Update: Root for This Team (NL)

Since I posted my advice on which NL team to root for if your favorite team was already out of the playoff picture, some interesting things have happened.

Most notably — at least for me personally — is that the Milwaukee Brewers have a record of 24-10 since I made that post (August 14), and are 13-4 in September. I did not include them in my “study” — for a number of reasons. Firstly, I needed a reason to write those posts. Secondly, I am a pessimist. (Not to be confused with a “fair weather fan”.) Finally, I really miscalculated what it would take for a team in the position that the Brewers were in at the time to get back in the wild card race:

Yes, my beloved Brewers could rattle off 15 straight wins and make a run for a Wild Card berth or even the NL Central title. But given that they traded their ace and that, even though they’ve been slightly unlucky in terms of how their run differential corresponds to their W-L record, they’re still only a .500 team at best, and that’s not going to cut it.

Apparently, all that was really needed was a 24-10 record accompanied by a massive slide from the now woeful Pittsburgh Pirates.

The fact is, per wRC+, the Brewers have been the best hitting team in the NL this year, tied with the Cardinals at 117. If you just look at the last 30 days, the gap widens. The Brewers offense has been performing at a 131 wRC+ rate over that span, a span in which the offenses of all the teams (minus the Braves) ahead of them in the wild card race have performed at below average clips.

In terms of pitching WAR, the Brewers have been the 5th best in the NL this year, a place that surprised me given their dreadful bullpen. That just goes to show how much more starting pitching means to a team’s success. In the last 30 days, the Brewers are also 5th in pitcher WAR.

The effect of trading Zack Greinke has been mitigated by the emergence of several younger pitchers. Mark Rogers (now shut down for the year) threw in a handful of decent starts (3.69 xFIP in 39 IP), while Marco Estrada, Mike Fiers, and now Wily Peralta are all contributing like soild mid-rotation guys, if not better. For instance, in the last 30 days, Marco Estrada has been the third most valuable pitcher in all of baseball, posting a 1.6 WAR in that time with a 1.73 FIP. Greinke is nowhere to be found on the same leaderboard.

So, I’m left wondering where the Brewers would have ranked in my “study.”

The Brewers have one of the worst markets in baseball, ranking 27th out of 30 according to Bleacher Report, which means they have smallest market of any NL team. But they won their division in 2011, and while their last World Series appearance was thirty years ago (1982), it’s still more recent than the last time the Pirates made it to the fall classic (1979).

In terms of “most exciting players,” Ryan Braun is at the front end of his prime and is one of the very best hitters in baseball, but he’d probably receive a score (in this study, anyway) similar to those of Matt Kemp, Joey Votto, or Andrew McCutchen, so that doesn’t really help the Brewers get to the top of the list.

While Marco Estrada has been one of the most exciting pitchers over the last several weeks, and while Stephen Strasburg (who received the highest pitcher score in the original study) is now shut down, if we continue to look at a pitcher based in a full season of performance, no Brewers pitcher would help them to vastly improve their “rootability.”

So even now that the Brewers have played themselves into contention for a wild card berth, it makes no difference which NL you should be rooting for if your team is out of the picture: you should be rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates, as masochistic as that might seem.

I, however, am no longer compelled to root for them. In fact, I will be rooting against them, especially today.