What’s Brewing in Milwaukee
Posted by Doug Thorburn on Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 3:08 pm
The recent hiring of pitching coach Rick Peterson was a strategic move that could pay huge dividends for the Milwaukee Brewers over the next several seasons. Peterson is an ideal fit in Wisconsin, and his familiarity with Ken Macha should make for a smooth transition in the dugout.
Macha and Peterson were key members of the Oakland coaching staff at the beginning of the decade, manning the bunker under General Art Howe back when the A’s were perennial contenders. Those teams relied on three-headed monsters in the middle of the lineup and at the top of the rotation, with an offense that was anchored by power threats Jason Giambi, Eric Chavez, and Miguel Tejada. The pitching staff was the greatest strength of the franchise, and included the vaunted Big 3 of Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito.
The A’s won a combined 296 games from 2000 to 2002, and in 2003 Macha was promoted from bench coach to succeed Howe as manager. Peterson then worked under Macha for one season before moving east to rejoin the General and take over as pitching coach of the New York Mets.
Peterson garnered national attention for his handling and mentoring of Oakland’s Big 3, as the young trio of aces was considered the cornerstone of the team’s success. Hudson was the first of the three to arrive, making his debut on June 8, 1999, during Peterson’s 2nd year with the club. Mulder and Zito were soon to follow, as each played a significant chunk of the 2000 season in The Show.
Peterson was instrumental to the development of the Big 3 at the Major League level, and guided their overall improvement during his time with the A’s. Following are the numbers for the three horsemen of the Coliseum during Peterson’s reign, with 2004 numbers included to demonstrate the relative impact of the coach’s departure from Oakland (stats via www.baseball-reference.com).
Year IP ERA WHIP BB / 9 K / 9 HR / 9 W – L
2000 449.0 4.29 1.381 3.93 6.71 1.04 36 – 20
2001 678.2 3.43 1.202 2.68 7.15 0.72 56 – 25
2002 675.0 3.05 1.179 2.60 6.57 0.85 57 – 21
2003 658.1 3.03 1.142 2.58 5.96 0.67 45 – 28
2004 627.3 4.17 1.341 2.98 5.82 0.88 40 – 25
The Big 3 showed consistent development as a group while working under Peterson, but they could not sustain that level of growth or success after he left the team. Most young pitchers bounce around statistically, but this trio improved their ERA, WHIP, and walk rates every successive season that they were under his helm, all while keeping the ball in the park. The only negative blip on the radar was a decrease in strikeout rate, which is a trend that is tied to a particular pitching philosophy and will be discussed later.
The most noticeable trend in the above numbers is the impressive walk rate, which was remarkably consistent in the three years following the 2000 rookie season of Mulder and Zito, and which sat comfortably below league average during Peterson’s tenure. As a franchise, the A’s are notorious for their adherence to the take-and-rake philosophy of power and patience on offense, but they also trust the corollary of preventing walks and homeruns as a top priority for the pitching staff.
Looking at the pitchers on a case-by-case basis reveals a bit more of the story.
- Tim Hudson improved his walk rate every year that he worked under Peterson, and even lowered it another notch in 2004 without the aid of his mentor. His rate dropped from 4.1 and 3.6 walks per nine innings in 1999-2000 to rates of 2.7, 2.3, 2.3, and 2.1 from 2001 to 2004.
- Mark Mulder was coach Peterson’s star pupil, improving on a rough rookie campaign to cut his walk rate in half from 4.0 to 2.0 per nine innings in 2001. He maintained a low walk rate throughout his time with Peterson, peaking at 1.9 walks per nine in 2003, but his rates spiked over 3.0 in the years following Peterson’s absence.
- Barry Zito consistently posted the highest walk rates of the three pitchers, with a total that hovered between 3.1 and 3.4 walks per nine innings from 2001 to 2004. Zito’s success was largely due to a very low hit rate, thanks to an effective mix of up-in fastballs and steep benders that helped to offset the free passes. He also suffered the most dramatic setback in the post-Peterson era, as he has been unable to maintain a walk rate below 3.8 since 2005, including an NL-worst rate of 5.1 walks per nine for San Francisco in 2008.
