Brock Beauchamp

Thank you! This job can get me down sometimes - particularly hard conversations like this one - and I genuinely appreciate hearing people say positive things. This project has cost me a lot of time and money and comments like this, even offhand, make it easier to pick up the next project and keep plugging along.

The Milwaukee Brewers offense continued to struggle and nearly wasted an excellent start from Freddy Peralta; the lineup faltered for eight innings before coming up big in the ninth to snatch a victory and sweep from the Pittsburgh Pirates. Brewers 3, Pirates 2 W: Hoby Milner (2-0) L: Chris Stratton (0-1) S: Devin Williams (1) Rotation Continues to Give the Brewers a Chance Freddy Peralta looked like the good version of himself - surely with some help from the generous strike zone of home plate umpire Vic Carapazza - and retired eight straight Pirates from the second inning through the end of the fifth. While he started to wear down in the sixth - not unusual for pitchers after the shortened spring training - his characteristic wildness was absent as he walked no Pirates while striking out seven over six innings. He allowed only three hits, all singles. Andrew McCutchen, You Have One Job Opposing Peralta, veteran Jose Quintana used his inherent left-handedness to give Brewer hitters fits through five innings of work, striking out nine batters and walking none. The sole exception to Quintana’s dominance was McCutchen, who homered on the first pitch of the game and later sharply singled to the outfield, accounting for two of the only four Brewer hits against the left-hander. The Brewers' offense needs to kick-start itself, especially against left-handed pitching (26th in MLB with a 73 wRC+), as they’re not going to face the hapless Pirates again until the final day of June after playing Pittsburgh six times in their first 20 games. A big reason why the Brewers lead the NL Central is thanks to their 6-0 record against the Pirates. Confusing Choices Continue to Confound Right-hander Miguel Yajure replaced left-handed Quintana to start the sixth. He walked Willy Adames to start the inning, which prompted Craig Counsell to continue his baffling platoon approach with Keston Hiura (career .838 OPS vs. RHP, .587 vs. LHP). Rowdy Tellez pinch-hit for Hiura and flew out to the warning track in right-center on a 106.7 mph towering fly ball. While Tellez missed giving the Brewers a three-run lead by only a few feet, consistently starting Hiura against left-handers and replacing him the moment a righty takes the mound is using the worst of both sides of Hiura’s stat line and minimizing his ability to create a positive impact on offense. As the team struggles to string together hits and runs, it’s hard not to be increasingly frustrated with this approach. Fans too often tout reverse splits, but Hiura appears to be one of the rare cases where a batter is legitimately better when the pitcher is same-handed. In all four of Hiura’s seasons as an MLB player - including 2022 - he has posted a better OPS against right-handed pitching over 821 total plate appearances. Hiura, ignoring his other offensive issues over the years, has enough data points to indicate this is probably not an aberration and should be factored into how he is used and platooned by Counsell. It Was Bound to Happen Brad Boxberger has been one of the stalwarts of the Brewers' bullpen, keeping the team and its low-scoring nature in the game through late innings; given the razor-thin margins the Brewers offense has given their pitching staff, days like today were inevitable. Boxberger entered the game and immediately began handing Pirate hitters BOGO rifle shots: Ben Gamel with a .970 xBA single, Michael Chavis with a .630 xBA double, followed by a Jack Suwinski .400 xBA grounder that was fumbled by Adames behind second base and ruled an error. One Diego Castillo .680 xBA sac fly later, and Boxberger’s day was over, having relinquished the lead to Pittsburgh in the form of a 2-1 score. Brent Suter was called in to clean up the damage with one out and a runner on first. One weak fly to left and another to center later, he had done just that. The Dead Cat Bunt? Chris Stratton came in to close the game for the Pirates and induced a weak fly out of Lorenzo Cain, which prompted Counsell to pinch-hit Christian Yelich. Yelich squared up to bunt on the first pitch, laying a beauty toward third for a single. Wong followed with a sharp grounder past the right-side infielders, sending Yelich to second. Omar Narvaez, the second pinch-hitter of the inning, blooped a single in front of the left fielder, loading the bases. Bringing the game full circle, McCutchen walked the plate. He rifled a line drive right at Pirates' second baseman Josh VanMeter who would only put a fraction of leather on the ball at a full leap, and the Brewers once again had the lead, 3-2. Stratton regained his composure, retiring Adames and Renfroe to stop the bleeding. Hold Onto Your Butts With Josh Hader having pitched in what feels like every Brewers win this season, Counsell had to lean on Devin Williams - always a controversial figure amongst Brewers fans, particularly early in seasons - to step into the closer role. Just as every Brewers fan across the country surely predicted, Williams quickly and effectively struck out the side, and the Brewers got to catch the early flight back home. WPA Heroes: Andrew McCutchen +54.1 (3-4, 1 BB, 1 HR) Freddy Peralta +38.9 (6.0 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 7 SO) WPA Zero: Hunter Renroe -5.4 (0-5, 3 SO, 4 LoB) The Brewers head back to AmFam for a three-game set against the Northsiders. The Cubs will put the infamous TBD on the mound against Adrian Houser as the Brewers try to extend their lead in the National League Central division. View full article

