BruisedCrew

Maybe people should just accept that there are going to be borderline and missed calls.. Just like with replay on other things all it does much of the time is push a controversy to another level.

I have a hard time understanding , if the feedback is so accurate, why not just use that as the call in the first place?

Oh well. One run on three hits is much much more of an issue than an umpire’s call on a borderline pitch.

It sounds like that probably isn’t going to resolve many of the problems that people see.

A challenge system on balls and strikes? How would that work? With the number of pitches that people complain about on this site, if all of those were challenged the games would take four hours.

That’s what the mlb.com game cast shows. It also shows that one of the strikes in that at bat could have been a ball.

might as well get used to it as long as they won’t be going to automated balls and strikes at least until 2025.

Can’t watch the game today because of a Spectrum Internet and cable outage in our area Another reminder of how frustrating it is to listen to Uecker when you can’t also see the video for yourself. On Tapia’s HR he said the ball was off-the-wall and then said it was gone. On Wiemer’s drive he sounded like the ball was going into orbit as he said “ get up, get up, get out of here,,…..caught.”

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.

The Braves lose 2 out of 3 in Oakland and they are so upset that they have a team meeting and come out winning again. The Brewers get swept by the A’s at home (adding to their increasing list of dismal series) and the reaction is that “all teams go through rough patches”. Not all teams are at or near the bottom of virtually every offensive statistic.

The bizarre thing is that Perkins and Monasterio produced two of the biggest hits the Brewers had in two of their wins over the Reds. It’s the players who were supposed to lead the team that are letting them down the most.

The A’s came into this series with an ERA over 6. The Brewers have managed 6 runs against them in 26 innings, including one inning where they had a gift runner at second and still couldn’t score.

You have to realize that disappointment and frustration are a function of expectation and hope. After 2021 expectations were high and the results the last two years have not come close to meeting them.

At least we have the memory of the three months in 2021 when Adames produced like an elite hitter. I don’t think we’ll ever see anything close to that again.

It would be hard for Tellez to be any more useless than he’s been for the last month.

Break out the brooms. And while you’re at it, scratch Peralta off the list of ace pitchers.

In the 11 games that the Brewers have played against teams that weee billed in some fashion as truly terrible teams, they are discouraging 4-7. That’s 0-3 against the Rockies, 1-2 against the Tigers, 3-0 against the Royals (who must really be terrible), and now 0-2 against the A’s. The team they have played with the next worst record is the Cardinals, against whom they have gone 3-3. No further comment is needed because these results speak for themselves.

I believe in regression to the mean when it comes to statistics relating to truly random events. But, I believe in it less when it comes to baseball projections, in part because the mean isn't a certainty and also because there are factors other than randomness that affect performance. In baseball, I believe in players having bad seasons and players having breakout seasons that present a significant deviation from their previous performances. In the first part of the season it's hard to tell if a player is having one of those, or is just going through a hot or cold spell. Coming into the season I thought the Brewers offense would be close to league average because of the large number of question marks. Of course, they have been significantly worse than that. I'm having a hard time convincing myself that the rest of the season will be much different. This collection of players might just be showing who they really are at this stage of their careers.

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.