Brent Sirvio

It’s been argued in this space before that the Milwaukee Brewers were asking too much of their pitching staff to repeat its high water mark 2021 season, which yielded Corbin Burnes a Cy Young Award and Josh Hader (another) Trevor Hoffman Award. A look at the numbers shows that to not only be the case, but that, save for a sudden change in performance, the Brewers’ vaunted pitching staff will be one of the reasons why they may well be on the outside looking in on October baseball. I start this week’s column with a clear proposition: the Milwaukee Brewers have a talented pitching staff. I do not want this to be in any way misunderstood. The rotation still has long-term upside: Corbin Burnes is not yet a finished product (imagine that!), while Brandon Woodruff and Freddy Peralta are still working to sort out how to best navigate lineups deep into contests. Adrian Houser has a ceiling as a decent #2, solid #3, advantageous #4 pitcher in a rotation, but hasn’t been able to put all the pieces together yet. The Weekly Dispatch is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others. The key players out of the bullpen are also solid to exceptional. Newly-extended Aaron Ashby remains a work in progress, but the Brewers’ faith in his ability to become a consistent force and enter the rotation in the future is not unjustified. Brad Boxberger, while obscenely overused in 2022, remains reliable out of the bullpen. Devin Williams has been given center stage after Josh Hader was inexplicably traded to the Padres for damaged goods and prospects. If it wasn’t obvious before that the Brewers’ front office assumed 2022 would be a facsimile of an all-time franchise best 2021, it is now. Assuming a lack of injury, that the league wouldn’t in some ways catch up to their formidable starters and bullpen, that run prevention would be as effective as it has been, that the stuff would be as crisp as ever, was folly. Not bolstering the offense beyond adding Hunter Renfroe in the offseason, or getting an impact bat or two at any time before the trade deadline only added pressure to a staff that had more than contributed their share to the club’s unprecedented fourth-consecutive postseason appearance. David Stearns and Matt Arnold tried to get blood from turnips, and their patience ran out as evidenced by the Hader trade. And, in some ways, they may have signaled a fatalist approach to a meat grinder 31 games in 31 days. The Brewers’ pitching staff entering play Saturday is second in the National League in hits allowed (864) and third in strikeouts (1043), but tenth in walks and 11th in home runs (365, 126). This talented, vaunted corps musters only a 106 adjusted ERA, falling well short of the 120 achievement from last year’s franchise-best staff. Yes, part of that is missing Peralta and Houser for stretches, Ethan Small’s struggles and needing to rely on Chi Chi Gonzalez to provide meaningful, productive innings, but injuries and regression are both parts of baseball life and it’s exceptionally difficult to meet historic bests in consecutive years. I projected out how this pitching staff may finish the season based on numbers through Friday night: 1456 strikeouts, 1422 hits, 530 walks, 186 home runs and a consistent 106 ERA+. No team in the expansion era has met or exceeded those counting numbers except the 2019 Boston Red Sox. They finished 84-78, third in the American League Central and had the luxury of an offensive core featuring Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers. Their adjusted ERA? 104. It should come as no surprise that all the talk from the team about a World Series before and after the All-Star break has abruptly stopped. Further, while the eye test indicates defensive regression, ERA to FIP is relatively flat (3.84, 3.90), while it should also be noted that the SIERA-to-ERA contrast suggests defensive lapses have been a little more impactful (3.65) while being somewhat counterbalanced and perhaps disguised by the gaudy strikeout totals. It’s also possible that the Brewers’ philosophy with their starting pitchers is to actually emphasize pitch to contact, leaning too much on run prevention and the strikeouts are more a reflection of the era, or more bug than feature. The problem is that the Brewers’ three major starters and Ashby are strikeout guys, and asking them to nibble around the edges to induce contact is not the best way to utilize their respective repertoires. This could potentially explain the two-strike struggles Ashby has, as diagnosed excellently earlier this weekend here by Tim Muma, while also generally providing insight as to why impact strikeout guys aren’t getting efficient Ks, triggering shorter starts and overextending the Brewers’ beleaguered, triaged middle relief. Whatever happened to the wipeout pitch? Between an offense that generally struggles with run support and opponents’ seeming knack for driving balls in 2022 they weren’t in ‘21, while also outlasting Brewer pitchers with walks and base knocks, the pitching has no margin for error. Asking for excellence and effort is one thing, asking for perfection – while apparently being content with a deficient, bordering on broken offense – is another. Like getting blood from a turnip. Stathead and Fangraphs were used in informing this article. View full article

