HarveysWBs

Since 1970, when the Pilots became the Brewers, they are 4432-4553 (.493), while the Cubs are 4401-4574 (.490). In that time, the head-to-head matchup favors Milwaukee 239-230, and 3-2 in the playoffs after last year. The Brewers have won eight non-COVID division titles (about to be nine), while the Cubs have won seven. The Brewers have ten playoff appearances, and the Cubs have eleven (about to be eleven and twelve, respectively). The two teams each have one pennant. But, of course, there's 2016. The teams are really close. The last four years especially have given Milwaukee a slight edge. But that one big piece remains to really break through. So, as someone who lives amongst an unfortunate number of Cubs fans, I understand and largely agree with the desire to avoid the chance of an offseason of Cubs crowing (my gosh, the Bears fans are more than enough). But this year, the Brewers have as good a chance against anyone as they ever have. I'll be nervous as heck watching any matchup, and maybe 5% more nervous if it is the Cubs. But it is time to finish the job, and I hope this is the year.

I really freakin’ love this team!

At the very least, if you can’t send Chicago into a spiral out of the postseason entirely, relegating them to the last WC spot and sending them to the opposite side of the bracket works for me as a consolation prize.

As someone who spent much of his adult life rooting for Aaron Rodgers, I can accept the fact that there is a certain amount of finding a chip for your shoulder involved in being a pro athlete. That being said, if Civale has any strong feelings towards the Brewers, it really ought to be embarrassment at how correct the Brewers were in diagnosing where is at this point in his career. The Brewers are not now and will never regret the trade they made, or the request they made for him to be in the bullpen. But I guess good for him if thinking otherwise gets him pumped up.

As for predictions, the NFL game is always really hard to do. There is so much variance at work, the whole exercise is one of futility, but I'll say 11-6 seems right. My inclination is actually to be a bit more pessimistic than that, though, which is something I've had to have beaten into me over the last few years. It used to be that a certain amount of regular season dominance could be expected, but that hasn't been the case in a while. I think there are two ways to tell that story. The first is that the team has been one with more or less the usual Packers amount of potential but has been undermined by really untimely injuries. If they could only have the kind of injury luck that, say, the 2025 Seahawks enjoyed, they would be right there in the title conversation. The second way to tell that story, though, is that the Packers repeatedly fail in ways that appear quite predictable, even to laypersons. Lack of depth in critical areas (WR in the late Rodgers years, especially as revealed after Adams' departure; defensive line and CB last year), or bewildering coaching and personnel decisions (whatever the heck we think we've been doing on the offensive line for a while, dating back to how we tried to handle Bakhtiari's absence against Tampa in the NFC championship game and extending through the poorly-executed revamp after bringing in Jacobs at RB; to say nothing of MLF's time management issues) mean that one can kind of get a sense how the team is going to fail in a given year. To wit, I think Parsons' return and the front seven on defense being reinforced enough combined with a much stronger sense of identity in the passing game will give the Packers a very solid floor. Barring catastrophic injury, of course, it is hard for me to see them winning fewer than ten games again, and the potential for more is easy to envision. But I think we have strayed too far from the old foundation of offensive line excellence that used to be the team's true under-appreciated identity. And in a division with St. Brown, Jefferson, Odunze, Burden III, and a bevy of dangerous tight ends, the CB room remains shaky enough to expect that, when the Packers lose a critical game down the stretch or in the playoffs, one of those two position groups (OL or CB) will again be the culprit. And I'm not sure Love and MLF, for as good as they are and can still be together, will overcome that when they haven't really done it to date. As always, I'm hoping I'm wrong. I know every team in the NFL starts out wishing for health and that their opponents don't find their Achilles' heel. It is just really hard for me to expect the best outcome anymore, when it has been so long since the team performed at the furthest edge of their potential. I won't begrudge those who still see the hope of what this team could be. I see it, too, but it feels to me like looking at the shore while swimming against a rip tide.

That's gotta be deflating knowing you put five on the Cy Young winner in four innings and still lost convincingly. Glad I'm not having to live with that shame.

That's my Joey O!

I kind of thought Hoerner was a meh shortstop, but he's made some plays tonight.

Nice to see the HR/FB ratio finally starting to level off a smidge. That trend can continue as far as I'm concerned.

Atta boy, Pratt, way to stay focused up there.

Yeah, the one Tyrone Taylor happens to be manning right field in at any given time.

C'mon man, cannot walk Amaya there. Give me a break.

Is there a way of verifying whether a pitchcom device is actually malfunctioning, or is it just the wild west out there on this issue? Not saying the pitcher or any pitcher was faking, just an area of curiosity for me.

I know it's a split-second thing, but Frelick needed to wear that 1st pitch for an RBI. I think he knew it, too.

Bregman bailed him out, but a result is a result.