BruisedCrew

The Cards pitching staff didn’t look like that much of a dumpster fire last weekend as they held the Brewers to 10 runs in 3 games. I enjoy every Cardinals loss, but I don’t think they’re the disaster some are making them out to be, even right now.

I would think that people would learn that the Cardinals are never a dumpster fire for very long. As an organization they always have the resources in both players and cash to put together a contending team. I don’t think they are panicking about a 5-7 start.any more than they were about being 4 games behind the Brewers in late July last year.

They aren’t posting it this morning.

I just saw the replay of the Cruz play. You can barely call that a slide it was so late. He looked more like he was aiming for the catcher than the plate. IMHO, if he had slid to the back side of the plate (either head first or feet first) with the high throw he could have scored without colliding with the catcher. I can see why the catcher was upset

I don’t expect it to be a big difference in the W-L record, but relative to the rest of the NL teams that they’ll be competing with for playoff spots, the Brewers are losing games against a worse group of teams than the teams in the NL West and (especially) East. The schedules will be more equitable now.

I'm going to skip the individual categories and just make my comments on the overall record. I am relatively bearish on the Brewers because it's hard for me to see how, at least on paper, the team is better than the team that played .500 ball for the last 5 months of the 2022 season. Compared to other teams that are considered playoff contenders they seem to have more question marks. I also think the schedule will be tougher this year as the new schedule doesn't offer as many games as the Brewers had last year against the Pirates, Reds, and Cubs (who still won the season series and should be improved this year). To be a contender a lot of things have to go right, including injury free seasons from the top pitchers. With Ashby and Houser starting the season on the IL, that hope is already off to a bad start. I also think the bullpen is not going to be the asset that it has been when the Brewers were most successful. The duo of Williams and Hader was a huge asset, and that no longer exists. Williams might be fine in the closer role, but there are a lot of question marks in the setup role. Like last year, I expect the Brewers to be middle of the pack in MLB in offense, and I don't think the pitching will be dominant enough to carry that offense to the playoffs. So, my bottom line prediction is 82-80 and fighting with the Cubs for second place in the division. No playoffs.

86 wins and no playoffs it is.

I think the best bet is to petition the league to let more teams into the playoffs.

Not really, but I find it kind of sad. I’m an old traditionalist who enjoys classic uniform styles and I hate seeing advertisements on those uniforms. I’m not a fan of all of the alternate uniforms which seem like a thinly veiled attempt to peddle more merchandise. Hopefully any sponsor messages will be subtle enough to not detract from the style; I wouldn’t want to see the Brewers (or anyone) wearing a big “Chico’s Bail Bonds” sign on their backs.

With the Brewers trading Hader and adding no hitters while the Cardinals and Phillies bolstered their rosters and are heating up, I’ll stick with my comments from before: 86 wins and no playoffs. The next couple of weeks with series against the Rays, Cards, Dodgers, Cubs and Dodgers might tell us if the Brewers are going to be in the race in September. Stay tuned.

I agree that the recent slide is a true team effort involving failures from the starting pitchers, relief pitchers, defense, and hitting. I disagree with the statement that the offense has been great since the break. It was great in the first 8 games, scoring 55 runs (even with a shutout in the one loss) while going 7-1. But in the next 7 games they scored just 28 runs against some of the worst run prevention teams in the league and lost 6 of those games. In all but one of those games the only runs came across on home runs. With the games generally being close, the inability to score without home runs has been costly. Four runs per game isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great, especially considering the pitchers they were facing. I also don’t agree that the effect of the Hader trade has been purely intangible. The Brewers strength for much of the season has been getting narrow leads and having Boxberger, Williams, and Hader bring them home. I even commented on a game thread a couple of weeks ago that I was concerned that the Brewers were relying too heavily on this pattern, and that they weren’t winning enough games by building leads big enough to not need saves from the back of the bullpen. The Hader trade shook up the roles in the bullpen by throwing the new pitchers into the mix and changing the roles of the incumbents. In 3 of the losses since the break, the pitchers were used differently than they were before the trade and games were lost in the late innings. Of course, we can’t say for sure that Hader’s presence would have made a difference. But, it might have Using Sunday’s game as an example, when Burnes could only go 6 innings because of inefficiency early in the game, the score was 1-1 after 6. Before the trade, Counsell probably would have gone with Boxberger, Williams, and Hader, hoping to get 3 scoreless innings and scratch out a run somewhere in there to get the win. Without Hader he went with Bush and Rogers, who gave up the tie breaking run (in part because Renfroe failed to make the play on what looked like a playable fly ball) If Hader had been here they might have gotten the three scoreless innings and might have won in 9. There were similar situations in the last two losses to the Pirates where runs surrendered by the bullpen affected the outcome.

