Thurston Fluff

I agree. Anybody who was living off the kool-aid before the season and thought the Brewers really could compete with this staff has to be getting a cold dose of reality right about now. I remember people saying this rotation was going to be better than last year's and that Gallardo was better than Sheets and Parra was going to improve and basically we wouldn't really miss Sheets or even CC who apparently didn't count because he was a late season acquisition. I was one of those people to an extent. I thought the rotation would be worse but not so bad that the core of offensive players coming into their own couldn't make up for it. I don't known of anyone that thought it would be as good. I don't recall anyone who thought pitching was going to be a problem thought Parra would flop as badly as he did nor that Bush would be out as long as he is. I knew we had no depth but thought we had enough serviceable guys to make the team competitive barring injuries. I know there are some who thought Parra wouldn't' improve but none who thought he would fail so badly that he had to be sent to the minors. Looking forward he seems to be figuring it out. Even this last game where he struggled badly to begin with he managed six innings and kept the team within shouting distance. Looper is an average pitcher at best and Suppan is pretty much done. Is Suppan any more done than he has been the last several years? He seems to be about the same #5 pitcher he has always been to me.

There's no study about knee injuries, but there are plenty of studies that show that young pitchers injury and fatigue rates increase greatly if their innings jump by more than 30 or so in any given year. I think you are misrepresenting the study's findings. It was meant to show pitchers need to build up their arm slowly at a young age. It was not meant to say a pitcher who had already built up to a certain level then when the innings went down the next year could only throw 20 more innings than that the following year or it would increase the risk of injury. I understand how you arrived at that assumption but it is not a proper use of that study.

I have always been a fan of his. He is a true blue brewer. I do not know how good he is as a pitching coach. It may very well be the pitchers but there are no pitchers doing better than we thought and several doing worse. That could simply be the small amount of time/players he has worked with or he might not be very good. I wish I could say for sure it had nothing to do with him but i can't. I am not willing to say he is at fault nor that he should be relieved of his duties after this year but he better show us something as a coach. Unless there is some underlying reason we don't see he should get a shot at proving himself one way other.

That's not a known fact. It's leaked information from a supposedly "sealed document" by anonymous sources. It is a known fact that steroids help the player achieve results they could not have achieved without them. It is also known that Manny has performed about the same level all his career. It is also known he has used steroids since he tested positive for a drug that is only used by men when they need to get their body to produce testosterone naturally again. It is known that you need to do that after you took steroids. If he took steroids once and his production was the same as it always was then it is reasonable to believe he always took them. Far more reasonable to believe that than he is the only one who did not get any benefit from using them. To be perfectly frank I didn't need any source for me to realize he was always juicing. I would have been very surprised if he wasn't.

Once again because he's no longer stretched out enough to pitch a full MLB season as he didn't have the opportunity to pitch last season. Where are you getting this information from? Is there some sort of study that shows a knee injury means a player cannot pitch his normal amount the following year? If you can show me actual evidence that Yoga is being hurt by occasionally throwing 110+ pitches after a knee injury cut his seaosn short then maybe it would change my mind. I also want to know just how long it takes an arm to get back to the level it was prior to a knee injury. If it's just the lack of innings last year I see relievers go from the pen to the rotation build up enough arm strength over a matter of several outings. I also see pitchers every spring get up to their normal workload in a mtter of a couple months. YoGa has had the entire spring and several months in the season to build up his stamina. I just don't see how a lack of innings last year being any reason at all why he can't go the same distance, pitch count wise, 3 1/2 months into the season as he could have been expected to if he had pitched all of last year. Maybe if there is actual evidence that a pitchers shoulder needs a year to regain it's durability then I would subscribe to the theory that it takes that long for it to be built up again. So far all I've seen is pointing to other players with arm injuries and saying this will happen because YoGa is coming off a knee injury. That to me is apples and oranges. You obviously don't understand the concept if you think I've cherry picked abused pitchers to make my point. Thank you for the condescension it make so your point so much clearer. My point is YoGa is not abused like Prior was. I never said you cherry picked I said your examples are no more relevant than Topper's was. He's averaging about 6.4 innings so far this season. He does not have the poor mechanics of Wood. He was not coming off shoulder surgery like Neugabaur was when he was being pushed too hard nor was he as young as Neugy. Those are not any better comparisons than a pitcher who is coming off a big innings jump season and showing no ill side effects because of it.

Normal circumstances I would think it would make a difference. The Brewers bucked the norm last year in the sense they saw a huge gain in attendance the year they went to the playoff vs the usual year after effect. That indicates to me the fans follow the team as it is vs what it was the year before. I think the team needs to address it's pitching going into next year more than it needs to make a nominal move now to prevent a backslide next year. Even if the team totally collapses this season if the Brewers find a couple legitimate pitchers for the rotation in the winter the fans will be back.

