Bring Back the Stein

I agree with bringing him back right away. This is the kind of thing that if it's injured, it's injured and why wait another week if he's going to have to wait a year anyway. Doomsaying aside.

Rock bottom is when Powell doubles talk of his upbeat assessment of our our PCL record, sort of like the flatline alarm going off when they come to take grandma's body.

I'm all for a 250-game season, by the way. Play part of the regular season in Arizona and avoid having to watch the Bucks run for the final playoff spot? Sign me up.

Dear God, I hope I'm looking back in a month-and-a-half at how foolish my fears were, that this team had no fight, that the manager had no sense and that this death spiral had no end. I would love to be able to kick my own ass for despairing right now and wave the standings showing a four-game lead and Sheets with three wins in September in my face.

Who's our best starter right now? A rookie with fewer than 10 career starts. Who's our best hitter right now? A rookie with fewer than 500 career ABS. I want to win now, but I have to believe that good things are coming.

I'm rooting for a total structural failure at Wrigley Field when one of their load-bearing urinal stalls snaps in two under the weight of too much expelled $7 Bud Lights from the bladders of the suburb of Lincolnshire. Ankiel under bricks, Pagan and his inflamed colon screaming like a little girl. Then, from the WGN News chopper, we'll see Ron Santo's stumps emerging from the Wrigley rubble, though anyone listening to the WGN game broadcast won't be able to tell the difference between the buffoonish moans he makes when Ryan Dempster allows a hit versus the moans he makes when suffering a biblical calamity. Anyway, the Cards scare me more.

Calling for Yost's replacement doesn't make you a bad fan any more than calling for an impeachment (and notice I didn't say of whom, so's not to anger anyone) makes you a bad American. Hell, I've seen it covered ad nauseam in other threads, but I don't think it makes you a bad fan for booing your own team when they're playing like bums. Everyone is a big boy here and if they're the kind that will wilt under what little pressure the chronically- and insanely-forgiving fans of Wisconsin lightly heap upon them, then they'd likely be better suited to be a hallroom monitor or a taffy apple puller. Yost is fair game. Fire away, I say.

Prince has no history of behavior that recklessly endangers the team. He gets a pass on this, by my mind. The timing's bad, but one day off in the stretch may not be such a bad thing. I agree that Yost should have protected his franchise player more, but more than likely he was probably daydreaming about his NASCAR fantasy picks for the day or how he was going to have Estrada lay down a drag bunt. Whoops. Wrong thread.

Not to get into the merits, or lack thereof, of the Brewers' house scribe, but I must defend Rick Braun, whom I think highly of and not merely because of his last name. He gives a very prosaic, exact account of the game and I look forward to his straightforward reports, stripped of cliche and fawning.

The Peter Gammons of Milwaukee media. Bet he'll have some nice, slobbering bouquets for Mr. Selig and any other representative of management. (Sorry for the negativity, but he pulls his punches so much that it makes this Web site all the more relevant and vital to a fan wanting to explore the real goings-on of the team, and not just Dear Leader Melvin's pronouncements.)

I believe that It's Gonna Happen. Sigh.

Unfortunately, too many times.

I don't think it's silly at all to term "injury prone" a pitcher with a big curve ball who has a tear in his middle finger, who relies on power and has back problems and shoulder problems and that a pitcher of any kind has inner ear problems. How many times on the DL do you have to be to be injury prone? Pedro is on the DL every year. I think he's injury prone. I also think he's a great pitcher.

I know, I know, I know. But this is the "vent" thread. This team is making me schizophrenic.

Will they finish above .500? Any sane person who watched the last three days would conclude, no. A five-run lead? Starters who can't pitch into the sixth. Middle relief that's about to turn into dust. All-star reliever whose slider has turned on him. Lack of situational hitting. A confused manager. Bah. I see this getting a lot worse before it gets better.

Does anyone really believe that Sheets is going to come back healthy and be able to contribute the way he had been? I, for one, do not. Would like to-would LOVE to-but I think he is what he is: A talented pitcher prone to injury.

