rluzinski

Jack, I think you might be getting a little ahead of yourself.

As someone else said, I think they'll get by with what they have right now and make a move after the all star break if necessary. That gives Hall a week to see where he is.

Every fan seems to think only their team is streaky. It's hard to find a team that didn't have huge peaks and valleys over the course of 162 games.

He would need way more ABs before we could presume such an extreme split. You can find his splits in the minors here: LINK Not very many AB there either, though.

The one constant is that a very good team bats a lot less than others...if they win most home games, those missing innings add up. Because of that minor glitch, you'll see most of them outperform their "expected" win total. Wouldn't that effect be very small? Even if they very good team wins the majority of their home games, it just means they are losing more than expected on the road, and causing a lot of 8 inning pitching performances (making them look slightly better in terms of RA/G). It evens out. So, it basically comes down to the difference in total wins. The difference between a very good team and a mediocre team is only 20 wins in a year. The very good team loses 20 innings worth of offense or has 20 innings they have to pitch more than an average team. An average team has about 1450 innings, so 20 innings is only 1.5% of that. That might cause a team to outperform their expected win total by about 1. Am I missing something?

The Sheets signing was huge but most of the other talent was home grown or aquired through trades. The credit should primarily go to Melvin and Jack Z. They put this team together and that talent is what has the fans excited.

Gallardo and Villy would easily be the second and third starters on this team but for some unexplained reason we will continue to have them pitch out of the bullpen. Actually, the reason why Yo is in the bullpen has been explained to death. At least 1 of them will be in the rotation in September. I think Cappy, Suppan and Bush are all pretty close in talent, with Vargas being a botch below. Villy and Yo have much more potential than the rest of them but their inexperience knocks them down a notch right now.

Push Weeks to try harder by sending him down to AAA or have someone else start and make him come off the bench. Not showing him that even if he struggles he's our "long term" solution. You think his problem is that he's just not trying hard enough? What evidence suggests such an explanation?

maybe during the time it might not mean anything to let a player advance one base but if that run comes into score and it effects the outcome of the game. But the runner is not given the free base unless his run IS meaningless. If a team has a 2 run lead and the opposition gets a runner on, it doesn't matter much if he's at first or third. The team is willing to trade the force out possibility to decrease the chance of a hit getting through the infield and letting the tying run on. Batters have a higher BA with a runner at 2B, especially LH batters, who can really take advantage of the hole left from holding a runner on.

Moving Yo from the Brewer's bullpen back to the AAA starting rotation is going to limit his innings how exactly?

I just don't think there's any holes to fill on this team. The bullpen looks pretty darn good to me right now, for instance.

but still, just a little bit of history HAS to play a part in the back of the mind, no matter how good they are now. Perhaps, but I think fans get hung up on stuff like that more than the actual players do. Do you think Prince cares that the Pirates owned the Crew in 2004?

In limited action w/ the Pirates last year, Youman compiled a 2.91 ERA. 'Small sample size' me all you want, but to make a blanket statement that he stinks seems like spurious logic to me. "Stink" might have been a bit severe. I'll revise my statement and simply say he's not a good starting pitcher at this point in his career. He'll be 28 in October and hasn't done much in the minors to prove he belongs in the majors. As for his "limited action" from last year, did you do anything more than just glance at the ERA? 5 SO and 10 BB in 21.2 IP. If I wanted to ignore the sample size, I'd probably use that as further evidence that he's not very good but it would be foolish to try and judge a guy based on the results of 3 starts. Have you looked at Capuano's numbers vs. Pittsburgh? Pitcher/team splits are interesting to look at but they generally have little or no predictive value. Should I really suspect that Paulino will continue to mash Capuano based on the results of 13 AB? Just not enough information.

