Cardinals (Gray) vs Brewers (Rea): 9/4/24, 6:40pm

[brewfanmn]

Also, I see people do this a lot, but somehow holding scoring runs off a position player against an offense is so lazy.

For starters, the Brewers have scored a grand total of 11 of their 683 runs this year with a position player standing on the mound. Remove all of those from the ledger, and they drop from the 5th highest scoring offense this year all the way down to... 7th. And it's not like the Brewers are the only team in baseball that have scored runs off a position player this year. They're #5 in MLB in runs scored regardless of whether you include position player pitching appearances.

And lastly, do people not realize why position players end up on the mound in the first place? More often than not, it's because you blew the other team out. You know how many runs the White Sox have scored off position players this year? Zero. Because you have to earn those games. Aside from the game against the Yankees, the reason the Brewers have faced so many position players this year is because they put up 8 against Charlie Morton, 7 on Bryce Elder, 8 on Reese Olson, 8 on Emerson Hancock, and brow-beat the Reds bullpen. To somehow spin that as a mark against the lineup is just disingenuous.

[Jim French Stepstool]

5 minutes ago, tmwiese55 said:

Well in just the last two pages this afternoon words of "brain dead", "very poor", "madness", not playoff baseball were all used. I don't even wanna see how bad it was last night.    Again, its baseball, the best teams lose 40% of the time, crap happens, no one can be perfect but the team has proven to bounce back over and over. Its probably best to go with the flow than have big reactions on game by game basis in baseball

 In baseball. Exactly. When I read comments, sometimes I feel like some of these good people would be better off just following the NFL, where you can lose three in a row & it might actually fracture your season. In baseball that's silly. 

Their most recent 3 losses are mostly centered around not scoring a runner from 3B with no or one outs. I don't know if that'll get better, but I know it isn't woe-is-me uncorrectable.

[Brian]

8 minutes ago, Jim French Stepstool said:

 In baseball. Exactly. When I read comments, sometimes I feel like some of these good people would be better off just following the NFL, where you can lose three in a row & it might actually fracture your season. In baseball that's silly. 

Their most recent 3 losses are mostly centered around not scoring a runner from 3B with no or one outs. I don't know if that'll get better, but I know it isn't woe-is-me uncorrectable.

And a pitcher shortage the past few games is what got me just as much as not scoring to help the cause. 

This was a badly needed day off to reboot. 

[Jim French Stepstool]

6 minutes ago, brewfanmn said:

Also, I see people do this a lot, but somehow holding scoring runs off a position player against an offense is so lazy.

For starters, the Brewers have scored a grand total of 11 of their 683 runs this year with a position player standing on the mound. Remove all of those from the ledger, and they drop from the 5th highest scoring offense this year all the way down to... 7th. And it's not like the Brewers are the only team in baseball that have scored runs off a position player this year. They're #5 in MLB in runs scored regardless of whether you include position player pitching appearances.

And lastly, do people not realize why position players end up on the mound in the first place? More often than not, it's because you blew the other team out. You know how many runs the White Sox have scored off position players this year? Zero. Because you have to earn those games. Aside from the game against the Yankees, the reason the Brewers have faced so many position players this year is because they put up 8 against Charlie Morton, 7 on Bryce Elder, 8 on Reese Olson, 8 on Emerson Hancock, and brow-beat the Reds bullpen. To somehow spin that as a mark against the lineup is just disingenuous.

And throw in their performances vs Imanaga & Sale, when there were no position players pitching. They also pinned a loss on Helsley this season (the hilarious part of that game was the winning pitcher, with two strikeouts in the final inning to strand the ghost runner, was Hoby Milner).

This isn't to point out some sort of invincibility of the offense, just to counter the negative vibes. They're talented but extremely inconsistent with the bats. Many rookies & young vets, and the more experienced hitters have a lot of swing-and-miss to their game.

[tmwiese55]

2 minutes ago, Jim French Stepstool said:

And throw in their performances vs Imanaga & Sale, when there were no position players pitching. They also pinned a loss on Helsley this season (the hilarious part of that game was the winning pitcher, with two strikeouts in the final inning to strand the ghost runner, was Hoby Milner).

This isn't to point out some sort of invincibility of the offense, just to counter the negative vibes. They're talented but extremely inconsistent with the bats. Many rookies & young vets, and the more experienced hitters have a lot of swing-and-miss to their game.