It was a sight we’ve seen all too many times this season across baseball - bad weather, weak bats, fielders standing where the ball is hit - but the Brewers did what they’ve done all season; they scored just enough runs to win while they leaned on their pitching staff to hold onto that lead late. It says something about modern baseball: a game with dual no-hitters going through six innings still required 3:01 to complete in front of a sparsely-attended PNC Park on a cold night in Pittsburgh. Brewers 3, Pirates 1 W: Trevor Gott (1-0) L: Wil Crowe (1-1) S: Josh Hader (10) After a wild 12-8 Brewers win the night before that saw Craig Counsell use five pitchers, he needed a quiet night from young lefty Aaron Ashby, which he received if you only look at runs scored. Ashby struggled with command but was ultimately effective, pitching 5.2 innings while only allowing a single hit and issuing five walks. Opposing Ashby, the Pirates used Dillon Peters as a two-inning opener, followed by Bryse Wilson filling the traditional starter role with a four-inning start. I feel like this isn’t something we’re seeing nearly as often this season after openers became trendy in 2020 and 2021, and I’m entirely okay with that being the case. We need baseball to look more like it was 30 years ago, not less. Through the first two-thirds of the game, the Brewer and Pirate pitching staffs tossed zeroes at each other, allowing no hits until Bryan Reynolds singled on a grounder to Willy Adames with two outs in the sixth. While it may appear the pitching staff of both teams was dialed in, watching the game gave a far different impression as the Brewers walked seven while the Pirates walked four. And the lack of hits was often the result of luck on both sides, not dominant pitching. Before Kolten Wong doubled hard to right field in the sixth for the first Brewer hit, Brewer hitters had made contact on balls with the resulting xBA (expected Batting Average): 930, .670, .550, .420, .480. The number of actual hits? Zero. Thankfully, things finally started to roll in the top of the seventh, with the Pirates holding a 1-0 lead after a shaky fifth inning from Ashby, which saw him exit with two outs in the sixth. Leading off the inning, Christian Yelich pulled a 105.9 mph ground ball past the first baseman against Pirate reliever Wil Crowe. Hunter Renfroe quickly blooped a single to right-center, with Yelich taking third. The Pirates continued their Bad News Bears routine as Tellez smashed a ground ball under the glove of first baseman Yoshi Tsutsugo for a two-base error. Tyrone Taylor kept the ground-pounding going with a liner between short and third. Unfortunately, the all-too-common offensive woes continued after this brief outburst. Omar Narvaez went down on strikes with runners on first and second with no outs. Mike Brosseau hit a relatively weak fielder’s choice, Tellez out at third. Wong, weak pop-fly to the left, inning over. The rally had ended, but the Brewers exited the top of the seventh, carrying a 2-1 lead. The Brewers were able to flip to cruise control for two innings, handing the seventh to Brad Boxberger and the eighth to Devin Williams, neither of which relinquished a hit and had clean innings. Sam Howard took the ball for the top of the ninth for the Pirates and had no feel for… anything. He faced leadoff hitter Rowdy Tellez, whom he promptly hit in the right arm. He walked Narvaez and then walked Brosseau, loading the bases. Kolten Wong was up, ready to extend the Brewers’ lead, which he did… by, you guessed it, walking in a run. It required a questionable check-swing call against Andrew McCutchen for Howard to get out of the inning finally, somehow allowing only one run. I want to say Josh Hader came in, closed the game, grabbed the save, and everyone went home four minutes later, but Hader uncharacteristically struggled with control as well. After a borderline ball four call Ke'Bryan Hayes, Hader continued to run up an excessive pitch count while striking out Dan Vogelbach, Michael Chavis, and Tsutsugo to end the game. A win is a win, but Hader is almost certainly unavailable to close the series after throwing 26 pitches to get through a single inning of work and tomorrow's early lunch-time start. The Crew goes for the sweep on the road with an 11:35 CST start time. Freddy Peralta (RHP) goes against Jose Quintana (LHP). View full article

