Milwaukee Brewers Bizarre Opening Day Starter Curse
By Kenny Jilek
2016 – The sinker strikes again
Alright, I had fun with that Lohse fun fact so we’ll just do one for everyone on this list. When Wily Peralta was a kid in the Dominican Republic, he and his friends used to play catch with lemons and cardboard gloves because they didn’t have a baseball to play with.
Peralta was destined to fail as the 2016 Opening Day starter. He put together one successful season two years prior in 2014 when he threw 198 2/3 innings with an ERA of 3.53 and won 17 games and an ok season in 2013 that was highlighted by a complete game shutout when Logan Schafer hit a 2-run home run for the only runs of the game. There’s a fun fact for free.
His 2015 season was not good. He was 5-10 with a 4.72 ERA and 1.537 WHIP. There didn’t seem to be many better options, however, and he was put on the mound for game one of 162.
It turned out there were many better options. He had the worst ERA of any Milwaukee Brewers pitcher to start more than six games at 4.86. He was 7-11 for the season and just couldn’t find his footing.
Anyone who watched the Brewers extensively while Peralta was here will remember how much he loved his power sinker. His sinker was never great. Even in his good season in 2014 opposing batters hit .311 against it, but it was only his third most thrown pitch.
The trouble began in 2015 when it became his most thrown pitch at 33.8 percent. Even that year batters only hit .303 against it. An average of .303 sounds bad, but I say “only that much” because it got even worse in 2016.
In 2016 he threw the sinker at a career-high rate of 37.2 percent of his pitches. That proved to not be a good decision, as opponents hit an eye-popping .347 against it. When opponents hit .347 against your favorite pitch, that probably means you should change it.
He made this adjustment the next year when it went back down to third most, and in 2018 he threw it just once. This could not keep him from suffering the same fate of bullpen relegation that Kyle Lohse suffered.
Luckily for the Milwaukee Brewers, newcomer Junior Guerra stepped up and pitched to a 9-3 record and 2.81 ERA and kept the Brewers somewhat afloat at a record of 73-89, earning the ace distinction for the next season.