Fear The Chorizo

This team stinks against lefty pitching

This does nothing. Never has. Never will. Nothing positive ever comes from those types of media interaction. They’ve made their decision and explained it. Disagreeing with it is one thing but badgering them about it because you disagree with it is pretty silly. Disagree completely, because their explanation is fine the first time they gave it back in early May and again after they brought shaw back up after a handful of rehab starts in early june, but at some point as CC indicated a decision contrary to their position needs to be made - so they've essentially admitted to their initial plan being the wrong decision.

Perfect follow up question to that garbled answer is "do you consider Hiura to be an impact player?" Another great ? could be "given the fact Cain just had cryo therapy on his thumb and is obviously not 100%, doesn't it make sense to put him on the IL and call up hiura so the team isn't playing a position player short leading up through the all star break?" They need to continue being asked about the hiura situation daily, not just CC but also stearns.

Pitching is a problem that has nothing to do with whether or not Hiura helps this team...so I really don't know why pitching woes keep getting brought up in a thread debating why one of their best righthanded bats is still sitting in AAA. Because those that are so desperate to have him believe it will right the ship. Solid to good pitching will. The rest of this is just whining to me. Hiura will get his shot, eventually. No matter what ends up happening with him, he himself won’t fix the ultimate problem with this team. ok, but I don't see people saying that Hiura alone will suddenly make them pitch better - and it's not like bringing him back up precludes the Brewers from making other moves to address pitching problems. Hiura on the MLB roster makes the Brewers a more talented and better team, not to mention replacing Shaw with Hiura would better balance the position player roster out from a righty/lefty standpoint, too. edit: not even trying to single Shaw out, although he's a logical choice to go down if he does still have options. At this point I'd be good with IL-ing Cain until the AS Break to hopefully get him healthy for the second half - him sitting multiple games with the bad thumb really hamstrings their righthanded hitting options and has the Brewers really shorthanded, even with him having a bad year thus far.

Pitching is a problem that has nothing to do with whether or not Hiura helps this team...so I really don't know why pitching woes keep getting brought up in a thread debating why one of their best righthanded bats is still sitting in AAA.

Hiura only went 3-4 with a bomb and a double yesterday, so I guess there's room for improvement down on the farm...sheesh They've tried to get past his super 2 cutoff during a seemingly easy stretch of games before the AS break, while hoping shaw and jesus could get going. Neither have set the world on fire at the plate and the team has floundered through june and missed a good opportunity to grab the division while the cubs have also scuffled. Time to get the more talented player on the mlb roster!

I think I'd like to see specifics on all these perceived roster holes to know that DS didn't actually make this years roster more talented. IMO heading into spring training this season, their roster was much better than what they had on the NLCS roster simply by adding Grandal and replacing schoop with moose for a full season. Unless you are a prophet and stated back in March that shaw and jesus would hit like pitchers, knebel would blow out an arm and wahl would blow out a knee, chacin and Byrnes would be terrible, etc, your point is reinforced only by hindsight. I'll clarify that my grief is with the decisions on the pitching side. Although I was fully expecting Aguilar to continue to struggle (or at least revert back to his career norms) based on his second half of the season last year, I was happy about the offensive lineup. I'll still argue that signing Moustakas and Grandal contradicted the approach with the pitching, I'm glad they were signed and without them we'd be in real trouble. My grief goes back to the pitching decisions. I was completely shocked when we let Miley go and he signed for a very small contract (relatively speaking). Then we broke up our major strength of the bullpen to try out three young guys as starters. Normally this wouldn't be a concern, but the odds of those three being successful and take us to the next level this year were very slim. Now we had to have adjustments to move two of them out of the rotation, and due to other struggles, we are and arm or two short in our starting pitching. I understand letting the young guys get their shot, but not if you are going all in (which the Moustakas and Grandal one-year signings would indicate). It's a contradictory approach, which I would have rather gone all young and target next year or the year after, or made the big splash for 2019. Personally I'd have rather them go for it in 2019 as you never know how long our window is. Understood, but puting the young guys in the rotation was in part predicated on not having much room for them in the pen assuming knebel and wahl were in the back end and pitching to their abilities. And Peralta never really contributed as a reliever last year. Woodruff and Byrnes were great in the pen down the stretch last year, but they both were rightly considered starters until proven otherwise at the start of this year . The biggest pitching problem for this team has been the fact they don't have a dominant middle of the pen - if knebel was the closer it would have freed up hader to do his thing in the middle innings to preserve a bunch of leads through innings 5-7. Shifting hader to the closer role has snuffed out the bullpen strength. Add in chacins struggles early and the fact only one of the three young starters has pitched well enough to keep a rotation spot, and they've been chasing their tails all year. I get that losing miley hurts, but it wasn't like he was a 200 inning workhorse last season - the brewers do have a lot of pitching depth internally, they have to be counting on it to improve. I'd be shocked if they don't go after pitching via trade over the next month, too.