By 2006, each of the Big 3 had moved away from the friendly confines of Oakland in search of greener pastures. Of them, only Hudson maintained his Peterson-era walk rate after embarking on his own. Both Zito and Mulder have been plagued with inconsistency in the last few years, and at least some of their struggles can be attributed to the loss of Peterson as pitching coach.
Zito has had a difficult time with the consistency of his mechanics, and has historically battled to find the proper timing of his delivery. The lefty was notorious for his slow starts in Oakland, and he seemed to struggle to find his rhythm for the first several weeks of every season. The situation has worsened in recent years, and Zito has not been able to harness his timing until far into the summer of some years.
Mulder, on the other hand, has been set back by injuries over the last few years. He has suffered from hip and shoulder woes in the time since Peterson’s departure, and has struggled to stay on the mound while playing with St. Louis. Dave Duncan, the Cardinals’ pitching coach, is renowned for his ability to work with veteran pitchers, but he has not been able to recapture Mulder’s mojo.
Duncan and Peterson are two great pitching coaches, each with his own unique set of tools when working in the bullpen. Peterson is a big proponent of biomechanics research, and has taken advantage of his personal experience with motion analysis to guide much of his instruction. Meanwhile, the Brewers are one of a handful of major league teams that tactically utilize motion capture for evaluation, and they have been doing their own research on pitching and hitting mechanics in recent years.
Motion capture is an excellent tool for the assessment of pitching mechanics. The hi-speed cameras allow one to watch a delivery from any angle at any point in time, and computer software can record very precise physical measurements. The technology enables a coach to evaluate his pitchers with visual accuracy far beyond what his eyes can see, and to breakdown a delivery with functional stats that put numbers to the pitching mechanics.
In baseball, motion analysis has two key applications for evaluating pitchers. The first is to measure mechanical efficiency, in order to determine any weak links in the kinetic chain that should be emphasized in training. The second is the measure of mechanical consistency, which is used to assess the ability to repeat the same physical delivery in the same amount of time for every pitch. Motion analysis brings these ideas together with a system of visual and numerical data that reveals a pitcher’s strengths and weaknesses on the mound.
The Big 3 can attribute much of their success to a focus on consistency and efficiency of mechanics, and each of the Oakland pitchers reaped the resulting rewards in their stat lines. Consistency of timing produced repeatable deliveries that led to low walk rates, and mechanical efficiency bolstered health and effectiveness on the mound. The three pitchers contributed heavy workloads in terms of innings pitched during their full seasons with Peterson, and they did so with minimal wear and tear. The value of this efficiency is evident through Pitcher Abuse Points (PAP), a stat that assigns a point system to the workloads of starting pitchers (PAP numbers via www.baseballprospectus.com).
Year Player IP IP Rank PAP Rank PAP / IP
2001 Hudson 235.0 4 51 171.7
Mulder 229.1 10-t 60 139.6
Zito 214.1 30 46 207.1
2002 Hudson 238.1 5 67 108.8
Mulder 201.1 38 77 96.7
Zito 229.1 9 52 165.5
2003 Hudson 240.0 3 30 219.6
Mulder 186.2 64 58 154.7
Zito 231.2 5 23 289.5
2004 Hudson 188.2 52 31 243.7
Mulder 225.2 8 36 190.8
Zito 213.0 19 13 344.7
Harden 189.2 50-t 22 306.2
These numbers represent the three full seasons that the Big 3 were in the rotation under Peterson, in addition to the 2004 season that was their last spent pitching together in Oakland. The A’s young hurlers consistently ranked near the top of the league in innings pitched from 2001 to 2003, but their respective PAP rankings were much further down the list. 2002 was particularly impressive, as all three starters cracked 200 innings pitched, with Hudson and Zito both ranking in the top 10 in the majors, but none of the Big 3 could be found in the top 50 on the PAP charts
Digging a bit deeper reveals that each pitcher utilized a high degree of efficiency to reduce his workload, as evidenced by the low rates of PAP per inning pitched. All three players improved their PAP rates to relatively harmless levels, which was crucial for a developing pitching staff that featured a 25-year old Hudson and two 23-year old lefties anchoring the 2001 rotation.