We hear 'It's a business' a lot when teams make moves or players move on. When the normal rules of business don't apply -- and they certainly don't apply to professional sports franchises like, say, oh, I don't know, the Milwaukee Brewers -- is it, though? The silence coming from 1 Brewers Way this week was deafening. Sure, there were prepared, perfunctory statements released through the Brewers' comms team and the typical post-transaction presser via Zoom Monday afternoon, but the first time stakeholders in the Brewers organization fielded real, face-to-face questions from the media was Friday, as the team prepared for their 40th anniversary-slash-alumni weekend. The Weekly Dispatch is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others. And they needed to show their faces, because this quote from President of Baseball Operations David Stearns Monday froze like a spitwad at -10°: We're thrilled with the amount of talent and the diversity of talent that we were able to get back in this trade. We were able to immediately add to our major-league team and able to bring in two very high-ceiling prospects. It brings me no pleasure to remind you that Josh Hader was traded Monday to the San Diego Padres – whom the Brewers may very well face in two months’ time – for Dinelson Lamet, Robert Gasser, Esteury Ruiz and Taylor Rogers. Lamet was designated for assignment Wednesday and claimed by the Colorado Rockies. Ruiz, the closest of the two prospects received to big-league readiness, was surrounded by the newly-promoted outfield trio of Sal Frelick, Garrett Mitchell and Joey Wiemer. Rogers has pitched in one inning since joining the Brewers. In the strictest sense of the term, yes, Stearns added to the major league team and added two prospects – though Ruiz is about as polarizing a prospect as one can find and Gasser is by most accounts more of a sleeper prospect than a needle-moving acquisition. Meanwhile, the Brewers looked like a team adrift on the field. After a week in which they showed major signs of life at the plate against the Rockies and Boston Red Sox and gave us renewed reason to believe in this roster, they went to Pittsburgh and suffered three crushing losses – two of which occurred in the vacuum created by Hader’s departure – at the hands of the Pirates, who some time ago traded in their privateer for a tank. Friday night, the Brewers returned to Milwaukee and resorted to their frustrating first-half form: lots of walks, plenty of strikeouts, runs generated by homers. The win, coming against another tanking team in the Cincinnati Reds, was a palate cleanse, but Hader’s absence from the bullpen still loomed large as Trevor Gott couldn’t get the job done and Devin Williams needed to come in for an Eric Gagne save. Of course, we’re relitigating the action on the field. What was happening both in the national baseball media and on social media was something else entirely. Granted, what happens on social media isn’t typically representative of reality, but the uniform confusion, if not anger, from insiders, outsiders, analysts and fans alike, combined with the half-hearted comments from players in the wake of the clubhouse shake-up and the immediate on-field malaise, made it abundantly clear that the Milwaukee Brewers placed themselves squarely into crisis mode, and did shockingly little to meet that crisis head-on. Crisis management is the process of preparing for and managing any disruptive or unexpected emergency situations that affect your business, stakeholders, employees, customers, and revenue. I’d say HubSpot is right on the money: trading Josh Hader was disruptive and unexpected, while it also clearly affected business, stakeholders, employees and customers. And the Brewers clearly didn’t have a plan in place to get out in front of the crisis. Bad business decisions typically start with leadership that has lost touch with either the organization they lead or the market they serve. In 2003, Mike Lazaridis infamously scoffed at the idea that a cell phone should have a camera. In 2022, BlackBerry has nothing to do with mobile phones. Circuit City eliminated an entire stratum of employees in 2007 and replaced them with lower-paid workers. That hit to an experienced workforce and company morale forced the retailer’s shutdown in early 2009. I could go on. Lehman Brothers. Countrywide Financial. Sears. Or, at the risk of coming too close to the nose of current affairs, Bear Stearns. If Mark Attanasio’s comments and body language said anything Friday, it’s that the Brewers’ organizational structure is firm: Stearns wanted the President of Baseball Operations role and responsibilities; he has them. The place to hold Stearns and General Manager Matt Arnold to account isn’t out in front of cameras and reporters. What Attanasio couldn’t do was hide his obvious discomfort, perhaps even disagreement, with the decision his baseball people made. David