coolhandluke121

Being a good floor spacer is about forcing teams to stay close to you, which Snell doesn't do because of his slow release and because he doesn't shoot unless he's wide open. He also doesn't work hard enough to get open, and his passive style puts too much burden on their play-makers. It's kind of a matter of gaming the stats to look like a better shooter than he really is. He's actually a very good isolation defender as a sf, but his pick and roll defense, off-ball defense, and defense against quicker guards is really bad. DDV is perfect for the team. Bledsoe is good if he buys into a role, but I'd be too worried about his knees to commit long-term. Guys like Kemba Walker, who admittedly is a great scorer, are running circles around him. So did Rozier in the playoffs. What made him potentially a "3rd-best player on a contender" was his effectiveness on both ends, but he's looking like more of a glue guy now. Foot speed in general is going to be a problem on the perimeter. Brogdon and DDV aren't especially quick, Snell and Khris are below average for sf's, Bledsoe has lost a lot of lateral quickness, and Dellavedova is basically a joke in that regard. Not sure what the solution is but I think they end up taking the bad with the good. They will have some nights where they have to choose between giving up lots of 3's or lots of penetration, but hopefully they don't often do both like they did under Kidd's mind-boggling stupid system.

Obviously I badly want the Brewers to win, but the only outcome that's truly dangerous to my mental health (besides a terrible injury) would be Freese killing the Brewers today.

I don't like saving him until the end. If you do that, you don't even know if you're going to have the type of high-leverage situation that makes him so valuable in the first place. Bring him for the first high-leverage situation with a dangerous LHB at the plate. Most likely that will be a middle inning after Chacin allows a base-runner or two, but I wouldn't hesitate to bring him in a little earlier if Chacin struggles at all. Another advantage of using him early is forcing LAD to make a difficult choice. Do you PH for an LHB in the 4th or 5th inning and then have too many RHB's for Knebel, JJ, Soria, et al later in the game? I've always thought using LHP's on a predictable schedule negates a lot of the match-up leverage they can give you, whether it be using them as starters or closers or any predictable role in between. ETA: All depends on their lineup too, of course.

Very true about baseball. Although in their defense, they didn't get to bat against Ryu, did they? He was so awful that it's almost not fair to compare guys who faced him vs. guys who didn't. However, I don't think anyone advocated Granderson starting against the LHP. I don't think anyone has ever advocated him facing an LHP since he's been a Brewer, for that matter. That was in anticipation of a possible game 7. Aguilar is the guy that made many people "eat their words". Hopefully facing a pitcher who was doomed to struggle even more than Aguilar has was just the thing to get his confidence back. But I put "eat their words" in quotation marks because I don't even believe in trying to predict what's going to happen in any given game and I don't believe guessing wrong is the same as being wrong-headed. Saying you'd start Braun at 1B and Santana in RF, if it was an option, was reasonable and people had plenty of evidence to support it. That's all you can do. Then you baseball.

I thought going to JJ in the 7th was a great call on many levels. First you get him some work a little earlier so that if he struggles you've got other high end options available. Secondly it gets him a nice clean inning, he is available for long work tomorrow and gets a good outing behind him first, builds some confidence again. I wasn't crazy about not taking a shot for Knebel when his shot came up in the 6th but it worked out and probably doesn't affect his availability for tonight. Definitely agree about JJ. I tend to agree about Knebel too, in part just because it gives me pause to see such a valuable reliever hit - especially one who already nearly had his whole year torpedoed by a hamstring injury. In my opinion guys like Guerra and Peralta deserve enough trust to hold a 3-run lead for a couple innings but I can see the logic of using Knebel.

What is he supposed to do? The Dodgers don't have to win today, we do. Would be senseless for them to unload their pen at the first sign of damage in the 1st. Yeah, I guess it's arguably too late now. But don't they have a starter in the pen at all? And you or I could hit Ryu today. That seemed apparent as early as the first.

