Pitching analyst Lance Brozdowski has been on Brandon Woodruff since the brewer’s right hand returned from a 2023 shoulder surgery on July 6. Brozdowski has written two articles about Woodruff, first breaking the way he looks like other pitchers this season. His second piece is titled “How does Brandon Woodruff do it?” I want to really dig out and answer this question, both because when Brozdowski asks a question, it’s usually a good question because Woodruff’s numbers are really confusing. As Michael Baumann pointed out a few weeks ago, Woodruff’s return almost exactly matches Milwaukee’s recent unparalleled stretch. “If Woodruff does come back, then his money will be bigger than any starter who may be moved by the deadline,” Bowman wrote. Woodruff, who scored 4-0 with a 2.29 ERA, 3.73 FIP and 34.9% strikeout rate, is likely a big part of the team’s playoff rotation, but whether he takes a step back remains an open question.
Before we get into everything, we should talk about Woodruff’s arsenal, which, at least, looks very different this season. A month ago, Matthew Trueblood analyzed Woodruff’s repertoire on Brewer Fanatic and wrote that to succeed, “Woodruff needs to reinvent himself.” The pitcher seemed to agree at least from the beginning. This season in the Grand Slam, he threw out a four-man, pendant, change, cutter, curve and sweeper. The cutter is new, and the sweeper replaces his traditional slider. However, he hasn’t thrown sweeping since his second start (probably because it’s another team’s second home run on the court), and he’s also significantly lowering his knife usage in his last two games. He also used the fastball almost evenly. Woodruff has led his four-man assistant to the lead in recent years, but now he throws it 34% and fallen 31%, leading the right against the right and the four against the left-handed. His curve ball dropped to 5%, and his change was steady at 17%. In other words, Woodruff’s time is 65%, and if you calculate the tool, this number jumps to 77%:
Let’s start with the reasons for doubt, note that this section forms five complete paragraphs. Luck is an important part of it. Woodruff is currently running .143 BABIP and 100% stock. Eight of the nine runs he allowed had home runs. These numbers are huge. The league averaged .289 BABIP and 72.5% stock rate. Even though he spent his entire career on Milwaukee’s excellent defense, Woodruff never had a BABIP under 0.269 or a stock ratio of over 82% (in 2023, when he only made 11 starts). No matter what happens, what else will happen, we should expect his BABIP to increase by at least 100 points, while his chain rate drops by at least 20%.
Woodruff’s fastball speed dropped significantly, and it was not entirely unexpected after shoulder surgery. From 2019 to 2022, his heaters averaged 96.4 miles per hour. Before he was injured in 2023, his speed dropped to 95.9 mph. He has been at a speed of 93.1 mph so far this season. According to Savant, this means he went from his 85th percentile in 2022 to his 29th percentile this season. He has gone from having acceleration to – uh, is there a scout word opposite to Plus? – Assume no acceleration. This is a strength; now it is a weakness. We have no way of knowing if Woodruff will recover some of this speed in the long run. Shoulder surgery is a big deal and as a 32-year-old, we hope he has lost some speed now. Maybe it won’t come back at all, or maybe it will end up, but we should definitely not expect him to be between October and 105 mph.
Woodruff also lost major moves on most courts. His four-person captains are all rising and running less than in 2023. The same is true for his changes. His curve ball dropped less and his settling flakes ran less, increasing. As you might expect, these things models are not excited about smaller speeds and smaller pitches. In 2023, PitchingBot gives Woodruff’s stuff in 54th grade, and the stuff+ lets him have it in 108. This season, these numbers are 41 and 96. Apart from the new sweeper he threw only seven times, both models believed that all his stadiums were worse than those in 2023.
Reality seems to agree with the model. Woodruff’s pursuit rate of 25.9% is his lowest since 2018. His ground ball rate is absolutely surrounded, from 38% in 2022 to 26% this season. He not only allowed the batsmen to hit the ball in the air, but also allowed them to pull it into the air. It was the most dangerous contact, and among pitchers who allowed at least 50 balls to play, Woodruff’s 23.4% pulled the air rate put him in the 92nd percentile, which was a bad way. His 9.1% barrel rate is the highest in his career. The batsman averaged a bat speed of 72.8 mph, ranking 10th in the 438 pitchers who have thrown at least 400 goals so far this season. The batsman sees the ball and waving it from his heels.