Maybe the team could designate Matt Wise to help his wife during her convalescence? (Please, only a joke.) I understand the importance of family and the seriousness of a c-section. And I like that the Brewers are a family-friendly team. But there's a reason taxpayers' paid millions for this stadium, there's a reason we've shelled out, collectively, millions of our own money, to watch and support this team. At this point, it's about winning. Not trying to pick a fight, by the way. I appreciate the opposing viewpoint, though I don't agree.

Maybe this belongs someplace else, but is anybody else angry at the Linebrink situation? We know he doesn't want to be here and now it's clear that he doesn't want to sign next year, but if we miss the playoffs by one game and it's in this stretch, I'll consider him a new Enemy of the Brewer State. Bereavement? It's outrageous and bizarre, given the circumstances. You think the other men in the pen are going to welcome him with open arms after he takes five or six days off in a period where his arm could be the difference? I'm sorry, but this is not a white-collar job. If he's a farmer during harvest he doesn't get time off. If he's a foreman on a welding job where the contract's coming due, he doesn't get time off. If he's a fisherman during the run, he doesn't get time off. Whatever they say to the contrary, that bullpen is gassed and they need Linebrink, especially considering what we gave up to get him. And they must have contemplated this before the trade. On the plus side, if a veteran arm like his doesn't get rejuvenated by more than a week off pitching....

"Die Nibelungen," if only to justify the crappy film classes I took in college.

I'm having flashbacks to the Bartman days, when the Cubs were insistent that they could re-create their results the following year and it was spoken of as a fait accompli. I teeter-totter between the urgency of winning now when, as it says rightfully above, the rest of the division is sleeping, and having hope in the foundation that Melvin et al have poured. My vision is occluded, of course, by the brown fog and stench of that road trip. That said, suffering with the Brewers is fun. Not to get too heavy, but for my job, I was just looking at pictures from a crime scene where one young man had a very bad day, via some bullets to his head. Losing eight games worth of our lead sort of pales in comparison. For the victim, that is. Me, I'm dying every time I see Craig Counsell's ersatz Yastrzemski batting stance on the television. Um, but seriously, we must at least pretend that there are more important issues out there than the downfall of Coco's slider. The environment, various wars and our most valuable resource, children. Especially, those who will grow up to be left-handed, catchers who hit for power and average.

Concede nothing to these people. Nothing.. Like Churchill said, in victory magnanimity, in defeat, defiance. Take every phone call, answer every e-mail, respond to every jape from the Cub fan. They are frontrunners, plain and simple, and their anxieties will devour them sooner than ours will devour us. When it comes time for their team's reckoning, when Lilly and Marquis and that bullpen come back to earth, when the regression to the mean kicks in, when D. Lee's back gives out or Theriot's groin is torn asunder, then we will be able to meet the gaze of their goldbricking asses with sharp teeth of our own. And if we don't win this year, there's no way they go deep into October, and we have our outfield, infield and starting rotation locked up for years to come, and every position promises to get better, and we have Kremblas in the wings waiting to pick up the flag if Yost fails. The Cubs have Lou Piniella in their dugout, face the likelihood of a disruptive sale and have a payroll the size of a banana republic's defense budget and are...in second place? They have no soul, ultimately, and ultimately we are stronger. We have endured the frustration of losing seasons without the benefit of $100 million payrolls. We have suffered without a whiny sense of entitlement, we have taken our medicine without syrupy mythology and idiot talk of curses, we have kept the faith without the prissy and ill-informed mawkishness of George Will or the clownish alcoholism of their sewer of a stadium. Also, punch them in the face, like that guy said.

At least the dp is an option. Um.

No one's fooled by Coco's away stuff anymore. Not a good development.

Maybe if I swear in Spanish?

Thank goodness for the dp. I was about to use up my first strike for profanity. But realistically, D'Bow has been lights out.