This early in the season, no game is must-win. There are months and months of baseball left to play. Almost nothing has been decided. But still, the Brewers needed yesterday, at least to keep things feeling hopeful in the Cream City. The team’s first win of the season was a 5-0 shutout of the Kansas City Royals. Three of their four NL Central rivals lost. Christian Yelich hit his first home run of the year. Their season wasn’t doomed if yesterday didn’t happen; it’s not magically fixed now. So let’s look into what’s gone wrong so far and decide whether it’s legitimately worrisome or just one week of baseball.
Jackson Chourio Has Started SlowJackson Chourio has been really bad this year. Entering today’s action, he was running a 47.8% strikeout rate and hadn’t walked or homered. To that I say: So what? It’s been five games. You can’t even make a reasonable argument about what happens after he puts the ball in play; before today, he’d hit four fly balls all year, and only had 12 batted balls period, and half of them had been hit hard.
If you want to point to anything as being worrisome, it’d be his approach at the plate. But I don’t think that’s a big cause for concern. Chourio has swung and missed quite a bit this year, but you want to know a secret? Chourio has some swing and miss in his game. In his superlative 2024, he chased more frequently than the league average, swung at pitches in the zone less frequently than average, and made contact at a below-average rate when he did swing. All that, and he still didn’t strike out particularly frequently, because he was very aggressive early in counts and then shortened up, with fewer very hard swings and more contact, in two-strike counts.
Is the strikeout rate scary? Sure, undoubtedly. But take a look at his swinging strike rate, and you’ll see that he’s been in this rough area before. Chourio sometimes swings and misses a lot. He’s streaky, which doesn’t feel out of place for a guy who turned 21 last month. If he keeps striking out this frequently, he can’t succeed, but he simply won’t keep striking out this frequently, or swinging and missing this often.
There is one thing I’m keeping an eye on here, but it’s more out of curiosity than concern. Chourio’s first-pitch strike rate is up this year, and at an unsustainable level. I wondered if he’d done anything to cause that or if it was just fluctuations in the way opposing pitchers have been attacking him, and I think it’s a bit of both. He has chased pitches outside the zone a bit more to start at-bats, but I watched every one of those swings, and they were mostly fastballs up that just barely missed the zone, completely in line with a good attack plan for him. His behavior on in-zone pitches hasn’t changed – he’s actually taken fewer hittable first pitches this year. Stop worrying that this ultra-talented youngster won’t figure things out; it’s been five games and he’s still great.
The Offense Is PunchlessI mean, yeah. That was one of the worries with the Brewers this year. Our positional power rankings, which are based on preseason projections, featured four Brewers offensive positions in the bottom third of the league, with only catcher (William Contreras), left field (Chourio and Yelich), right field (14th, thanks to some spare Chourio playing time landing there), and DH (Yelich) above average. Other than those three guys, offense is going to be hard to come by for this team.
The first week of the season hasn’t changed my opinion on that even a little – but my opinion was already that they were unlikely to score a ton of runs. Replacing Willy Adames with an Oliver Dunn/Vinny Capra platoon and otherwise keeping the same team will do that. Scoring four runs a game all season long would be very bad, but I think that’s unlikely. More reasonably, they’ll settle into a mid-table offense, with below-average batting stats propped up by great baserunning. Nothing I’ve seen in the first week changes that opinion.
What would make me change my opinion? If the rest of the outfield doesn’t hit, I’d start worrying. Sal Frelick and Garrett Mitchell are more renowned for their gloves than their bats, and both sport 100-ish wRC+ projections; Blake Perkins, currently rehabbing from injury, fits the same general mold. That makes them valuable contributors, but if they hit like Frelick has in his career to date (89 wRC+), the runs could start falling off the board quickly. On the other hand, if they can figure out a way to get even league average production at first base, whether it’s a Rhys Hoskins resurgence or more playing time for Jake Bauers in a platoon, I’ll revise my estimate up. But if you’re more worried about Milwaukee’s offense today than you were a week ago, I think you’re going about baseball wrong.
The Starters Can’t Miss BatsYeah, okay, this one is scary! Milwaukee’s plan for the season was Freddy Peralta and a bunch of filler, more or less. Peralta looks like his usual self, with his killer fastball and average secondaries combining to make a nice frontline starter with enough strikeouts to offset any occasional lapses in command. But then the team’s plan shifts from rock-solid to a lot of hope, and quite frankly, I don’t share much of their hope.
Aaron Civale? In this economy?! He’s not going to give up five runs in every start, but I’ve never liked his fit in Milwaukee. He’s a pitch-to-contact fly ball right-hander playing in a launching pad (sixth-homer-friendliest park in the majors per Statcast) that favors lefties even more (fourth-highest lefty homer run park factor). Luckily, he won’t start in Yankee Stadium, an even worse park for him, again this year. But he looked bad in his first outing and promptly hit the IL with a hamstring injury; I wouldn’t count on much from him this year, personally.