We should also mention the competition. Woodruff faced the Marlins and the Nationals twice, once against the Mets, and the Mariners once. The Marlins, Mets and Nationals have been three of the worst offenses in baseball since early July, ranking 24, 25 and 27 respectively, according to WRC+ data. The Marlins and the Nationals ranked 24th and 27th home runs this season, so they can be disturbing when they make you look like someone who is home run.
Well, that’s the end of this section. These are the reasons why worry that everything Woodruff has done so far is unsustainable. Now it’s time to believe the reason, and the first thing I want to point out is that Woodruff starts at a very high level. He’s been a real pitcher for years, so while all of these numbers I just told you are worse than they ever were, they’re not saying he’s rubbish right now. Quatt+ sees him as average, while PitchingBot expects him to have a 3.57 ERA, significantly better than the 4.12 points averaged by the starters in the league this season.
Woodruff also has bad luck, with good results this season. So far, 17.1% of his flying balls are his career-high home run. Now, he has won those home runs – Statcast thinks he should have 6.5 home runs instead of seven – but that doesn’t mean they won’t indirectly affect his BABIP. Part of the reason Woodruff’s Babip is so low is that when the batsmen hit the ball hard, they’ve already hit the ball off the court and those home runs don’t contribute to Babip. If you throw a home run, his XWOBA is .262 the lowest XWOBA in the league, and his average exit speed of 85.9 mph is also very good. So while his bapip is still unsustainable, at least it involves a little less luck than you originally thought.
Next, let’s take a look at Woodruff’s walking and strikeout rates because they’re both great. Despite the reduced stuff and a lower chase rate, his air price rate is on his career average, and his 20.9% strike rate is the best of his career. His first strike rate was also 69%. As a result, his strikeout rate of 34.9% was the best in his career and his walking rate was also 4.7%. If Woodruff can keep those numbers in place, even if he keeps giving up home runs and his Babip bounces up on normal levels, he will be a good pitcher.
To be honest, though, when his stuff looks worse, he isn’t sure he’s earning so much in the area, and I’m not sure how he makes so much known as a strike. However, this is my best guess. The so-called strike came almost entirely from his fastball. The common four-hole and sedimentation instrument had a strike rate of 24%. Neither of them would have reached 20% last season. If you only look at the courts within the strike zone, the numbers for this season will jump to 33.5%, which is again a career-high. I’m sure to have something to do with the teams Woodruff is on – the Marlins and the Nationals ranked 20th and 25th fastballs in the area respectively – but it could also be related to his stadium combination. While there is no doubt that the loss of movement and speed is undoubtedly a bad thing, Woodruff’s four partitions and pendants are now at 10 inches, the furthest ever in terms of level breakthroughs. Add to the occasional cutter, and suddenly, when the batsman picks up speed from his hands, this is the pitch movement they have to worry about:
The four holes are straight, the settlement piece gradually disappears, and the cutter cuts. In other words, the ball can travel in any direction. It’s the secret to hesitation, known as the strike, which is probably why Woodruff’s sniffs in the sinker and four airs and four sales are the highest price. According to the material model, the cutter did not perform well, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t make Woodruff’s other fastballs look better.
Again, it is not ideal to have more ascendance for Woodruff’s pendant, but this does create more vertical separation between it and his changes. Relatively speaking, there was a sudden drop in the change, which could help explain the dominance of the court this season. This is a small sample, but so far it has a WHIFF rate of 38% and a hard hit rate of only 5.9%.
Woodruff has always been an interesting pitcher. He was so fastball heavy that he wasn’t afraid to throw his four-sale lows into the area. I really want to know what he is going to do next. It was still early for him. Will he bring back a sweeper that looks so promising? Will he continue to eliminate knives? Since it seems so dominant, will he make changes more often? Can he continue to hit the area with a fast ball and will the batsman continue to hit the ball? As Michael Trzinski wrote last week on Brewer fanatics, if Woodruff can keep that up, he looks like a comeback candidate of the year. The brewer is even more difficult in front of them, and so far his next start seems to be competing with the Pirates, Bears, Giants, Blue Jays, Phillies and Rangers. It was a much harder road than he had traveled so far. It is unreasonable to expect Woodruff to continue running the 2.29 ERA, but I don’t think we know what reasonable expectations look like.