Stearns’ actions took us from aspirational to Oakland in a week. That might be a little extreme, but Dave Kaval at one time not too long ago was one of the most engaging and fan-friendly baseball executives in the game. Now that the Athletics are stuck in bureaucratic and litigious hell with regard to Howard Terminal, it’s a very different story: a truly atrocious ballclub, an alienated diehard fanbase stuck with a dilapidated stadium where the concourses fill with poowater and leadership that, when not sniping at fans or subtweeting rivals, is being openly courted to uproot from the Bay Area and join their former co-tenants in Las Vegas. Brewers fans aren’t there yet, if at all, though a vocal contingency of them are adamant Mark Attanasio is a cheapskate while also complaining about $8 beers they weren’t going to buy in the first place, while also selling surplus (and, in some cases, purloined) Robin Yount giveaway jerseys on Craigslist by the time the sausages race on Sunday. They’ve also conveniently memoryholed Bud Selig’s threat to move the Brewers. We are so good at forgetting the things that might blow up a preferred narrative. In fairness to Stearns and Arnold, there’s a lot we don’t know about what was happening leading up to the trade deadline. There was the suggestion of other deals that didn’t materialize for whatever reason. (Curiously, Juan Soto got namedropped by both ownership and management on Friday.) The former can’t afford to play the long game with Rogers, Gasser or Ruiz as he could with Eric Lauer or Luis Urias, and with Stearns’ contract running through the end of the 2022 (or is it 2023?) season, he likely won’t. My guess was that they wanted Lamet to work in the Arizona pitching lab, while Rogers worked out whatever was plaguing him in San Diego in the bullpen. Then they designated Lamet – there was no way he was going to clear waivers – and buried Rogers. Between the Hader deal and aftermath, the Luke Barker fiasco and then landing on adding Matt Bush and Trevor Rosenthal, none of this seems like work of the same guy who landed Christian Yelich or Rowdy Tellez, or even John Hammond’d his way into Hunter Renfroe. I’ve half-joked on Twitter that the oral histories that will be told later about the 2022 Brewers will be most interesting reading, but right now, in the midst of a crisis that has strained a fanbase, a clubhouse, a good portion of the baseball world and has seen the Brewers drop from first place in the Central to, as of Saturday night, on the outside looking into October, there’s just not a lot to laugh about. The reality is that none of this will move the needle with stakeholders. Major League Baseball and its teams won’t implode due to competition or discover a public sense of self-awareness due to a sudden, direct loss of revenue. There are no disruptors that will shake it from its own sense of self-contentment. There are no Bill Veecks to remind owners that fans are integral to the baseball milieu. Standard tickets are a decreasing percentage of overall revenue, with luxury boxes and group sales acting as tentpoles. Broadcast and streaming rights, in-stadium advertising and sponsorships cover most of the ground, while revenue sharing insulates teams from fan disinterest or discontent (i.e., #SelltheTeamBob efforts in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.) It’s not truly possible to vote with one’s pocketbook, not showing up ultimately drives up costs elsewhere, either in ticket or parking rates or merchandise markup. In fact, withholding dollars will only hasten further changes we don’t want: jersey ads, more naming rights, a ticking timebomb situation with MLB’s cringey, cozy relationship with gambling outfits. Fans that protest press for their own marginalization, or ironically serve to make a case for franchise relocation stronger. In the same thought, I need not remind anyone that the clock is ticking on making sure a clear plan for a renovation of or replacement for American Family Field is in place. And that’s where we’re at: a business that isn’t really a business at all, protected by Supreme Court ruling from federal oversight and accountability that has also protected itself from its own customers and, if anything were to change with their status vis-à-vis antitrust law, has threatened to nuke minor league baseball as we know it. This is the ultimate business-to-business enterprise that also manages to demand more money from fewer fans. There is nowhere else in American life where this works so brazenly (aside from perhaps the Internal Revenue Service.) What’s left to say? There was no crisis management plan because this season and its bizarre developments are only a crisis to those of us who choose to follow this team and love this game. The Yankees are the Yankees, the Rockies are the Rockies, the A’s are the A’s and in all those cases, there’s nothing that can or will be done about that. All that remains is just this single, uncomfortable notion: This is not your crew. And this last week made that abundantly clear. View full article

I'm sorry you feel that way. Thanks for reading!

