dpapo

Doesn't have his slider today.

Official Brewers lineup, per JSOnline, RF Corey Hart SS J.J. Hardy 3B Ryan Braun 1B Prince Fielder CF Bill Hall C Johnny Estrada LF Kevin Mench 2B Rickie Weeks RHP Yovani Gallardo

Saw this on JSOnline this morning, "Yost still plans to give right-hander Yovani Gallardo his first big-league assignment Monday against the Giants, assuming he isn't needed today in long relief. " Although, he later said, "Why break Gallardo into a spot that Villanueva is already broken into?" Yost said.

Does anyone know if Yo was warming up in the bullpen. If nothing else, I'm hoping Suppan can settle down and pitch a couple more innings so they aren't tempted to bring in Yo.

There could be two no hitters in one week. Can't see the game at the moment, but I'm sure they'll be showing the fight on ESPN again and again.

Shaky, but a win is a win.

Monroe maybe having a rougher day than Counsell.

Well, if Counsell makes that play of Sheffield, which he should have. It's 2 outs and no one on base.

Ugh. Counsell having a bad day.

Spurling is coming in.

Whew! Glad he was able to get that out.

Yikes! Shouse is in.

Well, that's one way to score.

The Tigers broadcast mentioned that it was 21 and a third innings after the first out.

Thanks. Glad I wasn't able to see that. I'll probably get to see the Brewers fail to drive home runners in scoring position and make another dumb mistake in an inning or so.

Okay, I can't see the game at the moment. How was Hardy out and yet Hart not score. According to Gameday, Hardy was out at second. Thanks.

Like I mentioned earlier, the Tigers announcers are basically saying it is a combination of Verlander having filthy stuff and the Brewer hitters not taking major league swings. Looking tentative, confused and unsure.

Okay, I am going to have to try to end this no-hitter by stating that the Brewers will get no-hit without a doubt. Not a chance they get a hit today.

Tigers announcers, not exact words but close to... "Some of the swings we've seen from the Brewers are not major league" Other announcer, "I know, very tentative and unsure"

I think people have been trying to read too much into things as well. Here is an interview Chase did before the season where he talks about the ending, among other things. I think he just left it open ended on purpose. If you take him at his word that he wasn't trying to be be audacious or blow people's minds then when he say's that "Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there." I take that to mean that there isn't anything more then what we see. Especially when the writer also shoots down the theory about the person at the counter and the two African-Americans who came in. Of course, people are going to read into the ending what they want, but it seems pretty straight forward to me. David Chase speaks! Posted by Alan Sepinwall June 11, 2007 10:50PM Categories: The Sopranos What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet. Sunday night, "Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner in France, where he's fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began, he intends to go into radio silence, letting the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself. "I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene. "No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them." In that scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a man in a Members Only jacket's walk to the men's room. Just as the tension had been ratched up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid song) with no resolution. "Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood. Some fans have already assumed that the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. "I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it. "I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it." Another problem: over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems." (Earlier in the interview, he notes that his favorite part of the show was often the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spin-off, it'll be set in Newark in the '60s.) Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails: Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next. Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.) Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending. Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of 9. "If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says. Much of this final season has featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we supposed to, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, finally wake up and smell the sociopath? "From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," insists Chase. "To me, that's Tony." Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes? "I'm the Number One fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'" One detail about the final scene that he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox. "It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my god!' I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around." Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry, and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies. "It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say." Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season: -After all the speculation that Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw that Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise. "This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the '70s," says Chase of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line. -Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to. "This, to me, feels very real," he says. "The majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now." Also, the apocryphal story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists, wasn't true. "What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion." -I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter Emily) that the nine episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, "No." -Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony? "I think Butch was an intelligent guy, he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was esentially a convoluted personal grudge." -Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Member's Only guy had never been on the show before, Tony killed at least, one if not both of his carjackers, and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory. Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com blog.nj.com/alltv/2007/06...peaks.html

Official lineup for today Hart RF Hardy SS Braun 3B Fielder 1B Estrada C Jenkins LF Gross DH Hall CF Counsell 2B

Has Matt Harvey been picked yet. If not, a high school right handed pitcher would be right up Jack Z. alley.

Surprised by the pick, but Jack Z. does have a good track record drafting position players in the 1st round. In a couple years and probably sooner, both Jenkins and Mench are going to be gone, so the Brewers are going to need a LF with power. So, while LaPorta it's a surprise pick, it does make some sense.

It's hard to get a good read on this draft. I was reading the Baltimore Sun and they wrote how the Orioles are going to probably choose between Wieters, Aumont and Detwiler. And an Oriole official expected the Nationals to take Wieters if he is still available. However, the Washington Post is predicting that the Nationals will take Mike Moustakas. So, it's just hard to guess who is going to be around when the Brewers pick My choose, for whatever little it is worth, would be Mike Moustakas, however with Devin Mesoraco name popping up at the last minute, I'll predict that is who the Brewers take. Of course, it'll probably end up being a high school pitcher.

I was looking at the history of high school pitchers the Brewers have taken over the years in the 1st round and maybe they should just avoid taking one. I'm only half kidding, but it hasn't been pretty. 1974 - Butch Edge - (Ended up being taken by Toronto in the 1976 expansion draft) Played one season for Toronto in 1979 and was 3-4 with a 5.24 ERA. 1975 - Rich O'Keefe (Never made it to the Majors) 1976 - Bill Bordley (Did not sign) Eventually made it to the majors with the Giants for one season (2-3 with 4.70 ERA). Ouf of baseball by 1982. 1988 - Alex Fernandez (Did not sign) Went to U. of Miami and eventually was drafted by the White Sox in 1990. Went on to have a productive 10 year major league career with the White Sox and Marlins. (107-87 with a 3.74 ERA) 1991-Kenny Henderson - (Did not sign) Eventually drafted by Montreal but didn't make it to the majors. 1991 - Tryone Hill - Injury problems, never made it to the majors. 1993 - Jeff D'Amico - Only high school pitcher drafted by the Brewers to actually pitch for them in the majors. Could have had a pretty good career if not for injuries. (45-52 with a 4.61 ERA) 1998 - J.M. Gold - Injury problems, never mind it to the bigs. 2001 - Mike Jones - Injury problems will probably prevent Jones from ever making the majors. Is going to likely have Tommy John surgery soon. 2004 - Mark Rogers - Another pitcher taken who has had injury problems. Hopefully will make a successful comeback. 2006- Jeremy Jeffress - Currently at West Virginia. On the other hand, every pitcher the Brewers have drafted coming out of college has made it to the major leagues. 1983 - Dan Plesac - A very productive 18 year major league career. (65-71 with a 3.64 ERA and 158 saves) 1989- Cal Eldred - Decent 14 year major leaguer that could have been much better if not for injury problems. (86-74 with a 4.42 ERA and 9 saves) 1993 - Kelly Wunsch- Never actually pitched for the Brewers and if I remember correctly I believe he may have had some injury problems as well. Would go on to have a 6 year major league career, mostly as a lefty specialist. (11-6 with a 3.76 ERA with 1 save) 1997-Kyle Peterson Another pitcher with injury problems. Pitched a couple years for the Brewers. (5-9 with a 4.71 ERA) 1999- Ben Sheets Currently the ace for the Brewers. Has had injury and ear (vertigo) problems, but is currently the Brewers ace and may end up having the best career or any pitcher the Brewers have drafted. (61-69 with a 3.83 ERA) EDIT: edited post for readability - Brian the Automator