Ennder

We caught the Phillies so are tied for worst record, can only go up from here!

And again the Brewers had the 10th most wins of any team in baseball since 2008 going into this season, it was around the 8th most wins at the all star break last year. This team has probably seen its best days as a franchise under Melvin. I think he probably should be replaced soon just because the game is trending younger for GMs but to say this team has somehow failed in recent history is just being ridiculous.

I'm a bit confused here. If you look at FA spending by team since 2010 the Brewers are very low in the rankings. Since when did we sign spend a lot on FA's? Lohse in particular is one FA who has actually been worth his deal so far so he isn't even a good example of a bad deal.

I think he was above average when he started here but is below average now because so many good young GMs have entered the league.

Funny thing is if the bats don't go ice cold to finish last year we make the playoffs and suddenly the organization is not the worst in baseball like people want to make it out to be. They put a playoff roster on the field, the team tanked due to a bunch of nagging little injuries late in the year. As for the Marcum thing, there were no good options at all. Gallardo had pitched poorly in Sept and would have to go on short rest which has never treated him well or you had Marcum who wasn't pitching well or a bullpen that would have struggled to get through a game since it wasn't rested.

This is the 3rd year in a row that a Roenicke team has been derailed by one just awful streak they couldn't get out of so I totally understand letting him go. I don't see any reason to think Counsell is qualified to coach a major league team though so I really hate the hire. At least it is early in a throw away season so it isn't like he can really do any damage either.

On top of all that offense is down over 20% since his prime. Even if he became the player he used to be it would probably be the tune of a 15-20% drop in stats.

And the rats come crawling out of the woodworks. If the team goes on a small hot streak they will go scurrying back into the darkness but for now they rule supreme feeding on a poor streak.

Sad. He would have been a really good player without all the injuries.

If we follow that line of thinking I guess baseball should have separate players for defense and offense for every position. After all why should we have to watch Kotsay play center just to get his bat in the lineup? Why did we have to watch Rickie Weeks or Prince on defense? It would have been a hell of a lot more fun watching prince hit and Ishikawa field. I can just imagine how great it would be to see nothing but pure hitters hit and pure fielders field. It would have made it a heck of a lot easier to find a first baseman the past two years as well. Maybe also get rid of that rule that says once you leave the game you can't come back. Because nobody is asking for anything like that so it really is no argument against anything. If I ask the city to build more bike lanes they don't respond "why don't we just outlaw cars" and ignore me.

Very few teams actually do this anymore. The DH is used to rest players more than anything else. As for the adding strategy, how often are you actually making a difficult strategic decision when PH for a pitcher? Maybe 1 in every 10 games or so. In the early 1900s a pitcher might get 125-150 PA a year. Now they get like 50-75. It just isn't enough repetition to expect a pitcher to be able to hit these days. Add in that every other league nationwide except a single Japanese league uses the DH in some way and it just doesn't make any sense anymore. The game changes, it is part of life and this is a long overdue change at this point.

4 series sweeps and we are right back at .500! Lets get her done.

I think I'd rather test Bruce's arm than rely on Logan's bat.

Yeah it wouldn't help much this year for sure. I just feel that the game has changed to the point where pitchers hitting makes no sense. They don't get nearly the AB they used to, other pitchers throw more breaking pitches etc. Even a positional player really struggles to stay productive when they only get in the lineup once a week, it is an outdated concept. It is really obvious that the two leagues need to be the same now that interleague is such a big deal and it makes way more sense to both go DH than both go pitchers hit given today's game.

I highly doubt that. Everything I've read on the tested effects of steroids suggests this is false. I mean other players who got busted mostly reverted to like 90% of their old stats just like you would expect. Braun has a hand injury added to his case which makes him the unique one and likely causing him to be the outlier. These aren't the steroids of the Bonds era where they added tons of muscle mass, the steroids used today are very different.

Hopefully this and the Scherzer injury create a Posey style buzz and we finally join the 21st century with the DH in the NL.

This would be a really bad time to trade him, even if he is totally done he is going to have a hot streak at some point, heck even Yuni B had them. If you want to move him you have to see signs of life first and then just take the risk that they aren't for real.

No it really isn't. How many players have actually been caught for steroids? The number is astronomically small. There is no reason on earth he would be worried about it before signing the contract. I was very uneasy when they did the extension because of his injury issues and that is almost certainly his thought process as well. Even if he is the biggest crook in the history of sports there was no good reason for him to think he might get caught. It is simply a stretch to think he knew he would caught given the history of steroids in the game.

That is a very huge stretch to come to that conclusion. A lot of players have signed deals just like that even before Braun. Braun has had nagging injuries his whole career, of course he was eager to get extended. My vote on this squarely goes in the it depends, April stats are more or less worthless for judging future production so I need to see how he plays into May and June. If he puts up say Corey Hart type numbers the rest of his career I don't think it is the worst deal in their history, if he is just worthless than yeah he might be.

I don't really think a new GM has enough time to get ready for the mid season stuff, that almost has to be handled by Melvin. I don't recall ever hearing of a GM being fired this early in the season. Also Melvin has been way too good a GM to embarrass like that and I know fans as a whole would be pissed by it.

Maybe he realized he made a mistake with Yost, the manager who was in the World Series a year ago. And who managed the World Series so poorly that Royals fans were shouting for his head~. Royals got hot at the right time and they had a bullpen even Yost couldn't mess up, it was a pretty good situation for him. Yost was a bad manager for the Brewers regardless of how he is now though.

If there was it would probably a team that was thought of as a lock before the season too. This is a Brewer team that needed a lot of things to go their way to make it in the first place. The worst case scenario is we get hot in mid May and get to like 6 games under around June and they decide to hold because we are 'hot'.

I don't think this would be very popular with the teams though. With how long players take to develop I think they would much rather take talent with a year or two of experience than a pick. I don't think you'd see the picks traded very often at all. In the NFL and NBA a pick adds value the next year, in baseball it is usually at least 2 years away and sometimes 4 or 5.

The entire team has just played poorly so far this year so there is no pointing at any reason for it. It is really hard for any team to play this poorly no matter how bad the actual team is. Even 100+ loss teams don't play this poorly.

Disliking a trade because you disliked it at the time is absolutely fine. But coming here and justifying that your opinion was right based on stats is simply hindsight. To use Odorizzi as an example, he has way too small a sample to know what he is yet, ERA+ is a really flawed stat to begin with, how do we know that he would have developed the same as a Brewer, he finally found his success on a team that seems to be able to churn out pitcher after pitcher. If we had gotten the 2013+ version of Greinke does that really change whether its a good deal or not? If we play a little better and make or win a World Series in 2011 does that change it? Saying you don't like us trading away young pitching is fine, trying to prove via things like this just isn't productive at all. From 2007-2015 (the Braun Era) The Brewers have the 12th most wins in baseball. They have more than any other team in the division except the Cardinals. That includes this simply awful stretch to start this year and bad finish last year, around the all star break last year that was around 9th best. It isn't like this team has been flailing around uselessly. They currently have a roster with some young talent and a load of players who have deservingly been all stars. The current roster was projected to be over .500 by most projection models. This whole thread is starting to just come off as a bunch of smug posters patting themselves on the back and saying I told you so because the team got off to a bad start. I do think a rebuild makes a lot of sense simply because the start is so bad and since Braun's future doesn't seem to be a face of the franchise type one, but I don't agree with a complete fire sale. I also don't agree that the franchise has been 'sad' in recent history. If our franchise has been 'sad' then half the league has been sad.