The Brewers made the playoffs for the first time in 26 years mostly off of the pitching staff’s second-half excellency. It’s been well-documented how incredible CC Sabathia was, so we don’t hear that again. With the loss of Sabathia and (assumingly) Sheets to free agency, the rotation is going through a major change (and downgrade). Let’s take a look at the projected pitching staff and figure out just what we can expect from them in 2009.

Starting pitching

Last year’s starting pitching was obviously anchored by two of the best starters in the game. They are now gone. Doug Melvin has done nothing to try and replace those guys, but instead is relying on his young pitching staff to recreate their performance. Let’s break down the projected rotation starter by starter.

Yovani Gallardo
Gallardo was injured for most of the year, as everyone knows, so his contributions to the club were minimal in 2008. Luckily his problems were entirely related to a freak play where he hyperextended his ACL and not a continual arm problem due to poor mechanics or overuse. He threw only 24 innings the entire year, including a 4-inning stint to start off the 2008 postseason for Milwaukee.

He throws a low-90s fastball with an excrutiating curveball and good slider. A young, cost-controlled, three-plus-pitch pitcher with little to no injury history due to mechanical problems? Sign me up.

Projections for Gallardo vary wildly to the point where one could project any combination of innings pitched/ERA and it’d be a reasonable projection based on one of the three main ways numbers are determined (Bill James, CHONE, and Marcel projections). For example, Bill James expects Yo to throw nearly 200 innings of wonderful ball, with more Ks than innings pitched and a 3.15 FIP ERA. Marcel, on the other hand, doesn’t think he’ll appropriately rebound from his injury last year, and will throw 79 good innings with a 3.65 FIP ERA. 79 innings means he’s either injured, demoted, or both; judging by the numbers he’s going to put up, I don’t see him getting sent down to AAA for seasoning any more.

While most people think of “projections” as what experts and computers “think” a player is going to do, that’s not actually true. Projections are merely a mean of “what-if” seasons played. For example, if you imagine a million hypothetical Brewer seasons next year, it’s possible that Gallardo throws 220 innings with a 2.65 FIP ERA and 11 K/9. It’s also possible that Gallardo has continual arm problems through the year and struggles mightily with only 60 innings and a 5.5 ERA. It’s a projection based on average seasons, so these things are inaccurate. With that said, we can reasonably expect Yovani Gallardo to be Milwaukee’s #1 starter in 2009.

Manny Parra
Parra emerged last year as a legitimate #3 starter behind Ben Sheets and CC Sabathia, posting pretty good numbers, except for his high walk totals. Last year, Parra was doing pretty well until his final few appearances of the year, which may have been related to fatigue, as he had a substantial innings-pitched jump from 2007 to 2008. Usually anything over 25 additional innings pitched in a year is cause for concern, because not only is the pitcher deflated, it also leads to poor mechanics which makes for a high injury risk.

Last year, Parra threw 166 innings, which is far more than he has at any point in his career, which is a bit concerning to me because he came off rotator cuff surgery in 2005. What’s most concerning about Parra is that he’s had only one other season of 100+ IP since joining the minors, so his workload is a little concerning, especially since rotator cuffs have a tendency to reoccur. Projections for Parra don’t get any higher than 150 innings, so it’s imperative that Milwaukee has depth at starting pitching as it’s not unlikely that Parra will go down sometime throughout the year with a major injury or a reirritation of his rotator cuff.

I also don’t like the mechanics he displays in this picture don’t make me too happy, either. There’s too much stressed being placed on his shoulder when he whips it around. That tells me that I might see more headlines of “Shoulder soreness lands Parra on DL” than I’d like to see.

Jeff Suppan
Jeff Suppan is Milwaukee’s version of the overrated, overpaid pitcher who gained instant credibility due to a good run pitching in 2005′s playoffs for the St. Louis Cardinals. Hidden behind that small stretch of good pitching, however, is an “innings-eater,” which, in other words, means a below-average pitcher with a rubber arm who is only out there because he’s dependable. It’s kind of like sending Brett Favre out to play with the Jets — he might be good, he will probably be bad, but you know he’s going to go out there and play. Whether or not you’re satisfied with 22TD and 22INT in a season is up to you to decide.

