RollieTime

Vogelbomb!

The Brewers seem to love producing Mother’s Day Magic. How about a no hitter this year?

Man do I miss Aguilar’s passion and fun he brought to the ballpark.

Pour some Avi on me!!

Houser Homer!!

Urias is going to be a good one.

Pablo Reyes: *watch off speed down the middle* *watch off speed down the middle* *swing off speed 6 inches off the plate* Gee golly mister, I wonder why we can’t score!

*sigh*

Couldn’t tell if it was a foreign substance or just discoloration. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it. You would think it has to be more than discoloration otherwise he wouldn’t be asked to get a different glove.

Lutz performed pretty well in A+ at the age of 20 and missed his age 21 season due to the pandemic. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him do what Grisham did and have a big breakout season. Lutz has always had the talent to possibly be a 5 tool player. He is a great young talented hitter. Maybe he can be our 2022 Opening Day right fielder?

That is actually really impressive. To not lead for a single inning in 6 games?

I think it might be time to look at Stearns and his ability to identify offensive talent both in free agency and in the draft. Stearns has been here for 5 full years where we should be seeing his true level of talent evaluation at the big league level since he has been here for a decent amount of years at this point. He has been here since prior to the 2016 draft, when Corey Ray was drafted in the first round. At this point, I think it is fair to say that Ray is a bust. Hiura was drafted in 2017, but it is now to the point where his ability to make contact is very concerning and something to keep an eye on. He looks lost at the plate at this point. It is too early at this point to know how other first round picks Lutz and Turang will fair. But we have also received no contributions from hitters in any other rounds in the Stearns era. Now to the big league roster. Khris Davis was traded, who would go on to hit over 130 homeruns the next 3 seasons with an OPS+ of around 130. Jonathan Villar was in the doghouse and part of a trade for Jonathan Schoop (yikes...). Now for my least favorite trade he has done since being here. Garrett Cooper was essentially given away for a guy named Tyler Webb who made a grand total of 2 appearances for the Brewers. Cooper hit every stop of the way through the minors. The year he was traded, he had 46 extra base hits through half a season and was hitting .366 in AAA. He also struck out under 20% of the time. This is a guy we would have for 6 years cheaply. Then Aguilar was given up on after two very good seasons and then a slight down season. His results that season would arguably be a top 3 hitter on our team currently constructed. Dubon also seems to be a quality bat that was traded away while on the cusp of the big league roster. Again, why are we trading successful minor league talent on the cusp of the MLB roster that we would control for 6+ seasons? Grisham is to be determined still, but he seems to be a great young player. Urias was a good get though, so we will see how this trade plays out. The Yelich trade was an A+ obviously and there’s not a bad word you can say about that trade. It’s odd that the few guys we get to the upper minors that are successful, we trade away. For being a small market team, producing minor league talent that you get for the minimum should be a philosophy instilled in management as an essential aspect to fielding a competitive team with young cheap talent as well as quality veterans brought in through free agency. For some reason, this doesn’t seem to be the case. For free agent signings, obviously Moose and Grandal panned out well. Cain played fantastic his first season, decent his second season, and didn’t play in his third season. They were established players with long track records of being offensive contributors. But take a look at the other moves he has done. I was on record of wanting to retain Choi, but we let him go. We went to the Sogard Well (twice unfortunately). Avisail Garcia was an overpay at the time and looks even worse now. Shaw hasn’t had it for a while and was brought back in. Jackie Bradley Jr. has always been a below average hitter his entire career. Other smaller signings like Brad Miller, Brock Holt (few at bats), and Justin Smoak produced little to nothing. Essentially, Sogard, Smoak, and Garcia were brought in for 2020 and it was a total flop. Garcia’s contract pays him $12.5 million for this year including his buyout for the 2022 season, which really put restraints on what we could do this past offseason. JBJ is a below average bat. Shaw is a below average bat. Hiura was struggling and a total wild card. Vogelbach was brought back in and is a career .205 hitter. This offense needed both Yelich and Hiura to produce to stay afloat. With neither being able to contribute, this offense is in serious trouble. Being able to play great defense and pitch well is 2/3rds of the game. But you need to be able to score some runs consistently. I am sure I am forgetting some moves and am just trying to paint a picture of some of the transactions we have seen recently. The Garcia, Sogard, Smoak, and trade of Grisham offseason was bad and I wasn’t surprised when it turned out the way it did. The 2020 offseason of JBJ, Shaw, Vogelbach, and Wong has one bright spot in Wong. I didn’t like Vogelbach or Shaw coming in and neither has done enough to this point to say they were good signings in any way. With Yelich being out, we knew it would be tough to score runs. With Hiura not producing, the offense is in serious trouble to consistently score runs. I understood the offseason plan of focusing on defense and pitching, but the lack of bats is a huge concern. That concern and lack of talent is a mix of Stearns trading away the little minor league talent we’ve gotten to the upper minors, poor free agent signings, as well as not drafting hitters well. I have a serious question and one we all need to sit and actually think about. How many hitters on this roster are from Stearns’ drafts the last 5 years? I’m not 100% positive, but I believe it’s 0. That is unacceptable and a huge reason as to why we’ve been paying below average hitters millions of (wasted) dollars to try to do something offensively. It is a pretty massive failure to not be able to churn out well below average .220/.300/.700 hitters for the minimum where we can spend money on better free agent hitters instead of $5+ million for guys that can’t even do that. The value of having someone like Cooper at first base long term has a huge trickle down effect. Him being at first would have allowed us to not need Vogelbach. In turn, Arcia would have been able to be let go and the money for those two combined, plus Shaw’s money would have been pooled together to sign a quality third baseman. That’s just one example, but receiving minor league contributors is a huge deal for a club like Milwaukee. This is a mix of a rant post and serious concern, but this organization needs an influx of hitters doing literally anything at the big league level. The minor league needs to churn out literally anything for batters and hasn’t for years. We should be able to contribute some type of average to slightly below average hitter once every two years. That’s an extremely low bar to set, but even that would help significantly in allocating resources towards better free agents. We are a mix of mostly below average veterans and AAAA players that aren’t even players from our own system. Stearns certainly knows how to identify pitching talent and has gotten the most out of them every year both through the draft and free agency. But man oh man do we need to stop striking out on free agent signings and in the draft. I am sure I am forgetting some transactions. Feel free to add some of the other moves I am forgetting. I know some will look at this as a thread created during a losing streak or something of the like, but it runs deeper than that. We have had many discussions regarding the offense in other threads, but this might be a good central place to discuss how we feel about the offense over the last few seasons and an evaluation of Stearns’ talent evaluation of hitters both in free agency and the draft. What do you all think?

