Milwaukee Brewers: PECOTA Predicts a Losing Record in 2020

With a number of unknowns surrounding this Milwaukee Brewers team in 2020, PECOTA is projecting a losing season ahead.

For a Milwaukee Brewers team that is coming off of two straight postseason appearances, which is something that has happened just one other time in team history, we saw an unusual offseason full of roster turnover.

High-profile players like Yasmani Grandal and Mike Moustakas went elsewhere via free agency. Meanwhile players like Junior Guerra, Chase Anderson, Zach Davies, and Travis Shaw among others, who all played important roles in the team’s success the last few seasons were either let go or traded.

While the hope of many Brewers fans was that those players would be replaced with a big name or two that would provide some more fire power, GM David Stearns instead opted to fill the roster with low-cost talent that has the potential for bounce-back seasons, but they also come with low floors as well.

The result is a Brewers’ payroll that at this point has been cut by 20 percent from last year’s Opening Day number and a lot of uncertainty surrounding this roster.

So far we’ve seen a few record predictions for the upcoming season that have the Milwaukee Brewers as a borderline playoff team. USA Today predicts that they will finish 84-78, which puts them at third place in the NL Central, and missing the final wildcard spot by one game.

Then we have Fanraphs ZiPS projections which predicts this Brewers team finishing with a WAR of 38.1. And if we extrapolate that out using the Unifying Replacement Level Theory, it puts them around the 86 win mark.

However today, Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA record projections were released and to put it simply, they are not a fan of the offseason moves that the Milwaukee Brewers made.

And for those unfamiliar with PECOTA, here is a quick synopsis of how it projects player and team performance:

"“PECOTA, which stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm, is BP’s proprietary system that projects player and team performancePECOTA is a system that takes a player’s past performance and tries to project the most likely outcome for the following season. It looks at all of the numbers, and all the numbers that make up the numbers, to see which players are more likely to repeat their success and which ones benefited from good fortune.”"

In 2019 the Brewers squeaked into the playoffs with a record of 89-73, but PECOTA is projecting a big drop-off with a final record of just 79-83 in 2020. This places them in fourth place in the NL Central behind everyone except the Pittsburgh Pirates.

PECOTA gives the Brewers just a 9.7 percent chance of winning the division and only a 20.3 percent chance of making the playoffs this season. Not to mention that as most are expecting the NL Central is going to be a very difficult division with the Cincinnati Reds as the projected champion with just 86 wins, the fewest of all the division winners.

And while yes, it is only a projection, take it as you will but last year PECOTA projected that Milwaukee would finish with 87 wins. Which as I mentioned earlier, was only two off from their actual total.

As Stearns has conducted this mini-rebuild on the fly, it’s left a lot of question marks, some of which includes third base, the depth of the starting rotation, the overall defense, the reliability of the bullpen, and who will replace the lost production from Grandal and Moustakas?

With Christian Yelich on an extremely team friendly deal, Lorenzo Cain still under contract, Ryan Braun coming off of a very good season, and Keston Hiura beginning his first full season at the big league level, most will agree that the Milwaukee Brewers’ World Series window is still wide open.

However, based on how many fans feel, as well as the PECOTA projections, as of now it appears that the Brewers didn’t do nearly enough this offseason to maximize 2020. Although as we’ve seen in the past, you can never truly count out Stearns and Craig Counsell.