Considering the state of 2009′s rotation, I don’t mind seeing Suppan in there at all. Losing CC Sabathia and Ben Sheets and keeping Suppan in the rotation is obviously a blow, but it’s not as if the Brewers have the immediate resources to compete in 2009 anyway, so having a below average starter who will post around a 4.7 ERA while tossing 200 innings in a transitional period isn’t the biggest cause for my concern. Unless, of course, we can pawn him and his contract off to a sucker team who thinks that he’s above average. But I don’t think that’s likely, because everyone who’s well as anyone knows that Suppan is what he is– a rubber arm who can give you 175-200 innings a year, which is still a valuable commodity to have.

Dave Bush
Comparing 2008 with his other major league years, Dave Bush had a career year in 2008. He posted a 4.18 ERA in 185 innings last year, including a great stretch run that helped propel Milwaukee to the postseason. Dig a little bit deeper, though, and it’s clear that his season was very lucky and fluky.

Despite Bush’s lowest ERA of his career since his short stint coming up from AAA with Toronto in 2004, his FIP was the highest it’s ever been. His low ERA was largely driven by an incredibly low .245 BABIP last year, which over the course of two seasons should be impossible since his LD% has been fairly consistent at just below 20%. His BABIP should be on the other side of .300, and an extra 70 points (or more, if he’s unlucky) on opposing batters would make an incredible adjustment to Bush’s actual pitching performances.

Even more, Bush’s ground balls were down and fly balls were up in ’08. More fly balls will generally mean more home runs, and since Bush pitches to contact and doesn’t strike many out, he will need to rely on the ball staying in the park more often, so the more ground balls, the merrier.

Hopefully Bush will continue on his hot stroke of luck, but I doubt it. Instead, he should work on either striking out more batters or working on his home run ratios. Having Mike Cameron in the outfield will unquestionably help him with his BABIP, thank goodness. His lucky year last year is netting him a nice payday.

Seth McClung/5th starter

Milwaukee hasn’t officially designated a 2009 rotation yet, and the 5th spot has been mysteriously vacant so far all year. Nobody in the minors is ready to make an appearance in the big leagues, but Tom Hardicout made a subtle hint that Seth McClung might be next year’s 5th starter simply because he left McClung out of his bullpen preview.

McClung would probably make the most sense to fill the vacant 5th starter spot out of everyone remaining, as he was a starter with the Devil Rays before coming to Milwaukee and has experience starting baseball games. Carlos Villanueva also has experience starting, but by now Milwaukee has found a place for him in the bullpen simply based on his small sample size of doing well in the 7th inning.

McClung was given a chance when he was incredibly young with the Devil Rays and posted abysmal results. Hitters were able to tee off on him when they were able to tell differences in his mechanics while pitching. An excellent analysis of McClung was already posted on Brew Crew Ball analyzing his performance and why it changed from the 6.00 ERA guy originally found on the old teams of Tampa Bay.

Since coming to Milwaukee and he’s shored up his delivery, he’s turned into quite the acceptable pitcher. His FIP ERA was at about 4.5 over a not-insignificant 105 innings, which is pretty good. He strikes out his fair share of batters, but walks far too many to be a truly legitimate #3 starter. One of the problems that will plague Chucky throughout the rest of his career as a starter will be his tendency to walk and strike out many a batter, thus making his pitch count not efficient enough to throw more than 6 or 7 innings. If you don’t mind pretty consistent 5IP games, McClung is your guy to fill the back end of that rotation.

Overall, the starting rotation is going to enter 2009 with a lot of question marks and not a lot of depth. Yovani Gallardo is coming off a major injury after logging a very few amount of innings last year– remember, in 2007, Gallardo had to be shut down near the end of the year because he had eclipsed the proverbial innings limit for a young pitcher. Milwaukee still has to worry about the strength of their young stud after posting only 24 innings the year before. He isn’t quite ready to become the team’s ace yet.

