The Brewers’ Rough Weekend

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Photo: Milwaukee Brewers - Twitter

Jace Peterson, Rowdy Tellez, Willy Adames, Luis Urias

Jace Peterson, Rowdy Tellez, Willy Adames, Luis Urias

The Brewers had a rough weekend in San Francisco, and even the lone victory raised questions about what could have been.

In top of the second inning of a scoreless game on Thursday night the Brewers’ first three hitters all singled, loading the bases with no one out. The next batter to the plate was Jonathan Davis, however, and he struck out. Then Andrew McCutchen struck out, and so did Willy Adames, and the Brewers failed to plate a run in what seemed like a golden opportunity.

This won’t be the only time this season that Giants pitcher Carlos Rodon strikes out three batters in a row. Rodon has been excellent for the Giants this season, striking out more than eleven batters per nine-innings and posting an NL-low 2.14 Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), a statistic that attempts to remove luck and non-pitching factors from ERA. This particular instance did extend a narrative around the Brewers’ offense, however, and their performance when they load the bases with none out.

All told, through their first 93 games the Brewers have had 17 innings where they’ve had the bases loaded with no one out. On average they’ve scored 2.24 runs in those innings. Off the top, there are two things to take away from those numbers.

• First, that’s a lot of opportunities. As noted in this The Hardball Times feature, in 2019 the Angels had the most bases loaded, no out innings in all of baseball with 29. The 2022 Brewers are on pace to do it 30 times.
• Second, the Brewers’ average performance in those innings is almost exactly in line with expectations. In 2015 Tom Tango, who has gone to work for MLB Advanced Media, published data on expected runs by base/out situations. His numbers show that, across the board, the expected runs in this situation from 1950 all the way through to 2015 was between 2.3 and 2.4. Against that backdrop, the Brewers have underperformed expectations in this situation by about one or two runs across 17 innings.

That average doesn’t quite tell the entire story, however. While the Brewers’ total outcome is roughly in line with expectations, their path there is heavily influenced by a handful of big innings. Among those 17 innings they’ve had six where they scored four or more times, but they’ve also had six where they didn’t score at all. In his data linked above Tango estimates that a team that loads the bases with none out will fail to score, on average, about 14% of the time. The Brewers have done it about 38% of the time.

Furthermore, the Brewers’ performance in these situations likely feels worse than it has been overall because of the nature of the situations where they’ve succeeded and failed. They loaded the bases with none out three different times in an 18-4 win over the Reds on May 4, for example, and scored four, four and five runs in those innings, respectively. The first one blew open what had been a 2-2 game, but the others came when the Brewers were already leading 9-3 and 13-3, respectively. Similarly, the Brewers loaded the bases with none out on their way to an eight-run eighth against Pirates rookie pitcher Cam Vieaux on July 1, but that game was already 9-1 before the inning started.

Their failures, meanwhile, have come at much more visible times. On May 23 they had the bases loaded with none out in the fourth and tenth innings of their game against the Padres and failed to score both times, eventually losing the game 4-3. On June 23 they managed just one run across a pair of innings with the same situation against the Cardinals, a game they perhaps should have blown open but instead held on to win 6-4. By run expectancy, the Brewers had reason to expect almost nine runs across those four innings. They scored one, on a sac fly.

These struggles are also magnified because they match a longstanding narrative about the Brewers’ performance with runners in scoring position. It’s worth noting that the numbers don’t reflect that storyline in 2022: As a team the 2022 Brewers have an .805 on-base plus slugging with runners in scoring position, more than 80 points higher than their overall numbers. They’ve also been better than their overall numbers in situations Baseball Reference identifies as “high leverage.”

In the end, of course, there’s only so much that can be taken away from a small sample. Seventeen innings is certainly not enough to judge a team or a season, and single random events could skew these numbers significantly. While it’s unclear if this performance to date is predictive going forward, one can safely conclude that the Brewers have been relatively good at turning bases loaded, no out situations into big innings, but not great at all at avoiding wiping them out without a single run.