With apologies to Milwaukee Brewers manager Craig Counsell, there's no way what's been happening since the All-Star break is a result of the team saying, 'Let's be a little bit better.' The Brewers are a lot better, and they're a lot better because they've made significant changes with their plate approach. Brewer Fanatic colleague Tim Muma put it best Friday night, following the Brewers' win over the Boston Red Sox at American Family Field East Fenway Park: "Fun, fun ballgame." Brewers fans were subjected to some painful baseball in the front half of this 2022 campaign. Yet for all the misery at the plate, thanks to three divisional rivals deciding to sit the season out and the Cardinals sputtering in July (this is what you get for taking Matt Pauley from us!), the Brewers entered the All-Star break gassed and in first place. After an uneven series with the Colorado Rockies where they still took three of four, and swept the two-game mini-series with their faux rival Minnesota Twins, they put together a convincing victory someplace they haven't played since 2014, with the combination of a Brandon Woodruff performance reminding everyone that he is an ace and an ability to manufacture runs when it mattered. It was exactly what a good ballgame should be, with the exception of time of game, which came courtesy of Red Sox manager Alex Cora's opener nonsense/cry for help. Fun games should feature good pitching, timely hitting, crisp pacing [after the opener gambit, that is] and exciting moments. Brewers and Red Sox fans alike could walk away satisfied, even if the latter weren’t necessarily happy with the end result. For us Brewers partisans, it certainly felt better than anything we saw in June. This writer penned a column here earlier this month after noticing a stunning number of outs coming from batted balls at a 30* or higher launch angle, all with abysmal expected batting averages. I looked at what the Brewers were doing at the plate – seriously, though, what were they doing? – and reviewed the macabre metrics and results. What could one reasonably hope for with a team-wide commitment to golfing the ball, come what may? Here’s what I wrote at the time: “Getting better, more drivable pitches requires Brewers hitters to stop swinging at less-than-ideal balls in the zone…. It also requires the Brewers to paradoxically give up on the home run in favor of flatter-planed swings, forcing pitchers and catchers into adjusting their approach, wearing them down and digging into bullpens.” In the interest of fairness, this writer added that “making moves toward an offensive sea change in-season is highly unlikely.” Mea culpa, I guess. Said Counsell: “It wasn’t, ‘Change our approach.’ It was just, ‘Let’s be a little bit better.’ We’re not asking for big, drastic things from anybody in our approach, we’re just trying to do everything in every moment just a little bit better.” If you believe this, you are being worked. This is an organization that provides as little useful information as possible, if it doesn’t flat out engage in paltering. Moving Christian Yelich is a textbook definition of asking for big, drastic things in baseball. A radically and noticeably different approach at the plate from before to after the All-Star break is something more than trying to be a little bit better. It is commendable for the club to use the break to reset and look at the findings from the first half autopsy and make adjustments. Frankly, the approach was a bucket of cold water to the face; seeing the team take Colorado Rockies pitching consistently to the opposite field, rather than pulling out the 5-wood and hoping for the best, was fantastic! And not only that, they’ve kept it up, banging out the second-most hits for any club with an eight-game sample through Sunday morning (81, Toronto has 88), while second in the league in team hitting and leading all of baseball in OPS, with a robust .380 team OBP. None of this was happening before. Big, drastic things. And yes, tHe SaMpLe SiZe Is SmAlL. I get that, but this team wasn’t doing any of this before the break aside from dingers. What’s happening right now is remarkable, and there’s no indication they’re going to revert. In revisiting Baseball Savant, it’s clear the Brewers still like to try launching the ball: 42 of their 81 outs in eight games have come as a result of one of these 30+ degree duds. But, as noted as encouraging in my earlier column, where the 26-29* batted balls were promising before, they’re fulfilling now. Of eight Brewers hitters who have found that sweet spot thus far, their composite is .750, for 2.333 and a wOBA of 1.277 against an expected .948. Is that outsized result sustainable? Probably not, but running these two sets of data shows who still struggles at the plate (Willy Adames) and who’s figuring things out (Kolten Wong, Rowdy Tellez). What’s truly unsustainable is expecting any kind of reasonable or consistent performance from 30-and-up, regardless of what Omar Narvaez did yesterday (which is, by eye test and data, an exception to his rule.) The other component to this is the Brewers’ commitment to hitting the ball the other way. Yelich, Wong and Tellez are feasting off this approach: a combined 15-21 for six doubles and a .750 shift-busting BABIP. Sacrificing dingers for opposite field balls in