rotoherb

Butler had a 2.59 GO/FO ratio last season and has a 2.23 ratio so far this season. Sounds like he does a good job getting ground balls, though it would be nice if he struck out a few more guys. BA says that he throws 92-95 with hard sink in their write-up of him and have him as #16 in the Rays system. Getting any pitching prospect with promise for Gabe Gross is a good trade in my book.

Does Riske not feel well? he's pitched 2/3 of an inning since the 16th.

Hart was just doing what he was told to do. He's running on contact with that play.

You don't win too many games with two runs. The offense has to take it's share of the blame. The Cardinals got two runs in the third inning on one hit and one run in the eighth without a hit.

The whole "five hits in a row" thing seems way over the top to me. One was a check swing and the last two were ground balls that are outs probably 80% of the time. Heck, Bako's ground ball was so weak that it barely made it out to Hart in right field. Griffey's double play ball was hit harder than either of the last two hits. Villanueva wasn't getting behind in the count and he didn't appear to be laboring so I don't really have a problem with Yost not pulling him because Encarnacion guessed correctly on a first pitch curve ball. If people want to get upset with something about yesterday's game then get upset about not drawing a single walk the whole game and only two in the entire three game series. The Brewers are dead last in the majors in walks at just 17 and two of those were intentional. Yost's managerial decisions will have much less of an effect on the season than the Brewers' ability to get on base.

wow, I really didn't think it would take so long to run that delete statement, but it's not entirely surprising. OK, the following process will work a lot faster, you just need to be able to create a table, which I think you can handle. I just ran through this and it looks like it works to me. 1) Double click on "create table in design view" and create a table with one field called "playerid". Make it a text column with a field size of 10. Save the table as "toDelete". 2) Click on "Queries" under "Objects". Double click on "create query in design view". Close the small "show table" window that comes up, you don't need that. Right click on the Query window and select "SQL View". 3) Copy the following statements into that window and run them one at a time by hitting the exclamation mark in the toolbar. insert into toDelete (playerid) select distinct playerid from batting where teamid not in ('mil','ml1','ml2','ml3','ml4','mlu','se1') insert into toDelete (playerid) select distinct playerid from pitching where teamid not in ('mil','ml1','ml2','ml3','ml4','mlu','se1') What you are doing here is inserting every player who never played for a milwaukee team into that table. 4) Copy and paste the following statements one at a time into the window and run them. delete from toDelete where playerid in (select playerid from batting where teamid in ('mil','ml1','ml2','ml3','ml4','mlu','se1')) delete from toDelete where playerid in (select playerid from pitching where teamid in ('mil','ml1','ml2','ml3','ml4','mlu','se1')) What you are doing is first inserting every player who didn't play their entire career with a milwaukee team into the toDelete table. Then in step four you are deleting all of the players who played only part of their careers in Milwaukee. What you are left with is a list of every player who never played a day for a milwaukee team. 5) Run this query to delete all of those player from the Master table. delete from master where playerid in (select playerid from toDelete) This should leave you with about 1000 rows in the Master table. These queries won't delete all of the managers. If you want to delete the manager then I'd suggest just opening the master table at this point and sorting by playerid. Then you can highlight all of the rows without a playerid and hit the delete key to delete them. The result is a Master table with 868 players. Again, I'd recommend making a copy of the database before you do any of this.

you can open a query window and run these queries one at a time to delete every player who never played on a milwaukee team: delete from master where playerid not in (select playerid from batting where teamid in ('mil','ml1','ml2','ml3','ml4','mlu','se1')) delete from master where playerid not in (select playerid from pitching where teamid in ('mil','ml1','ml2','ml3','ml4','mlu','se1')) It may take 30 minutes or more to run the queries, but it should work. There are faster ways to do it, but you'd need to create a table first and do some inserts. The queries above will get the job done. I left in any milwaukee team, including the Pilots, I'm not sure if that's what you want. If you just want the Brewers then take out all of the teams except for 'MIL'. It's also a good idea to make a copy of the database before you run those queries, just in case it's not what you're looking for.

Are you trying to delete the player stats or do you just want to delete the players from the master list of players? Editing the debuts and birth dates is easy. Just open the database in access and double click on the "Master" table. You just need to find the players that you want to edit and then you can edit the values manually. If you want to delete all of the other players first then I can give you some queries to run, I just need to know if you want to delete all of the player stats or if you just want to delete those players from the Master table.

They replaced Corey Koskie with Nelson on the 40 man roster.

There was an intesting blog post over at Baseball America about catching prospects and the percentage of runners that they throw out stealing. BA blog post They list the caught stealing percentage of every catcher who was in their 2007 Prospect Handbook and had at least 40 attempts this year. Angel Salome threw out just 6 of 46 base stealers this season (13%), which was the worst of any of the top prospects. I know that the pitchers can have almost as much to do with throwing out runners as the catcher, but it still probably doesn't explain being that bad. Did anyone see him this year and was he really that bad throwing out runners? The average for high Single-A is 32%, so he was 18% below average. Most top catching prospects don't do well throwing out runners simply because it's their bat that makes them prospects, not their arms. Still, I'd like to see Salome do a little better than that.

I guess Bush has decided the best way to not give up any hits is to not throw a strike.

