PHOTO CREDIT: Evan Casey
It has sometimes gone without noticing, but Milwaukee’s current fans are witnessing the best generation of Brewers baseball. This week they’ll begin postseason play for the third time this decade, matching the total from the franchise’s first 42 years of existence. In late August, just as the Brewers were beginning to turn a corner to contention, they also achieved a milestone: They have over 800 wins in a decade for just the second time in franchise history. Thursday’s win gave them 824 wins in the 2010’s, breaking the record they set with 804 in the 1980’s.
The decade, however, has been split into two runs of success for the organization, and two teams that followed very different paths to a contending destination. While the 2018 and 2019 Brewers have christened phrases like “run prevention unit” and “initial out getter” and gotten through games with an all hands-on deck approach on the mound, the 2011 team followed the opposite blueprint.
While many of 2011’s memorable moments featured Brewers hitters, the starting rotation carried the lion’s share of the load in a 96-win season. Randy Wolf, Yovani Gallardo and Shaun Marcum each accumulated over 200 innings pitched, a feat only one Brewer has managed since (Gallardo again in 2014). Milwaukee used just six starting pitchers all season, with Marco Estrada filling in when Zack Greinke wasn’t ready for Opening Day. A Brewers starting pitcher completed the sixth inning in 117 of the team’s 162 games, the most by this franchise since the 1982 team had 121 such outings.
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The 2019 Brewers are following the opposite plan, continuing to find success by de-emphasizing the role of starting pitcher. Twelve different hurlers have taken the mound to start a game for the Brewers this season and just one (Zach Davies) has done so 30 times. A Brewers starting pitcher has lasted six innings in a game just 37 times this season, easily the least in franchise history and the third lowest in MLB history. The Brewers’ previous franchise low was 56, set last season, and before that they also set full season franchise lows in 2017 (67) and 2016 (71).
The Brewers’ movement towards early hooks and bull penning shows up in another statistic: 2019 is the first season in franchise history where the organization will not have a single pitcher qualify for the league ERA title by pitching one inning per team game, with Zach Davies coming up just short at 159 2/3 over 162 games. 2018 was just the fifth time in franchise history the Brewers had only one qualifier, with Jhoulys Chacin as the only one to log that much work. This season’s Brewers team has just four pitchers that even reached 100 innings: Davies, Chase Anderson, Brandon Woodruff and Adrian Houser.
The Brewers are not, of course, the only team following this trend. They are, however, the only team doing so successfully: Five MLB teams will not have an ERA title qualifier in 2019 but the four others, the Angels, Orioles, Padres and Blue Jays, all fell well short of postseason contention. The Angels, beset by injuries and the untimely passing of Tyler Skaggs, nearly went through the entire season without any pitcher logging 100 innings, much less 162.
At times it’s hard to believe how much the management of pitching staffs has changed within a decade across Major League Baseball. The Brewers, however, have bookended the most successful decade in franchise history with postseason berths earned both the old way and the new way.
