Cool Hand Lucroy

Eric Lauer, zombie Brewer.

I do agree that the NL was the superior league. My concern, if I'm a Dodgers fan, is that getting basically perfect pitching for another series is probably unlikely, especially against this offense. So, how does the team react if they go down 2-1? That Phillies series easily could have gone 5 games. It probably should have. I'd be very surprised if this series isn't at Rogers Centre for a Game 6.

Rooting for Guerrero and the Jays. Fun team. Whole country behind it. Should be a fun World Series.

Still have to go through Julio again no matter what. Big Dumper as the potential winning run. Long way to go. Going to be a wild finish in Toronto.

Holy crap, this Game 7. I'm not sure if the bottom of the 7th is an advertisement for not bunting or an endorsement of bunting just to avoid a double play. Springer is having an insane series.

If I'm post-mortem-ing the Dodgers series, the real question lineup wise is just whether you maybe wanted to get Danny Jansen's bat in the lineup. Hoskins wasn't going to be on the roster, and I think it's hindsight to ask for that. It's probably hindsight to ask for Jansen too. But you acquired that guy to hit home runs, and he didn't get a single AB. Especially against Snell in Game 1, you might have been better off sitting Frelick or Yelich, and giving Jansen 2 shots to hit.

Thanks for this! I'd been thinking about the Cubs team too. Hope history does repeat!

Fun season, everyone. A lot of great, great moments. Certainly the most giddy 50-game stretch of my lifetime. This isn't a group we'll forget anytime soon. Not quite 2011 level for me, probably just a touch behind 2018 too. Still. When it comes to wringing every possible win out of a roster, this group tops the list. One of these years, we'll top everyone's. Or we won't, and that's okay too. Baseball's about the stories. This team has given us a lot of them, and I know the franchise has more to say. Time for the annual cycle of trading good players, getting undervalued, and proving the projections wrong. But, first, hockey and basketball seasons. Go Brewers. Undisputed kings of the NL Central.

Who's gonna tell the Dodgers we still won the season series?

I think a salary cap is coming. The union can refuse it all they want (and they may be right in principle), but the owners are going to push, and they aren't the ones who will be hurt by a work stoppage. The best MLBPA can do, I think, is a soft cap/floor ala the NBA. I'm more inclined to side with them by nature, but they just don't really have the cards. I am sure they will publicly be very firm in their total opposition to any kind of cap, but a smart union rep would be backchanneling with MLB to try and float the most advantageous possible salary structure that still allows the league to put out positive competitive balance headlines, and then selling the heck out of that advantageous solution to membership behind closed doors. If MLBPA gets a soft cap/floor? That's a big win for them. I think it's the best they can realistically hope for.

I mean, the entire league is going to be. Like, he did it off three different pitchers, in a 3-0 series, in a game this already 4-0. I am tipping the cap.

It is hard to even be mad. Kind of honor to be directly involved.

Look, the Dodgers are just better. They beat us. I wish we'd played better, but I think our limit here was getting this to 6. We have some great young pitching. We have a couple of really good young bats. The system is deep. The pitching lab is great. This franchise is in great shape. I don't know if we'll win a pennant in my life, but I have seen more meaningful baseball than I ever thought back in 1999. Meaningful baseball is the point. I consider this season a clear success. This ending is incredibly frustrating the last two nights, but not the kind of frustration that's going to stick around more than another 8 hours. Sometimes, the other team is just better. I do hope we manage not to get shutout, though.

Not sure about Perry's brother. But the other two were! The MIL's favorite was Bob Allison. They talked a lot about games at the Met in Bloomington. Believe the Mall of America is on that site now.

You got it! My favorite was the MVP. Zolio Versalles. Mudcat Grant and Jim Kaat big names too. I might be able to name the 2011 Brewers better than the 2018 ones, mostly because of the bullpen and more established rotation.

Was talking to my in-laws today (both Twins fans) about the 1965 World Series. Koufax threw 24 innings in that series. He gave up 2 runs, only 1 earned. He pitched a complete game shutout in Game 5. Then, he did the same thing ON TWO DAYS REST in Game 7. We had a fun time seeing how many names from the Twins roster they could remember. They did pretty good for all this happening 60 years ago. Point is: baseball is great, win or lose. You don't remember these games if you're not a part of them. Go Crew! Let's get one and see where it goes.

Yup, I agree. I think baseball economics are like 20-30 percent to blame for our October struggles. The rest is some combo of execution, management, and randomness. Others can ratio that out differently. I think you can defend a lot of reasonable numbers

Thoughts. 1) How about Mis? What a postseason from that kid. MVP of October. Talk about showing something. I am super impressed with his ability to harness his stuff and keep us in the game. Seriously. Nobody talks about heroic performances in losses. That was one. 2) We wait on Chourio's hammy. I am going to choose to think he'll get a nice long rehab and recovery and come out better next year. Dude was still probably our best hitter in the playoffs. Gamer. Franchise cornerstone. Get healthy, kid. 3) Andrew Vaughn is making outs this series, but he has had very hard luck. Good ABs. Loving him at 1st next year. 4) Great game from Durbin. 5) Our lefties didn't hit. We didn't win. I mean, what can you say? The offense has gone MIA, and it's not one guy. It's the whole group. If not for a great play from Muncy, we get two runs and still lose. I don't think our whole offensively philosophy is to blame. I don't think MLB economics are to blame. I think it's maybe a combo of good pitching, mental blocks, the nature of baseball, and randomness. We look like the April/May Brewers. Bad time for those guys to return. 6) Let's just win one. Just win one. We're all pretty resigned at this point. It was a good year. Keep it going one more day.

