It’s taken until September, but the Brewers are who we thought they were… and it’s not pretty. Milwaukee has lost 6 games in a row at just about the worst time possible. With only a month to go, instead of looking in the mirror, Milwaukee is looking up at an NL Central leader for the first time all year.
Before the season started, we thought that the Central would be a three team race between the defending Divisional and League Champion Cardinals, the reigning Wild Card winning Pirates, and the Wild Card runner-up Reds. Turns out we had the numbers right but mixed up the Reds and Brewers. While Cincy sustained injury after injury (and Jay Bruce), Milwaukee got off to a scorching hot start. They were 20-8 on May 1st, and capitalized on some early struggles in Pittsburgh and St. Louis to build a sizable division lead.
The offensive story as been strong showings from Carlos Gomez, Aramis Ramirez, and the hopefully steroid free Ryan Braun, supporting a Jonathan Lucroy performance that will have him in the MVP discussion come season’s end. On the mound, Yovani Gallardo has regained his old form and leads a strong starting staff.
Or led, anyway. Milwaukee has lost 9 of its last 11 games and starting pitching has been largely at fault. In 5 of those 11 games, opponents scored 15, 13, 10, 9 and 8 runs. Not exactly a recipe for success.
But Milwaukee had been walking a fine line all season. Braun’s first post-Biogenesis campaign has been pretty good, but not up to his typical standards. He has a lower WAR in 113 games this season than he did in 61 last year, and his mark of 1.3 is also the lowest over a full season in his entire career, by far. In fact, other than a ludicrously good season from Lucroy, and a very strong one from center fielder Gomez, Milwaukee has nothing too exciting going on. to think positively, we’ll say they’ve done it with a balanced approach this season. The Brewers don’t rely on one or two stars like some other teams (Tigers, Mariners, etc), instead, it’s a team effort: other than the aforementioned Lucroy and Gomez (5.6 and 4.6, respectively), no one has a WAR above 2.7.
That’s what makes the recent swoon so distressing: everybody seems to have gone into a funk at once. In a division as competitive as the NL Central, that’s not going to work.
The truth is, troubled waters run deeper than a collective funk. A rotation of Gallardo, Kyle Lohse, Matt Garza, Wily Peralta, and Who Ever The Fifth Guy Is This Week, wasn’t going to work forever. Peralta has 15 wins and has thrown well, but he’s rapidly closing in on a career high in innings, a mark set last year. Gallardo’s BABIP is only .285, portending the rapid expiration of luck, and corresponding ERA explosion. Garza’s BABIP is .255, so ther’s only worse in store for him. Lohse and Marco Estrada each have xFIPs above 4.00, so yeah. Even though the Brewers are 2nd in the league in quality starts, they don’t have a single pitcher without serious questions over the home stretch. If anything, they’re all due for a season’s worth of regression over the final month.
The Brewers are a good team, but they are not nearly as good as they’ve played. Their Pythagorean win-loss record has them 3 games worse than they are, and Gomez, Scooter Gennett, and Rickie Weeks all have BABIP’s above .330. Pair that with the tightrope the starting 5 has walked, and things aren’t poised to get better. The Baseball Gods have a way of evening things out, and the Brewers appear ripe for the smiting.
-Max Frankel
PS: As I was writing this, word came out that Carlos Gomez is out for at least (very bad) a week with a wrist injury (much worse). So that’s not going to help.
Editor’s Note: I watched the Gomez wrist injury live, and all I could think was that the managerial ineptitude required to leave him in the entire at-bat should have been cause for immediate dismissal. It looked a lot like Jose Bautista in 2012…