I think I'd like to see specifics on all these perceived roster holes to know that DS didn't actually make this years roster more talented. IMO heading into spring training this season, their roster was much better than what they had on the NLCS roster simply by adding Grandal and replacing schoop with moose for a full season. Unless you are a prophet and stated back in March that shaw and jesus would hit like pitchers, knebel would blow out an arm and wahl would blow out a knee, chacin and Byrnes would be terrible, etc, your point is reinforced only by hindsight.

He's probably the 5th best 2B option for the Brewers this year...on just their AAA affiliate. Hiura, Saladino, Dubon, and Spangenberg are all better. So, nope.

As a 130 OPS+ player he can be poor on defense. Everyone thinks Moustakas is just mashing it with the bat and Santana isn’t too far off that offensively. Moose is OPS-ing mid 900's, while Santana is roughly 100 OPS points behind him primarily due to slugging, so yes, Moose is mashing compared to Santana. Plus, Moose plays two infield defensive positions well along with being capable of playing 1B if necessary. Moose has accumulated 3 WAR thus far in 2019, while Domingo is at just 1.0 WAR despite his offensive production. Why? Santana has no defensive positional flexibility - if he plays everyday you have to stick him in a corner OF spot and hope he doesn't get the ball hit to him if you are an NL team. It's really difficult to be that bad defensively in the OF to severely impact your value as a player when you put up really good offensive numbers - but Domingo has found a way! Until Santana is a fulltime DH, he's a marginally good player stuck in a corner OF position.

What stands out to me is all 5 teams in the division are within 5 losses of each other in the standings - really paints the picture of the division being muddled with a collection of good/not great teams that all have flaws. Health and teams' abilities to make moves to fill holes on their rosters by end of July will be the difference. There were threads asking whether the Cards were dead and assuming the Reds and Pirates were afterthoughts - I doubt there will be any afterthoughts in this division until late August at the earliest.

If the Brewers would have wanted to roll with Santana as an everyday player on this roster, he'd have Braun's roster spot. I'm sure they could have rolled with that move had they been willing to eat roughly $40M in salary to trade Braun away for nothing meaningful in return...but I'm guessing Stearns opted to try acquiring a more versatile OF defender plus a pretty decent looking pitching prospect in return for Santana, who spent most of last season in AAA. Santana had a really good 2017, but even then he struck out a ton and played terrible defense. His offensive production isn't missed at all with this team, and if he was still with the Brewers the roster composition would look even wonkier than it currently does without him.

Knebel getting hurt in mid-Spring Training was a huge blow, as was losing Wahl around the same time. The 2019 team talentwise is actually better than the 2018 team, IMO - they're essentially the same group of guys plus adding Grandal, Moose for a full season, a more versatile 4th OF to their roster, and having Hiura on the verge of being an everyday MLB contributor. The problem thus far with the 2019 team is many of their players are having poor years by not being even close to the standards set for themselves in 2017-2018 - that includes Shaw, Jesus, Burnes, Jeffress, Cain, Chacin, Anderson, Jeffress, and others that I'm sure I'm missing.