Also, McClung isn’t going to be able to log very many innings due to his high pitch counts, and Suppan/Bush just aren’t very good. With no depth in the organization outside of bullpen necessity Carlos Villanueva or Tommy John Surgery rehab guy Chris Capuano, Milwaukee will be searching for some depth in case of injury or poor performance from the scrap heaps of Triple A or the literal scrap heaps of pitchers who didn’t get signed.

One more thing to worry about for the season: with all of the high pitch counts (McClung, Parra) and poor, wild card pitchers (Bush, Suppan), tat most likely means that the bullpen will be overtaxed at different periods of time as the pitching staff hits a rough spot during the season– if normal 5-6IP starters have a bad outing, that means they’ll be limited to 4-5 innings through rough stretches, and it’s not going to be nice if a bullpen like the Brewers has to throw 4-5 innings by themselves over a period of a couple of weeks. Poor starting pitching ultimately harms the bullpen just as much as the team.

The bullpen
2009′s bullpen is going to be very similar to last year’s as both are a consortium of spare parts and dejected major leaguers looking for a new home. Take a look at the comparisons: each bullpen has a large free agent signing with the intention of taking over the closer’s role (08: Eric Gagne 09: Trevor Hoffman), each has former pitchers ridiculed for their performances even though it was probably their manager’s fault for placing those pitchers into high-leverage situations in the first place as they don’t have the talent to be a big guy in the bullpen (08: Gulliermo Mota 09: Jorge Julio), and a general consortium of average to below-average pitchers thrown together from scrap heaps in hope that they will perform acceptably.

Thus, there are not many returning bullpen members, with the losses of Eric Gagne, Brian Shouse, Gulliermo Mota, and Salomon Torres. To replace those guys, we’ve gotten Trevor Hoffman, R.J. Swindle, and Jorge Julio to shore up the bullpen along with Todd Coffey as an addition from the end of last year.

Hoffman is Hoffman (and MUCH better than Gagne, thank God), and R.J. Swindle is more than enough of a replacement for aging, expensive Brian Shouse; seriously, when Ryan Howard is up with the bases loaded and 2 out in a one-run ballgame in the 7th, you’re going to be glad Ken Macha went with Swindle instead of Carlos Villanueva. He murders lefties. Jorge Julio is an average pitcher who has succumbed to teams thinking he has more talent than he actually has and therefore will be a serviceable reliever as long as he’s relagated to low-leverage situations or games where it’s not all that close. David Riske is coming back from an injury-plagued year last year where he just couldn’t quite get to full form seemingly all year, but early on in the season performed acceptably as a reliever.

Riske is definitely overpaid for a middle relief guy (3 years, $13m plus a 2011 option and incentives) who you can develop through the minors or pick up for cheaper on a free agent market, but he’s still good to have on the team. I could easily see Riske becoming the 8th inning guy for Ken Macha, keeping Hoffman in the closer’s role and Villanueva in the 7th inning spot. That bullpen isn’t half bad, and when your better relievers are set for the high leverage situations while guys like Julio or Coffey aren’t, the bullpen should be slightly improved in 2009. Whether or not they crumble from overuse due to short starting pitching stints remains to be seen. I don’t want to see Riske getting injured in 2009– I’d want to run him out of town then.

The overall pitching line of Milwaukee doesn’t sound too bad, however, the depth and reliability of the rotation leaves quite a bit to be desired. The difference between the rotation when it’s healthy and when it’s not is contention for a playoff berth, so the health of the rotation is crucial in determining the result of the 2009 Brewers. It’s not going to be surprising, though, if someone gets injured and Milwaukee starts giving up 10+ runs more than it should.

It’s about time Suppan earned his huge contract as well. It’s time to earn their paychecks one more year.

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Brewer stuff, milwaukee brewers by Cody