Cool Hand Lucroy

True, and the weather in central Illinois, eastern Iowa is importantly better than Wisconsin in April, though quite a bit more uncomfortable in the summer months, especially later on. I think the QC could probably support Double-A if not for the geography. Just not enough viable markets nearby. That might be a problem for Madison as well, though a Triple-A budget would help some and Madison is a decent enough fit in the International League West. Farthest road trip would be Gwinnett.

Always surprised Madison doesn't have a stronger history with minor league baseball, especially when you see places like Peoria, Cedar Rapids, and the QC doing a strong job keeping up teams and traditions. If the Fox Cities were a little more compact, that Green Bay to Oshkosh/Fondy stretch is a nice population center. T-Rats seem to do pretty well at High-A (I'm a Midwest League fan, I guess), but that's a big jump to AAA. Honestly? I almost wonder if somewhere in the western Chicago suburbs would be a good fit. Kane County used to play High-A. Lots of population growth out that way. Heart of Cubs country, obviously, so that'd be weird, but...maybe the Cubs move there eventually, and Des Moines is open. Typing that out it sounds crazy. Gary, IN had a robust triple A situation for a while. Just throwing out off day ideas at this point. Hard when so much of the population growth is in the Sun Belt. I think you're right. Madison is the obvious choice and by a long, long way. Hope it happens eventually. I do think it would be the kind of competitive advantage the Brewers are built to capitalize on..

I think this is right on. And one of the things about being a Brewer fan over the last ten years is that the whole organization is built to win on depth, basically. Sometimes it's bullpen depth. Sometimes it's having a bunch of "out-getters" who can all throw 3-4 innings. Sometimes it's having 9 guys who grind out ABs and all wear down the opposing starter. Sometimes it's taking every advantage of the Nashville shuttle (the Brewers would so love to be the Twins and have a AAA affiliate the next town over--you just know these nerds in the FO would salivate over shuttling guys while saving travel costs, both financial and physical, and I love them for it). The good thing about that approach is that it works. The bad part is that it works in ways that are really, really difficult to see. Perkins looks bad. Matos looks bad. Who is Greg Jones? I think my answer is: he's probably better than the guy in that spot on just about every other roster in baseball. The Brewers care about the difference between a guy OPSing .625 and one OPSing .640. For most teams, both those guys are worthless. But, for this team, the thinking is like "I'm going to have a below average player taking a lot of ABs this year; I might as well make them a little closer to average." We find out who most teams are in July and August. That goes double for the Brewers because that's when spreading out ABs and innings starts to add up on the margins. It's not great to watch sometimes, but it gets the job done.

Rodriguez did a nice job finishing this one. Felt to me like one of those you're just going to lose over the course of the year. Agree about Hamilton's error being the biggest play of the game. After 21 games, being 12-9 is fine. Would we have liked to get one or two more, especially given the Red Sox and Nats series? Yeah. But we haven't played anyone from the Central yet, we're still banged up (missing probably our best player and best veteran). I've been a big believer in the "you can't win a pennant in April, but you can lose it" idea, and we haven't lost it. Mixed reviews. Holes in the bullpen and in the bottom of the lineup. Not always sharp defensively. But getting some good starting pitching, scrapping out a few big innings, hitting the long ball at home, and generally playing tough and staying afloat. I'll take it, on balance.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the benefit of pitching to Sanoja is, but I guess it didn't much look like Hall was going to get anyone out. Great piece of hitting by Sanoja too. Hopefully the bats can make this interesting. Never gonna complain about winning 2 of 3 on the road. Now we can get back to playing the AL after an off day.

Was just thinking this. The swings of baseball are crazy. Brewers go from only scoring on home runs during the Nationals series to bunting 3x in a row for a run. Anti-moneyball is the new moneyball.

Good post. I think it's right on. We all want the 80th or 90th percentile outcome on every trade. This one feels more like the 50th, though folks can think it's slightly better or slightly worse, and I won't argue one bit. Ortiz has been a serviceable infielder, often at the premium position, for 2+ years. It's a shame he hasn't been able to come close to 2024's 102 OPS+. Even an 85 there changes everyone's evaluation. I think he'll probably have to turn it around soon to keep earning PAs over Pratt, but I'll be rooting for him quite a bit over the next month or so. I've genuinely liked the guy since we acquired him. Edit: And I forgot about Blake Burke, so thanks to the folks who pointed that out.

Chad Patrick feels like a starting pitcher to me too. We've got quite a few fringe types in the system, as well as some decent relievers on the IL. Patrick was awesome in the playoffs last year. He's earned his spot.

Hey, 9-8 feels a lot better than 8-9 (even though there's no real difference). You definitely take the Brewers giving up a run in the first and then the whole staff getting 24 scoreless outs. Huge credit to Chad Patrick, but not sleeping on any of the contributors tonight. Had some batted ball luck, but this is a nice win when everyone admits (or should admit) that this team is just trying to hang around right now. Win a series tomorrow, and you're turning in a reasonable homestand.