By the way, I expect to roll out an official dark mode for the site within the next few weeks.

Thanks for the feedback. I’m starting to believe an ad free option might be the best route forward here. I have a site meeting tomorrow and this will be the focus of it.

One thing I'd like to touch on a bit more: the point of this blog post is to illustrate with numbers how, whether you use the other site features or not, you benefit from them because the forum is no longer losing traffic. And all the people operating those portions of the site would not do so without a monthly check for their efforts.

I’ll use a base of 1,000 page views a month or about 30 page views a day. That’s $15 of revenue a month for us.

Out of curiosity, what would you pay monthly for an ad-free version of the site? I don't know that we're anywhere near offering this (but we do offer it on Twins Daily), I'm just curious.

I know some of you have been frustrated with the ad experience and I'm frustrated, too. My vow is that I will attempt to address everyone's concerns to the best of my ability, as it's literally my job to provide all of you with a quality experience on Brewer Fanatic. The following is not an excuse for a bad experience; I simply want all of us to understand and operate with the same knowledge base. I will continue to refine and tweak the ad experience until all (or really "most") of us can reach a happy middle ground. I'm going to pull back the veil a little bit and show some numbers that explain what was happening not only on BrewerFan.net, but across the internet to almost all independent forum sites. The reality is that Reddit and Facebook are killing independent communities by the truckload and BrewerFan.net was no exception. Here is the user traffic from April of 2017 through the day the site was relaunched as Brewer Fanatic. As you can see, traffic was accelerating toward terminal velocity and this graph is actually the norm today in the wake of the assault from social media giants. From the outside, forums often look like they're stable until they're suddenly not and a quick death usually follows. Even during the Brewers 2021 postseason run, BrewerFan.net attracted only ~60% of the users it attracted through 2017, 2018, and 2019. I haven't been exaggerating when I said BrewerFan.net wouldn't make it another 3-4 years at the rate it was atrophying. There are the numbers and you can see I wasn't exaggerating. I've talked to several forum owners over the past year and this kind of graph is alarmingly common. It saddens me to no end to see all these great communities withering away but it's the reality of the situation. Now let's compare that user graph to the same time frame on Twins Daily. You probably see where I'm going with this. What makes Twins Daily different - and where Brewer Fanatic is now - is that we pay our creators. By protecting the forums with high-quality content on a daily basis, people don't naturally drift to Facebook or Reddit and instead, we keep attracting more users. The forums get bigger, we have more volunteers to create great daily content like the game threads and debate forums; the Twins Daily community is exceptionally vibrant. None of that would exist without all those paid roles wrapping the forums in a protective envelope. Which is why we need to run ads and why ad blockers genuinely hurt a community. The people running this site don't pocket advertising money, we consistently reinvest it back into our writers, video creators, and even our moderators. You'll notice a big jump in Twins Daily's traffic starting in 2019. I'll give you one guess when we finally "figured out" how to implement advertising well and started paying our content creators much more money than we could afford before that point. And it's working for Brewer Fanatic, just as it worked on Twins Daily. In April of 2022, Brewer Fanatic is attracting 50% more people than BrewerFan.net did in April of 2021. Again, none of this is an excuse for all of you to have a bad, jumpy experience on the site. I'm going to keep working diligently to improve the experience and I use the site, too. If something frustrates you, it's probably frustrating me as well. I'm here and I will always listen to your suggestions because without users, a community is an empty shell. But I hope you now realize why keeping things as-is on BrewerFan.net wasn't really an option, either. If this community is going to persist, it needs a stable, robust revenue source and ads are really the only way to achieve that goal.

