Bob Skube Snacks

You obviously have never played the game, much less managed a team. The AL has almost no strategy other than, as you call it, "reading a spread sheet" as to what pitcher is to face what hitter. In the NL the strategy is timing of using a PH and using your bench accordingly. Does a mgr. hit for the starter earlier if he thinks runs will be scarce. Which hitter off the bench hits early, does he use his best PH or save him for a later situation? If a double swith is made, how does that affect the defense, especially in the later innings. Now days, because of 13 pitchers on most teams, the mgr. has only 4 bench players. One is his back-up catcher who he is reluctant to use in case of injury. He may want to hit for a weaker hitter other than the pitcher too. Does he use a versatile defender who may be his best hitter or does he send up a weaker hitter in a clutch situation early in the game? This is just a small portion of the strategy that a NL manager has to utilize. You are raising what are almost always obvious decisions into some grand alchemy that only the select can figure out. In truth? It isn’t that hard. Very few managers swerve from their usual tendencies in these situations. Oh! You mean the Brewers saved Ryan Braun on his day off for the last pinch-hitting situation in the ninth inning! What strategy! I never saw that coming the 50 other times they’ve done it! Managing decisions like the ones you point out are always a matter of playing the percentages. That doesn’t make it “strategy”. The strategy of baseball is what pitch to throw on what count, where to move defenders based on the batter, whether to bunt or steal. As I said, pitch-to-pitch decisions or risk management type of things. None of which are taken out of the game with the DH. And forget the strategy argument. Baseball is entertainment and I’m not really entertained by the exercise in working around a black hole in the order. It would be like deliberately putting a punter on the offensive line and trying to work around the inherent weakness. What’s the point? Add in the injury factor and the DH is fine by me. I’ll enjoy the game with or without it, but I’d prefer to have it.

I loved the Brewers just fine when they played with a DH until 1997. I’ll love them just fine if they go back to using it. And the “strategy” in the NL is the most overrated red herring foisted upon us by baseball fans. Most of it what’s called “strategy” isn’t strategy at all, it’s obligation forced on managers because of a black hole in the lineup. There’s no big brains at work with NL bullpen management either. In the AL, you have to manage your bullpen around the matchups without that black hole in the lineup. As far as pinch-hitting is concerned? Every manager chooses the right LHP/RHP vs. LHB/RHB split or chooses a player who happens to hit a certain pitcher well. That’s not strategy. That’s called reading a spreadsheet. The strategy in baseball takes place on the pitch-to-pitch level. Not in the obvious decisions that anyone with half-a-brain can make.

So 35-year-old John Lester and 35-year-old Cole Hamels are not candidates to regress, the loss of Justin Wilson from the bullpen will have no impact, Brandon Morrow's and Yu Darvish's elbows are certain to recover, Addison Russell's 40 game suspension will have no impact and he won't be a distraction when he returns, 38-year-old Ben Zobrist isn't a candidate for regression, Baez isn't a candidate for regression... The Cubs have as many question marks as the Brewers, if not more. The Cubs' window ended in 2018. The only question is if 2019 will be bad enough to break any denial on their part. I detest Chicago teams as much as any red-blooded Milwaukee-born ought to, but statements like this just make me laugh. They tied us for the division a year ago. While I agree they’re not 100-win material, they ain’t going anywhere for a little while. The window is wide-open for both them, us and the Cardinals. And the Reds are at least in the same room as the window for the first time in a few years. The Pirates could be, but they’d rather live in a windowless, furnished apartment because it’s cheaper.

Figured all along it was just MillerCoors backing out. The naming rights “thing” isn’t anywhere near as hot or attractive to companies as it was when the phenomenon started in the 90s. Naming rights is no longer easy money for franchises in any sport. Oakland went an entire season without a corporate name on their stadium. All of which makes me pleased I spent, like, an hour, lamenting the “death” of Miller Park before getting over it. I’ll likely call it Miller Park regardless, so who cares?

I’m surprised this is still a hot-button thing. I cared about it for maybe half-a-day and moved on.

I thought the Miller deal was $40 million for 20 years and was signed in 1996. So in 23 years (25 years when it's in effect), there was no increase in value of the naming rights? When I heard the $2M/year in 1996 I thought that was VERY low. I would have thought in 2019 dollars we'd be in the ~$15M million/year range. No increase makes this even more disappointing. Naming rights money has gone way down everywhere since the 90s.

I hope all of the Venezuelan Brewers - Chacin, Aguilar, Perez, Pina, Arcia, Guerra - are safe, and preferably, out of their home country as all hell is breaking loose. Breaking diplomatic relations is serious business. Hopefully, it doesn’t impact their ability to travel, etc., as the Brewers would be in hot water without a boat if they were barred from doing so.

