BruisedCrew

seriously. Does a company really think it’s going to improve its sales by putting the same ad in between every other message? It’s so annoying, and makes the threads so hard to follow, that I’m more inclined to boycott the sponsor than patronize it.

How about an HR with a runner on base.

So, you're saying that it makes no sense to talk about strictly offense when the title of the thread is 2022 Brewers Offense Thread? If you really want to evaluate the Brewers position group based on projected WAR, and not just on offense, I think you'd find that my earlier comment about the Brewers not having players in the top 10 at their position would still hold true. No, I did not expect the Brewers to sign Freddie Freeman. But, I did, and still do, think that the Brewers could improve their offense by trading one of their top 7 starting pitchers. Just like they improved their everyday lineup last year by trading some marketable relievers and landed Adames. The lockout made that much more difficult than it would have been in a normal offseason, but it could still be done with teams that are in need of a middle rotation starting pitcher. It may be tough to complain about the Brewers having the 5th best run differential in the NL (not in all of baseball). But, because of their run of playoff appearances, the bar has been raised to evaluating the Brewers as possible World Series contenders. Being 5th best in the NL makes that difficult without a lot of things breaking well in the playoffs, especially if the team has to play in that opening 3 game series.

I don't think the majority of posters on this thread have been talking about the Brewers having a good position player group as a whole and using projections to make that point. There was one comment talking about WAR, which is slightly off point because this thread is focusing on offense, not on defense and pitching. I'm not sure about your source for the comment about few teams having 7 players with projected WAR in the 2-3 range. But, when I look for projections like this I go to Fan Graphs because it doesn't require a paid subscription. In this case, the Fan Graphs projections do a pretty good job of supporting the point I have been trying to make about the Brewers offense. In their latest projections, the Brewers are projected to end the season with 4.52 runs per game, which would place them 20th among the 30 MLB teams. The other teams that I (and probably most everyone else) considers the top contenders in the NL project as follows: Dodgers 5.19 Braves 5.02 Phillies 4.80 Mets 4.73 Cardinals 4.68 Giants 4.52 They are all higher than the Brewers, except for the Giants who are also at 4.52. The Brewers can make up that some of that difference with better pitching and defense, but the projections still place the Brewers run differential of 48 lower than the Dodgers (152), Mets (118), Braves (108), and Giants (66). I think these projections illustrate and support the point I have been trying to make. That is, that the Brewers offense does not measure up to the best teams in the league, and may struggle to be in the top half of MLB. That doesn't mean that they won't or can't beat these other teams if they meet them in a playoff series. But, if they could add a bat or two to the lineup to narrow some of that gap, I think they would stand a better chance. If you disagree with my opinion, I really don't care. But don't try to tell me that my opinion is based on the first 10 games of this season. There has been a lot of analysis in this thread of stats from the first few games, along with some sarcastic comments about the season being over after 4 games. But those discussions of the early stats and the sarcastic comments did not come from me.

You seem to be ignoring my reference to career performances of players and what they might be reasonably expected to do this year. Using your logic there would be no point in discussing a team’s prospects in the offseason because no games have been played yet. Haven’t you ever heard of the hot stove league? The opinions and expectations I have for the offense now are the same as they were over the winter and when spring training started. If you want to wait until at least 40 games have been played before you make any comments or express any opinions about the team, that’s up to you. But, for as long as I’ve been around, which might be a lot longer than you, baseball fans have discussed their teams and their prospects all year round.

The most uplifting swing of the season to date.

That promising inning fizzled pretty quickly with 3 Ks. Thank goodness for the wild pitch.

It might become less of a crapshoot in the new format. Teams that have to play a best of 3 series while the top 2 division winners are sitting back and setting up their rotations might be at a pretty distinct disadvantage. Even if they survive that series they might stress their top starters and relievers doing it.

I don't understand why anyone assumes that any criticism or concern about the Brewers offense is based on these first 10 games, or just the Braves series, as opposed to career performance of players and reasonable expectations for what they might do this year. I think looking at April, May, and September of last year is just as relevant as citing "after the Adames trade". I expected the Brewers to trade a quality pitcher (maybe Hauser, Ashby, or Small?) in the offseason to try to add a more proven major league hitter to the lineup. But, the lockout made that impossible and, once you get to spring training, many teams are more inclined to see what they have before making a deal. I am hoping that Stearns might still be able to pull something off early in the season to prop up the batting order.

NM

That was the day we brought our second daughter home from the hospital. The weather was warm and I was firing up the grill for my first brats of the season. When she was born two days earlier we arrived at the hospital just as the Brewers were recording the final out in their 10th victory. Two days before that I had to go on a business trip on a small plane to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. My wife didn’t want me to go because the weather was really foggy and she was afraid something might happen and I wouldn’t be able to get back in time. In those days if had told the company executive I was traveling with that I couldn’t take a trip because we were expecting a baby any day, the response I would have gotten would have been “You’re not having the baby, are you?”. As it was I made it home that night in time to see the last few innings of Juan Nieves’ no hitter. A memorable week all around.

The lack of HRs has maybe been the biggest problem the Brewers have had so far. They don’t have a lineup that is likely to produce strings of hits so, like many teams these days, they are going to score a lot of their runs on HRs. I think everyone would agree that if the Brewers only hit 81 HRs as a team this year they are in big trouble. There is always a lot of attention on batting average with RISP and failure to get the “big hit”. The Brewers biggest problem in this area is more not getting enough opportunities with RISP than failing to convert them. But an occasional 2 or 3 run HR can quickly make up for that.