play, and a return to an approach that lets the lineup keep moving is also producing winning baseball and, incidentally, better pitches to drive. It’s also awfully hard to take pitches the other way when you’re dipping the shoulder with intent to pull and launch. Changes like these are how you get there, and how a club goes from being tagged with a 2014 vibe with one of, say, the 2021 Braves variety. There are still months of baseball to be played; things can break in any direction. But what we’ve seen since July 22 is reason to believe in this team again, as good a reason as we’ve had all year. What’s happening now, coupled with the Brewers’ penchant for taking bases on balls, is the way forward for this offense and a team that has gone on the record with stated desires for a World Series. And even for that much alone, the Brewers deserve credit. Baseball Reference, Baseball Savant and MLB.com provided invaluable data toward this column. View full article

Sorry to disappoint; this is not my goodbye column. We depart from the typical focus on the Brewers to discuss a far more important matter happening this very weekend about 950 miles east from where I type. The scene is Cooperstown, New York and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, where seven inductees will be formally enshrined. Amongst them will be the late Buck O'Neil. I would call this class the revenge tour, including long-overlooked and underappreciated guys like Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva and Minnie Miñoso, but Dick Allen inexplicably didn't get the nod from the committee, so we're not quite there yet. Further, Buck would've never liked being part of a revenge play. He was far too classy and too decent a human being for that. John Jordan O'Neil: Kansas City Monarch, Chicago Cub, coach, scout, executive, teacher, ambassador, humanitarian, historian, icon. And now, a Hall of Famer. This is the end of an error. The Weekly Dispatch is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others. Buck was snubbed. In 2006, a special committee explicitly designed to recognize overlooked Negro Leagues players and influential figures selected 17 for enshrinement into Cooperstown. Buck was not one of them. In what could be characterized as insult to injury, Buck was tasked with delivering the induction speech honoring those including Effa Manley, Oscar Charleston, Cristobal Torriente and JL Wilkinson, and he did so, almost 16 years to the day this piece is published, with the grace, good humor and dignity that were his hallmark. Buck, sick with an ailing heart and what would be diagnosed later as bone marrow cancer, would not live to see the 2006 World Series. While Buck would never admit it, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick would later concede this failure haunted his friend, the singular force behind developing the facility that, along with the American Jazz Museum, serves as a twin diamond in Kansas City's historic 18th and Vine District. He would be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that winter. A year later, Buck would be honored with the inaugural, eponymous lifetime achievement award and a statue in Cooperstown, a tacit non-admission of that committee's failure to get it right. After all, when it comes to the Hall of Fame, nothing less than a plaque will do. You probably know Buck O'Neil best from his liberal interviews with Ken Burns and company when they interviewed and shot footage for Baseball for PBS, that seamhead creature comfort MLB Network runs regularly between Christmas and New Year's Day. A firsthand witness to the victory Jackie Robinson earned for Black Americans, as well as the beginning of the end of the Negro Leagues, that beautiful byproduct of distinctly American institutional atrocity, Buck recognized early on that the opportunity Robinson and Larry Doby opened up for he and his peers also threatened to wipe their chapter from our societal memory. "While a fine ballplayer in his own right ... and nurturer of the likes of Ernie Banks and Lou Brock," writes Lawrence Hogan in Shades of Glory, "...in his senior years [Buck O'Neil] has been even a finer preserver and disseminator of the history of Negro baseball." Buck himself recognized the ramifications of integrating Major League Baseball. In his interviews for Baseball, he sympathetically noted "[T]he one thing I didn't like--in the Negro Leagues, there were some 200 people with jobs. Now, these people didn't have the jobs anymore. We eliminated those jobs." When societal evils ossify into ways of life, life adapts. No one, not even Buck O'Neil, would say that the Negro Leagues were a good thing: everyone knew this brand of baseball only existed as a result of racism and bigotry. To put a finer point on it, it was dues to the 'gentleman's agreement' [probably] initiated by Cap Anson, who would solidify his on-field greatness as a member of the Chicago White Stockings, later the Cubs. Buck would never see the field as a major league player, but was hired as a scout in 1955. For the Cubs. In those years with the Cubs, he also worked as an instructor and coach, the first African-American coach in MLB, and after his career with the Cubs came to a close, became the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum's chairman in 1990, championing