But they're also letting the Brewers save their pen.

Ryu is choking and frankly so is their manager.

Lol, don't know why I even had to verify that this was by the guy with the Conan The Barbarian sig.

Braun walking and letting someone else be the hero is so good to see. I'm almost crying.

Sure. And over a 162 game sample size, this team showed itself to be better than our opponent. It's easy to pick reasons to feel good or bad about tonight's game. Some people look for reasons to be pessimistic. Except Buehler and Ryu only pitched in 40 of their regular season games, and they're the starters the next 2 days. Only a few starters are going to pitch for each team, and the Dodgers have better ones. Miley and Chacin have earned some trust but Buehler and Ryu have better stuff and don't have the advantage of being pulled early for a great bullpen so often. Saying the Brewers have less than a 44% chance of winning the next two is not even close to being blind pessimism. It's just being realistic.

Certainly late in the game or in extra innings as you run out of PH options, it's a given that you use the back-up catcher eventually. It's a lot like trying not to use your last 2 relievers in a tie game though; a lot of other options will be explored first. It's not a given that he will hit at some point, as it probably is with Santana for example. I agree with tmwiese that Pina was supposedly this great defensive catcher who helped the staff overachieve last year though, so why doesn't that apply now?

The problem is it's really dangerous to use your only back-up catcher in any close game. You burn him as a PH and he's done. What if Kratz gets hurt or ejected? Disaster. Same thing if you bring Pina in to catch but he gets hurt or something. I'm not sure that's a risk they can afford to take, even if Pina is hitting really well lately.

That's something that hardly anybody can disagree with. With his bat-to-ball ability, there's no reason he shouldn't be turning himself into a great singles/doubles hitter like prime Lucroy. We have never seen any indication that he's willing or interested in changing his approach though.

That stuff doesn't carry over game to game. That's not how baseball works. Ryu and Buehler are very talented starters. If the Dodgers were starting Hill in one of these games, I'd like the Brewers chances a lot more.

Yes, Aguilar is terrible right now. If Braun had more reps at 1B in recent months, that would be the obvious choice. But objectively Braun isn't really working counts though. Less than 3 pitches per plate appearance this series. I just want to see Granderson more. He looks like such a poised, professional veteran out there compared to a lot of the Brewers' hitters. I tend to have a lot of confidence in him at the plate lately.

I'm not really saying that. It's that being such an aggressive swinger is part of an overall strategy that, with a talented hitter, leads to more of every type of contact and more hits, but at the expense of walks and taking pitches, which is generally not a good trade-off. A guy who has fewer at-bats because a healthy percentage of his pa's end in walks is usually going to have fewer hard-hit balls simply because he has fewer at-bats, all else being roughly equal. So Braun's volume of hard-hit balls isn't the same as a good percentage, and more importantly on-base percentage is the one that matters most by far. I'm fine with him in there, though everyone knows I prefer Granderson if they make it to game 7. This became a tense discussion because it seems some incredibly loyal Braun supporters need to silence anyone questioning Braun at all, which causes discussion to devolve into posters' feelings about Braun or about each other.

No way anybody should be writing them off, that's for sure. It's excusable in the emotions of a gut-wrenching loss, but not now. However, given the Dodgers' starters the next 2 days, I'd put the Brewers' chances below 44%. Another factor in that stat is that having home-field advantage in games 6 and 7 often means you were the more talented team all along, even if you fell behind 3 games to 2, but that's not really the case here. The talent isn't as far apart as some people make it out to be, but I do think the Dodgers have a little more of it. They've been building it up intelligently for years and have a huge payroll, whereas the Brewers were tanking a mere 2 years ago. I think the Brewers will have that much talent eventually, but I don't think they have it now.