Gallardo's stats the first time he faces a team: 60 IP, 2.25 ERA, 52K, 19BB, 1HR The second time he faces a team: 24 1/3 IP, 9.25 ERA, 23K, 9BB, 6HR His walks and strikeouts have pretty much remained the same the second time he's faced a team, he just gives up a lot more hits and a lot more HR. This is actually the third time against the Pirates, but second start. Let's hope that they haven't figured anything out.

I believe the Brewers just traded for Ray King, as per ESPNews. It probably can't hurt, I haven't really looked up his recent numbers. I know he's always been tough on lefties.

Suppan's contract was conveniently structured to keep his salary below Sheets' salary for 07/08 and then it jumps up to $12.5 million for the last two seasons. I'm guessing that Sheets will want at least as much as Suppan, if not more, per season for at least four years. I would certainly hope that Melvin had a plan when he set up Suppan's contract knowing that Sheets was slated to be a free agent after the 08 season. He's either already decided that Sheets will go or he's already planning on offering Sheets $13-$15 million per year in an extension.

I doubt that there will be a large turnover of players, but Melvin will need to figure out what Sheets wants and decide if it's doable. If he feels that there is no chance to resign Sheets then he may trade him and get as much as possible. He knows he can get more in a trade during the offseason than at the trade deadline. Plus, there's no guarantee that Sheets will be healthy at the trade deadline. Trading Sheets wouldn't exactly constitute "rebuilding", but it's likely the players he got in return would help more in future years than in 2008.

I'd rather draw the comparison to the 2001 Twins, who were 56-32 on July 12th and went 29-45 the rest of the way to finish 85-77. I'm pretty sure I recall that the Twins set a record for laregest disparity between pre All-Star game win pct and post All-Star game win pct. At least the Twins went on to win the division four of the next five years.

The Brewers were 48-34 on July 2nd, the same 14 games over .500 that they were when they were 24-10, and I believe it was the best record in the NL at the time. People just keep bringing up the 24-10 because it's really easy to remember and it was the beginning of the season. They were 15-5 over a 20 game span in June, but I don't think anyone has talked about how they wasted that stretch. You can take a 20 or 30 games stretch out of any season and find a hot or cold streak, the Brewers just started out the season in one so everyone is going to keep going back to it.

A quad usually isn't as bad as a hammy, so we'll have to wait and see if he'll miss more than a few days. Soriano is only hitting around .270/.280/.420 since the end of June, so he really hasn't been helping them out much lately, but having him out of the lineup means he can't get hot like he did in June. The Cubs haven't been playing as well as the media makes it out, going just 7-8 over their last 15 games. The Brewers have been blowing things lately more than the Cubs making a run.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-thu_canning_0802aug02,0,2383561.story Is it a conflict of interest to own 11% of the Brewers and be actively trying to buy the Cubs? I'd doubt that he has much if any say in running the team, but it just seems like an odd thing to have an owner actively trying to jump ship to the competition.

Just because I want to take the positive outlook... Cubs over the last six games: 2 - 4 Brewers over the last six games 3 - 3 Clearly, the Brewers are starting to run away with things.....

While I'm not jumping for joy over this deal, I don't get the "this is a terrible trade" talk. I haven't read every post, but from what I can gather most people are under the impression that Inman was the top prospect in the system. You'd be hard pressed to find any scout right now that would put him in that position, as he'd definitely rank behind Gallardo, Jeffress and likely behind LaPorta and Parra as well. I still think that Melvin gave up quite a bit, maybe more than he's have to for another pitcher of similar status. From listening to his pregame comments it became clear that he has been pretty obsessed with Linebrink for a number of years and hopefully that didn't cloud his judgement. I do find it interesting that 20-30 years ago there would have been almost no outcry to this trade at all. It would have probably gotten a 99% approval rating from the fans. There was no internet and no one had any idea who minor leaguers were or how they even rated. Any and every trade that was minor leaguers for a major league player was hailed as a great trade. That was obviously the wrong approach, but really the only one fans could make because of the lack of information. Now, I think the internet has swung the pendulum past the point of objectivity and way to the other side. The internet has given fans the ability to follow prospects from the day they are drafted and even allows them to become personally attached to each one. They see stats, they get caught up in other fans' hype for a player, but they never actually see the player pitch. I don't love this trade, mainly because I think they could have gotten a reliever who I think is better than Linebrink, but I don't see it as being a bad trade either. I do think they got better in the bullpen and better as a team this year.

I didn't see anyone bring this up before, but Kevin Goldstein at Baseball Prospectus did an updated positional rankings for minor league catchers last week and Salome didn't make the top 15. He actually had Lou Palmisano in the "Honorable Mention" area, but no mention of Salome. I thought it was a little strange, but maybe scouts don't think as highly of him as we do around here. It's a free article, if anyone wants to give it a read: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=6467

Northwestern University - '94 with a BS in Chemical Engineering (though I've never used that degree). I worked at the sports pavilion for three years and in the tech administration offices for one while in college. It still took me eight years to pay off my loans after I got out. That's two for NU!

In 12 July games Brantley is hitting .368/.520/.474 with a 9/0 SB/CS ratio, 12/3 BB/K ratio. Even as a small sample size, that's pretty amazing for a 20 year old in the Southern League. Maybe the Brewers knew what they were doing when they promoted him.

online AP articles say it was for minor league pitcher Jerry Blevins. I really do hope it is Marshall, though. That would be great.