BruisedCrew

IMHO that is still a pretty crappy lineup with big holes or question marks at 3 key hitting positions (1B, 3B, and DH). The standard has to be higher than “better than Winker” or the team is going to have trouble scoring runs.

I don’t follow minor leaguers anywhere near enough to have any specific informed opinion about Tyler Black. But, based on past experience with can’t miss “he’s hit everywhere he’s played” prospects, I am skeptical that taking someone who hasn’t even played at AAA and throwing him into the Brewers lineup in the middle of a playoff race is going to yield immediate dividends. I would love to see Black (or anyone) come up and be the exception to what seems to be the norm. But I’m not holding my breath. If he is that good maybe he can be used in a trade to acquire someone with an established MLB track record who might be more likely to provide immediate benefits. I am willing to accept the risk that it wouldn’t be “mortgaging the future” any more than trading away Matt LaPorta or Lewis Brinson.

I see that the Reds have called up Encarnacion-Strand from their warehouse of prospects. It will be interesting to see how the Reds, especially their offense,respond to scoring just 3 runs in those 4 losses to the Brewers. Will that prove to be just a brief slump in the midst of a hot streak or the beginning of a fade back to .500 as projected by Fangraphs.

Very simply, I would go to a 6 DAY rotation not a 6 MAN rotation. I think it’s foolish to have your best starters, whoever they happen to be at any given time, go a full week in between starts even if they might be capable of pitching effectively every fifth day without being overused. There are a few places in the schedule coming up in which there are two off days within 3 or 4 days of each other (see August 10-24 when there are 4 off days and 11 games in 15 days). Using a strict 6 man rotation through that period would mean some pitches having 2 starts 8 days apart. I’d prefer using that period to try to win some games with less stress on the back end of the bullpen, either by “piggy backing” starts or using one or two of the starters. In the bullpen. If I were managing I would be setting the rotation to maximize reasonable use of my best starters and using the pitchers in the lower parts of the rotation to fortify the bullpen in between starts.

Since you’re touting these projections, I assume that means that you wouldn’t consider someone to be a pessimist if he thinks that the Brewers are going to continue to play around .500 for the rest of the season.

I think the most relevant words here are “it’s impossible to predict”. Which is why I look at those projections for entertainment more than any kind of precise measure of the actual probability of a particular outcome. When you pile projections about how much certain players are going to play on top of projections on how they are going to perform and try to use all,of those projections about individual players to estimate how many games their team is going to win, the result is going to be far from precise. It shouldn’t take much for the Fangraphs projections to be better predictors than fist half winning percentage or first half Pythagorean. Those numbers would not reflect any significant events that took place in the first half such as injuries or player additions that caused the team to be significantly better or worse at the halfway point than it was early in the season. Or, as is true with the Reds and Brewers one team starts strong and then flounders while the other comes on strong after a slow start. When you put together projections on top of projections I’m not sure a projection of 84 wins is significantly different than one of 82 wins. So, I’m going to treat it like a tossup until something happens that changes my mind. Maybe I’m affected by the memory of last season when, if I recall, the Brewers chances of making the playoffs were significantly higher than 54%.

But again, for me it all begs the question of what those simulations are based on. For example, how do they weight recent performance relative to the overall performance to date. If you just take a snapshot of the current standings you see the Reds 1 game ahead of the Brewers. But how do you factor in that the Reds, who added McLean in May, and DeLaCruz and Votto in June have gained 9 games in the last 6 weeks or so on the Brewers, who have been treading water since their quick start in April? The Fangraphs projection is that the Brewers will continue to tread water while the Reds will cool considerably from their pace of the last month, with their offense cooling off and their pitching getting worse than it’s been. They have the Reds finishing 32-39, which would be a pretty dramatic comedown from their last month. My old fashioned gut reaction is that the NL Central is going to be a two team race and that at this point it looks to me like a tossup. That might change in the next 2 weeks as the Brewers play the Reds, Braves, and Phillies exclusively in their next 15 games.

