Thurston Fluff

Not picking on you personally but this is the type of criticism that always baffles me. How are any of those things on Matheny? The player yes. The GM who brought him in yes. Hell the baserunning coach can even share the blame. The manager is about the last person in the team to blame for that.

Honestly, since some of the projects I make my students work on are pretty tedious, once their eyes start to glaze over I'd rather they stopped for a few minutes to check their email or whatever. Ditto for us. We employ mostly teenagers and college age kids. We ask them to work the shop alone and give them projects to do that can sometimes be tedious. As long as the projects we give them are done on time and correctly I don't mind. The only other demand is they have to be responsive to the customers when they come in. Don't act out out or ignore them while you finish your tweet. In some ways I think it can help them when a job demands they pay attention but is really boring work.

As a glass half full person, power is something that comes in spurts. If he can get the rest of his hitting in order the power might follow.

How's that strategy working for ESPN? Their ratings have been going down for a long time. The sooner these networks realize they can grow their fan base beyond just the big markets by actually showing teams from other markets their rating might start to grow as well. They take such a short term view of things that they end up making less in the end.

WE don't really have any stars. We have a bunch of really good players and young talent who may be as good as the stars but haven't been around long enough to get much national recognition. I think the other part of that is the national story line seems to be the Brewers are built to be a good regular season team but can't make a postseason run built this way. Mostly because pundits seems to think true aces are necessary to win in the post season. Not to go off on a tangent but it really bugs me how lazy of thinking that is. The Dodgers had aces up the wazoo for the last five years and have no ring to show for it. How many rings does Greinke, Strasburg, Darvish and Kershaw have combined? The answer is less than Jeff freaking Suppan. The Royals starters didn't exactly light the world on fire, yet they have more rings than the Dodgers this century. Rant over.

Invest in more hashtags. Well played sir. Well played.

Those of us who live in Wisconsin can't watch any games if we don't subscribe to cable. You miss a couple games a year. I get to see a couple a year.

If the only reason Facebook agreed to this was to entice more people to get Facebook accounts by keeping it off everywhere else, that tells you all you want to know about Facebook. MLB was incredibly stupid (and uncaring) to take games away from elderly fans who watch games religiously so they could brag how their audience "skewed 20 years younger". Of course it did MLB. You locked everyone who normally watches out. That's not how you reward your fans. Most aggravating is that Brewers were featured in consecutive weeks? Is that because the Boston's and Yankees know better than take the games away from their fans? Come on Attanasio for goodness sake. Don't ever agree to that again You don't think it might have something to do with the Yankees and Red Sox owning the cable network they are on? They are heavily invested in yesterday's technology so they have little choice but to remain in it.

The fact that retirees are baseballs most loyal audience is the reason why this is a good idea. I look at facebook as the gateway to a new wave of game viewing options instead of the endgame. In that light it is leading baseball into the modern age. Cable is not the future, it's the past whose time of major relevance is nearing an end. Sports are one of the few areas it still has dominance. Baseball, sports in general really, would be wise to look to the future or be stuck with smaller, older audiences. Personally I'm waiting for a Netflix version of sports programming but I like interactive part of facebook games. More as an idea in general than how facebook is doing it now. AS far as having games blacked out isn't that what cable has done forever? I can't get the one team I'm interested in on MLB packages because of cable rights. What's the difference?

My dog hides in the shower during storms and fireworks. This morning he came out of the shower as I was shaving and half asleep. I spent the next ten minutes trying to sow my head back on. Safe razor my arse.

As someone who cut the cord years ago the only drawback was not being able to watch games. It's nice to have an outlet to actually watch a game. I also think it's something that baseball has to embrace if it wants to grow. I tend to think baseball lends itself better to a interactive formats like facebook than any other sport. At this point the broadcasters are asking kind of stupid questions to get conversations going but as time goes on it's going to get more sophisticated. Interactive broadcasts might just end up being baseballs brave new world.

A lot of his ground balls are hit so softly, they turn into infield hits. He has 25 hits on 90 ground balls. Huge, huge difference. That huge difference isn't just due to luck. Speed is a skill that cannot be taught but it is a skill nonetheless. It helps a subpar hitter be average because he can leg out more infield singles. Oh and using fielding percentages to determine defense is about as useful as using wins to determine how good a pitcher is.

His playing time went down because of how poorly he played not the other way around. Had he been hitting well early he's still be in there most days. I still think he's going to be good major league player but he was clearly playing the worst of the OF options this season. Hopefully he gets things turned around.

ARam was one of the better guys at playing that slow roller I've seen. Shaw isn't a bad fielding third baseman but that isn't his best type of play. I think people are right that he sets up where he does because the stats say it's the best way of limiting runs. What I wonder is if the stats being used are tailored to what Shaw does well or if it's less specific than that. Given the detailed analysis of today and the Brewers embracing of metrics from top to bottom, I assume it's as specific as possible.