If it's one inning, I guess it doesn't matter if it's Ashby or Koenig. They want a lefty, maybe they trust Koenig more in a leverage spot. The thing that's been tough to understand, all year, is just how often they use Ashby. He's up to like 71 MLB IP this year. Maybe that's not that much, but he's gotten it in a pretty condensed period. Are they anticipating him as a starter next year? Do their analytics just really trust his recovery? I have to think there's some underlying philosophy here, but it's pretty hard to see given that he's pitched (and struggled) as both an opener and a leverage lefty in these playoffs AND pitched in nearly every game. I'm not upset about this. I am confused/curious. Hopefully, he pitches another clean first, after already being staked to a 5-0 lead.

When I get to feeling like this...

Yeah, there aren't really a lot of SP options. I'm a little surprised we haven't just gotten Quintana named, even if the plan is just a few innings. I suppose the most logical explanation is waiting to see how some of the bullpen guys recover, going with an opener, and then Q or Mis get bulk innings. I'll assume we want to start a lefty. That means Q, Koenig, Ashby, or Gasser. Koenig seems likeliest since he's the most rested. Gasser not going to happen. Ashby could go too, since Murph and the FO don't seem to care much at all about his usage rates. If it were me, I'd just throw Q and be done with it. He's most likely only going 3-4 anyway. I know it's basically a need to win game, but somebody's gotta throw. I could see Mis as well. He's on full rest. Maybe they go Koenig-Mis and try to get through the fifth before turning to Patrick, Ashby, Megill, Uribe (in some combo) to try and close it out, hoping to let Q throw Game 4. Just seems like Q and Mis are really the only bulk options in some order for Thurs/Fri. I GUESS you could try to get 3-4 from Chad in Game 4 too, but he seems more valuable in a pen role right now.

This is very thoughtful. Many ways to skin the cat competitive balance wise. It can't all be reduced to cap/floor. The issue right now is that players are receiving around 50% of league revenue in salary, but the distribution curve for that is obviously weird. A pre-req for a labor agreement should be revenues remaining split 50-50. If a cap doesn't shift that balance, the union's resistance to it is a bit harder to defend, but there are also non-cap ways to maintain that ratio and restore some balance via revenue sharing and some of these other things you mention. Theoretically, this CBA negotiation shouldn't be that hard. The problem is, these sides REALLY don't trust each other. That, more than anything, is going to make things very difficult. If I'm the players, my biggest concern is leverage. I don't think they have that much. They'd probably play with a temporary CBA and be very reluctant to strike. The owners are the ones floating lockout because they always have the leverage in these situations, and fan sentiment, even in a fairly progressive baseball media sphere, is going to have a healthy anti-players contingent. Brewers have been good at drafting and developing young players and transforming pitchers lately. They keep doing that, the economic moves will sort themselves out.

Low-key, I've thought Durbin has been a big key for us. He was good at third tonight, but his first two ABs included six pitches. All strikes. For the woodpecker thing to work, that dude has to see pitches. I might be tempted to start Lockridge on Thursday just because he leads the world in pitches seen.

The economic structure of baseball is unfair. Mark A could also spend quite a bit more on payroll. He's pouring cash into Benfica and Norwich over in Europe, so the investment capital is clearly there. I don't blame him for spending it on a sport with a big potential growth market. He's still an excellent Brewers owner. But it's not entirely on MLB that the payrolls here are so imbalanced. It really is as simple as win one game. That's it. Put the pressure on them and see how they respond. They probably do and will respond. But we were up 2-0 in a shorter series, lost a nailbiter in Game 3 and then really needed some nails performances from the bullpen to win Game 5. It doesn't matter if the team wins the series. Just win once and take your shot at bringing the series back to Milwaukee.

If it’s the hope that kills you, tonight did a good job of making sure we all live very long lives. Observations: 1) We came out aggressive against Yamamoto, which was a good plan. We just couldn’t hit the strikes we got, Chourio excepted. Some of that is hard-hit balls finding outs. Some of it is being unable to know when to ambush a first pitch and when to let it go. Our swing decision have just been really, really bad in the games we’ve lost all playoffs. It hurts double when their bullpen is the one thing you have to get to in order to have a shot. 2) Our lefties were bad again. Yelich is an all-time Brewer. I feel bad for him. But it isn’t just that he’s struggled. His ABs indicate that he doesn’t have any idea right now. It’s like when Simone Biles had to withdraw from the Olympics because she couldn’t find the ground all of a sudden. Our lefties had two singles tonight. Not good enough against a righty. 3) Freddy was fine. He needed to be great. But he would’ve had to throw six shutout to give us a real shot. 4) The RBI double to Pages (1 for 29 in October coming into the series) was Freddy’s worst result. That’s an absolute killer. 5) It isn’t even Ohtani and Betts and Freeman that are killing us. It’s the Hernandezes. They’ve killed everybody all postseason. When you can pad your lineup with guys who turn robocop in October AND roll out four aces, it’s a massive advantage. 6) These guys did this same thing to Philly. They’re better than us. It feels like we’ve wrung every win out of this roster. 100 wins. I hope we can add one or two more to that total. Like a lot of you, though, it’s really feeling like the end of the line. 7) I thought Murph kind of quit managing in this one. Pitching to Ohtani was weird. Kind of an impossible choice, but he called walking him a “no brainer” yesterday, and it seems kind of like a similar situation. Whatever. Not walking Edman in the 8th was malpractice. I know Hernandez has been on fire, but why bring the infield in against Edman while letting him keep the platoon advantage. Dude never Ks. We were losing this anyway, but that was a bad one. 8) That said, let’s see what these guys do in LA. Everyone needs the day off. Weirder things have happened than a team like us coming back from down 0-2. Win one game, and who the heck knows. One game is, of course, a daunting task. But it’s also all it takes. 9) If we end up miracle winning this because I posted before the 8th inning was out, you’re welcome.