Photo via Brice Turang - Instagram
Brice Turang leading off
Brice Turang
The Brewers won three games in the last week where they scored two runs or fewer, a familiar story for a team whose pitching staff finished first in the National League in earned run average but whose offense was last in total bases last season. The way the Brewers scored runs in those games, however, is a pretty significant difference from some of the criticisms this team faced a year ago.
The first of the three wins came on Wednesday, when Brice Turang singled, stole second base and came home on Blake Perkins’ ground ball single in a 1-0 victory over the Padres. Friday’s 2-1, 10-inning win over the Cardinals turned when William Contreras grounded a single up the middle to give the Brewers the lead. Finally, both of the runs in Sunday’s 2-0 win over Saint Louis also came when Blake Perkins and Brice Turang singled, Turang stole second base and Owen Miller drove them both home with a single.
In an era where teams are often accused of only swinging for the fences, the Brewers are putting the ball in play. They’re in the bottom half of the league in strikeout percentage and swing-and-miss percentage. They’re trading some power for contact, however: They’re hitting the ball on the ground more often than the average MLB team, and they’re below the league average for exit velocity.
The Brewers are also, however, being inordinately rewarded for making soft contact. Before Sunday’s games they were leading all of Major League Baseball with 31 infield hits on the season, including six each for Willy Adames and William Contreras. Across the sport players have a .515 on-base plus slugging on ground balls this season, but the Brewers entered play on Sunday at .692. That’s 83 points better than any other team, which is bigger than the gap between second place (the Phillies at .609) and 14th place (the Diamondbacks, .517).
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Team Speed Increased
The Brewers are well positioned to take advantage of balls hit into play on the ground at least in part because their team speed is significantly better than a year ago. There are only 26 players in baseball this season with an average sprint speed of 28.9 feet per second or above but the Brewers have three of them in Turang (29.3), Oliver Dunn (29.1) and Sal Frelick (28.9). Among the 13 Brewers who have played enough to have a Statcast ranking, only four (Gary Sanchez, William Contreras, Christian Yelich and Rhys Hoskins) are below average in sprint speed and five (Turang, Dunn, Frelick, Blake Perkins and Jackson Chourio) are in the 80th percentile or better.
The level of success the Brewers are achieving on suboptimal contact, however, seems to be higher than their speed alone can account for. The Brewers are batting .333 on balls in play this season, the second highest mark in baseball and 41 points higher than the league average. Baseball Savant uses Statcast data to produce “expected” statistics based on the quality of a team’s contact, attempting to remove luck from the equation. By their measures the Brewers are batting 28 points higher than their quality of contact would suggest they should, hitting .279 as compared to an xBA of .251. They’re also outpacing their expected slugging percentage by 23 points (.451 vs .428) and their weighted on base average (wOBA) by 25 points. Their .356 actual wOBA is the second best in baseball, while their expected figure ranks eighth.
It remains to be seen if the Brewers can maintain this pace or if their current run of success on suboptimal contact will prove to be an outlier. For now, however, they’re certainly defying one of the game’s most prominent trends.
