they have never done before in getting to October in four consecutive years. They have an elite pitching staff they’ve never had before.
And now, to get back to contending in a World Series and have a shot to do that one last unprecedented thing, they must do something else:
Put the bat on the ball, and put it all together. That’s how Octobers are won.
For the uninitiated, a Gagne is a credited save with less than an inning of work. A Sutter (or Gossage, take your pick) is a save with 1-2 innings pitched. A save with more than two innings is a Wilhelm.
In fairness, the Freeman-Woodruff split shows Freeman with a lifetime average of .364 and a relatively small sample size; Woodruff also doesn’t have a slider with an occasional mind of its own.
Wong mentioned earlier this season some dissonance he had with the Cardinals, who wanted him to take a bunch of pitches as a classic leadoff guy and didn’t want him trying to drive the ball or otherwise be aggressive. Wong has otherwise been a tremendous addition to a Brewers team that needed help at second base, but that was a killer mistake in an ill-advised tack toward smallball. If the pitch isn’t good to bunt, don’t try to bunt it.