The workloads began to increase during Peterson’s last season with the A’s, and 2004 saw new pitching coach Curt Young tax the arms of the Big 3 far beyond their previous experience. The most intriguing case from ‘04 was 22-year old Rich Harden, who put up a higher PAP/IP score in his first full season than any of his rotation mates had registered in the previous three years. These trends show the potential impact that a pitching coach can have on his staff, and how lessons previously learned can fade without consistent instruction.
The Big 3 displayed remarkable efficiency under Peterson, and the term applied to pitch selection, pitch command, and mechanics. Peterson preached the Maddux approach, in which the perfect game would take 27 pitches to register 27 outs, and his three students quickly learned the value of that lesson. The philosophy was guided by concepts such as the disruption of batter timing, staying ahead in the count, forcing the hitter to make bad contact, and trusting the defense.
The result of this philosophy was fewer pitches per inning, less PAP per game, and an optimal walk rate. An emphasis on forcing the batter to make poor contact also had a negative impact on pitchers’ strikeout rates, which is perhaps the lone downside to the Maddux approach. Most statistical models will penalize a pitcher with a low K rate, but in the immortal words of Crash Davis, “Strikeouts are boring. Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some groundballs, it’s more democratic.”
Peterson did not experience as much success with the Mets as he did in Oakland, though in his defense the task was entirely different on each coast. Rather than a stable of young arms to mold, Peterson was faced with a staff in New York that was mostly comprised of post-prime stars and veteran reclamation projects, which happens to be Dave Duncan’s specialty. Future Hall of Famers like Pedro Martinez, Johan Santana, and Tom Glavine were likely not looking to make many tweaks to their mechanics, and other players like Ollie Perez, Kris Benson, Orlando Hernandez, and Victor Zambrano were pitchers with a long history of inconsistency. Peterson made some strides with his personnel in New York, but he found it was tougher to teach the old dogs new tricks.
With Milwaukee, Peterson is walking into a situation that is more similar to Oakland in 2000 than to New York circa 2004. The Brewers have been far too forgiving with the four-ball counts in the recent past, and ranked 3rd in the National League in walks allowed during the 2009 season. Peterson will be asked to help reverse that trend, lest opposing hitters start referring to the city as “Mil-walk-ee,” which Alice Cooper claims is Algonquin for “the free pass.” The Brewers have a recent history of developing great young hitters such as Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun, but they have not had that kind of success on the mound. Their one success, Ben Sheets, failed to survive his first trip to free agency, and most of the hope for the future pitching rotation centers on Yovani Gallardo.
Gallardo has some mechanical flaws in his delivery that are linked to his inconsistent command, and I’m sure that Peterson already has a plan to address the problem. The most glaring mechanical inefficiency for Gallardo is his posture at release point, as his head and spine tilt to the glove side before he finishes the pitch. This is evident in the picture below, and one can see how it contrasts to a pitcher with strong posture such as Pedro Martinez. Peterson encourages his pitchers to have stable posture throughout the delivery, which results in a deeper and more consistent release point, better command, and a lower injury risk. Keep an eye on Gallardo’s posture in 2010, as it will serve as an indicator of his progress.
Behind the scenes, the pitching rebuilding project in Milwaukee has been underway for several years, and the hiring of Rick Peterson may have been the final piece to the mound-shaped puzzle for the Brewers. He and Doug Melvin share a vision when it comes to pitching, one that is committed to science-based evaluation and instruction. Lessons learned from mutual research will pay dividends through the draft and player development, and Peterson will have earned his salary many times over if he can manufacture consistent development and an improved level of production from Gallardo and Manny Parra over the next few seasons.