Remind me when Lincecum blew out his knee and only pitched 24 innings in a season? How does blowing out a knee on a freak play makes any difference to a pitchers arm health. I'm not sure what the best case scenario actually proves and why you keep going to CY winners and Hall of Famers to make your point? It makes as much a point as using a couple severely abused players, one of which had been predicted to have problems because of his throwing motion, have to do with using YoGa beyond 100 pitches once after he failed to go 6 innings the last several starts. I think the point is you have to know the particular pitcher and the general pattern of use more than just how he was used one or two times.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I don't think BUC is actually blaming Macha for the team playing poorly. What he is saying is that the poeple who were complaining about Yost last year, should be equally upset with Macha this year. I think. Exactly. Im not really a big fan of blaming managers when players play poorly. I do think some blame should go when the manager does not use his players enough to give them a chance to be effective. My only real compliant about him is his use, lack of use really, of the bench players. Had Hall been average McGehee would be one of them. Nelson and Duffy never really got enough playing time to stay sharp enough to be effective when called upon and same thing is happening now with Gerut. That is a pattern that concerns me. If he continues to do that we will always have a short bench. So when a team scores 22 runs in 2 games you blame the manager over the pitchers? Um, OK, like what managerial decision would you have made that would have made a difference? Who would you have started over Villy? Dillard, because he looked amazing yesterday? Funny I used to say the same thing about Ned. FO rthe most part I agree with you but to play devils advocate I will use the same argument as Ned bashers did. The manager puts the players in the position to win. Sometimes it is the decision made weeks or even months ago that make today's poor choices what they are. It isn't about two games where his hands were tied it is about how he got his hands tied. I don't have a problem with how he handles a poor pitching staff but the tread is asking why Macha is getting a pass. IMO Those who didn't accept it wasn't Ned's fault when he had poor pitching must now admit either it's Macha's fault this team is where it's at pitching wise or that maybe Ned wasn't as bad at it as they previously thought. No free passes.

Topper if you think the team is roughly the same as last year at this time performing worse whose fault is it? I know who people thought was at fault last year. I tend to agree it is about the same talent wise. No doubt this year's version has worse starters but better relievers and the same offense one year more mature. If Ned was a problem last year and this team is worse then it stands to reason Macha is no better maybe worse. I don't expect those who hated Yost to say they were wrong but they should at least acknowledge the obvious. This team is no better off with Macha than they were with Yost. Probably worse.

Melvin said Cleveland told him the Brewers didn't have what they wanted a while ago. If you look at that team they are in desperate need of relievers. With the loss of two staff aces in two years they pretty much needed to get at least one good young starter who could be in the rotation for years to come. The one thing the Brewers lack is any minor league starters and very few relievers whom we don't need ourselves.

I think that GMs have to prepare for the inevitability of injuries to the rotation -- certainly there are some injuries that can knock a team out of contention, but every GM is going to have some nicks and bruises to the starters Looper was meant to do this. It wasn't enough but what else could have been done? The problem wasn't so much the major league starters as it was the complete lack of depth in the upper levels of the minors. Melvin could have traded for some AAA pitching help but I'm not sure how realistic it is to get good AAA pitching without overpaying so much that it hurts the team more through the losses in other areas. I thought this team would be better because the increase in offense should mitigate the decline in pitching. Macha has not handled the bench well enough to make the offense truly better than last year. For that he has to take the blame. His refusal to play his bench enough to keep them sharp has made this a very shallow offense with no depth to compensate when a starter struggles. Yost was far superior to Macha in that respect.

There are enough injuries not arm related that I think it could skew them. Obliques injuries for one are common enough that I don't think you just say it is irrelevant.

I don't think this is true. Dillard was moved to a starting role because how weak the MLB rotation could potentially be I should have stated that better. I meant quality starters at both the majors and AAA were in short supply so they used Dillard as a starter to cover mroe bases (no pun intended). I don't know if innings accumulated as a starter count the same, injury/fatigue wise as they do as a reliever. I will let that to someone smarter than I. I suspect the toll is more taxing as a reliever than a starter because of the inconsistency of appearances. But that is just speculation on my part.

This again makes no sense. The way Macha talked about Dillard, he makes him sound like he's better used as a reliever. Then why was he turned back into a starter this year? They did so because of how weak the AAA rotation was. AAA starters can relieve in the majors easier than AAA relievers can start. When it comes to players like Dillard I don't think it matters what his role in AAA is if all the organization sees him as is a reliever. In fact since he is stretched out he can go more innings per appearance because he was a starter in the minors. That makes him more useful as a reliever in the majors while maximizing their rotation options.