Nestor Cortes had an even worse time in the Bronx over the weekend, and with worrying signs of his own. His fastball averaged 90.2 mph, which is a scary stat: Excluding this year, Cortes has racked up 9.3 WAR in seasons where his average fastball velocity exceeded 90 mph and -1.2 WAR in seasons where it’s below 90. He lives in that sweet spot where having a few extra ticks is incredibly important, and he just doesn’t have them right now. Maybe it’s a ramp up thing – historically speaking, he’s started the season about a half a mile an hour below his eventual average velo. But keep an eye on this. Velocity often matters the most for the pitchers right on the fringe of major league-playable fastball speeds.
The other two starters so far this year have been Chad Patrick and Elvin Rodriguez. I don’t think either is going to make many starts this season, but they’ve been completely acceptable. Patrick shut out the Royals, while Rodriguez got torched by them, but they’re both in the rotation as injury stopgaps rather than long-term solutions.
That means that if the starters are going to hold things down, pitchers not currently on the active roster will lead the charge. That starts with Jose Quintana, who isn’t injured, just a late signing who still needs time to ramp up to game shape. He’s eligible to return from his minor league assignment soon, and for me, he’s going to be their number two starter out of the gate. Quintana has some Civale to him – he’s not a strikeout guy, and he’s not a groundball guy – but I like him quite a bit more for this season. As a lefty, he’s a better fit for the park, and he’s more of a neutral batted ball guy than a fly ball pitcher, which also helps; Milwaukee has great defense everywhere, but you can’t hit a grounder out of the park, so that strength matters more for Quintana than Civale.
Brandon Woodruff is due back in late May, though I truly have no idea what he’ll look like when he returns. He’s reportedly sitting in the lower 90s in simulated games and still working through rust, which seems reasonable! His last full season was 2022, and shoulder surgery recovery is notoriously difficult to predict. I have him as more of a wild card with upside than a clear contributor.
That leaves Tobias Myers, who was a pleasant surprise as a rookie last year. He should be back by the end of this month, and while we have him down as their sixth starter, I think I’d prefer him to Civale right now, and potentially to Cortes depending on how his velocity trends. He’s yet another pitch-to-contact guy, and he’s also a fly ball righty, so I’m not saying it’s a great situation, but his deceptive, backspinning fastball means that at least he’s getting some whiffs and pop ups to even things out.
Is this section longer than the rest of the entire article combined? Yes. But that’s because it’s a huge worry. The Brewers won’t keep pitching this poorly, but the starting rotation as currently constructed is quite bad. It’s the kind of group that gets you into a lot of slugfests, and the Brewers aren’t really equipped for those kinds of games. Quintana, Myers, and Woodruff will need to be very good this year. Now, was that true before the season? Yep. But it’s a lot more clear after seeing what the current situation looks like.
The Bullpen has a 10.03 ERANope, don’t care. Milwaukee’s relievers have barely pitched in a close game. Closer Trevor Megill has an average entry leverage of 0.08. One is average; closers average closer to two. Megill was at 1.86 last year. In other words, the bullpen statistics are warped by the fact that Milwaukee starters have allowed 19 runs in 18.2 innings of work, and also by the fact that the starters have managed only those 18.2 innings in five games.
This looks like a pretty good bullpen to me, but when the top three pitchers in terms of innings pitched are the three last guys out of the ‘pen – and infielder Jake Bauers is tied for fifth – it’s probably too early to draw conclusions. Megill might be too belligerent for my tastes when it comes to torpedo bats, but he and his end-of-game counterparts were awesome last year during Devin Williams’ early-season absence, and they continued to deliver down the stretch. If the starters force them into an untenable workload, the so-so depth might be an issue, but if that happens, there are bigger problems anyway. If you’re wondering what’s wrong, look elsewhere.
So there you have it: After five games, the Brewers aren’t hopelessly down and out. In fact, we haven’t learned much new about them. Their offense is neither great nor terrible. Their starting pitching is thin, and it was always going to start the season even thinner thanks to injuries and late signings. If you made me pick a team that might give up some crooked numbers in the first series of the year, I probably would have picked this banged-up group against one of the best offenses in baseball.
The bigger issue? Going 1-4 to start the year isn’t great. It’s a small problem, obviously, not even 1/20th of the full season. But the NL Central might be closely contested this year. Before the season, our odds had all five teams within five games of each other and all of them with at least a 20% chance of making the playoffs. The only other division with that much parity is the vaunted AL East. Starting the season in the cellar is a bummer when everyone has such a similar talent level. Our playoff odds have dinged Milwaukee’s chances of making the playoffs by 14 percentage points, and it has nothing to do with a changing estimation of team talent. It’s entirely down to the fact that the race is likely to be close and they’re already 1.5 games behind the division favorite. Is that a ton? No, it’s not. But razor-thin margins work that way.
Should you be worried about the Brewers? Yeah, I think so. But you should have been a little worried a week ago, too, when you looked at the projected rotation. It’s hard to imagine a worse four-game stretch to kick things off. But it’s only four games! They won their fifth! As I’m writing this, they’re tied 1-1 with the Royals. That run? A Chourio homer! If the offense starts putting Bernie on his slide a bit more frequently, particularly against the Cubs, this will all feel very foolish. It’s April 2, and content never sleeps, so a check-in was merited. But if you’ve meaningfully changed your opinion on how good Milwaukee’s team will be this year, I think you’re overreacting.