Black Baseball's history from the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City through the construction of the museum at 18th and Vine. Returning to the city where he spent nearly his entire career as a ballplayer, Buck adopted Kansas City, and Kansas City returned the favor. His tireless advocacy for baseball's rich Black heritage, as well as for Black youth and education in the area, continues to inspire long after his passing. His induction in 2006 should have been a slam dunk. Joe Posnanski, who was there with Buck when the committee held its ballot behind closed doors: Now, after everything, he was being told that the life he had spent in baseball was not worthy of the Hall of Fame. It was enough to make those around him cry. But Buck laughed. “I’m still Buck,” he said. “Look at me. I’ve lived a good life. I’m still living a good life. Nothing has changed for me.” Ollie Gates, of Kansas City barbecue fame and a longtime patron and board member for the NLBM, insists the news that day killed Buck. His body destroying him from within, he kept his focus on the celebration of those others who won induction. That's the man he was, dignified to the very end. Buck's induction this weekend places a bookend not only on his life and legacy, but a fitting coda on a chapter of American sports history that never should have been written in the first place. Those proceedings in a small town in central New York will mean more than any baseball game played, because the game would not be what it is without those players whose legacy Buck O'Neil fought to keep from being memory-holed. There will be other HoF-related causes to champion and wrongs to right -- Dave Parker and the aforementioned Allen, to name two -- but Sunday is a good day for our game, regardless of what happens in the Menomonee River valley. This is the end of an error. *** Postscript: If you haven't made the trip to Kansas City to visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the Paseo YMCA, I cannot more strongly recommend taking a long weekend and bringing your family to the middle of the country. The stories housed at the NLBM are inspiring, hilarious, poignant and heart-breaking. It will make you smile, laugh, think and cry, sometimes all at once. If you love this game, or even have a passion for American history and civil rights, you owe it to yourself to make the trip. It is as essential for the baseball lover as Cooperstown. View full article

When the game comes first, you can find yourself watching any team anywhere and appreciate what's happening because it's the game. Someday, I'd love to be able to sit up late and watch West Coast baseball and not worry about being dead the morning after. Do I like the Mariners? Not especially, but I love watching the way the game is played, interpreted and presented by teams outside of my own primary experience.

WIth the resumption of annual proceedings between the Minnesota Twins and Milwaukee Brewers this week at Target Field, a look at the nature of the fan, the triviality of modern rivalry and how allegiance to laundry helps us miss the forest for the trees. The Weekly Dispatch is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others. The rivalries MLB set up with the dawn of interleague play are mostly ridiculous. Some are intuitive; others, historically-inclined: Cubs-White Sox, Yankees-Mets, Royals-Cardinals, Giants-Athletics. Others -- Rays-Marlins? Padres-Mariners??? -- have the stink of MLB's marketing brain trust all over them. Yes, there was brief history between the Brewers and Twins, but there really isn't anything there. If anything, similar to the Detroit Tigers-Pittsburgh Pirates rIvAlRy (aside below): they took another rivalry, in the latter example, the NHL's Red Wings and Penguins, in the former, the old NFC Central/North's Packers and Vikings and called it a border battle, even though the two metropolitan areas are five hours apart. [Aside: Anyone who's been around the region knows that Pittsburgh and Cleveland are two cities that hate each other. Failing to seize upon that rivalry in favor of a fairly non-descript diagonal rivalry with Cincinnati was peak lazy MLB. While I'm here, the fact that it's the Ohio Cup (seriously, look at this hunk of metal) and not the Chili Bowl doubles down on just how facile this business is. As you were.] Rivals should have history. They should bring out the best in each other. At the very least, they should have great players on both sides who faced off with something to lose. The Royals and Cardinals have 1985. The Lakers had the Celtics. The Milwaukee Brewers (410-495) and Minnesota Twins (427-476) had Robin Yount and Rob Deer and Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek in the 80s, but the baseball heritage these franchises actually share is poverty and Paul Molitor. Forgive me for not really feeling invested in what is an obviously-astroturfed deal, especially when the Brewers' actual rivals were just in town last week. Complicating my ennui for this two-game(!) series being something of actual importance is that I was born in Wisconsin to a Yooper expatriate father steeped in the Lombardi-era Packers and a native outstate Minnesotan mother. My first memory is seeing the decaying Metropolitan Stadium from northbound Highway 77 in Bloomington. My maternal