igor67

I'm partial to Jamey Davis myself, but I agree with Roco's point. Moyer is incredibly cagey. Looking at some of his miscelleanous stats it looks like not only has he generically benefited from some really good defense and favorable park (in addition to his sly style), but he inverted his GB/FB ratio after Safeco opened. Which is exactly what you'd want to do if you went from the Kingdome to Safeco with Mike Cameron watching your back. Davis has a somewhat similar profile, but It's hard to project him for the same kind of excellent success. I'm happy to wind up with a #4 starter. And looking at his career line I can't for the life of me figure out why Texas let him go he never posted an ERA above 5 except for his 1 2003 start.

Well to this point Ned has done a great job managing he stretched Davis about as far as he could without watching him blow-up then took full advantage by using his worst reliever to finsih off a weak line-up in the ninth with a 4 run lead. If Ford can't hold this lead he needs to be demoted immediately.

Call me unconvinced but against the worst line-up in baseball Obermueller still posts a 4.50 ERA? He may have bought himself more time, but I'm leaning more fluke that real at this point.

The question will all want to know has the alien left Housman's body? Will he continue his streak of 9 K games? Did we somehow steal the essence of Randy Johnson in a mutagenic baseball and give it to Jeff?

Having watched the banter the durrington move was pretty dicey, but considering the roster is missing a few available people he wasn't an obviously worse choice to hit in an OBP situation (which is to say I highly doubt that Trent can't atleast post an OBP near .300 given time). Using Bennet in the 9th looks bad in retrospect only because the Crew came back. Given the overall quality of Expos pitching so far, even if Livan struggles that inning it would seem like they still have a good chance to shut you down. This might be a case where Melvin should take some heat and they might want to be thinking about letting Bennet go and finding a real reliever.

Counsell is not a starter, Billy Hall probably isn't one either. Right now the only thing Counsell can do is take a walk. That's nice, but in terms of bench skills I want to see that's not high on my list. Put another way how often are you going to want to put Counsell in as a defensive replacement? How often would you go the the man for a pinch walk and his stellar .330 OBP? Pinch bunt for the pitcher maybe? Hall on the other hand given the opportunity to see more major league pitching can probably settle into a Jose Hernandez type skill set low OBP, but large power off the bench with the ability to play numerous positions. Power is more useful in a pinch batter than walking, since the vast majority of pinch hit appearances are during not starting a rally.

Housman again???????? It's clear that he's paying the luck gods back for last season, but at what point does this pass beyond fluky WOW to my gosh we've got another pretty good lefty prospect.

I think Yost goofed, but the brutal truth of the matter is the decision to carry 2 wounded relievers and spot start some long relievers put Yost into a terrible situation. I mean the team did have the lead at the time, so the question was which way gives me the least opportunity of screwing it up? No guarantee Kiesch doesn't strikeout or GIDP. And he's been dealing lately, but how much of that is real? If he gets into trouble you don't want to bring in Bennet to try and preserve a lead in a jam. Basically Kolb is going to end up going almost a full 15 days without pitching. The difference between him being available a couple of days earlier does not outweigh the affects of playing with a 24 and for a couple of days a 23 man roster, really 22 with the rule V guy.

So strolling through the stats. Hart is having a pretty good go of it. Hardy to though he hasn't walked much, but he's more of a put it in play hitter. Which is when I noticed that so far this year his strikeout rate has plummeted! Yes the man that has consistently Ked about once every 9 ABs has gotten even better, and it's not like he's losing power. In a better pitchers league in a pitcher's park at a higher level he's Slugging about 30 points higher than last year! Now it's possible that he's been seeing more strikes, and as a consequence not going as deep into counts and depressing both the walk and K rates, but I can't help but think that while not quite on the Vlad talent-o-meter this kind of bat control really makes those who questioned his bat look silly.

I'll throw in late on the the Sheets pitch count issue. Prospectus has some solid work that indicates average pitch count is a poor measure of "stress" from a pure numbers point of view after about 105 pitches or so the risk of damage increases exponentially. So 110 on a semi regular basis from an established pitcher isn't bad. 120 on occasion is acceptable given other justification, but every pitch over 120 starts to extract a large cost. Starts much over 120 tend to have spill over affects of decreased performance for the next few starts. An extra day of rest is not going to substantially counter act these issues. My concern is that Yost is 2-2 in starts he could have let Ben keep going. The first few starts of the year the pitcher is still getting stretched out something Yost realized, and so he had no real chance to abuse Ben in those games. Since then though... Ben has established himself as a horse, but not the kind of old veteran like Schilling and Johsons you can ride hard on the pitch counts. It should be a month before Ben goes over 120 again or unfortunately I'll have to agree with the assessment that he'll see some DL time this year.

Is Yost trying to recreate last weeks magical wins, by starting Hall for the final two games? Rather interesting strategy, still whatever Ned wants to believe as long as he gets Hall some more ABs. I am amazed that Hall has continued to do so well, after Taylor tried so very hard to kill his career he's fought through to be a productive player with a fair amount of upside.

I was thinking it would be great if the Brewers had there 10AM start time AA affiliate up here in the Twin Cities, but then I'd never accomplish anything. Great for at work in 36 minutes!