I’m not a jersey buyer or wearer so it won’t make any difference to me one way or the other. But I would definitely not buy one with a sponsor logo on it.

I looked up Ruiz’s record, and it seems like a risk taking a player with just 29 games in AAA and 14 with the Padres and tossing him into CF in the middle of a playoff race. Maybe he would start producing immediately or maybe he would struggle like some highly touted prospects like Jarred Kelenic who hits well in AAA but has been a complete bust so far in two stints with the Mariners. The Brewers would be better off with Taylor’s production than something like that. I am not excited about the stolen bases in the short term. So far this year he is 60 for 71 in the minors, and I would expect that it’s harder to steal in MLB. If that success rate drops much it becomes more of a negative than a positive.

I don’t follow the minor leaguers. Is there anything in his background that suggests that he would be likely to provide immediate value to a major league team other than as a bench player? With very little MLB experience would he be an upgrade over Davis?

I guess Lamet was not a “sleeper” in this deal, but a corpse.

I agree wholeheartedly with 2 main points: 1. The Brewers offense is less potent or reliable than indicated by the raw runs per game number. I have raised this more than once on the ongoing thread about the offense. The Brewers run production has been propped up by runs scored against the weakest teams in the league, including some games with extremely high run totals in single games against the Reds and Pirates. I understand that it should be expected that teams will score more against better teams and better pitchers. But, I have presented evidence that the gap between the Brewers R/G against weak teams as compared to R/G against better teams is much greater than the gap for other playoff contenders. IMHO this leads to a legitimate concern that the offense will really have trouble scoring against the best pitchers on the teams they would be facing in the playoffs. 2. I recognize that it was going to be difficult for the Brewers to obtain a real impact bat that would significantly improve the offense. part of the problem is the price to acquire and pay the very top talents (like Soto) and the fact that the Brewers are loaded with average hitters, so the upgrade in obtaining a slightly above average hitter might not be that great. In that case, it still would have made sense to acquire a right handed hitter who would offer a better option than Severino or Davis if they wanted to pinch it for Wong or Tellez. That could have been done without coming close to "mortgaging the team's future". I've seen enough cases of players like Randy Ready, Matt LaPorta, Louis Brinson, et al who produced wails of despair when traded but never became impact major leaguers. I fully expected a deal like the Bush deal to prop up the setup portion of the bullpen. The Brewers do that every year and this team needed it. But, I look at exchanging Hader for Rogers to be a more significant downgrade than others seem to unless we assumed that Hader's recent troubles are a sign from a permanent fall from his position as the recognized best closer in MLB. And I don't see the erratic Lamet or the injured Rosenthal offering anything that will help this year's team. Maybe the prospects obtained in the Hader trade will make this a great trade when looked at a few years from now. But for this season I see the Brewers moves as signaling that they recognize that winning the weak Central Division is probably the team's ceiling for this year. Even that may be tougher than it looked as the deadline approached. ETA: I did not realize when I posted this that Lamet had already been DFA. So, as it affects the team this year, the Brewers traded Hader for Rogers.

Two of the three players to watch (Story and Devers) are on the IL and won’t be playing in this series. Martinez missed the first four games after the All Star break and has gone 0 for 10 in the three games since his return. Hernandez has been on the 60 day IL and will not be playing. Cora said he might start swinging a bat soon, but I wouldn’t be looking at him as a trade option for the Brewers unless there is reason to believe he will be back soon. He was off to a bad start before he was hurt. Between the injuries and a number of players having subpar seasons (Dalbec, Verdugo, Arroyo (also injured)) it’s almost remarkable that the Red Sox are at .500 considering the division they play in. They are 12-29 against AL East teams and 38-21 against everyone else. They had a great June (20-6) but have struggled in July (7-17) against mostly division rivals, though they did rebound to split 4 against the Guardians this week after losing 9 of 10 to the Rays, Yankees, and Jays. Their pitching can be atrocious at times, as evidenced by giving up 55 runs in 3 consecutive games (14, 13,and 28) against the Yankees and Jays last week. The Brewers are catching the Bosox at a good time, but they are still a formidable team. Controlling Bogaerts and Martinez, and hoping JBJ doesn’t pull the standard “former Brewer” act will be key.

