Milwaukee Brewers’ Offense Struggles Early On in 2020 Simulation

In Baseball Reference’s simulated season, the Milwaukee Brewers find themselves above. 500 but it’s been a rough start for the offense early on.

Unfortunately, while we should be having real Milwaukee Brewers baseball taking place, the season still remains suspended for the time being. So this means that we’ve had to get creative to help fill the void that no baseball has left.

To help us with that, Baseball-Reference has been holding a simulated season for every team using Out Of The Park’s (OOTP) computer software. For those unfamiliar, OOTP allows you to manage your favorite baseball team over the course of an MLB season but obviously for this scenario, Baseball-Reference lets the computer do the work to take any biases or unwanted variables out of the equation.

And when it comes to the Milwaukee Brewers, who are 20 games into the current season, they’ve had mixed results so far but still sit above .500 at 11-9 overall. However, they’ve had their fair share of struggles as a team at the plate.

While this is only a simulation, poor offensive production is an actual worry for this Brewers team in 2020. Despite making the playoffs two straight seasons, GM David Stearns elected to let two big bats leave via free agency – Yasmani Grandal and Mike Moustakas – and chose to replace them and others who were let go with low-cost free agents that have the potential to produce, but they also have low floors if things go south.

It’s a bit of a risk that Stearns and Company are hoping pays off, but so far through the 20 simulated games, at least offensively, it has not.

As a team, the Brewers have 11 games where they’ve scored three runs or less and an additional four games where they’ve scored four. Even with a few big games that include 8, 9, and 12 runs, overall they are averaging a measly 3.85 runs per game. In long the run that just isn’t going to cut it.

One issue is that the new guys, minus Omar Narvaez, aren’t producing at all. In 60 plate appearances, Avisail Garcia is batting .218 with a .720 OPS, while Eric Sogard and Brock Holt aren’t doing much better. Over 69 plate appearances, Sogard is hitting just .215 with a .645 OPS and Holt is batting .214 with a .690 OPS in his 34 plate appearances.

And even worse off is Justin Smoak who is hitting a lowly .155 with a .466 OPS over his 63 plate appearances. Yikes.

Meanwhile, Lorenzo Cain hasn’t bounced-back at all, in fact, he’s struggling even more at the plate. So far he is batting only .211 with a .605 OPS. On top of that, Keston Hiura is having his own issues with a .200 average and .639 OPS.

As far as the shortstop position goes, Luis Urias is yet to see a plate appearance which means Orlando Arcia has once again been Milwaukee’s go-to starter. However, despite a nice start to Spring Training, as we’ve seen in the past, his production has dropped off drastically with a .185 average and .520 OPS up to this point.

The few bright spots offensively include Christian Yelich (duh), Ryan Braun, Omar Narvaez, and Jedd Gyorko, although it’s worth pointing out that Gyorko only has 10 plate appearances. But it still might be time for Craig Counsell to start giving him more at-bats.

Although in terms of offensive production, the start to the season has been less than ideal for the Milwaukee Brewers, they still sit above .500 and of course, it’s a long season with plenty of time for these struggling players to turn it around. Let’s just hope that’s the case.