Ennder

So far in the majors Estrada is a flyball pitcher with poor control, that just isn't the skillset I'm excited about and in general I'm worried about a guy who is still in AAA at age 26. I'm not saying Estrada is worse or better than Suppan, I'm saying that we need to find real players to replace Suppan. If Estrada is the best we can do to replace him I just don't think we are going to upgrade that roster spot much.

When we still have guys like Estrada on the roster getting rid of Suppan isn't going to do much. The team needs to find a number of better options to make this worth worrying about.

Don't look now but Braun is batting 2nd today with Escobar batting 9th!

I'm not buying that the glove slipped off there btw. I'm not saying West was in the right here but I'm not really buying what Guillen and Buehrle are selling here either.

If a pitcher like Buerhle can throw 2 no hitters someone like Wolf can throw one. What I find interesting is the best pitcher in baseball threw a no hitter for once. Seems like a large number of them have been by pretty mediocre pitchers lately.

Pretty clear at this point that Estrada is by far the worst pitcher on the team and should be gone, regardless of how much extra hate Vargas and Suppan get. OH well none of them are great so it isn't going to hurt one way or another.

12-15 Tie Breaker - 9 I think this is a really tough month schedule wise and the Brewers will struggle with it.

11-14 so far with tie breaker of 18, still a lot of people in the hunt to win this thing with just 3 games to go.

Estrada has likely pitched worse than Vargas or Suppan on the season given his peripherals, wouldn't bother me a little bit if he was the one to go. There are plenty of guys to choose from who aren't going to help the team all that much so I don't mind the timing of this.

That is kind of odd, Johnson and Uggla both have 12 HR already and Utley is always a beast. Seems strange that Weeks makes the top 3 even. Of course since it is fan voting you get all kinds of weird results.

This roster should probably be a .500 team so it won't surprise me. Doug Davis didn't struggle, he gave up a bunch of extra singles which if you watched the games were mostly ground balls that found holes. Now Dave Bush is actually struggling with most of his peripherals being significantly worse than his 3 year average. If you want to worry about a pitcher in the rotation he is the one you should be looking at, not Doug Davis.

Not singling you out in any way here but a lot of people on the forums want to give 100% credit for the good drafted players to Jack Z and 100% of the blame for the drafted players that didn't work out to Melvin. There is a pretty prevalent double standard at play on the forums.

That is why your expectations will never be met no matter what GM runs the team because they simply are not realistic. Over the past 5 years the Brewers have 409 wins. The Cardinals have 438 wins over that same time frame. The Cubs have 410. The other teams in the NL Central all have fewer than the Brewers. To say that is somehow a failure is just flat out wrong. The Braves only have 411, the Dodgers 420, the Mets 427, the Phillies 447. All other NL teams have fewer wins than the Brewers over the last 5 years. So the Brewers have the 7th most wins of any NL team over the past 5 years and are 2 wins away from the team with the 5th most all while still in the middle of rebuilding the franchise and with a below average payroll for the majority of the time and that is a failure?

I felt the 2009 team underperformed as well, pretty much every single starting pitcher on the team had the worst year of their career and by a significant amount, Hardy took a major step back, Weeks got hurt, none of the young guys except McGehee really did anything useful. That team had at least .500 talent and probably a bit over .500.

But again this just isn't accurate. Players do not judge themselves based on titles, they want to win titles. Those are two very different things. You'll never hear someone say that Prince Fielder wasn't a good player because he hasn't won a world series, players just don't think like that. Players aren't going to say Craig Counsell was one of the best SS ever since he won 2 world series. Players want to win titles, they don't judge themselves by them. It makes a tiny bit of sense in basketball since one player has such a huge effect on things but it makes absolutely no sense in baseball or football.

I just think judging players by team achievement is just terrible. It is like people who say one QB is better than another because he has more Super Bowls like that actually matters. I'll never understand that line of thinking. Ryan Howard is a good player because he hits a lot of HR, not because his team was good enough to win a world series, they have nothing to do with each other.

I would expect a rebuild of a franchise that was as bad off as the Brewers were to take roughly 10-12 years. I also fail to see how being a .500 team over an extended period of time is a failure, given the payroll that should be the goal not a failure. Sometimes we'll get years where we can make pushes at the playoffs, sometimes we'll have years that are duds.