That all begs the question of how exactly those projections grind through individual projections to reach a conclusion about teams. I tend to look at them for entertainment value but not like actual mathematical probabilities. i question how well those projections work on teams that have so many players with not much of a MLB track record and when teams have injured players whose return is uncertain. If we’re going to take these projections as an accurate reflection of probabilities, we have to accept that the Cardinals still have a 5% chance to win the division. Do you believe that?

Fangraphs projects the Brewers to finish with a record of 84-78 and the Reds at 82-80. Given the nature of these projections that amounts to a virtual tossup.

I think 538 is out of the sports projection business. Their projections were last updated on June 21.

The other thing to add to this is what Hiura did in previous tours at Nashville. Also, unless he has improved significantly he does nothing to address the defensive issue at first base.

Screw Reds fans. Reds fans my age got to enjoy the Big Red Machine and two World Series and a few other playoff appearances in the 70’s and then another World Series in 1988. And that was when making the playoffs was difficult. They’ve had enough other good seasons to entertain them. As far as I’m concerned 3 World Series titles for your favorite team is more than any fan should get and any more than that is just greedy. Their younger fans have plenty of time to wait. Maybe I’ll have some sympathy for them in 2039 if they reach 26 years in between playoff appearances (not counting the COVID year, which I really don’t count for the Brewers). (Note: this is a little tongue in cheek, but not entirely. As a sports fan I tend to follow the advice of Mr. Applegate from the book “The Year The Yankees Lost the Pennant” (which was the basis for the musical “Damn Yankees”) His credo was “Never Feel Sorry for Anybody”.

If recency is the issue then go back to 2021 and look at where the Cardinals stood in early to mid August. Their playoff chances were less than 5% then.

I thought this article was going to be one word.

No doubt they have to play a whole lot better.

If you want to talk about context, you also have to consider that the bar for making the playoffs is much lower than it was in 2011, especially in the very mediocre NL Central. Even at 14 games below .500 they are only 8.5 games out of the division lead with 90 games to play. Climbing over 4 teams isn’t that daunting either when there is no indication that, unless the Reds do it, any of the teams above them are going to move much above .500. It’s not like they have to win 15-20 in a row like they did to claim a playoff spot in 2021.

One of my many unpopular opinions is that injuries have not played a significant role in the woes of the Brewers offense. . I have always thought that their biggest problem is the lack of true impact hitters, and having Urias and Mitchell wouldn’t have that much of an effect. In fact, before his brief spurt before he got injured, some posters who are generally bullish on the rookies and minor leaguers were advocating sending Mitchell back down because he was striking out too much. I don’t think many people would have bet on him maintaining an OPS in the high 700s through a few hundred more plate appearances, even if he was strictly platooned If you look at a list of the top hitters in MLB in terms of OPS+ you have to drop down pretty far before you come across any Brewers hitters. Some teams have three or four before the Brewers have two, and their best hitters are substantially more productive than the Brewers best (Tellez), who is effectively platooned.

The Reds are pounding on the Red Sox for their fourth straight win. They could have a chance to take over first place this weekend.

I never questioned the projection models showing the Brewers as division favorites, but I did question some of the percentages, specifically those that show the Brewers with a 70-75% probability of winning the division. That’s what prompted my comment that I think that a bet on the Cardinals winning the division at 3-1 would be a better bet than one on the Brewers at 1-3. A subsequent post showing current Vegas odds backs me up on that. Because of yesterday’s exchange I looked more closely at the FanGraphs projections for the rest of the season, and they also support my points. They show the Cardinals going 56-50 the rest of the way to finish 80-82 with the Brewers finishing 82-80. So, they consider the Brewers a very slight favorite. I don’t think they would agree with your opinion that the Cardinals would need to win something like 17 in a row to come out on top. The FG projections also show the Cardinals allowing 4.54 runs per game the rest of the way to the Brewers 4.56 RAPG. The individual projections for the Cardinals SP show virtually all of them having ERA’s a half a point or more lower for the rest of the season. They seem to agree with my general expectation, which is admittedly not founded on advanced metrics, that the Cardinals pitching will be better the rest of the way than it was for the first month or so. I don’t really care how much of this is attributable to the starting rotation, but the assumption of some Brewers fans that the Brewers pitching is going to be significantly better than the Cardinals is not shared by FanGaraphs. The FG projections also expect the Cardinals to continue to score more runs than the Brewers (4.80 RPG to 4.54). My read on this is that Fan Graphs is doing a better job (or at least one that seems more accurate to me) than the ones that show the Brewers with a significantly higher probability of winning the division. You can say all you want that my opinions are “just Pro Cardinal spin”, but I think there is factual support for them.

