Photo credit: Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club
As we all begin to look ahead to 2021, we’re once again reminded that the Brewers have some work to do to prepare for a new baseball season. They’re not alone on that front: With the small exception of a few free agent signings most teams appear to have deferred their offseason moves into the new year, and most of the winter’s largest questions remain unanswered.
The slow pace of the offseason creates an additional challenge for the people tasked with updating various MLB projection models, adding a new hurdle to a task that would already have been harder than usual. This winter the purveyors of those models already had to figure out how to weigh the data from 2020’s abbreviated season.
There is some good news for Brewers fans in those projections, however, and it starts at the top: Both Steamer and ZiPS, two of the first 2021 projections available, expect Christian Yelich to rebound nicely from a frustrating and challenging 2020 season. With the exception of his health, just about everything that could have gone wrong for Yelich in 2020 did so: He was generally less aggressive at the plate but struck out more often and was plagued by bad luck on balls in play, where he batted just .259 despite setting a new career high with an average exit velocity of 94 mph. In 2018, for comparison purposes, Yelich batted .373 on balls in play with an average exit velocity of 92.6 mph.
While Steamer and ZiPS both stop short of projecting another MVP-caliber season for Yelich in 2021, they both suggest he’ll return to star-caliber performance. Even splitting the difference between Yelich’s big years in 2018 and 2019 and his disastrous 2020 leaves him with a .280 batting average, .389 on-base and .531 slugging in Steamer. FanGraphs estimates Yelich was worth 7.6 wins above replacement in 2018 and 7.8 in 2019; both projection models have him somewhere around 4.5 for 2021.
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Yelich has some company atop the Brewers’ projections this year in the form of budding ace starter Brandon Woodruff. Woodruff has somewhat quietly posted an ERA under 3.75 in each of the last three regular seasons and took a nice step forward in 2020, where he started 13 games (more than one-fifth of the Brewers’ contests) and had a 3.05 ERA and 11.1 strikeouts per nine innings. In the intro to the ZiPS projections Dan Szymborski wrote that Woodruff “continued to display ace potential,” and said he was “mildly surprised he didn’t pick up a stray vote or two at the back of Cy Young ballots.”
The biggest question with Woodruff is his ability to hold up as a rotation workhorse over the duration of a full season. Steamer projects Woodruff to log 185 innings in 2021, which would be over 60 more than he’s ever worked at that level before. A full season from him, however, projects at around four wins above replacement. According to Baseball Reference the Brewers have only had one pitcher reach that plateau in the last 12 seasons.
The projection news isn’t all good for the Brewers, however, and some of the positional question marks are really highlighted here. ZiPS’ efforts to build a projected depth chart for the Brewers have them giving significant playing time to all of the following:
- Lucas Erceg, a one-time top prospect who has struggled at the upper levels of the minors, is currently listed as one of the prime candidates to play third base. Erceg struggled at the plate at the AAA level in 2019 and didn’t fare much better in a brief stint for the independent Sugar Land Lightning Sloths in 2020 and has been left unprotected in the Rule 5 Draft each of the last two offseasons.
- Recent waiver claim Billy McKinney is projected to claim some playing time in right field alongside Avisail Garcia. He’s a former first round pick and has experienced some success in the minors but is a career .231 hitter with a .291 on-base in 124 games in the majors over the last three seasons.
- With limited clear candidates elsewhere on the roster, Keston Hiura is projected to split time with Ryan Vogelbach at first base. Hiura has never played first base at any professional level and Vogelbach has started just 77 of his 244 MLB games at that position, having been used primarily as a designated hitter.
So, as the countdown to spring training gets underway in the new year the Brewers find themselves roughly where they were three months ago: While there is some reason for optimism about several individual performers on this roster, there are still a lot of questions left to answer before they’ll be ready to play ball.