Yes, but this is the series thread, not the game thread. I think it's a perfectly reasonable place to advocate more at-bats for Granderson, even if a few of them come at the expense of Braun. And it's not as that Braun wouldn't be a very valuable PH presence and likely get 2 pa's even if he didn't start. Hopefully he has some patient at-bats, works the count, and is rewarded for his discipline tonight to make it a moot point. I just haven't seen any evidence that he's doing that. Besides the low OBP, I think it has a negative trickle-down effect, like helping the Dodgers' excellent starters stay in the game longer.

It's a small sample, but a representative one. Braun has never been a patient hitter. He got away with it because of his raw talent in the past (although he would have been an even better player if he had drawn more walks in his prime) but not now. A lot of people are citing some hard-hit balls as evidence of his contributions, but at the expense of plate discipline, it's not worth it. That's like praising a good scorer in basketball who forces 6 shots he shouldn't every game, makes 2 of them on average - sometimes in sensational fashion - and therefore scores even more compared to everyone else on the team. The Brewers have a long history of needing better plate discipline, and it can't be easy to instill that when your highest-paid player won't do it. And it's not even just about Braun. I realize people know I don't care for him and think that's why I'm saying it, but it seems very apparent to me that plate discipline is a huge problem in this series and that's why I want Granderson in there. He has been absolutely outstanding in that regard the whole time he's been with the team and it's what the Brewers need. So it's as much about him as it is about Braun, if not more so.

I agree about Aguilar but I don't see Braun at 1B as an option they're considering. There was no way they were going to commit to getting him reps there once Aguilar started mashing and Thames got over his thumb injury, and now he would be too rusty.

Except I didn't even make a big deal of it. I said Granderson should have more than 3 plate appearances and get a start against the RHP. It's the Braun Police that have to overreact to anything like that who made a big deal of it. It's not a hot take, a mere symptom of Braun hate, or a fixation. There's sufficient evidence to support the argument. It's debatable at worst, but some people here are trying to turn any disloyalty to Braun into something sacrilegious.

I mean he quite literally had a higher WAR than Aguilar this year. Not that that has ANYTHING to do with this discussion.

Or maybe you've been waiting for a few numbers to justify your loyalty to him? That can't really be proved either way, even if Braun (or Granderson, for that matter) has a great day tomorrow. It's about what the evidence supports, not about being able to predict what's going to happen in any given game. It's not a hot take. Granderson is comparable to Braun in all ways, including peak WAR, career WAR, and WAR the last 2 years. It's okay to say you prefer Braun, but it's excessively loyal to say it's not even close or mock the very idea of preferring Granderson. And to be clear, I'm not mocking the idea of having Braun out there; I just think Granderson deserves some of his pa's. Yes, Braun was hot to end the year. How long have his hot streaks lasted the last few years? They're no better than what any typical respectable corner outfielder like Braun or Santana or Granderson is going to have on occasion. Have you considered the info I gave about how many pitches he's taken per at-bat compared to Yelich and Granderson? Do you know why OBP is generally regarded as being nearly twice as important as slugging? That's in part because of all the intangible, indirect benefits of drawing walks, like taking lots of pitches, in addition to the obvious fact that it's more important to protect outs than aggressively seek hits. Braun's 1 walk in 35 plate appearances is a big problem in playoff baseball, and he's averaging less than 3 pitches per plate appearance this series. By citing a few hard-hit balls, you are playing right into the batting average/slugging fallacy by rewarding and praising players who go for theirs instead of doing what's best for the team at the expense of personal glory. I like this article for a little more about the value of guys like Yelich and Cain vs. guys like Shaw, Moustakas, and Braun: https://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2015/9/18/9329763/separate-but-not-quite-equal-why-ops-is-a-bad-statistic

Braun smoked Buehler. Doubled in his first at bat to give us a 1-0 lead in game #3. Wrong. Again. This is just sour grapes to those calling you out. The "only player to show up in both series" with an OPS under .700 is blatantly a pro-Braun bias. He has not been good. Case in point right here; one hard-hit double with a .558 OPS in the series proves me wrong? Okay. You are reaching to support a strong pro-Braun bias.