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Hunter Renfroe - Milwaukee Brewers
Hunter Renfroe
The Brewers have managed to tread water across the first 10 games of the 2022 season, but they’ve done it without much help from the offense. They set a new season high on Sunday when they scored six runs, but they still rank among the bottom three in the National League in team batting average (.213), on-base percentage (.298), home runs (5) and runs scored (31).
This is only the third time in the last 25 years where the Brewers have been held to five home runs or fewer in their first ten games, and their 31 runs scored through ten games is the fifth-lowest total in franchise history. Of the four teams below them on that list, none won more than 69 games. The 2018 team, however, scored just 33 times in their first ten games and went on to win 96 games and the NL Central.
And this is clearly not a case of the Brewers running into a tough early schedule: Neither the Cubs nor the Orioles are expected to contend this season and the Cardinals are down from recent years. FanGraphs’ annual positional power rankings had those teams’ starting rotations as the 25th, 26th and 23rd best among the 30 MLB teams. The 10 starting pitchers the Brewers have faced this season had a combined 3.99 ERA in 2021, but collectively they’ve held the Crew to just 13 earned runs across 46 innings this season (a 2.54 ERA).
There are some bright spots, of course: Rowdy Tellez has emerged as a legitimate middle of the order threat and has either scored or driven in nine of the Brewers’ 31 runs. Andrew McCutchen has played in all ten games and reached base 13 times, and he already has two stolen bases after running just seven times all of last year. Victor Caratini, the newest Brewer, has already caught in five games and been a difference-maker at the plate.
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Swing and Miss
Overall, however, the offensive woes that doomed the 2021 club appear to have followed this team into a new season. Across the first two weeks of the year this offense looks startlingly similar to a club that swung and missed a lot a year ago and was prone to long offensive droughts. While it’s certainly too early to panic, the Brewers certainly haven’t done anything in the first ten games to shed a narrative that plagued them last year.
For what it’s worth, the advanced metrics paint a brighter picture for this Brewers team than they did a year ago. In 2021 MLB’s Statcast metrics had the Brewers dead last among the 30 MLB teams in Barrel %, a metric designed to track quality contact on batted balls, as well as Hard Hit % and average exit velocity. Through ten games this season the Brewers are near the middle of the MLB pack in all three of those numbers, an encouraging sign.
Still more good news is the fact that the Brewers have plenty of time to get back on track, and their upcoming schedule continues to be exceedingly favorable: 19 of their next 23 games are against the Pirates, Phillies, Cubs and Reds, all of whom rank in the bottom third of the National League in ERA this spring. The three Pirates starters the Brewers are expected to face this week have yet to finish the fifth inning in any of their five opportunities this season and combine to have just one outing where they’ve allowed fewer than four earned runs. If ever there was a time for the offense to turn the corner, this would seem to be it.