New to the site, we've added both the active roster and the 40-man roster pages! These pages will update nightly so they'll always be up-to-date with the current state of the big league club, adding yet another long-term feature I've wanted to see on our baseball sites basically forever. There isn't a lot to say about these pages other than they feature the standard set of player info: name, position, handedness, DoB, etc. To find these pages, use the hamburger menu at the top right of every page (the three horizontal lines), click "Brewers Resources", and then you'll be presented the options for both the roster pages and the team schedule for the season. As always, if you have suggestions for new features you'd like to see added or improvements to current features, please comment below!

I have no idea how to interpret this comment. Compliment? Insult? Back-handed compliment? I JUST DON'T KNOW

I have no idea how to interpret this comment. Compliment? Insult? Back-handed compliment? I JUST DON'T KNOW

I have no idea how to interpret this comment. Compliment? Insult? Back-handed compliment? I JUST DON'T KNOW

I have no idea how to interpret this comment. Compliment? Insult? Back-handed compliment? I JUST DON'T KNOW

We are not quite one-tenth of the way into the 2022 season and the Crew have rebounded from a bit of a rough start to find themselves just one-half game behind the Cardinals. A scheduling quirk this coming week sees the Brewers travel to Philadelphia for a weekend series with the Phillies, then back to Milwaukee for a single-game against the Giants, before they head back to the Keystone State for three more with the Pirates. The Brewers' return to their winning ways has improved the vibe in the forums this week. So let's look back at the last seven days of conversation at Brewer Fanatic. Let's kick off this week by looking back at one of the iconic games in Brewer history. @craigharmann recalls his memories from Easter Sunday, 1987, when the Brewers came back from a 4-1 9th inning deficit to defeat the Texas Rangers 6-4 for their 12th straight win to open the season. The then 11-year-old @dlk9s wanted to leave the game early, but some clever negotiations by his father resulted in their staying. How lucky is that, considering the game wasn't even televised in Wisconsin. Was there any doubt the Brewers are going to win that day? The date was 4/19, after all. Head Brewer Fanatic @Brock Beauchamp reported on the early returns from the Minor leagues and the(ir) pitch clock. The pitch clock, which is 14-seconds with the bases empty and 18 with runners on, shaved 25 minutes off the average game time in its first week. Over a 162-game MLB season, 25 minutes per game is 67.5 hours. Or nearly three days. Or the time it takes to cook about 1,000 frozen pizzas. Whatever metric you use, the change is, to quote our leader, "bonkers!" It will be interesting to follow this more as the season progresses. @Tbadder wonders if this will result in more injuries, while @areacodes thinks we may see less maximum-effort pitches from pitchers with less time between throws to the plate. As you'd expect after the Brewers have gone 7-3 in their last 10, the 2022 Brewers Optimism Thread! has seen a bit more action. @MVP2110 linked to a tweet from April 18 which talked about Christian Yelich's grand slam being his third batted ball of the season with an exit velocity over 108 after going the entire 2021 season with only one. And the Crew's sweep of the Pirates inspired @torts to bring out a classic brooms GIF. As we close out another week, don't forget to check the forum daily for Brewer game threads and the best Minor League Coverage in our Minor League Forum. If you've never taken the time, stop by and see what it's all about. That's it for this week. Enjoy the week to come, and GO CREW! View full article