Factor in their june competition, they've been dreadful this month...sub 500 against the likes of the reds, giants ,Padres, and Marlins after splitting a pair with the astros is a joke

the embedded file shows 2019 season long batting #'s for the Brewers against LHP...which hammers the point home even more that the righthanded bats who should be carrying the offensive load against southpaws just aren't getting it done. When lefty starters can essentially pitch around Yelich, Moose, and Grandal as necessary to then attack the righthanded bats, it's pretty sad.

They can start worrying about that after their roster no longer includes corner IF's who hit like pitchers. IMO Cain is going to benefit from the AS Break, I'd have preferred he be put on the 10 Day IL or given a few days off after the couple games he crashed into walls and fouled a bunch of pitches off himself. Seem like he's been playing with dings alot this season and his struggles at the plate show that. I agree that Cain needs to right the ship, but frankly there are much bigger areas of concern with the roster that need to be dealt with first.

Shaw's improved patience could actually just be facing poorer pitching during this stretch of games that don't just attack him. I frankly don't see anything different in him compared to the first couple months of the season. He just seems painfully in between timingwise, and there's way too much swing and miss in his approach against seemingly hittable fastballs.

So I guess in the grand scheme of things it could be worse than stinking up a few games on the west coast. Yet Rick Hahn continues to draw a big paycheck. Granted Tatis wasn't a huge heralded prospect, but that deal didn't even make sense even when it happened. I don't think Tatis had even played a game for a White Sox full season affiliate by that point - case study in not trading high ceiling talent early

This is the toughest pill to swallow, IMO. It’s impossible to know if any of these game results would have been different, but at least you would have been giving yourself the best possible chance to score runs throughout these six games on the west coast, five of which were against left handed starting pitchers. Getting tougher and tougher to justify that the move wasn't motivated by save a few million dollars a few years down the road. And as a fan, that sucks. What's worst about it is they could have easily optioned Shaw and waited until a later part of the season that made more sense to ship Hiura back to AAA to play the Super 2 game...perhaps at a time when Shaw was leaving no doubt he belonged back in the MLB lineup offensively. Now that they're struggling during a seemingly easier part of their schedule against pitching a good righthanded bat would most certainly improve their chances, it makes the decision to option Hiura a few weeks ago look really bad even if he isn't going to solve the pitching issues on this team.

lol...most depressing way to break the scoring snide ever

I don't think this guy could throw 3 strikes before throwing 4 balls right now - dude is all over the place

glue the bat to Arcia's shoulder until he's got 2 strikes on him

I just don’t get this constant need to police how people react to games. It’s not just you doing it, it happens all the time here when people post negative thoughts about the terrible baseball they’re watching. You do realize this is still a 1st place team, right? Read these IGTs and you'd think we're watching the Orioles. It gets grating after awhile. I know, I know ... just ignore it. June is the soft underbelly of their schedule, and they are wasting it by playing uninspired baseball. The Cubs are on fumes after an extended stretch of games with very few days off to catch up to the Brewers in games played - this stretch was a golden opportunity to put some distance ahead of the Cubs in the standings and it's not happening. Perfectly fine to be frustrated as a fan right now despite them being in 1st.

Yeah, this team hits LHP just fine

That has the look of a broken hand and a long DL stint. Fingers crossed that he can dodge that part of the bullet. That would be absolutely horrible for this team if he misses any length of time. Moose has been a godsend to this lineup this year, and that have no one to replace that bat. Yeah, Hiura would probably come up, but he isn't going to match the production lost to a Moose injury. Likely not even close. The biggest problem would be Shaw having to try and replace Moose's everyday production. That's what wouldn't even be close.