I definitely think the FO was hoping for more. The comp pick may well swing this in the Os direction, but there's also still time, for Hall especially. For me, I'm with you in terms of being underwhelmed by how that trade has gone down so far. I respect the underlying process (and, again, reasonable folks can disagree on that process), and I think it was just a case of the Crew took shots on a couple of guys with team control, hoping one of them became really good, and it just didn't happen.

Not disagreeing, but it's fascinating to me that, right now, bRef WAR has this trade dead even. To date: Hall + Ortiz = 3.9 WAR. Burnes with the O's? 3.9 WAR. By the Brewers way of thinking, that trade was just fine. We can debate whether or not that's the right way to think, but they're committed to it.

However this one turns out, it has solidified my love for Chad Patrick. Just a really fun guy to watch pitch. You can tell he loves it.

Oof. That Rengifo AB was disturbing. Not much better from Sal, and we're really going to regret these last couple innings if we can't hold on.

Sconnie?

I actually kind of like these new uniforms, but I preferred last year's version. The powder blue with white always looks nice. The salmon piping is a cool feature. My biggest gripe is that these aren't really weird enough to be City Connects, nor are they traditional enough to be good daily uniforms. It's a little bit uncanny valley for me.

This is a banged up group, so I'm not surprised by the start. In some ways, being 8-7 feels about right. Right now, everyone in baseball, save for about three teams, is clustered somewhere between 6-10 and 9-6. This is all just fact-gathering right now. The fact that I have gathered is pretty simple. We need more trustworthy high-leverage arms and for our good hitters to be healthy. I am fully expecting to see Williams up for Matos/Perkins/Lockridge at some point, and I don't know if Ortiz is long for the roster either. Maybe we also see some pitching guys come up too. I'd imagine Logan Henderson is back. We'll see, but the one constant during every April losing streak is a lot of fan complaints over a roster that resembles the July-August roster as much as I resemble Mike Trout.

This team needs to do some bullpen reshuffling on Monday. And to get healthy. We're 15 games in, so everything is a big whatever, but you'd expect these guys to do the little things right. Not doing that, especially on defense, has been a really big problem this past week. Hoping they can continue to hit and win a slugfest here, but they're really going to have to get guys right or bring up some new 6th-8th inning arms soon.

I don't know about this. Rengifo and Matos are pretty much what you get at the bottom of the roster. Depth has basically been THE reason for the Crew's success. They do a great job of finding 23rd and 24th guys who do everything you want in that role, including putting up really tough ABs consistently. Where we should be spending more is the middle of the roster, I think. When you lose two of your best sluggers, there's just nothing but David Eckstein-Hamilton types, and a lineup full of those is a struggle, even though I really like a lot of them individually. The pitching will be alright. Enough youth and talent there to get this team far. I would expect we'll see some high-ceiling young positional talent up here by mid-May. Never fun to go on a losing streak, but my biggest concern is the bullpen. Not a lot of trust there right now, with anyone. Might not be long before Yoho gets another look or Zerpa works his way into the ninth.

Two ugly performances in a row. I thought the defense was very good until the ninth, but that game was teetering all night. Big swing from Bauers, then nothing at all against a team that's really struggled to get outs. Not a big deal this early, but you'd certainly like to see better baseball.

More worried about Turang than any of the other injuries at this point. I'd IL him and give Pratt a taste so as not to mess around, but maybe it's pretty minor. Not a good effort today, as others said. Day off will hopefully do them good.

Tough one so far. Nice to get game 1 because the other two pitching matchups were going to be a toss-up and a Red Sox advantage. Lots of baseball left today, but hard to complain about a 3-3 opening roadie and an 8-4 start given the way of March/April baseball.

Think I saw left side tightness. Hoping not an oblique.

Curious to see how this works out, but you knew Logan was going to pitch pretty much no matter what, so fine to give him a start. Testament to the organizational depth that the 27th man is a guy with solid MLB experience.

Broadly true, but it is consistent with Murphy's Ashby usage last year, so I get the concern. The tendency to extrapolate Ashby's usage rate this week (and down the stretch last year) out to all of 2026 is probably misguided, but I get where it's coming from.

I hope you're right. My nightmare scenario is everyone hoards their challenges for the final innings, and the pitches that get challenged are basically all 50-50, and you get a closing situation that's just fundamentally different from the rest of the game because now its functionally being umpired by a software entity. I don't think the system was designed that way--it's designed to correct obvious errors. But baseball also has a long history of aiming for every microscopic edge, and ruthless ABS challenge efficiency might well be something we converge toward. When we get close enough to that, full ABS will be the only option. I don't like that one bit, but I should probably start preparing for it.