grandmother was a lifelong baseball and Twins fan, the Edgar Martinez of church picnics in southwest Minnesota. The Brewers were mostly terrible when and where I grew up; ours was a household with limited exposure to the Brewers, who in most of my formative years had no television presence outside Milwaukee. In 1987, my grandparents mailed Homer Hankies to my brother and me. Grandma kept a pristine stash hidden away and, when she passed, we found them in amongst her hoarded things. They were placed under archival glass and framed. One hangs in my family room today in her honor. The idea of a rival is that someone is close to your equal in greatness, someone who brings out your best. The rival need not be a bad descriptor, provided there exists respect between the two, or at least an acknowledgement of the other's humanity. Think Larry Bird and Magic Johnson; Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Without those qualifiers, it's not rivalry as much as it is bullying, or the most pitiful form of prejudice known to mankind, because we default to lesser instincts as a result of the clothes on a person's back. How is this different from hating or marginalizing another based on their skin color? To be a fan is to pledge allegiance to a tribe. Colleges and high schools are more -- for better or worse -- entitled to this tribalism instinct. They are communities within which their athletes are developed and placed at the competitive level. In this respect, the Wisconsin-Minnesota collegiate rivalry rings true in a way Brewers-Twins, or any professional team, for that matter, cannot. The university rears; the professional club acquires. Joe DiMaggio was a West Coast native. Babe Ruth hailed from Baltimore. Joe Mauer is an extreme outlier. Henry Aaron's closing act as a Brewer was far more doing right by the player and getting a novelty act as it was a prudent baseball decision. No one faults Aaron for coming home or the moribund 1970s Brewers bringing a Milwaukee god back to the city where his legendary career started. But a theology of adoption is lost in the modern American church, saying nothing of the cathedrals of our modern religion. Christian Yelich was beloved until a foul off the knee seemingly derailed his career. Now Brewers fans largely think of him as an albatross. "What have you done for me lately?" is a pretty crappy measure of commitment. The idea of a fan was flawed to begin with, and is totally unraveled now. I love the Milwaukee Brewers, but I came to my love for this team by way of being a displaced undergraduate student, following the Brewers by way of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel online gamers and opinion pieces from Tom Haudricourt, Drew Olson, Dale Hoffman, Michael Hunt, Bob Wolfley and Todd Rosiak. Having said that, I'd have no affinity for the Brewers without falling in love with baseball. That renewal of my passion for the game happened almost literally in the shadow of the Metrodome, watching the Twins come back to life as much as I followed Jack Zduriencik from afar as he used those years of Brewers failure to sow the drafted seeds welcoming in this new era of relevant Brewers baseball. Then, waiting for Rickie Weeks, Prince Fielder, Jeremy Jeffress, J.J. Hardy, Corey Hart and Ryan Braun to arrive. Love and commitment are two sides of the same coin. Penelope waited, and her persistence, even defiance in waiting, was in time rewarded. Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds faithful: your day will come. Maybe. In the end, it's all hot dish and fish fry. One shouldn't dislike one because she happens to like the other. That's the least-valid, most childish reason to not eat. If our allegiance isn't first to the game and then to its participant clubs, we will have missed what makes this entire enterprise so special. And that means looking past the laundry to see players for who they are. Luis Arraez is a remarkable talent. Byron Buxton, when healthy, is about as enjoyable a player to watch as anyone in Major League Baseball. These guys don't suck because they wear another uniform. They don't suck at all. If rIvAlRy forces us to marginalize Minnesota Twins because MLB did some gerrymandering 25 years ago, then this rivalry, perhaps any rivalry, is to Baseball's detriment. Enjoy the games this week. View full article

The Milwaukee Brewers are committed are committed to launching fastballs, come hell or high water. Other teams know this. The Brewers don't seem to know that other teams know this. This is a problem. The Weekly Dispatch is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others. First things first, temper your enthusiasm for revived Brewer bats: they hung 19 runs on a Pittsburgh Pirates club that lacks major league talent up and down its roster, left a young arm out to rot -- rightly earning the non-partisan scorn of Baseball Twitter -- and is about to sell its best commodity for what will almost certainly be 40 cents on the dollar. What they did Friday night is decidedly the exception to the rule. We can look at a more manageable schedule and probably anticipate the Brewers build their division lead by 2-3 games in a tripartite involving the Pirates, Chicago Cubs and Pirates again, before hitting the road for stronger competition; the Minnesota Twins and the almost Minnesota