Cub fans coming to Milwaukee is almost the same as Brewers fans going to games in Minnesota. The only difference is Brewers fans go to games in MN no matter how well the team is doing. The only other difference is Brewer fans seem to know the difference between a lazy fly to shallow left and a homerun before the fielder catches it.

It's always hard to say goodbye. I had to put mine down a week before Christmas which put a damper on the holiday season. I got rescue dog in mid January and she is about as opposite of the last one as it's possible to be. My old one was the most focused dog I ever met and the new one has the attention span of a gnat.

I mean, sure, I guess you could. Easy to say that when it isn’t your money though. Waste some money on Miller and Sogard to not be on the MLB team in a month or so is kind of a waste of resources if you ask me. If we are that desperate just go call the Marlins on Castro or the A’s on Lowrie. Just force a deal there...or just wait. Not saying I personally advocate for acquiring either of those guys, but if we are trying to improve that seems more effective than Brad Miller. Last winter everyone was saying we could be players in the free agent market because we had such a low payroll for the foreseeable future. Part Of the advantage of not going out and paying top dollar for free agent starting pitchers is we now have the room to do more of the small stuff.

I'd rather just leave Villar at 2nd. He seems to be adjusting to that spot and starting to be useful on offense again. He seems like a guy who struggles with some fairly simple things to begin with so why make changes when he's starting to get on track?

Both of these are spot on. Pitch counts used to be about not letting pitchers throw too many pitchers. Somewhere the 100 pitch count also turned into how long they should go. The new way of thinking seems more about times through the order vs pitch count. I get why Briggs is upset about it since he tends to be more of a traditionalist in such matters but times are changing. I also agree that if we have a stud capable of going through the order more times to let him do so. I have little doubt the Brewers would. The way Counsell is using this staff seems to be more about what he has to work with than some sort of predetermined strategy he'll use for every staff.

I don't know how two bad outings from the pen qualifies as starting to backfire. Our starting staff is competent but not dominant. I think at this point, with this staff, pitch count is less relevant than number of times through the order. They have the stuff to get hitters out twice but struggle the third time through. So why let them when we have a pen capable of covering four innings on a regular basis?

A lot of young pitchers have problems with certain part of the season. Some need to learn to get going early, some to pitch in the dog days of summer, some late in the season when they are getting fatigued. Most of them learn to figure it out. Unless they are never allowed to figure it out. But it would be more a victim of a self fulfilling prophecy than any actual flaw that cannot be fixed.

Yea, way too early to say it was a great trade for the Brewers. At the very least it looks like the Brewers got what they wanted. Just far too early to know if it will be as good of a trade as the Gomez/Fiers trade was. THAT was great trade, will probably end up being exceptional. And yea, I won't be happy if the four traded away all become HOF players. That would mean it was a horrible trade. I'm not sure if this was directed at my post about being wrong about the relative production or not but let me clarify what I meant. I thought the Yelich deal would help us some this season but not enough this year to make a difference compared to what we'd have got from the others. I was wrong about that. I agree it's too early to know if it's a good trade overall but for this season, and probably next, we are getting much more production than we'd have had with some combination of Broxton, Brinson and Phillips.

I was one of those who was skeptical that this trade was going to give us much more production than we'd have had to be worth the cost. I'm very happy to be wrong.

but as we have seen CC uses the back end of the roster more than most teams (even NL teams), and much more than he should. It’s like we need to take the sharp objects away from him so he doesn’t cut himself lol. Playing the same guys every day no matter what is a good way to wear them out. Hardly playing bench guys makes them useless when needed. The Brewers have the best record in the NL while not wearing out their key players in the process. I would be much more concerned about the team if the Brewers had overused their starters to get to this point. This approach seems more sustainable over the whole season. Frankly I give Counsell a lot of credit for doing it this way.

Again, what would be your alternative? Sogard is consistent at SS, his arm is below average for the spot...but he makes the routine plays and has decent range. All this boo Sogard, but if you can't mention a viable alternative it just sounds like whining. Oh I am 100% whining and I know it... lol. If they are getting a backup catcher for a few $$, cant we find a fresh middle infielder the same manner? Give Orf a shot and Saladino a chance to play every day. Villar may be a better SS than Sogard.... Perez a better 2b man than Sogard... (ok ok that sentence may be a stretch.) UGH just I've had enough of the Franklin's and the Sogard's of the world! Saladino was a welcome addition, Stearns is good like Melvin was at finding that guy who needs a change of scenery and then ride them til they go back to normal career levels.... sign up JJ Hardy bring him home cheap to make a championship run with us as a bench player... IDK. I just have such high hopes I want to see some exciting moves, not ones that make me throw up in my mouth. Rant over. I'm done whining now. lol. I now realize this is the back end of the team and , no, doesn't mean much - as long as CC knows that and sits him deep on the bench where he belongs... but I don't trust him to do that... Saladino is one of the Franklin's and Sogard's of the world. A small stretch of good hitting doesn't change that. I think what they're doing is riding what they have until they find something better. Arcia needed to be sent down for his own sake. He can't play regularly the way he's going and he shouldn't be sitting on the bench. With Sogard it doesn't really matter.