Did the Brewers finally solve their revolving door situation at first base heading into 2024?
Abbott and Costello would have loved seeing the post-Prince Fielder Milwaukee Brewers, where the quandary of who’s on first has taken on a life of its own with a bit of a spin – who’s at first?
In all, the Brewers have trotted out 60 different players to first base in the 12 seasons since Fielder left for greener pastures – or at least greener dollars – to Detroit in free agency in 2012. Brooks Conrad, Jason Rogers, Shane Peterson and Ryon Healy are just some of the Immaculate Grid legends and Sporcle stumpers from that time.
And even though the spot has been largely a revolving door for the Brewers for more than a decade, never before did they use more first basemen than they did in 2023.
Brosseau. Canha. Caratini. Miller. Ruf. Santana. Singleton. Tellez. Toro. Voit.
Now that 2024 has rolled around, however, there should be a much simpler answer of who’s at first.
Milwaukee signed slugging veteran Rhys Hoskins in late January to a two-year, $34 million contract with an opt-out to primarily man first base. It was by far the most resources – financial or otherwise – that the Brewers have thrown at the position in recent memory.
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Hoskins wasn’t the lone first base acquisition of the winter, either, as the Brewers spun a trade for 28-year-old Jake Bauers from the Yankees in exchange for prospects Jace Avina and Brian Sanchez.
Prospect Tyler Black is also nearing a big-league debut and is capable of playing first, while Owen Miller, Christian Arroyo and Jahmai Jones are all options buried further down the depth chart.
But the Brewers’ hope is their off-season additions Hoskins and Bauers can handle the lion’s share of the work.
At the very least, ten first basemen shouldn’t be needed.
One stat that perfectly displays what Rhys Hoskins can bring
A barrel is the term assigned by Statcast to batted-ball events whose comparable hit types (in terms of exit velocity and launch angle) lead to, on average, a minimum .500 batting average and 1.500 slugging percentage. The number of barrels can then be divided by the total number of plate appearances to determine which players are doing the most expected damage at the plate.
It’s of course only measuring one element of hitting, but on the whole, barrels have a high correlation to overall offensive success. For instance, the Brewers finished 24th in weighted runs created plus – a catch-all stat that measures park-adjusted hitting performance – and were 24th in barrels. The year prior, they were 11th in wRC+ and eighth in barrels, and in 2021, they were 23rd and 22nd, respectively.
This is where Hoskins thrives. Hoskins has barreled the ball up with regularity throughout his career, making the most of much of his hard contact by elevating it.
His barrel rate the last three years has ranked in the 93rd, 94th and 78th percentile across the league.
Hoskins pairs that contact quality with elite plate discipline. He’s owned chase rates in those three years that have ranked in the 80th, 65th and 81st percentiles.
If you simply take Hoskins’ worst years out of his past three in both barrel rate and chase rate – so, 78th percentile barrels and 65th percentile chase, you won’t find a single Brewers hitter who has matched both in a season since Christian Yelich in 2018.
It’s no surprise, then, that the Brewers have not gotten many individual seasons matching Hoskins’ average production in that time.
But there is a reason Hoskins was available for the Brewers to sign
When the Brewers initially signed Hoskins in January, general manager Matt Arnold said he “wasn’t sure we were going to be able to access a player like (Hoskins).” It’s not often the Brewers are signing one of the top bats on the entire free-agent market.
But Hoskins, coming off a torn ACL, was a candidate for a “pillow” contract – a one-year deal to reset his value before hitting the free-agent market once again. It’s the same type of contract the Brewers signed Yasmani Grandal and Mike Moustakas to in 2019.
For the Brewers, it doesn’t carry the same type of financial risk as the types of multi-year deals other teams gave out this winter – even if Hoskins picks up his player option for 2024 there will be at least 20 other deals with more minimum guaranteed money handed out this offseason – but there is still some performance risk despite how good Hoskins has been in his career.
That’s just what comes with the territory with a 31-year-old first baseman coming off a torn ACL and who hasn’t played a competitive game since the 2022 World Series.
Hoskins, of course, passed a closely-scrutinized physical exam before officially signing with the Brewers and by all accounts seems to be returning to the diamond this spring with no restrictions. Athletes are able often able to return to their prior forms after ACL injuries across sports, which is more good news for Hoskins and the Brewers.
We just won’t be able to know for certain if Hoskins will regain his prior form until the season begins.
Jake Bauers may have been snakebit in 2023
Based on surface numbers, Milwaukee’s acquisition of Bauers in November had some of the makings of a head scratcher. Bauers had a .693 OPS for the Yankees last season while striking out over one-third of the time, has never had a year with an OPS above league average in four seasons, is out of minor-league options, will likely only play first base and cost an intriguing lottery ticket prospect in Jace Avina.
Dig just a bit further, though, and it’s not hard to see why he was a target of Milwaukee’s.
Bauer’s underlying batted ball profile showed upper-tier contact quality, though it did not at all match his pedestrian results. Bauers had a hard-hit rate of 48.7% last season which was tied with now-teammate William Contreras for 41st out of 403 qualified hitters across the league. His expected slugging percentage, as calculated by Statcast based off his individual exit velos and launch angles of batted balls, was .480.
Yet Bauers found himself slugging just .413 instead, in large part because he had the third largest gap in baseball between expected slugging and his actual slugging on balls in play.
Now, proclaiming players merely “unlucky” can be walking a very fine rope. Even if the numbers indicate a player should have had better results in the past, it’s no guarantee he will have them in the future. It’s not as if Bauers wasn’t hampering his own chances of finally running into some luck by running a 34% strikeout rate, either.
Whether Bauers maintains a similar contact quality to what he displayed in 2023 remains to be seen. If he can repeat his performance, there’s potential for a breakout.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Rhys Hoskins, Jake Bauers hope to fix Brewers first base situation