To suggest Christian Yelich is a polarizing figure within Brewers fandom is an understatement. He posted two consecutive MVP-level seasons immediately followed by two disappointing seasons, with 2021 being even worse than his already disappointing 2020 campaign. Early in the 2022 season, we see a mix of those two Yelichs. Which will be the real Christian Yelich in 2022? As a newcomer to the Brewers internet sphere, I was surprised as I saw the vitriol from within the community aimed at Yelich and his recent performance. As a long-time Twins fan, the obvious comparison is to that of Joe Mauer: left-handed, hard contact, low launch angle, and the vitriol. So much vitriol. That’s not the point of this piece, though; I wanted to see what we can glean from Yelich’s first two weeks of play. While there are no solid conclusions from such a small sample size, Yelich has made enough contact with the ball that there are some reasons to be optimistic about an offensive rebound coming in 2022. This will be rather heavy on advanced stats, so bear with me a bit; I will attempt to quickly give bad/average/good parameters for each statistic for those unacquainted with the terms I’m using. First, I want to look at FanGraphs’ wOBA (weighted On-Base Average) and xwOBA (expected weighted On-Base Average). These stats are used to give each hitter a single value for their offensive performance based on their hitting outcomes (wOBA) and then, using the quality of the contact - how hard the ball is hit and where - to give a value to what the outcome should have been (xwOBA). Average is .320, good is .350, excellent is .400. Here is how Yelich has scored using those metrics over his Brewers career: wOBA xwOBA 2018 0.422 0.411 2019 0.442 0.424 2020 0.343 0.343 2021 0.325 0.325 2022 0.380 0.416 Surprising to no one, in 2018-2019, Christian Yelich was an elite hitter. He was well past “excellent” and into perennial MVP territory, according to the OBAs. And, reinforcing our eyeball tests, he immediately plummeted to “decent” in 2020 and “average” in 2021, losing over .100 wOBA points in only two seasons of play. In 2022, we’ve seen a big bounceback through the first 11 games of the season. As good as Yelich has looked over the past 3-4 days, his wOBA still sits at .380, roughly .050 points below his MVP-level seasons. The real story is in his xwOBA, which tells us that he is hitting the ball similarly to how he made contact in 2018 and 2019. That’s promising… but it gets a little more complicated as we move over to Baseball Savant’s slew of StatCast-based data. If you’re not familiar with Baseball Savant, it’s possibly the most helpful tool available to the modern baseball fan. I highly recommend everyone dive into that site; it’s easy to get lost in the numbers, a mathematical Wikipedia of sorts. I want to focus on three stats that tell a lot about who Yelich was and possibly who he will be going forward: Exit Velocity, Launch Angle, and Barrel Percentage. The first two metrics are becoming more common in baseball broadcasts, so you probably have at least a passing understanding of them. Exit velocity is how hard you hit the ball, and anything over 90mph is good; anything over 95mph is excellent. Launch angle is the degree at which the ball travels off the bat, and if you’re looking at good power hitters, they usually sit in the 15-20 degree range. Barrel Percentage is the frequency at which the hitter “barrels” the ball. They often put “good wood” on the ball and drive it. Exit Velocity Launch Angle Barrel % 2018 92.6 5 12.9 2019 93.3 11.3 15.8 2020 94 7.1 12.1 2021 91 2.8 7.6 2022 94 3.1 22.7 These metrics tell us important information that has always made Christian Yelich a rarity in baseball, at least in the world of MVP-level players: he hits the ball hard but he doesn’t consistently elevate it, which means he’s often - probably too often - driving the ball into the ground. And his barrel rate, while good, has never been top of the class, as players like Mike Trout routinely sit at 18% barrels. On the other hand, even in 2020, Yelich’s exit velocity was excellent. We all knew that, though… which leads us to his early 2022 results. His barrel rate is way up to an unsustainably high 22%. His exit velocity remains in the good-to-very-good range, which confirms the wall-banging hits we’ve seen a few times out of him already this season. Unfortunately, his launch angle sits at only 3.1%, roughly ten points lower than you’d like to see out of a player with Yelich’s hit profile. If Yelich continues to barrel the ball but not elevate it routinely, he’s going to be a feast or famine player in 2022, which is what we’ve seen in the first two weeks: he has only eight hits on the season, but six of those hits have gone for extra bases. Given the ubiquity of the shift in the modern game, it’s likely Yelich will either roll over to an infielder or take at least two bases if this approach continues, which it almost certainly won’t, given his unsustainable 22% barrel rate. If that barrel drops to be more in line with Yelich’s Brewers career, we likely see an immediate return to the 2020 version; which isn’t a terrible outcome, but given how the rest of the offense has struggled, the team needs more from their left fielder than a slightly above average offensive performance. Unfortunately, we’re still seeing the biggest problem persist with Yelich, even if it has been masked over by a handful of 2022 balls that he managed to elevate. After his knee injury, something changed in his swing that caused him to stop elevating the ball with enough frequency to excel in baseball. And while some of his metrics have improved early in the season, it’s hard to see this early-season success continue without more elevation than we've seen. It’s possible Yelich will continue his “elevation explosion” which led to multiple extra base hits during this homestand but ultimately, it’s unlikely he will return to being an offensive juggernaut with a launch angle under 5%… which is a 2% higher launch angle than he has today. View full article