At least the Wild are starting now.

Counsell would 100% not pull Hader in this exact situation. Let’s see what Girardi does

Nice battle for McKinney. Let’s go Wong!

Since we no longer have Voit, Vogelbach is my new favorite player to watch run. Outside of Astudillo of course. That dude is a treat!

A blind squirrel finds a nut!!!

...

Every guy who started offensively yesterday was a better option at clean-up than Keston. Keston is the worst hitter on the team, is completely lost at the plate and has been all season, yet our manager hits him #4? lol It's comically funny. Do or Die Ryon Healy says hi!

Time for a Shaw Slam!

agreed 100%. I just want to add that Urias has been playing very consistently and is playing well this season. Narvaez was getting every day playing time and has been smoking the ball all season. Sometimes platoons make sense, but over half a roster of it doesn’t seem to work. And quite honestly hasn’t worked well, but we continue to do it. It might make sense in theory to do it, but the results I don’t think have been there. Certainly not this year or last year. What were the results of the platoon guys in 2019 or 2018?

I don't buy this. Tomorrow's lineup is totally rigid and can't be altered based on who might be hot today, who might not be feeling great tomorrow, etc? Not feeling great sure……one replacement level player has a good day…. doubt they are going to give that much weight at all. And this is why our non every day guys are just roster filler and we struggle to have a consistent offense. That’s why so many guys struggle and it’s been a fairly consistent issue the last few seasons outside of Yelich, Cain, Moose, and Grandal. Refusing to play a hot hand is plain dumb. The guy doesn’t need to be an everyday player, but should be playing consistently if he’s hitting the ball well. Once they revert back and go 0-7 over a two game stretch sit him. But deliberately taking them out of the lineup, messing with their routine, and not riding a hot bat truly is bad managing.

These umps are literally making up stuff as they go. There’s not even words to say anymore for things. It’s sad to see umps trying to take over games like this and seemingly deliberately making incorrect calls. These calls recently don’t even make sense. You basically can’t even play the game of baseball anymore because running from first to second base isn’t allowed Annoys me when the umpire just walks away and refuses to look down at the ground and see how wrong he was. Just look down, see where he stepped and change the call. It was brutal because the evidence was literally right there, no need to even see a video. I don’t understand why they are so reluctant to change a call even if he were to check the dirt and see that the runner clearly ran straight to the bag. I am curious on this too. If he doubled down after seeing the replay, I don’t see how he could keep his job. If that is running outside the base line and he confirms it, I don’t see how the MLB could defend him either. Everybody knows the call was clearly wrong. At least acknowledge the mistake and apologize to the Phillies.

Just because I’ve had people say recently it doesn’t really happen, but Nottingham is benched the game after hitting 2 home runs. For a team that is the worst or close to the worst offensively in all of baseball. You have a guy who hits a home run or two and gets benched. Happened 3 times last year when a player hit two home runs in a game. Here is one again for the worst offense in baseball. Good play is not rewarded.

It looks like a whole new lineup with him and Cain back.