Do you want Gallardo to follow that same career path? Do you want to risk it? If we can get those three seasons of top level pitching before he becomes average yes. More than likely that's all we will have him for anyway. Again what exactly is the actual risk? People keep saying it's a bigger risk but they have yet to quantify the actual difference or even how much there is one way or the other. If it goes from 10% to 50% chance of injury stop doing it. If it goes from 10% to 12% chance of injury that would be a risk well worth taking.

31% of all injured pitchers had above average career PAP totals for their career pitch counts. 9% of all healthy pitchers had above average career PAP totals for their career pitch counts. This suggests that high PAP pitchers are more than three times as likely to be injured as low PAP pitchers of who've thrown similar numbers of pitches. We have our first piece of evidence that PAP provides predictive information beyond what pitch counts alone can tell us. It also suggests 69% of the pitchers who get injured are not overworked. Now take into account that only a fraction of the total amount of pitchers actually get injured. Even less in their first six years and you will find it is far more likely the pitcher will not get injured or get injured through random luck than from overuse. I think sometimes people get so involved in the raised injury risk they lose sight of the actual risk of injury. For instance if YoGa gets used in a way that makes his injury risk go from 10% to 12% is that 2% injury risk increase really worth not using him as much as we could? So if someone can show me what his actual injury risk is used one way vs the other then maybe those stats will be more telling than simply saying almost 1/3 of all injured players were overused. If all that can be shown is his risk of injury goes up but no real % of risk associated with it then I don't see how that is really cause for us not to use him as needed for the team to win more games. It isn't about the higher % chance as much as it is the total % chance of injury. I am not advocating having him pitch 125 every game just allow him to go deeper in situations where the team needs him to go as deep as possible. Given the way the starters have been going lately, YoGa included, now is one of those situations.

This isn't really true -- DM inherited a system that had Hardy, Hart, Prince, Parra, etc. already in place, our farm had started to turn the corner before DM arrived. The thing he did since he arrived was find serviceable major league players to fill the gaps that Taylor so badly missed on. He found scrap heap guys who could play then flipped them for something more useful when in house options came up. The farm is obviously important but so is finding players outside the farm to supplement the team. The difference between Melvin and Taylor is Melvin found Podsednick Melvin found Hammond. He was so much better than Taylor that when the budget was cut by about half he still managed to put a better team on the field.

TO me it's more about how to best use a guy whom you have for six years. Year one we broke him in, year two we lost due to injury and we are now on year three. It we monitor him so closely that we harm the bullpen's effectiveness later then we have just lost 50% of his time with us where he is less than the top level pitcher we so desperately need him to be. If the idea is only to use him to his fullest extent the final year of his contract I just don't know if we got the most out of his career here.

Are the Cards going to have anything left in he minors after this season? Seems like they've given up an awful lot for two players.

I don't think a platoon as much as Hall becoming the go to guy when Hardy has a day off. Even if it was a platoon I don't see how having Escobar sit a lot helps him or the team much.

How does a knee injury hurt YoGa's arm health? Injuries are not all created equal. The knee injury was a contact one not a wear and tear one so I doubt it has any effect on his arm health going forward any more than players who have no injury history at all. I think JohnBriggs is right about the abuse. Why should we save him for the Yankee's or Angels benefit? He has already used about half his time with us up. If we don't use the players we have when we have them we will always be playing with half a deck. YoGa's value to this team is as a staff ace who can go deep and save the pen. He cannot do that unless he's playing. He has not been doing that as of late because he just wasn't pitching very well. Now that he is pitching well we are supposed to pull him out despite pitching well so we can use the already overworked bullpen one more inning? A bullpen he helped overwork lately I might add. I am concerned about getting as much use out of YoGa as anyone. I just think taxing his arm now isn't as big a deal for next couple years as it would be 5 years down the road.

I agree with TLB. Hall seems more like a broken man than a whining player. I really feel for the man even while agreeing the player isn't worthy of more time. Comments from people who are going through a tough time are often made in a rambling incoherent fashion. much of what they say should be taken with a grain of salt as it is probably more stress/depression related than what their real selves would indicate. Hall might benefit from being sent down but if they DFA him he could just opt for free agency and still get paid. I think at this point it would benefit the Brewers and Hall to redefine his role as a utility infielder who would play more shortstop. That is the one position he could play where there would be a relatively low drop off from the starter while giving JJ an occasional a break as well.

Lilly is scratched from his next start with a sore left shoulder. MRI scheduled. This would be a huge blow to the Cubs if it's more than a week or so type injury. link

The Cardinals aren't exactly the weak sisters of the poor. They can afford to make a competitive offer. He is good but he isn't in the same category as CC or Teixeira.

Last year took an incredible run in the second half by CC and a great 1st half by Sheets. If Melvin got those types of players I don't see why it shouldn't count simply because they had good years. It wasn't like Suppan was came out of nowhere and put up Cy Young type numbers. It was two of the top pitchers in the league doing what top pitchers in the league do.