Brock Beauchamp

Yep, hard to argue with these grades, though I may have given Severino an F- purely out of spite.

This piece does a really nice job of giving off the “what the ****” vibe that is the Colorado Rockies.

I KNEW YOU WOULD POST FIRST ?

Welcome to the first presentation of our community awards! A few times a year, we take a moment to recognize the community participants who make this site a great place to talk Brewers. Here are our inaugural winners. We've been doing this at Twins Daily for a couple of years now and it only seemed right to carry that tradition to Brewer Fanatic. The first half of 2022 has been a rollercoaster as we transitioned to the new name, new software platform, and added a ton of features. But at the core of this work is you, the community members who visit every day and provide the best Milwaukee Brewers discussion anywhere on the internet. With that said, let's get into it! Top Posts of the first half of 2022 goes to… Honorable Mention: Covid and Lorenzo Cain are sensitive subjects around here. While most showed regret how Cain stumbled out of MLB after being such a great player for so long, others weren't as kind to him, going as far to complain about him opting out of the shortened 2020 season out of concern over Covid. In defense of Cain, @JRob1125 posted the second most popular post in the first half. It's somewhat controversial to highlight this post but I'm not the one who liked this post a bunch of times. Don't shoot the messenger! The Top Post and Prize Winner: I know, I know. This is going to seem self-aggrandizing but it's the most popular post on the site! I don't know what I'm supposed to do here, folks. Praising the transition to the new Brewer Fanatic, @edfunderburk talks about their Brewer fandom, background, and how much they enjoy the new site. We enjoy it too, edfunderburk, and thank you for the praise. Without the community behind us, we'd just be hollering in the dark. And I do that enough already, thanks. Your prize? This really cool set of vintage Union 76 Brewers glasses. I hope you enjoy them through a deep October run! Top Blog Entry of the first half of 2022 goes to... Blogging is hard. We don't receive many user blogs here on Brewer Fanatic (yet). In time, I hope that will change but in the meantime, several of you ventured into those treacherous waters and gave it a shot. The most popular of them was @CheeseheadInQC and their entry The Carolina number that matters most. I love this entry, as it highlights the lack of organizational strength in Latin America over the past couple of decades and how it feels like the pendulum might be swinging back in the right direction. Minor league coverage is what sets this site apart from others and user-contributed efforts like this are a key part of that coverage. Well done, CheeseheadInQC. For this stellar effort, you receive the "aw, what might have been" prize of a vintage 1982 Brewers World Championship pennant. It stings a little to look at it but it sure is cool. We hope you enjoy it. Prolific Posters of the first half of 2022 Honorable Mention: @Joseph Zarr is the Brewer Fanatic equivalent of Roy Kent. He's here. He's there. He's every-*******-where! The front page. The forums. Blog comments. No one can escape his enthusiasm and this site is the better for it. Thanks for all you do and keep up the minor league reports, Joseph! The Most Prolific Poster and Prize Winner: A game thread staple and constant source of analysis-forward conversation, @Brewcrew82 is the most popular poster of the first half of the 2022 season. Congratulations and thank you for the literal hundreds of great comments over the past three months! The reward for that great content is a personal favorite of mine: an autographed 1986 Teddy Higuera Topps card. As a nine year old living in northern Wisconsin, Higuera captured my interest and started me on my long path of baseball fandom. I'm thrilled to pass this on to another Brewers fan for them to enjoy. We cannot thank all of you enough for the amazing contributions, advice, and input you've given us as we've begun our journey with Brewer Fanatic. None of this is possible without the community that powers it. Here's to another successful four months and GO CREW! See you again in the offseason with our second half awards so if you want to make the next cut, get typing! View full article

Personally, I'd knock half a grade off each guy except Renfroe, who has been a pleasant surprise. I worried about him - probably unfairly - before the season but he has been just fine with the bat and pretty good with the glove.

For sure, it's going to be extremely hard for a lumbering first baseman to be valuable if his OPS is under .800, even in this depressed offensive game.

Byron Buxton has an OPS under .300. He's also the fourth most valuable CF in baseball according to FanGraphs.

This is a good point. When talking about the way modern rosters are constructed, ten players is kinda the positional bare minimum but I would probably argue to grade a full 12 players (1 UTIL, 4th OF, 2nd C). Given the flexibility of modern lineup construction and the plethora of injuries in the modern game, a team could have a very good starting "nine" but still be pretty crappy due to the back-end of the roster being atrocious while consuming up to 20% of team PAs.

I didn't realize Wong had been that brutal defensively. I knew he wasn't playing well but... ouch.

I don't know, this is a tough decision. Baseball has probably become a little too homogenized nowadays and outliers can succeed but some swings simply won't translate to major league velocity and movement. I don't know enough about swing mechanics to even venture a suggestion and will defer to the trained professionals in the development pipeline.

No problem! https://support.google.com/android/answer/9075928?hl=en

Can you screen shot it for me and post it here so I can get a visual of the issue? Thanks!

