MILWAUKEE -- The Brewers hope Willy Adames’ two-homer, five-RBI game in Friday’s 7-1 win in Cleveland is the beginning of a jump-started offense. They have spent most of the first half trying to get middle-of-the-order bats such as Adames’ going, and it’s fair to ask about the hitting coaches’ role in this.
Manager Craig Counsell addressed that question during a series against the D-backs this week in which the Brewers were held to three hits apiece in the two losses -- their 18th and 19th games this season scoring one or fewer runs.
Last year, the Brewers had 26 such games all season. This year’s club is last in the National League with a .677 OPS. Their current pace of 4.07 runs per game would be the Brewers’ lowest output since 2015, though the higher-scoring summer months are still to come.
“I think one of the things in baseball that’s complicated is that the job of a hitting coach and a pitching coach are almost completely different jobs. It’s almost like a different industry,” Counsell said. “You’re training for a different thing. One guy starts the action, starts with the ball. That leads to a lot of different ways to help those players. The other person is completely reacting to something that’s thrown at them.
“That’s where we start. A lot of the hitting coach’s job is just to know the person very well so they can go through that checklist of, ‘This is what happens when things are going good,’ or, when things are going bad, to get back on the right track.”
The common, knee-jerk reaction when things are going bad for a Major League lineup is to blame the hitting coach, or coaches, plural, which is the case almost everywhere across the sport now. The Brewers have had multiple hitting coaches since hiring Ozzie Timmons and Connor Dawson after dismissing Andy Haines following the 2021 season.
But taking emotion and frustration out of it, it’s not necessarily that easy.
One, hitting coaches don’t assemble the team, and the Brewers officials who did assemble the team were not necessarily expecting an offensive juggernaut. They built the team to win with pitching and defense, and attempted to make the offense a little bit better by acquiring William Contreras’ bat at catcher (that move has paid off) and former producers such as Jesse Winker and Brian Anderson.
Two, the performance of hitting coaches does not always directly translate to the performance of hitters. That’s always been one of the hardest things to explain in baseball, a sport that demands as much -- probably more -- from a hitter mentally, than it does physically. You’ll never convince critics of hitting coaches of that, but those within the walls of the clubhouse will tell you it’s true.
“I think we consider hitting more psychological,” Counsell said, “because it’s tougher to fail more. There’s more failure in the job. It’s a lower success rate, hitting. No matter who you are, that’s harder, mentally.
Two hitting coaches, Counsell said, is merely a reflection of how the volume of work in the job has changed. With so much more information available, it takes more smart people to distill and disseminate it.
And it’s worth noting the areas in which Brewers hitters have done well. If you want them to be selective, they have been, with a 26.3 percent chase rate that ranks eighth-best in baseball, according to Statcast data.
“The job of hitting coaches is to meet before, early, before the players come, and get on the same page about what’s coming today and what we’re going to do with the scouting plan for the [opposing] pitcher, and what we’re going to do for each hitter,” Counsell said. “There should be differences of opinion. There is on the pitching side, too. Then you come to one conclusion and go with it.”
For comparison, here are the Brewers’ OPSes by year during the full seasons of the Counsell era:
2016: .729 (18th)
2017: .751 (15th)
2018: .747 (9th)
2019: .767 (12th)
2020: .702 (24th)
2021: .713 (20th)
2022: .724 (10th)
2023: .680 (27th)
And their runs per game:
2016: 4.14 (t-25th)
2017: 4.52 (t-20th)
2018: 4.63 (12th)
2019: 4.75 (t-15th)
2020: 4.12 (27th)
2021: 4.56 (12th)
2022: 4.48 (10th)
2023: 4.07 (24th)
And arguably the best measure, wRC+, which is useful because it’s normalized across ballparks and seasons. In other words, it’s helpful to compare the Reds in their hitter’s haven to the Padres in a pitcher’s park to the Brewers, who, believe it or not, play in a relatively neutral setting at American Family Field.
2016: 92 (23rd)
2017: 94 (19th)
2018: 100 (10th)
2019: 97 (14th)
2020: 90 (25th)
2021: 92 (23rd)
2022: 104 (11th)
2023: 86 (28th)
That final metric is particularly good because it’s adjusted such that 100 is average, and every point above and below represents a percentage. So, believe it or not again, the Brewers best offensive season in the Counsell/David Stearns/Matt Arnold era was 2022, the first season with Timmons and Dawson working with the hitters.
The concept, perpetuated on social media, that they’ve been bad at scoring runs every year just isn’t true. Neither is the concept that a team can magically replace half of the lineup in the middle of the season.
The truth is this: The Brewers need more from the hitters they are counting on in the middle of the lineup.