Given the state of the team 6 years ago and the fact they probably won't end up losing 90 this year I'd say that is a very strong track record. I think people just expected way too much out of one crop of rookies.

We will have to agree to disagree, Morneau is having by far the best year of his career this year which might move him up the list but situational hitting is such a minor part of what makes a player good or bad that it can't possible move him up the list by itself. This is the same kind of thinking that made Carlos Lee so grossly overrated.

We have really drafted for hitting in general in the past. They decided to start the rebuild by drafting hitting heavy first. A big part of the problem is that we are still in rebuilding mode which people dont' seem to realize. Our first wave of good talent hasn't even reached the point where we are trading it yet which is where the 2nd phase of rebuilding an organization starts. Rebuilding an organization that is in as bad of shape as the Brewers were is more of a 10+ year project most of the time. You have to get a good group of prospects, get them to the big leagues, have them show success, draft good solid players while they are showing success and then trade some of them for more prospects. Only at that point have you really rebuilt the organization. What Melvin does with Hardy, Hart, Braun, Fielder, Weeks, Gallardo is going to decide how good of a job he did imo. We took a huge blow to the organization last year when we did not get proper compensation for Sabathia or Sheets, that was a major step back for the process. Trading a lot of talent to get Sabathia and not even get true type A FA compensation is just painful. Another hit to the rebuild was that they also needed to rebuild the fan base so they brought up every one of these players about a half year to a year before they probably should have. We should have each of these guys except maybe Braun for 1 more season than we do so this alone probably set things back a full season. We have had a number of starting pitchers that people thought might make a real impact at some point in the past few years. Inman who the team I think correctly decided was not going to be much of a major league pitcher but probably should have been used in trade for someone longer term. Jackson who just didn't pan out. Gallardo who has turned into an almost ace. Villanueva who has found success in the bullpen. Parra who suffered through multiple injuries and hasn't really been the same since. Jeffress who has had drug problems and Mark Rogers who has been hurt. Before those guys we had De La Rosa and Eveland who took until a very late age to find any success at the major league level. Where the Brewers have really failed is not getting RP from within. You don't need high end draft picks to develop RP, we should be seeing a steady diet of RP coming up through the system and not having to get them via FA very often. People point at the Rays as an example but it is a poor one. The Rays were an expansion team who built themselves specifically around future youth and upside and basically started their 'rebuild' the year they were formed. There first winning season was in year 10 of their rebuild and their minor league system started from a better spot than the Brewers did. The current Rays are where we would hope the Brewers will be in like 2-4 years assuming they do a good job with things. I don't hold much faith that this is going to actually work out though because our minor league system is just decent right now and not great.

I'm guessing they'll just move up Narveson, they seem to think he can throw 130 pitches a day.

This is just not a good way to judge a pitcher though. If a hitter comes out and hits 20 line drives in a week but they all are right at someone for outs he isn't hitting poorly. If a pitcher comes in and gives up 5 BB, 1 K and 75% of his outs are deep flyballs he didn't pitch well. You have to focus on the things in the pitchers control and ER are largely out of his control over a sample of 6 innings. Dave Bush has not pitched many good games this year, regardless of the ER allowed.

You don't want to judge a pitcher by ER for single games, it is a terrible way to judge them. Look at tha game log, he has as many or more BB than K in over half of his games. He is giving up way too many flyballs. The first game of the season and maybe the April 20th games are the only real quality games in this game log.

I sure hope Mark doesn't start making moves just because fans like to overreact to everything. I'm fine with someone not liking Melvin but he certainly isn't the must be fired category of GMs either. If they find a really good replacement I dont' mind them making a change but there needs to be a plan in place first and not just firing him because the team is underperforming. I could really care less what happens to Macha, they'll replace him and I'll just dislike a new guy probably~.

Well Ranger starters haven't exactly been amazing this year. Feldman has a 5.90 ERA, Harrison a 5.29 ERA, Harden a 4.74. Holland is the only guy they have with an xFIP under 4. Looking deeper into the stats they mostly have very low BABIP and high LOB% except for Feldman. That could be a good bullpen and good defense partially at play, could be a bit of good luck. Considering none of these guys were starters for the team even 3 years ago it is hard to say what part of this is Maddux though.