When the Brewers start calling for a new state of the art ballpark that the city/counties/state needs to fork over to keep the Brewers? Just when I give the Brewers credit for being a good organization, they firmly plant the corporate head up the corporate ass... What is the difference between what Only Money Matters stadium and what MillerCoors was offering? It's possible with all the changes with Miller there is no longer any link to the Milwaukee community that MillerCoors cared to maintain... But I'd be much more down with Harley Davidson Park/Field/Stadium than this colossal CF... So why assume it’s the Brewers’ fault? I put the blame on MillerCoors before I do the Brewers.

This is a shame. As others have said, Miller may have been a corporate name, but it was a local one and it tied directly to the team name which ties directly to the city’s heritage. Miller Park and Miller Brewing are within sight of one another. It was a perfect match, and for Miller, it was a way to be visible with other brewery-named parks in St. Louis and Colorado. I mean, it’s not a game-changer as far as buying a ticket or anything, it’s just a shame.

I can certainly see that in the Brewers in the 90's on, but in the 80's the Brewers payroll's were competitive with almost every team in baseball. I know they had the highest payroll at one point and I believe Yount signed a record setting contract when he was a FA after the '89 season outbidding some of the big spenders. They also spent a lot of money on guys like Higura, Stubbs and others. I tend to view Molitor leaving as the period when the Brewers started losing players because of money. I don't remember the details, but I think they actually offered him a pretty big pay cut as a free agent coming off a monster season. This was also when Bando came in and Selig was an absentee owner while serving as acting commish. https://shepherdexpress.com/sports/brew-crew-confidential/messy-divorce-brewers-paul-molitor/ I found this article while trying to remember the circumstances. It looks even worse than I remembered with Molitor...and it really shows how lucky we are to have a real GM and not Sal Bando. I’m not typically a conspiracist, but I’ve always thought Bud Selig suddenly got a lot more skinflint than he needed to be around the time he became commish to use the Brewers as the poster child for small-market lack of competitiveness back in the labor wars of the 90s/early 2000s. (And also to get Miller Park built so the Brewers could “be competitive”.) The Brewers were his salary cap guinea pig. I was like many fans of the era and fell for it, but the truth was he was just cheap and using the Brewers to foster an agenda. Attanasio has proven you can win here without a salary cap, some smarts, and some well-timed ambition. Now by the mid-2000s, when the super-rich began buying up clubs? That’s when the Seligs were truly out of their depth financially and they sold at the right time.

Dee Gordon please.

Meh.

If Baines is in? I want Cecil Cooper in ... and I’m not joking.

Would you rather have Hader come in for the 7th inning with a one run lead to face Votto, Gennett, and Suarez or have him come in for the 9th and face a PH, Hamilton, and Peraza? Game situations should dictate how a reliever is used, not "just" because it's the 8th or 8th inning. As you saw, sometimes Hader will pitch the 9th inning. Like game 163 vs the Cubs. I understand the argument, I just don’t entirely agree with it. See NLDS Game 1 for an example. Hader kills off the last part of the 7th and 8th. Great, but then Jeffress allows two leadoff singles in the 9th and has to face the meat of the Rockies order anyway when he’s clearly not on his game. The Brewers were very fortunate to escape the 9th with just a tie game to contend with. (And I know Jeffress was very good during the regular season, but I don’t think anyone would argue he’s better than Hader.) I’d rather take the risk in the 7th, when you still have time to theoretically make up for any bullpen problems with your own lineup, than in the 9th, when you’ve burned your most dominant reliever and (maybe) have one turn at-bat to deal with it. I want my most dominant reliever to kill the game when the game is there to be killed, not in a theoretic sense earlier in the game. The Dodgers use Kenley Jansen in that traditional sense and it works just fine for them. It can work fine for us too with the relief corps we have.

Has nothing to do with saves. I think, as we found out a few times in the postseason, that the highest leverage moment is the 8th and 9th.

I think a better question is whether Hader ought to be a six-out closer? He’s dabbled in a role sort of like that, but other than brief periods, he’s never been the designated closer with Knebel in 2017 and Jeffress in 2018 assuming the closer roles.