Baseball itself is somewhat at fault for this perception, as it's a very common problem with highly-paid players, particularly players in small to mid-markets. MLB and the MLBPA need to adjust how free agency is reached and how much players are paid before they reach unrestricted free agency. If Yelich had already made $80m before reaching FA and/or reached FA earlier than he did, we'd likely see considerable scaling back of these 8-10 year deals with massive dollar amounts for players we KNOW aren't going to be worth that money through at least half the contract.

This is how I've come to view baseball more over the years. While I don't do it as much this year due to general busyness, I'm the type of person that tunes into a Pirates/Marlins game if that's the day game happening. There are obviously teams I'm more interested in than others but I'll watch almost any MLB game if that's what is available to me in the moment.

As a fan of both teams, I've never understood the (mostly manufactured) hatred. I lived in WI for a long time. I've lived in MN for a long time. Then again, the teams I actually "hate" are few and far between. That's just not how I really form a fan experience; I want a certain team to win, I'm not particularly interested in a certain team losing. Obviously, there are divisional rivalries where one team winning means a competitor loses and that's doubly beneficial to the team I want to see win. But outside the division, the only team I come close to "hating" is the Yankees because everybody not from NY should hate the Yankees.

This got me thinking so I looked it up. The 82 Brewers had a 121 OPS+. That's ridiculous. To compare to the modern day, the 2022 Yankees - the best in baseball - have a 117 OPS+ playing half their games in that shoebox of a stadium.

This got me thinking so I looked it up. The 82 Brewers had a 121 OPS+. That's ridiculous. To compare to the modern day, the 2022 Yankees - the best in baseball - have a 117 OPS+ playing half their games in that shoebox of a stadium.

We have weekly draft updates, you can find them here: https://brewerfanatic.com/search/?&type=cms_records1&tags=mlb draft 2022&search_and_or=or On draft day itself, we'll be launching an entirely new section of the site that will be updated in real-time with Brewers picks.

Not much. He's well below where a super-utility like Marwin Gonzalez sat when he entered FA and he only received something like 3/$24m. I suspect Peterson would accept a one-year deal but do not see anyone offering him more than two years, at maybe $4-5m per year.

Not much. He's well below where a super-utility like Marwin Gonzalez sat when he entered FA and he only received something like 3/$24m. I suspect Peterson would accept a one-year deal but do not see anyone offering him more than two years, at maybe $4-5m per year.

It has been a little over three months since we flipped the switch on the new site and exactly three months since the front page news portion of the site was added. We thank all of you for working with us as we kinda find our way through merging an existing community into our site model. There were some bumps and bruises along the way but the community as a whole has been exceptionally welcoming to all of us as we work through issues. First off, the past 30 days have been incredible for us, despite the Brewers scuffling for a significant portion of that time. I'm sure many of you shared my personal experience of grimacing through many of these early June games and Brewers baseball wasn't a lot of fun for a couple of weeks. But you stuck with us and we appreciate that; now let's watch the Brewers sail to another postseason berth (hopefully). Behind the scenes, we've been doing a ton of work to bring in new users. As I mentioned many times early in this process, most forum-only sites are in decline under the assault of Facebook groups, Reddit, and social media in general. I'm happy to say we've reversed that trend on Brewer Fanatic but there's still a thousand miles of headroom left to grow this community, as we're still drawing only about 12% of the users we saw on Twins Daily over the same period. But that's a big step up from the 7-8% we were at three months ago! In the past 30 days, Brewer Fanatic has drawn in 22,000 users with over 20,000 new users. During the same period in 2021 (May 29th - June 27th), BrewerFan.net drew in just under 11,000 users with just under 9,000 new users. That's over 100% gain! We're seeing similar results with user registrations, the second step in building a robust community. If a user doesn't register, they can't comment. In the past 30 days, Brewer Fanatic had 31 new user registrations on the site. During the same period in 2021, BrewerFan.net had six new user registrations on the site. The final step in building the community is getting those users to comment. We've also seen an uptick in those numbers but this is where we have the most work to do: the final conversion step. In the past 30 days, Brewer Fanatic had 8,461 new posts. During that same period in 2021, BrewerFan.net had 7,371 new posts. Once again, thank all of you for being a part of this community and helping us grow. But again, we're only getting started. We've seen all these gains and we have yet to approach two of our top 3-4 biggest points in the baseball cycle: the MLB Draft (just wait until you see what we have in store for that) and the MLB trade deadline. At Twins Daily, we focus an enormous amount of energy on those two periods of time and expect that same kind of coverage here at Brewer Fanatic. I can't wait to see what comes next and I hope you're all there to see it with us!

I generally sum it up this way: 1970s and 80s baseball was strategically dumb but it was a hell of a lot more fun to watch. And given how spectator revenue literally funds the sport, uh... that's kinda really important.

I generally sum it up this way: 1970s and 80s baseball was strategically dumb but it was a hell of a lot more fun to watch. And given how spectator revenue literally funds the sport, uh... that's kinda really important.

His is perhaps the weirdest I ever saw, like he was attempting to get hit by lightning every time he stepped to the plate.