Bringing up the rear
Tom Haudricourt looks into why the Brewers rank 25th among the 30 big-league clubs in scoring.
In what already is being called “The Year of the Pitcher” in Major League Baseball, offenses across both leagues have been challenged to score runs, with a few exceptions.
They say misery loves company, but one thing is certain: In a down year for offense, you don't want to be at the bottom of the heap. It's bad enough being one of the worst offensive teams in a decent year but you certainly don't want to be bringing up the rear in a down year.
Yet, that's exactly where the Brewers found themselves entering their weekend series against the Atlanta Braves.
The Brewers ranked 25th among the 30 big-league clubs in scoring with 139 runs in 38 games, an average of 3.65 runs per game. With four runs per game usually the bottom line for success, you don't want to be below that level on a regular basis.
The Brewers were 28th in batting average as a team at .213, last in the National League. It's true that batting average is not the end-all and be-all of offensive statistics, but they also ranked 26th in on-base percentage (.298), 27th in slugging (.357) and 27th in OPS (.655). In just about everything that matters in generating offense, the Brewers are a bottom-five team.
One category the Brewers were not laggards in was strikeouts. With 387 entering the weekend, they had whiffed the most in the NL and second-most in the majors, trailing only Tampa Bay (413).
Therein lies the Brewers' biggest problem in scoring runs, or more accurately, not scoring runs. With games on the line, they simply do not make enough contact. It's one of the primary reasons they rank last in the NL and 29th in the majors with a .201 batting average with runners in scoring position.
Of their 293 at-bats with runners in scoring position, the Brewers struck out 91 times, a 31% rate. Compare that to their 20% rate in getting hits in those situations and you begin to see what the problem is here.
A 2-0 loss to St. Louis on Thursday provided perfect examples of how failing to put the ball in play at certain times torments the Brewers. Trailing by one run, the Brewers had hitters lead off the second and sixth innings with doubles off Jack Flaherty. Each time, the next hitter struck out, and in both instances the runner never advanced even one base.
“We've had guys on base but just haven't gotten that next hit,” manager Craig Counsell said of his club's RISP woes. “That's baseball. Obviously, we'd like to score more runs. We'll keep trying to score more runs. My goal is to keep putting pressure on teams and hopefully, we'll break through one of these times.
"This is about sticking to the process of having good at-bats. That's getting a pitch to hit and taking your best swing at it and swinging at the right pitches. I think major-league hitters talk about that enough that they can boil it down to that, and I think doing that is the challenge every night.
“I mean, it's the nature of baseball. We could talk about that every night. It basically determines who wins and loses every night. That's the game. It's those at-bats. That's why you just stress having a quality at-bat and doing it as often as you can and creating as much pressure as you can so that you have those situations as much as you can.”
Only one Brewers hitter has gotten off to what could be called a hot start. Catcher Omar Narváez is batting .352 with a .941 OPS and 160 OPS+, and was badly missed while sidelined a couple weeks with a hamstring strain. He returned to action Thursday, which should help going forward.
With the exception of one week in which he had trouble making contact, rightfielder Avisaíl García also has swung the bat well for the most part. And he hasn't hit in the best of luck with a 54.2% hard-hit rate (exit velocity of 95 mph or higher), one of the best marks in the NL.
Without question, it has hurt the offense immensely to have Christian Yelich out since April 11 – with the exception of a one-game trial balloon in Philadelphia – with back issues. When healthy and swinging the bat well, he is one of the top offensive forces in the game, as he proved before a significant COVID-19 hiccup last year.
And it certainly didn't help that Keston Hiura followed a below-average if shortened 2020 season with an even worse start to this year. When he batted .152 with a .266 slugging percentage, one homer and five RBI in 26 games, the Brewers had no choice but to send him to Class AAA Nashville in hopes of a reset.
A return of a healthy Yelich as well as a rebooted Hiura would do wonders to spark a moribund offense. In the meantime, however, the Brewers are wasting some banner pitching efforts, particularly by their starting rotation (3.47 ERA, ninth in the majors). To be 2-4 in six historic starts by Corbin Burnes (1.53 ERA, 58 strikeouts and one walk in 34 1/3 innings) is an absolute travesty.
Instead of showing some improvement, the offense has been worse than ever of late. Entering the weekend, the Brewers had scored only 30 runs in their last 11 games, an average of 2.73 per game. Not surprisingly, they were 3-8 in those games.
It is true that the Brewers encountered some very good pitchers over that stretch. But, in “The Year of the Pitcher,” that seems to hold true nearly every night. That's still no excuse to be a bottom-five team in every important offensive category.
“You can see the games – 2-0, 1-0,” García said of a constant stream of pitching duels. “It's been tough games, but we've been grinding and competing, man. It's a jungle out there.
“You've just got to compete and do your best and fight every at-bat, every pitch. The pitchers, they're doing their thing, so we're just trying to support them and do our best.”
There's still plenty of time for this to change, particularly with the injured list getting a bit shorter. But, as Yogi Berra once said, it gets late early out there.