If Benintendi can play CF decently, that would be the only way acquiring him would make sense to me. Otherwise he’d be replacing Yelich, Mc Cutchen or Renfroe and that wouldn’t seem like enough of an upgrade to the offense to make it worth giving up much for him. It would give them more depth in the OF to cover days off and injuries.

Who would Benintendi replace in the everyday lineup if everyone is healthy?

I don’t know what stats anyone would want to use to put an objective measure to it, but how would we compare the performance of the Brewers infield to the infields of the other NL playoff contenders? Position by position, I don’t think it would stack up very well, especially against the top teams (Dodgers, Mets, and Braves) and the Cardinals

I’m not going to quibble about specific grades because they are so subjective and depend so much on what the baseline is. You say that you based these on what could reasonably be expected from a player, and that’s fine. Presumably if you based the grade on a league average, or what a playoff contending team should be striving to get from that position, the grades would be different. If you expect a player to be average for his position, and his actual performance is average, that would be a C in my book. And that would leave the Brewers with a lot of C’s. The Brewers being in the top half of the league in most offensive categories is great if your goal is to have an average team or if you expect the pitching to be so exceptional that it can lift an average offensive team to one of the top playoff positions. The comments about the “offense is so bad” narrative seem to miss what that “narrative” really is. The offense was a question mark coming into the season and it’s hard to identify many players who have exceeded their expectations. And the troubling thing is that the offense has been progressively slipping as the season has progressed. If the performance in the games following the 19 run outburst in Pittsburgh are a sign of things to come, the Brewers have a real problem.

Nothing new here. Where we seem to differ is that I have hoped for the Brewers to be in a better position than “not impossible” to win a playoff series against the better teams in the league. I have never said that it was impossible, which is why I object to the characterization of “dumpster fire with no hope of doing anything in the playoffs.” That is not and has never been my opinion, and I think you and the rest of your cohorts who like to complain about some others not living up to your standards of optimism know that. BTW, do you think this article is too pessimistic about the Brewers offense?

I have made my opinion about the Brewers offense very clear (particularly in the "2022 Brewers Offense" thread). and it is not that the offense is a "lost cause dumpster fire and that the team has no hope of doing anything in the playoffs". So, when someone disagrees with my opinion by responding directly to me, that isn't the position they are disagreeing with. I'm not sure that anyone has used the exact words "the offense is just fine", but when I hear people telling me that the Brewers offense is in the same tier with teams like the Braves, Phillies, Giants, and Padres, and that the Brewers have "enough" offense because of their elite pitching, that sounds like someone telling me that the offense is "just fine" as is. Same when I am told that the offense will be OK when all of the injured players are back in action. I think the Brewers offensive deficiencies are not solved with just players on the current roster returning from injury. These exchanges can all be reviewed in the "2022 Brewer Offense" thread. There are other examples there of posters using advanced stats attempting to refute my opinion about the Brewers offense. My opinion might prove to be too pessimistic, but suggesting that I have said that the Brewers have no hope of doing anything in the playoffs is flat out wrong. Maybe instead of responding to me, you should address the author of this article and tell him that he is too pessimistic. His conclusion is, if anything, even more pessimistic than mine, but he uses some of the advanced statistics that some posters seem to think is a prerequisite for a valid opinion.

I have made my opinion about the Brewers offense very clear (particularly in the "2022 Brewers Offense" thread). and it is not that the offense is a "lost cause dumpster fire and that the team has no hope of doing anything in the playoffs". So, when someone disagrees with my opinion by responding directly to me, that isn't the position they are disagreeing with. I'm not sure that anyone has used the exact words "the offense is just fine", but when I hear people telling me that the Brewers offense is in the same tier with teams like the Braves, Phillies, Giants, and Padres, and that the Brewers have "enough" offense because of their elite pitching, that sounds like someone telling me that the offense is "just fine" as is. Same when I am told that the offense will be OK when all of the injured players are back in action. I think the Brewers offensive deficiencies are not solved with just players on the current roster returning from injury. These exchanges can all be reviewed in the "2022 Brewer Offense" thread. There are other examples there of posters using advanced stats attempting to refute my opinion about the Brewers offense. My opinion might prove to be too pessimistic, but suggesting that I have said that the Brewers have no hope of doing anything in the playoffs is flat out wrong. Maybe instead of responding to me, you should address the author of this article and tell him that he is too pessimistic. His conclusion is, if anything, even more pessimistic than mine, but he uses some of the advanced statistics that some posters seem to think is a prerequisite for a valid opinion.

Apparently you don’t completely agree with the posters on the forum who are committed to using advanced stats to try convince others that the Brewers offense is just fine.