I fully understand that, but they are an objective measure of hitting ability. Players who produce good fantasy numbers in categories like OBP, XBH, HR, etc, are going to be valuable real world offensive players too. If there is a better way to judge players as hitters relative to others I’m open to it. I see a lot of references on this site to projections used to evaluate what to expect from players and teams. Are those any better or different? The broader point, which I haven’t seen anyone disputing, is that the Brewers do not have any hitters who are among the best at their positions, whereas most championship contenders do have at least one, if not several. The Brewers offensive deficiencies become even more apparent when you look at the traditionally strong offensive positions: OF, 3B, and 1B. Just seeing the Cardinals with Goldschmidt, Arenado, and O’Neill highlights the disadvantage the Brewers are at when looking at just offense. At some point, it requires extremely good pitching and defense to overcome the offensive advantage that some of these other teams have, especially the ones that also have solid pitching.

The way the Brewers have looked so far I thought before this series that I would be satisfied if the Brewers could gain a split. I am satisfied. That would have been a tough one to cough up.

So, not only have the Cardinals cut the lead to one, but now they have the heart of their order coming up in the 9th. Hader is going to have his work cut out for him facing that string of Brewer killers.

Others have.

In other words, it is possible to have questions or concerns about the Brewers offense or any of their hitters without basing them entirely on the first few games of this season.

Here comes the walk monster.

First victory of the night…getting through the first inning with no walks.

It should be clear from all of my posts in other threads that my opinions and expectations about the Brewers offense are not based on these 8 games. But, if you’ve decided that anyone who makes any critical comments about the Brewers is basing everything just on today’s batting order or these 8 games, that’s cool too.

Hiura batting cleanup should put an end, at least for the time being, to the debate about the strength of the Brewers offense. Maybe they'll break through the 5 run ceiling tonight after scoring just 4 runs total in 3 previous games started by LHP. But Hiura batting anywhere in the middle of the lineup seems to speak for itself about the team's lack of quality hitters. I don't expect him to go 9 innings, but the Brewers could sure use an efficient quality start similar to what Houser did against the Cardinals last September.

I’m not shifting the goalposts. Whether Adames is number 6, or 8, or 10, or 12 offensively among MLB SS is beside the real point. My use of the fantasy rankings to evaluate the Brewers offense as a whole (not just Adames) was an attempt to put some objective measure on the subject that was completely removed from the first week of the season (where the Brewers offense has been undeniably bad). I don’t think the Brewers need a “superstar” bat, but I think they need more above average bats than they have. The Braves last year added bats to a lineup that already had Freeman and Albies (who are among the very best at their positions) and Riley, who had as good a year as Adames offensively last year. They had a potent offense even after losing Acuna and made the moves to pick up the slack after he got hurt. I obviously can’t disagree with the statement that the team will be OK if the guys they have hit when the pitching performs. But the question is whether the Brewers have enough guys who can realistically be expected to hit at the level needed to produce even a top half of the league offense. As I described in an earlier post in this thread, I digested the fact that the Brewers were tied for 7th in MLB in runs scored after the Adames trade by mixing it in with how they performed for the first two months of the season, September, and the playoffs instead of just their best 3 months. And the net result was much more of an average offense than one that matches up well with the best teams in the league.

I think one of the question marks for the Brewers offense is whether Adames had a career 3 months last year and will not be able to carry an offense for an extended period. Hopefully his time with the Brewers last year is a sign of a relatively young player who is coming into his own in a new environment.

I am only using fantasy rankings and projections to illustrate a point because they are presumably objective analyses of how players stack up against each other. I also think they are relevant because we are talking about offense and most fantasy leagues only consider offense. The talk about Adames as an MVP candidate was kind of ridiculous and was based on the Brewers as a team taking off after he joined. But, look at it this way. Ignoring salary considerations and focusing on the short term, how many of these SS would you rather have in your everyday lineup over Adames: Trea Turner, Tatis (when healthy), Bo Bichette, Bogaerts, Tim Anderson, Story (now playing 2B), Lindor, Seager, Wander Franco, Correa, Baez, Witt (now playing 3B). All of these players were rated higher than Adames by Fantasy Pros. Maybe Adames is actually a better offensive player than several of these players and is a top 10 MLB hitting SS. But the point would remain that, if Adames is the Brewers best offensive player, that isn’t real good for a championship contending team.

Anyone who plays fantasy baseball and takes time preparing for a draft using rankings or projections would notice that the Brewers don’t have one player who ranks in the top 10 in MLB at his position. In the rankings I used from Yahoo and Fantasy Pros, in the preseason rankings of all hitters, the Brewers highest rated player is Yelich with a rank in the 50’s, and that ranking is based on a projection of 20-25 HRs and an OPS over .800. I think most of us would be extremely happy if Yelich could achieve those levels considering how he hit the last two years. Many teams, and all leading World Series contenders, have multiple hitters better than the Brewers best. The Brewers lineup is populated with hitters who are generally average or worse for their positions. It shouldn’t be surprising if they end up near the middle of the pack or lower in runs scored. ETA- I should add that one team that produced a pretty effective offense last year without obvious stars on offense is the Giants, who somehow always seem to be greater than the sum of their parts. Maybe their odd, pitcher friendly park has something to do with having players who have more value in winning games than racking up fantasy points.