Photo Courtesy Scott Paulus/Milwaukee Brewers
We’ve endured a long 182 days since the last time the Milwaukee Brewers played a game that counted in the standings, but today that drought ends as Miller Park reopens its doors to host the Brewers and San Francisco Giants at 1:10 p.m.
The 2016 season will likely feature a strong focus on individual storylines: As a group this team is at best unlikely to make any significant run towards postseason play, but this roster is heavily laden with players with something to prove. Wily Peralta, making his first Opening Day start and the first of two starts in the Brewers’ first two series, is a perfect example of that.
Peralta, a one-time top prospect, turns 27 in May. Statistically, he’s entering the likely prime years of his MLB career. After years of discussing what he might be someday, the time has come for him to be the pitcher he’s going to be. As I noted on Twitter over the weekend, Peralta is only the 20th youngest Opening Day starter in Brewers franchise history (but just the second pitcher to bat eighth in a season opener). By this point in their respective careers Ben Sheets and Yovani Gallardo had already made a combined seven Opening Day starts.
Unfortunately, in addition to any first-time Opening Day jitters and pressure to turn a corner as a pitcher, Peralta also has some work to do to overcome a disappointing 2015 season. After making 32 starts each in 2013 and 2014, he missed more than two months in 2015 with an oblique injury and struggled down the stretch, posting a 6.32 ERA in his final seven appearances and allowing opposing batters to hit .341 with a .414 on-base percentage and .532 slugging against him.
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Peralta posted career-worst strikeout rates (just five per nine innings), hit rates (10.8 per nine) and home run rates (1.2 per nine) in 2015, and his peripheral numbers suggest it wasn’t a fluke: His player page at FanGraphs shows that opposing batters made hard contact on almost a third of the balls they put in play against Peralta last season, the highest rate of his career. As indicated by his reduced strikeout rate, hitters were putting the ball in play more often than ever before, and they were doing so with more authority.
There is a potential explanation for this change: Peralta’s player card at Brooks Baseball shows that his velocity was down noticeably in 2015 on three of his four pitches, his four and two-seam fastball and slider. The difference is slight, between a mile and a half and two miles per hour on the fastballs and between two and three miles per hour on the slider, but the difference could be significant. When Peralta’s velocity dropped in 2015, opposing batters responded by making more contact and Peralta’s swinging strike rate dropped nearly 20%. Radar gun readings are not reliably available during spring training, so this week will be our first opportunity to see if Peralta’s velocity is back to normal.
Throughout this first week of the season we’ll see a cavalcade of new data, small sample size trends and anomalies to wade through in an effort to figure out what’s real. If you’re looking for a number to focus on during Monday and Sunday’s games, though, I’d suggest glancing occasionally at the speed of Peralta’s pitches. If you’re regularly seeing numbers in the upper 90’s, it could be a good sign that he’s prepared for a bounce-back season.