It's not that it's dumb Kat it's that every other Lou in the world that plays a sport is called sweet. As I recall Jim was really on the ball with this one last year. And I agree we're all for anything but sweet.

Someone want to explain to me when Housman decided getting punch outs was important? The guy goes from smoke and mirrors to dealing with an ERA seemingly out of whack? I wonder if some odd upward mobility on the old power 50 will be waranted by this unexpected show of stuff.

The Keg and Cap'n Lou still ive on in this Brewer fan!

Random statitude addition. Remebering my earlier post about trying to get a better judgement of Kade and ading up all of his AA stats. His current line is .219/.292/.362 which is pretty bad, but up substantially from last years .192/.271/.296 If Kade were to keep this year's pace going for another 3months (which would give him 400 AA ABs) he'd have an aggregate line of .261/.327/.504. Which would be solid for the Southern League from a catcher. One of the biggest things Kade has done is make better contact this year last year in 213 ABs he had 65 Ks this year in 47 ABs only 9. Equalizing those he'd have about 38 in the same number of ABs this year. Or the better way his 400 AB total would be 101.

I'll add my comments: It was wet and cold Unfortunately I had to leave early so I didn't see the go ahead runs, but it was an interesting game. Had the wind been going steady like it was earlier as opposed to the occaisonal gusts I'm sure we'd have seen a couple more Snapper HRs as they bounced a couple of those doubles high off the wall. Trofholz did hit a shot to dead center, nearly off the flag pole. It did seem like the Snappers we're taking BP off the T-rats starter. I think I saw everyone, but didn't get a chance to meet the Rizzo's. Good showing with 27 people, maybe we can get a May game next year http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif

Keish!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well I can only figure on the Japanesse Fielder connection as the reason for that story. Unless Bud plans to pay down Miller Park debt by selling those two guys http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif

All kinds of box score nuggets today. Perhaps the suggestion that Forrest Martin could come close to Hendrickson astounding HD performance of two years ago was a bit optimistic. I'll take Chris Saenz from last year though with another good start, but victimized by the park. Ford a solid performance, does Stewart have a real future in the pen or is this just a veteran creaming AA hitters? Dana Eveland with 8 Ks and no walks in 6 innings. Is it greedy to want Rookie ball to start already? The wannabe prospect mayvens that dissed Hardy with "questions" about his bat should really find a whole to crawl in today.

Sweet Hardy with a Grand Slam! Indians 4-3 in the 5th.

OK so it's great that Nelson is trying to make most of us feel bad for doubting him, and Prince looks to be awakening, and Saenz is also showing that great pitchers can survive HD, but the real question is Kade Johnson for real? Moeller's fine, but Bennet will wilt away just like Perez did last year after a fast start, and leave us looking at catcher as something of a problem with Captain Lou still aways off. Here's the essential problem with trying to figure out Kade aside from the teeny sample. He's repeating the level. When prospects repeat a level they tend to do much better even dominate sometimes, but this tends to be an unreliable indicator of true talent. The obvious counter point though is that aside from seeing fewer ABs last year for being a catcher, he also spent a good chunk of the year in HD. All of which is true Kade only registered 213 ABs in Huntsville last year. And he did seem to start showing signs of life in the playoffs. Perhaps it's a more reasonable way to approach the issue by treating the start of this year as an add on to last and recalculate his performance? Doing that his mere 20 plate appearances this season push him from a .192 BA to a .211. His OBP from .271 to .279. And the biggest mover his SLG from .296 to .350. The total numbers still stink, but if by time he gets to 300 ABs he can push that line to something like a .250/.300/.400 line that's not bad for a catcher in the Southern League. To do that he'd have to go 26 for 68 (.382) wouldn't have to register a single walk in that time to have a .301 OBP. And of those 26 hits he'd have to generate 13 more total bases, which would be like 4 HRs and a double, or 3 HRs 3 doubles.

Well to this point we've seen the beginnings of a Ben breakout, which was one of those preseason keys to doing better than anticipated, and solid performances from Davis and Capuano. Spivey has been better than I anticipated, but not to the extent he can carry the team. So on average the offense has been about what I expected overall. The real issue has been giving away every game Obbie and Kinney have been in save 1. Luckily while some of our pitching prospects may not be quite ready enough to replace both men, we only need to replace one, perhaps with Ford? The parallels between Kinney and Rusch are getting eerie. Both pitchers with previously excellent BB:K ratios that have horrible starts based largely on not having those excellent ratios. Mercifully we have other options now, and can move on without hanging on ever dwindling prospects for a turn around.

Great to see Hardy getting it going, and Hart continuing to pound the ball, but I want to see Hart handle things when he sees teams a couple more times and they get some scouting on him. Making adjustments is always the hardest thing to do.

I've been looking at the splits for opposing batters to examine the "benefit" from the lefty starter, and to this point I'm underwhelmed. Houston is just stacked with guys who really make hay off lefties. St Louis was closer to neutral with Edmonds being severly neutralized, but a number of other batters benefiting to varying degrees. and SF was pretty much straight neutral Bonds appears slightly less dangerous against lefties having posted basically the same OPS over 3 years against both, but he loses .050 points of OBP against lefties (probably an indication they challenge him more frequently). I'm hoping we start finding these line-ups that we can "exploit" with our lefties or it's hard to see the point of making a big deal about it in the first place.