Yup, that has been the weakness the last 5 years and what we all feared going into this year. Besides the patchwork rotation, but most assumed some trust in the management to figure out pitching.   Hitting has been the Achilles heel for years and it still might prove to be. But at the very least it looks better than the last few years do to Willy being a tick up and now Chourio taking off along with generally having more contact type ABs rather than HR/K type guys.  Really sucks Yeli went down after bouncing back so well, that would have really helped to flip a replacement level bat for an all star, still might not have been enough but sure helps the odds.   

But when it comes down to it you have weak sub 700 type hitters at usually 3 spots right now so its still a hole but at least they have more speed/contact type approaches than past years weak spots.  But as a small market team its impossible to not have holes.  The deadline pickups last year helped but I'd still say these years situation seems better.  Now lets hope the Mets somehow get that last spot to avoid the Dbacks/Braves pitchers and we don't get a repeat of last year.

[Brian]

10 minutes ago, Jim French Stepstool said:

And throw in their performances vs Imanaga & Sale, when there were no position players pitching. They also pinned a loss on Helsley this season (the hilarious part of that game was the winning pitcher, with two strikeouts in the final inning to strand the ghost runner, was Hoby Milner).

This isn't to point out some sort of invincibility of the offense, just to counter the negative vibes. They're talented but extremely inconsistent with the bats. Many rookies & young vets, and the more experienced hitters have a lot of swing-and-miss to their game.

I agree 100%,  I also think it is time to get Eric Haase more at bats some how, he has been an unexpected bright spot. To bad they never tried him at 1st base during the season. 

[adambr2]

1 hour ago, Jim French Stepstool said:

 In baseball. Exactly. When I read comments, sometimes I feel like some of these good people would be better off just following the NFL, where you can lose three in a row & it might actually fracture your season. In baseball that's silly. 

Their most recent 3 losses are mostly centered around not scoring a runner from 3B with no or one outs. I don't know if that'll get better, but I know it isn't woe-is-me uncorrectable.

The season of course wasn't lost in the most recent 3 losses, but the odds of achieving a 1st round bye definitely took a significant hit. 

[BruisedCrew]

1 hour ago, brewfanmn said:

Also, I see people do this a lot, but somehow holding scoring runs off a position player against an offense is so lazy.

For starters, the Brewers have scored a grand total of 11 of their 683 runs this year with a position player standing on the mound. Remove all of those from the ledger, and they drop from the 5th highest scoring offense this year all the way down to... 7th. And it's not like the Brewers are the only team in baseball that have scored runs off a position player this year. They're #5 in MLB in runs scored regardless of whether you include position player pitching appearances.

And lastly, do people not realize why position players end up on the mound in the first place? More often than not, it's because you blew the other team out. You know how many runs the White Sox have scored off position players this year? Zero. Because you have to earn those games. Aside from the game against the Yankees, the reason the Brewers have faced so many position players this year is because they put up 8 against Charlie Morton, 7 on Bryce Elder, 8 on Reese Olson, 8 on Emerson Hancock, and brow-beat the Reds bullpen. To somehow spin that as a mark against the lineup is just disingenuous.

I only mentioned the position players because you cited the 14 run game.as recent evidence of the Brewers offense. I fully understand that those games are blips in the context of the season.

There have been several treatises written here telling me how wrong I am and restating the obvious about how baseball works. If you think my opinion about the Brewers offense is based just on the last 2 games you are missing the point. 
 

My broader point is that playoff baseball can be a lot different than regular season baseball, and a team like the Brewers with so many inexperienced players is not, in my opinion, well suited for playoff baseball when the teams with more experience will really be bearing down.

Let me ask this. People,like to cite the Fangraphs projections on things like probability of making the playoffs.

Why do the Brewers have a lower projected percentage for winning the World Series than teams like the Padres and Diamondbacks that have lower probabilities of making the playoffs in the first place? It must be that the projections view the Brewers as a weaker team than some others that they would be facing in the playoffs. 

[wiguy94]

4 minutes ago, BruisedCrew said:

I only mentioned the position players because you cited the 14 run game.as recent evidence of the Brewers offense. I fully understand that those games are blips in the context of the season.

There have been several treatises written here telling me how wrong I am and restating the obvious about how baseball works. If you think my opinion about the Brewers offense is based just on the last 2 games you are missing the point. 
 

My broader point is that playoff baseball can be a lot different than regular season baseball, and a team like the Brewers with so many inexperienced players is not, in my opinion, well suited for playoff baseball when the teams with more experience will really be bearing down.

Let me ask this. People,like to cite the Fangraphs projections on things like probability of making the playoffs.

