Whiting strikes out the final hitter! ACL Brewers win! Moving on to the 3 game championship series to face the winner of ACL Dodgers and ACL D-Backs Red. ACL Dodgers are winning 3-2 over ACL D-Backs Red in the 7th inning.
ACL Brewers up 3-2 in the bottom of the 9th. Runner on 1st base and the ACL Rockies are pinch hitting a 24 year old...why do they have so many 23+ position players on their ACL team??
Time for the weekly Biloxi bullpen meltdown. Luis Amaya inherits runners on 1st and 2nd with 2 outs in a 1-0 game. He goes BB, BB, 1B and it's now 2-1 Pensacola with runners on the corners
I think Diaz could possibly be up with Freeman and Olson in all honesty. He's overperforming his xwOBA but a 160 wRC+ is 2nd only to Freeman although his baserunning is truly abhorrent.
I’d put Freeman, Olson, Diaz is the top 3 pretty easily. I think Alonso has a pretty solid argument for #4 as I don’t consider Bellinger a 1B as he’s only played like 230 innings at 1B this year and over 2 times that much in the OF.
First off Hiura's BB-rate in AAA is 8.4% not 10% and the league BB-rates are massively different.
Average MLB BB-rate in 2023 - 8.6%
Average International League BB-rate in 2023 with the tiny automated strike zone - 11.8%
So Canha's 10.6% BB-rate is comfortably better than league average and Hiura's 8.4% BB-rate is well below league average.
If we can go 4-2 to close out the month with a series win against the Cubs, I would feel pretty good about our playoff chances. We already have the tiebreaker over the Reds and winning the series against Chicago at the end of this month would leave us needing 1 win in the final series of the season to have the tiebreaker over them as well.
Also since the trade deadline, the Brewers have a 105 wRC+ from the DH position despite rocking a comically low .250 BABIP so the production there hasn’t been a problem this month after some additions improved the depth of the team.
If we want to talk tangible reasons Hiura might not have gotten the call look no further than his chase and whiff rates before August (August numbers aren’t updated but will probably stay pretty similar as his K rate and swinging strike rates have actually jumped up this month)
Before August he had a 32.7% chase rate and 30.3% whiff rate. Those would both be 23rd percentile in the MLB which wouldn’t be entirely problematic if he could maintain those rates in the MLB. The issue is those rates always spike in the MLB as the quality of pitchers is night and day compared to AAA.
Are you sure about that? Seems pretty cyclical to me. Here’s the order.
1. Hiura has a good game
2. You post about his good game and how insane it is that Hiura isn’t a Brewer
3. Someone talks about his AAA numbers being irrelevant because he’s always hit there
4. You bring up his 2022 MLB numbers as a counter argument
5. Someone argues about the unsustainability of his 2022 numbers
6. Argument eventually fades until another good Hiura game then back to #1.
Blayberg Diaz gives and Blayberg Diaz takes. After a huge CS earlier in the 9th he has a throwing error throwing down to 2B with runners on the corner and 2 outs and Columbia takes the 6-5 lead. Another blown lead by the Carolina bullpen. Lynchburg won earlier today, so if Carolina can't come back from down 6-5 the division lead will move down to 1 game.