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American Family Field - Claws Up
American Family Field
The Brewers’ season ended sooner than they certainly hoped it would but, on the positive side, the extra time is keeping them from having to rush into their offseason decisions. They demonstrated an understanding of that situation on Friday when David Stearns announced in his postseason press conference that the team intended to wait seven to 10 days to make any announcements about the 2022 coaching staff.
Some of the conversations necessary to make those decisions might not take long. Pitching coach Chris Hook, for example, has overcome the challenge of filling highly respected predecessor Derek Johnson’s shoes and likely deserves some of the credit for a pitching staff that did two things extremely well this season:
• Putting pitchers in position to succeed, as demonstrated by a 3.50 team ERA (third best in the National League) and major steps forward for several top contributors.
• Guiding many of those same pitchers through the heaviest workloads of their careers to date while avoiding major injury.
As such, Hook and bullpen coach Steve Karsay have to be considered near locks to be invited back for another season on Craig Counsell’s coaching staff. Beyond the two of them, however, there are some questions to answer.
Bench coach Pat Murphy will likely always have a spot near Craig Counsell in the Brewers’ dugout as long as he wants one. Murphy has known Counsell since their time together when Counsell was a player at Notre Dame and has been a valued voice of experience since shortly after Counsell became the Brewers’ manager in 2015. He’ll also turn 63 in November, however, and survived a heart attack in 2020. It’s possible he could be a candidate for some of this winter’s managerial vacancies, as Will Sammon of The Athletic mentioned, and there’s also a chance his health would be better served by working in a capacity that allows him to contribute without going through the grind of a full MLB season on the road.
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With all due respect to Murphy, though, the coaching decisions most fans will be most interested in involve hitting coach Andy Haines and assistant hitting coach Jacob Cruz. On the whole, the numbers suggest that duo oversaw a league average or slightly better group in 2021: The Brewers finished sixth in the National League in runs scored, eighth in home runs and third in walks.
Trends throughout the season, however, led to some frustration regarding the Brewers’ offense. From the start of the season through May 26 the team batted just .209 with a .295 on-base percentage and .353 slugging as a group. Over the 93-game stretch that followed, shortly after the Willy Adames addition, they improved greatly upon all those numbers by batting .251/.334/.426, respectively. In the final weeks of the season the bats went quiet again, with another .209/.294/.359 stretch in the season’s final 20 games as the Brewers went 8-12. Then, of course, they scored just six runs across four postseason games en route to a disappointing early exit.
Beyond the group production, there’s also the question of how to evaluate a collection of individual performances. Haines and Cruz’s fate may well be determined by how the organization values their role in bounce-back seasons for Omar Narvaez and Avisail Garcia and a breakout campaign for Luis Urias against major disappointments from Christian Yelich, Jackie Bradley Jr. and Keston Hiura.
For another winter one of the biggest questions facing the Brewers is almost certain to be what they can expect from Yelich, who followed up back-to-back MVP candidacies in 2018 and 2019 with performances far below those levels in 2020 and 2021. One of the first decisions they make this offseason may play a role in that conversation: Do they think Yelich and some of their other struggling hitters are most likely to bounce back in the current system, or do they think new voices on the coaching staff will help the Brewers (and their fans) move confidently into a new year?