Agreed. No fan base is innocent and all will defend their own, especially in the heat of a postseason run. I’d venture to guess many here are also Packers fans. I don’t remember what the reaction was among Packer fans to Charles Martin body-slamming Jim McMahon in 1986, but I think I’d be pretty safe in assuming there were some who cheered it with a few “Bears still suck” thoughts tossed in for good measure. What Machado did to Aguilar was a punk move, no doubt about it, but I think it’s funny that many fans’ reactions - including my own - was that he eventually needs to be drilled in retaliation. In the grand scheme of things, hitting someone with a baseball is as bad and violent or worse a punk move than kicking someone’s foot. Just because “baseball code” makes it “acceptable” doesn’t make it any less violent an act. It’s funny how one act constitutes outrage and the other grudging acceptance. As for his slides on Arcia? I couldn’t care less. He paid the proper price for the second one as the rules are currently written. On top of that? Those slides would have been perfectly legal, tame even, not 10 years ago. It’s not as if he barrel-rolled into him. Much ado about very little.

In their playoff history, Brewers have come back from California needing more than two wins to survive. Needed three in ‘82. Let’s get this, Brewers.

I'm not following this logic at all. Yes, you just need one out. So wouldn't you want to face a pitcher who gives you far and away the best chance at getting that one out? The optimal move would have been to walk Bellinger to get to Grandal. Set up a force at third or second and face a struggling hitter. Walking the bases loaded? Hell no ... and I don’t care if the pitcher was up or not. Guerra was tiring and he’s a breaking ball pitcher. There would have been a high probability of a ball going in the dirt. Remember ... MACHADO WAS IN SCORING POSITION IN THE FIRST PLACE DUE TO A WILD PITCH! Game over if there’s another one. Given how tired he was and the stakes, there was a decent probability he might walk the pitcher, who, given the situation, would be ordered not to swing the bat. Game over at that point. I saw one analyst surmise that he could have thrown BP fastballs and got the out. I find that dubious, and even so, are you willing to stake a playoff game on that? I think the only thing Counsell should have done was walk Bellinger. Everything else is 20/20 hindsight at its worst.

This extra inning game is big time torture if you live in the Eastern Time Zone.

Jeez. I hope some of you handle adversity in life better than you do after a game. It would have been great to win. Didn’t happen. On to the next one.

Must be a Chicago thing. It’s an every fan thing. Let’s not pretend our fans don’t this too. Heck, I do it sometimes.

Bill James wrote about it in one his long-ago historic abstracts about how the stadium atmospheres changed in the mid-80s to a much more sedate vibe from the somewhat unruly 70s and early 80s atmospheres. He couldn’t put a finger on how the vibe changed, but there was a difference. When I was a kid in the late 70s, I thought it was normal to see a fight or two in the stands at County Stadium at every game I attended. Didn’t think anything of it. Cops came and broke it up, made arrests if necessary, and that was that. (One Brewers-White Sox game I went to back then had a ton of arrests, including a guy getting dragged out of a nearby section by his Mike Epstein-style afro!) By the mid 80s, I rarely saw this and have rarely seen it since anywhere I’ve gone. I know there are arrests made at games, but it seems a far more isolated thing than it was 40 years ago. It probably had to do with an increase in ticket prices, more awareness about alcohol abuse and, as far as running on the field is concerned, far more emphasis on security. The last County Stadium-style postseason en masse field storming I remember was when the ‘84 Tigers won the World Series. I think it’s a shame. I know it’s dangerous and stupid, but I love watching that mass outpouring of jubilation in ‘82. The speed at which the fans got out there amazes me still. And, of course, you have the hilarity of fans running out their with their beer coolers, etc. I was at the game, but didn’t run on the field as I was only 11. I do recall watching from my first base-side grandstand seat one poor slob jumping out of the bleachers and being down on the field injured because he presumably broke his leg or something. Stuff like that is probably why it’s a relic of the past.

That’s the truth. It amuses me when I see complaints about him from short-sighted Brewers fans. Anyone who lived through the Selig years from 1993-05 knows we hit a lottery ticket with Attanasio. Ask Pirates fans how committed their ownership is? Or the Marlins, Reds, Royals (one brief period being an exception to an otherwise skinflint operation), etc. Of the markets our size, Attanasio makes the best commitment to the product on the field. As a fan, that’s all I ask.

I will add this ... at no point in my 40 years of being a Brewers fan have I felt like they have their s$&* together like they do now. Front office has a plan that’s working better than anyone envisioned, managing is on the cutting edge of how baseball is evolving, this team is at the beginning of run, not the end as in 1982 (didn’t realize it at the time) and 2011 (when we did), this team has few weaknesses to paper over, and it feels like the baseball god’s have touched us as they never have before. Honestly? We’re not a franchise that has been blessed very often. I feel like we’re in that very rarefied air right now. To add to that? I’m extremely proud to be from Milwaukee. I haven’t lived there since the mid 80s, but I wear my Milwaukee and Wisconsin heart on my sleeve. For better or worse, I express my pride through my sports teams. This is a particularly proud moment. I’m reveling in this moment. I hope everyone does. Smell these roses. They don’t pop up very often.