Why do the Brewers have a lower projected percentage for winning the World Series than teams like the Padres and Diamondbacks that have lower peobabilities of making the playoffs in the first place? It must be that the projections view the Brewers as a weaker team than some others that they would be facing in the playoffs. 

Well they do and they don't. You're talking about the model that uses ZiPS projections to determine odds (I know you don't like using ZiPS and those projection systems. The model that's build off season to date performance has the Brewers as the most likely team in the MLB to win the WS.

[BruisedCrew]

5 minutes ago, wiguy94 said:

Well they do and they don't. You're talking about the model that uses ZiPS projections to determine odds (I know you don't like using ZiPS and those projection systems. The model that's build off season to date performance has the Brewers as the most likely team in the MLB to win the WS.

I was looking at Fangraphs which is what I seem to see cited here most often.

It isn’t that I “don’t like” projection systems, but I don’t like it when they are treated as if they are mathematically proveable probabilities instead of the compilation of estimates that they are. 

Any system that projects the Brewers as the team most likely to win the World Series is inherently suspect given that the Brewers are likely to have an extra round to win than 4 other teams will have. 

[Brian]

7 minutes ago, BruisedCrew said:

I was looking at Fangraphs which is what I seem to see cited here most often.

It isn’t that I “don’t like” projection systems, but I don’t like it when they are treated as if they are mathematically proveable probabilities instead of the compilation of estimates that they are. 

Any system that projects the Brewers as the team most likely to win the World Series is inherently suspect given that the Brewers are likely to have an extra round to win than 4 other teams will have. 

The best I seen the Brewers World Series projection was 5th in Las Vegas odds. It is:

1) Dodgers 

2) Phillies, 

3) Yankees

4) Baltimore

5) Brewers

6) Astros 

7) Cleveland

8) Padres

[Jim French Stepstool]

2 hours ago, adambr2 said:

The season of course wasn't lost in the most recent 3 losses, but the odds of achieving a 1st round bye definitely took a significant hit. 

They did. If you don't sweep Philly, you need to uptick the level of play & hope Philly finds some losses. And right now the Phils are playing really well.

[Jim French Stepstool]

3 hours ago, tmwiese55 said:

  Really sucks Yeli went down after bouncing back so well, that would have really helped to flip a replacement level bat for an all star, still might not have been enough but sure helps the odds.   

 

Josh Bell wouldn't have been a bad fit as a DH. But I don't know if we explored that, or if the PTBNL list Zona offered was richer than what we'd be willing to spend. Also, while he's been swinging it well for the D-Backs his OPS at the time of the trade was just below .700. So probably not much interest.

[yourout]

2 minutes ago, Jim French Stepstool said:

Josh Bell wouldn't have been a bad fit as a DH. But I don't know if we explored that, or if the PTBNL list Zona offered was richer than what we'd be willing to spend. Also, while he's been swinging it well for the D-Backs his OPS at the time of the trade was just below .700. Hoskins' was 40-50 pts higher at the time. So probably not much interest.

I really wanted them to go after him. Yes he was having a crappy year and could be had probably for a reasonable price and his contract would be off the books after this year. He's one of those guys that when he gets hot can carry an offense for 2 weeks and come play off time that would have been a really nice card to play.

[Jim French Stepstool]

3 hours ago, Brian said:

I agree 100%,  I also think it is time to get Eric Haase more at bats some how, he has been an unexpected bright spot. To bad they never tried him at 1st base during the season. 

I think someone said he's played there once in his career. And I don't want to disparage what he's done since being brought up, but there's a lot of swing & miss in his game & if he played more regularly I believe that would catch up to him.

[Jim French Stepstool]

3 hours ago, BruisedCrew said:

 treatises 

On a sports message board, I'd give that a silver medal.

I still give a slight edge to 'cromulent'.

[sveumrules]

16 hours ago, BruisedCrew said:

Why do the Brewers have a lower projected percentage for winning the World Series than teams like the Padres and Diamondbacks that have lower probabilities of making the playoffs in the first place? It must be that the projections view the Brewers as a weaker team than some others that they would be facing in the playoffs. 

The primary factor driving the difference between the Brewers World Series Odds derived from the projections on FanGraphs (3.4% currently) versus their WS Odds derived from season to date stats (11.6% currently) is that the projections don't believe the Brewers MLB best FIP beating capabilities (3.60 ERA vs 4.27 FIP) will continue moving forward with their depth charts projecting a 4.11 ERA vs 4.13 FIP rest of season.