BruisedCrew

No better pitcher for someone looking for his first big league HR. Lauer is an equal opportunity gopher ball pitcher.

One thought I had is that they don’t want to risk having to give up the DH spot if they want to move Caratini to catcher at some point. The other thought is that Hiura plays 1B like a catcher.

Not sure how that isn’t a balk, but karma delivers the deserved out.

One batter, I baserunner for the Cubs courtesy of the home plate ump.

I hope Caratini at 1B doesn’t become a factor.

I would guess yes.

No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just saying that 20-20 is 20-20, whether you get there by winning 4 stands and losing 1 or winning 1 and losing 4. Maybe the trend of series or stands can reveal something of useful. The last 3 stands at least show that the Brewers have emerged from the slump of losing 8 in a row and 12 of 14 For me , the biggest questions for the second half of the season are (1) how well the Brewers pitching will hold up and (2) whether the offense will be strong enough to back up a pitching staff that is not the one we expected at the start of the season. I’m not sure how well the projection sites can capture the impact of injuries when the return of players is uncertain, especially when they are potentially high impact players like deGrom, Tatis, and Harper. There’s no way they can anticipate future injuries or player moves made before the deadline. This will be an interesting month both on and off the field. August 2 will be a good checkpoint of how things stand

But when a stand lost is 1-6 and the 4 stands won that surround it total 19-14, that nets out to 20-20. So, trying to present winning 4 out of 5 stands as something positive is IMHO an unconvincing spin on these 40 games. We could make the point that 20-20 in these 40 games is pretty decent considering the injuries (which are far from over). But that has little to do with how the wins and losses are distributed among stands and series. At some point fans are looking for the Brewers to make some more progress after basically treading water for the last two months. I have been looking at these 10 games against the Pirates and Cubs as an opportunity to pick up a few games on .500. Maybe it will still happen.

Thanks for the info. I never realized that.

Bonehead play by Narvaez. The ball was right there and he had plenty of time to make a simple throw.

Pretty sad showing from the offense today. Hopefully it will be enough.

No insurance runs today. It’s all up to the bullpen.

The fact that players, and especially pitchers, often have little things bothering them that aren’t publicized is one reason why people get uncomfortable when they aren’t performing up to expectations. I am skeptical that Houser was feeling 100% and suddenly had this issue come up out of nowhere after serving up a few more gopher balls. Maybe something has been bothering him for some time and he tried to work through it, or maybe he hurt something trying to make mechanical adjustments to address the problems he was having.

I know you weren’t directing that at me. I was just using the opportunity to point out one of those rare times when something I recommended actually is working out.

Steele will be pitching for the Cubs tomorrow so we’ll probably be getting a look at him then.

I made that comment about Yelich’s cheap hits as more of a compliment to him and a counter to some of the cheap hits the opponents get. Remember that when many were calling for Yelich to be moved down from the third spot in the order, I was calling for him to be moved up to the leadoff spot. So, it warms my heart to see him do well there.

There’s still going to be the question of how often he’ll be able to play and whose place he takes. If he catches he takes Caratini’s place, and how much of an upgrade is that? At DH there’s no room for all of McCutchen, Yelich, Renfroe (if he ever comes back) and a CF. At 1B he might do more harm in the field than he does good at the plate. As I said before, I hope this is just a very short term thing until Taylor and Renfroe are ready. Then I think Severino and/or Hiura don’t have spots; I would take Brosseau over either of them.

Big chance here for Tellez to open things up.

Yelich gets his share of cheap hits too.

Another head scratching play from Wong. With Vogelbach lumbering to second I think he had plenty of time to field that ball on the hop and turn and make a throw to second instead of the backhand flip.

There haven’t been any walks yet. The Pirates had a leadoff single in the first that was wiped out on a DP.

I’m not a fan of the 3 catcher arrangement, but hopefully it will not last any longer than Taylor’s concussion IL stint. I’m also not a fan of throwing some guy at 1B who has never played there. It never seems to take long to lose an out and give up runs because of the 1B messing something up by being out of position or making an error.

Running themselves out of a scoring chance.

The idea of having 3 catchers on the roster is completely contrary to the philosophy of having flexibility with position players. Given that he won’t be eligible for the postseason, trading Severino to a team that isn’t concerned about this season’s playoffs seems inevitable .

I'll preface this by agreeing that we will see where we are later in the season. But, I'm going to offer some reactions to the opinion that things like OPS+ are more predictive of what's going to happen in the future than looking at runs scored in the past. First, the records against teams over .500 (which at this stage of the season are the same as the teams that I am considering playoff contenders) does refute the reaction that the Brewers can't beat good teams. Though that record got a recent boost with the games against the Jays and Rays because before winning the last 4 of those games the Brewers were 15-21 against contending teams. I think those games have had a reassuring effect. That aside, one of the things I have been watching is not just the Brewers wins and losses against contending teams, but what the offense has done against them. The Journal Sentinel had an article about this about two weeks ago and highlighted how much more productive the Brewers hitting has been against weaker teams. I described in a post a couple of weeks ago that I am tracking how many runs the Brewers have scored against contending and noncontending teams. This is very easy to do using data in the Schedule and Results section of Baseball Reference. I have now updated those numbers for games through yesterday (and including today's Brewers and Cardinals games). They continue to confirm that the Brewers run production is dramatically higher against noncontending teams. In the 40 games against noncontenders, the Brewers are averaging 5.88 runs per game, but in the 40 games against contending teams they are averaging 3.43 runs per game. That's a pretty significant difference of almost 2 1/2 runs per game. When I first did this I wondered if this kind of discrepancy was typical. At least for the teams I checked (Cardinals, Dodgers, and Giants) it is not. The Cardinals numbers are 5.19 vs non contenders and 4.44 vs contenders, a difference of 0.75 runs. For the Dodgers those numbers are 5.54 amd 4.54 (a difference of 1 run). I haven't updated the Giants numbers but when I looked at them a month ago they were actually scoring slightly more against better teams. So. the question or concern that I continue to have is whether the Brewers offensive numbers have been propped up by the high number of games against the noncontending teams that allow the most runs (Reds, Nats, Pirates, Cubs) and that they will have far fewer games against those teams in the second half than they have had in the first half. As I mentioned in an earlier post, by the end of next weekend the Brewers will have played 41 of their 87 games against those 4 teams. They will only have 22 games against those teams in the second half plus 12 against the Rockies and Dbacks (who are not quite as generous as those bottom NL Central teams). You made the statement that things like OPS+ are more predictive of future scoring than past runs scored. I asked the question yesterday, and didn't receive an answer, whether a stat like OPS+ includes a factor based on competition. But, if it doesn't, wouldn't it be fair to expect that as competition gets tougher, the OPS+ of the players and the run production for the team might come down too? I understand that we can't arbitrarily remove the extraordinarily high scoring games like the 18 and 19 run games the Brewers have had against the Reds and Pirates. But, for predictive purposes I question how much value those games have toward how a team might be expected to perform in a playoff setting against the best pitchers on the best teams. We're not going to resolve this now, but it will be interesting to follow going forward.