ballclub, the San Francisco Giants, lead into the All-Star break. The Brewers won't hang 19 runs every night, especially when they're not designed (primarily or otherwise) to fill up box scores. This remains a run prevention team that doesn't do a particularly good job of preventing runs. They are overly reliant on a injury-riddled pitching staff and three true outcomes (top-six in MLB in HR, BB, SO) and lefty bats in a home ballpark with a short right field fence that is, for the first time in its 20+ year history, benefiting pitchers. Whether that's the humidor or baseballs with the apparent composition of a wet sock, MLB has done the Brewers no favors in 2022. In the same breath, though, the Brewers are doing themselves no favors this year. This space has mentioned the apparent lack of advance scouting and good analysis on opposing pitchers in the past. It is a deficiency that has plagued this organization long before its current administration. It takes no real acumen for strategy to rely on three true outcomes: either hit ball hard, don't swing at ball. or get out trying, requires minimal mental investment. The team approach to offense -- something, again, that has less to do with whomever occupies the hitting coach position and more to do with whomever is running baseball operations -- has been to lift and drive the ball, something that can best be accomplished with hanging breaking stuff and fastballs. The problem is that if a batter is unable to recognize a pitch, and the Brewers all season have struggled to pull the trigger on hanging stuff, it's easy to fool him. So they launch, third in the majors in home runs, feasting on lesser opponents and scraping by against contenders. I looked at all batted ball outcomes in 2022 where Brewers hitters have made contact with a launch angle of 30 degrees or greater, and removed small sample size hitters to normalize results. The results? Well, Brewers hitters are clearly not being put in a position to succeed. While these 30-degree and up outcomes represent less than 1.5% of total pitches seen, they comprise nearly 21% of team outs. If a pitcher wants to beat the Brewers, they'll simply get them to do what they've been instructed to do. Here are the month-by-month breakdowns: April: 21-147, .126 BA, .158 xBA , .057 BAbip, .349 SLG, 46.49 average launch angle May: 32-196, .181 BA, .176 xBA, .027 BAbip, .661 SLG, 44.57 average launch angle June: 19-169, .130 BA, 140 xBA, .057 BAbip, .510 SLG, 46.26 average launch angle Bear in mind, these figures exclude cameo appearance players and the Brewers as a team don't chase outside the zone relative to league average. If they get under the ball, it's not going out. To wit, the numbers on batted balls with a launch between 26-29* are much more encouraging, but the sample size is far smaller. Opposing batteries seem to know better and have adjusted accordingly. The Brewers, not so much. In essence, the team is winning in spite of its own organizational prerogative. It was borderline absurd to expect Brewers' starters to replicate their franchise-best dominance in 2021 (saying nothing of sustaining health) and emerge from a lockout-induced sequester with two new hitting coaches and suddenly start mashing. In fact, given the interrupted offseason and staff-in-transition -- and the strong possibility there was some sort of fire causing the smoke of offseason rumblings about David Stearns and/or Matt Arnold being lured to another organization -- a continued reliance on 3TO was probably the most reasonable prediction. Turning this cruiseliner around is no easy proposition. Getting better, more drivable pitches requires Brewers hitters to stop swinging at less-than-ideal balls in the zone. That's a challenge when they don't have adequate intel on what's coming, and regardless of whether it's a deficiency in databases or scouting, whatever it is they do have is obviously broken. Working counts into walks isn't a bad thing; there are those of us who remember the Brewers striking out with impunity not that long ago. Walks are great when a team is among the league leaders in grounding into double plays, keeps its bats on the shoulder more than league average, and also resides amongst the league's worst in BAbip. It also requires the Brewers to paradoxically give up on the home run in favor of flatter-planed swings, forcing pitchers and catchers into adjusting their approach, wearing them down and digging into bullpens. Moving Christian Yelich to lead-off, recommended here by BF's own Tim Muma weeks before it happened, is in a way a concession to the need for a change in approach. This is also a roster that wasn't necessarily built for athleticism on the base paths or for putting the ball in play. Given the litany of injuries and the lack of adequate reinforcements at Triple-A, making moves toward an offensive sea change in-season is highly unlikely. The Brewers are, from this vantage point, stuck with what they've got: a team that might be good enough to get into October, but also has some uncomfortably familiar 2014 vibes. After three months of 2022, the takeaway from the data is clear: if the ball gets in the air, hope for the best and expect the worst. Baseball Savant, FanGraphs, Baseball Reference and Statmuse were instrumental in developing this piece. View full article