The forums are only getting started, as the Brewers are back over .500 and aiming to knock down division opponents over the coming days... Or really, I mean the Cardinals. Are the Pirates even considered opponents at this point? Last evening, the Brewers tapped the Keg, taking home a significant victory against the Cardinals in the home opener of the 2022 season. As always, the forums are abuzz with conversation so let's get right into it. User @Ulice Payne asks you What if you were Monarch of Baseball? It's precisely the kind of question that our forums thrive upon, and the answers don't disappoint. I believe hitters should be given the option to run the bases clockwise or counter-clockwise on a whim, but I also believe in burning society to the ground, so maybe I'm not the right person to answer this question. Next up, we look at the lowest-of-hanging fruit in the 2022 season... @MVP2110 gives us a place to trope with the 2022 Brewers offense thread. Considering how the season started following how the 2021 postseason ended for the Brewers, MVP2110 smartly decided to funnel all complaints to a single thread. It was a smart move and unsurprisingly gained quite a bit of traction with other users. The next topic is one of the things I love about community forums, and those are the bonkers-out-of-nowhere ideas that, while seemingly insane on the surface, actually have merit. In this case, @treego14 asks Can MLB teams trade for cash/percentage of TV revenue instead of prospects/players? At a glance, it's completely insane. But upon consideration... is it that insane given the wild inequity of modern baseball? Obviously, fixing the inequity would be the correct decision but let us not make good the enemy of perfect. In the following thread, I will pat myself on the back a little so bear with me a moment. This morning, I asked the question Yelich: a new (old) man or a mirage? And then Christian went out and crushed two balls in almost the same way he crushed a ball just a night or two before. Are we finally seeing a return of the Christian Yelich the Brewers so badly need in 2022? In conclusion, we have to shout out to the home opener thread from the ever-present @Eye Black, the most active moderator on BF that isn't named Mass Haas. Considering how it wasn't only the home opener but also a resounding beating of a division rival, let's take a moment to read Game Thread (4/14/2022): Cardinals (Wainwright) at Brewers (Woodruff) - 4:14 PM CDT. That's all we have for today; see you all next week, and GO CREW! View full article

Yeah, now we just need to get Julio to cut his word count in half so he doesn't burn out in the middle of May... ?

Yeah, now we just need to get Julio to cut his word count in half so he doesn't burn out in the middle of May... ?