I don’t see my comments criticizing the Brewers and comparing them to the Cardinals as “defending” the Cardinals or “attacking “ the Brewers. I see them as a counterbalance to some of the extreme homerism that appears on this board. I don’t “swiftly dismiss” some of these advanced stats, but I do question how predictive they are of what’s going to happen in the last 4 months of the season. Several of the Cardinals SP are performing significantly worse than they have in their careers and how they performed as recently as last season. I don’t assume that that will continue and that the only way for the Cardinals to improve their pitching is through acquisitions. Maybe my view of the Cardinals pitchers is skewed by how I see them shut down the Brewers. The focus on the Cardinals SP problems doesn’t address the question of whether whatever advantage the Brewers have in that department might be more than offset over the course of the season by the Cardinals clearly superior offense.

Didn’t take you long to pull out the LOL. You really can’t resist that, can you? The easier schedule point has not been made factually. Series against teams over .500 in one month is hardly a conclusive argument. I think that for the season to date the teams’ schedules have been equal enough to not be significant. Who has had more injuries by number or by days spent on the IL isn’t all that meaningful by itself either, especially when the discussion is about future projections. It may be relevant for making excuses, but unless there are high quality players who can be expected to return and perform at a high level, they are irrelevant. Which brings me back to my original point of how well projection sites can anticipate the impact of returning players. When you or anyone else tries to conclude that I am a Cardinals fan, they lose a lot of credibility with me. It means you are cherry picking certain comments and ignoring hundreds of others. As a point of fact, I have been a Brewers fan for twice as long as you have been alive, and I take that into account when I evaluate your comments.

I’m really not buying the “much tougher schedule” argument when 2 of the Brewers series were against the Giants who are only over .500 because of winning 5 of 7 against the Brewers. The Cardinals had several difficult series in April too, including Atlanta, the Dodgers (with whom they are now finished for the year,) and Blue Jays. I also factor in that the Cardinals started May 0-5 to finish a stretch of losing something like 11 of 12 to fall to 10-24 and 10 games out of first place. Since then they have gone 14-8 and have carved that deficit to 5.5 games. If the Cardinals can pick up 3.5 games over the Brewers in about 3 weeks, I don’t think they need to win 17 in a row, or anything close to that, to make up 5.5 games over 4 months. I don’t find the injuries and underperformance argument very persuasive either. I guess I would agree that if all of the injured Brewers return, nobody else is injured, and all of the players who have underperformed improve their performance, while none of the players who have performed well slide back, the Brewers will be the favorites to win the division. We might disagree about the likelihood of all of those things falling into place But, I also recognize that a lot of other teams (including the Cardinals) have had injuries and underperforming players too. I can see that some Brewers homers see refusing to declare the Cardinals dead means that I think that they are unbeatable, or shoo-ins to win the division, or (the most laughable) a closet Cardinal fan. I just think past experience, including the last two seasons, tells me that harping on the Cardinals flaws is like whistling past the graveyard.

Then why have the Brewers gone 10-15 in May? There is obviously a lot more to winning games than some of these advanced stats that are thrown around. There are so many of them that it can’t be hard to find some that make the case for one team over another.

I’d rather be known for expressing my opinions than what some others on this board are known for.

The Cardinals starting pitching has undeniably been terrible, and yet as a team they are only allowing about .25 runs more than the Brewers while scoring almost a run per game more. Is it more likely that the Cardinals SP will improve, or that the Brewers offense, which has barely managed 3 runs per game over the last month, will suddenly start producing at something close to the league average? Unless something changes significantly, the NL Central is going to be won by a seriously flawed team winning barely more than half their games. If I were betting, I would take the Cardinals at 3-1 over the Brewers at 1-3.