I agree with this statement I guess when trying to project the rest of the season but after 162 games it really doesn't matter. It depends on what we mean by "worst division". I took that to mean actual talent, just not a team's record. If he just meant division records, then add them up ans spit out the result. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

Baseball isn't much fun if you just expect mediocrity and averageness all the time. I don't think that expecting the Brewers to occasionally have games where they are *GASP* tied in a game with an inferior team isn't exactly accepting mediocrity. Now, if I expected them to actually lose to one, once in awhile...

Although I to think Billy is back, I think he still has not gotten as hot as he will. The guy had a .911 OPS June!

How's the weather looking in Milwaukee for this evening?

This from the guy who believes in the value of statistics? Sounds like a Yost-esque gut instinct from Russ Youman stinks and Cappy is generally pretty good. Obviously, I'm only guessing on the effects Cappy's DL stint will have on his performance today but even if he's off a bit, he should still be better than Youman.

The Davey Lopes and Jerry Royster squad went a remarkable 56 - 106 (.336 winning percentage!) in 2002. What is your guess for the date that the current team surpasses that win total? They need nine more wins. My guess.... July 21st.

My thoughts are that the playoffs are almost impossible to predict and that comes from a guy who tries to predict everything. A 5 game series lets the underdog win often, which may be good or bad for the Brewers, if they make it.

I'm basically following the idea that many times with scientific calculations anomolies that don't fit the paradigm (as outlined in Thomas Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions) get ignored as random when in fact there may be some sort of minor variable that could be used to further enhance the calculation. I think people KNOW that there are variables that are being ignored. The real question is, how significant are those omissions. For instance, the pthygorean equation assumes a normal distributions of runs scored per game (x amount of games scoring 0, 1, 2, etc.. runs). We know that not all types of offenses will score the same distributions but it's generally close enough to ignore. We accept a small amount of loss in precision to simplify the model but the overall accuracy of our model shouldn't theoretically suffer. You seem to be suggesting that a significant variable might be being omitted, which may be causing a significant and systematic error in the projections? I won't begin to pretend that it's not possible but would assume a fairly rigorous study would be needed to find it. These projections are no longer something people throw together in their free time. They are constructed and tested against the actual results and each other over and over again. I don't think you'll find an obvious omission. Also, as I mentioned in the PM, there's a lot of statistical noise in a seasons worth of games for a team, so it's difficult to find systematic problems with a model without looking at many years worth of results. Assuming a binomial distribution, a team that has a 50% chance of winning every one of their 162 games still has about a 60% chance of winning 85 or more games or 76 or less games. That means that you could construct an absolutely perfect model and still expect it to be wrong by at least 4 games more often than within 4 games! The reality is that any projection system will always have a high degree of uncertainty associated with it. Of course, if that wasn't true, the sport it was modeling would be incredibly boring, since people could have a pretty good guess with how the season would play out before a single game was played.

I dont know -- I think people need to take a harder look at the long term deterioration of these dudes' melons and not try to call it a "roid rage incident". (generally speaking) I didn't specifically mean the steroids (is there more than anecdotal evidence of roid-rage, anyway?). If a person is using painkillers, taking antidepressants, injecting testosterone and then throws recreational drugs in there, it wouldn't be completely far fetched to suggest that it may have contributed to his incredibly insane behavior.

As others have said, whether Villy had 25 or 45 total pitches probably made little no difference to his availably. I like the idea of keeping him as stretched out as possible, since he can slide right into the rotation if needed, then.

How many rookie starters have the Brewers faced the last few years and how bad have they actually been against them? I doubt any worse than expected. I think this pitching match up looks very good. Cappy might be a little rusty but it sure seemed like a nagging injury was hurting his production to begin with.

This is pretty tough thing to do. First, it's not really fair to throw reliever in there with starters, since many of them could never go the 5+ innings needed to start. Just different skill sets. Second, we still haven't really seen THAT much of Yo or Villy in the majors yet. With Suppan and Cappy both being about true 4.0 ERA pitchers, it's tough to project rookie starting pitchers as sub 4.0 ERA guys right now. How many starting pitchers actually start as true sub 4.0 ERA guys?