rluzinski

Which, in theory, makes Melvin's job of upgrading the lineup that much easier. ZiPS ROS projections: McGehee: .257 / .309 / .395Betancourt: .262 / .289 / .389 McGehee's projected line isn't THAT bad for a 3B but since he is also a pretty poor defender, he has little value. Betancourt is so bad at playing baseball in general that he never should have been on the team, much less getting the majority of starts this year. Any slick fielding, no hit AAA SS would probably be an upgrade.

Wow. Did I just read that on a Brewer board? If we can't even rally around Cubs hate, BF nation is SCREWED.

Loe has thrown his slider about 85% of the time this year: http://pitchfx.texasleaguers.com/pitcher/434180/?batters=A&count=AA&pitches=AA&from=3%2F1%2F2011&to=7%2F4%2F2011 A sinker has a very large platoon ratio: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/platoon-splits-2.0/ Shouldn't we expect a significantly larger platoon split from Loe than average?

Kotsay on the other hand has started 3 games in the last week, He's 5 for 12 with a HR and 3 RBI. Is the point of this thread to see who's been good or bad recently or to identify areas ripe for an upgrade? SS, 3B and #5 OF are begging to be upgraded, 2B and 1B are not.

You do realize you don't have to take everything literally, right?Literal would have been if I thought actual pegs were being discussed. The point of my response is that I often notice Brewer fans getting too worried about how the Brewers are being perceived by others (especially after a particularly bad game or stretch of games). I like when the Brewers have a high team ranking on ESPN.com but let's not worry ourselves too much about falling in that. I agree with you on the idea of splits being kind of trivial when compared to the big pictures, but your happenstance comment is far from the truth. After watching a good amount of the games this season the team takes on a completely different form when they are on the road. You can almost feel it while watching a game. They exude confidence at home and show non on the road. I'm still waiting for the team that can look confident while losing and while dominating. Poor performance causes grimaces and exasperated looks, not the other way around. This team doesn’t have the same mental makeup on the road as they do at home. Does it make sense? Not really, but that is 100% the case. The pitchers don’t have confidence in their stuff the hitters lose their approach. Do you have any evidence of this? This is the kind of psuedo-analysis we get from ESPN but it doesn't really mean anything.

10 pegs but only 3 wins. Until teams make the playoffs based on number of pegs, I am more concerned about wins. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif

I don't really get that kind of logic. It's convenient to look at home/road splits but we can look at any other mostly-random splits that we want to. Day/night, roof open/closed, day games after night games, record on Thursdays, etc... It all makes interesting trivia but I don't see the utility in it. I do not believe that there is anything about the Brewers as a team that has caused them to significantly over perform at home and under perform on the road. What could even affect the whole team? Just a curious happenstance, in my opinion. And it is just as easy to suggest the Brewers shouldn't be as dominating at home as they have been so far. If the Brewers were .500 on the road they would be 50-32 and on pace for 99 wins. The Brewers are a decent team but they are nothing special. They are no where near a 99 win team. They are now on pace for 85 wins which is right around where they were expected to be. Hell, the brutal part of the schedule is over, so I'd probably expect more wins than that (based on just their performance this year). It was a terrible series but let's lets look at the big picture. The Brewers are done being bent over by the AL East and will have at at least a share of the NL Central after today. Did anyone really have higher expectations than that?

http://www.fangraphs.com/livewins.aspx?date=2011-06-30&team=Yankees&dh=0&season=2011 Yankees have an 84% chance of winning and that assumes both teams are relatively equal in talent. CC vs. Wolf, Yankee's offense vs. Brewers offense... Brewers have a 1 in 10 shot if I'm being kind. EDIT: OK, even worse now http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

Isn't it harder for Yankee fans to get excited about a team that was largely bought? I suspect they don't really care but it would bug me. Bill Gates could decide to buy the Royals tomorrow and turn them into a perennial World Series contenders by spending $250 mil/year. It just seems kind of makes the whole thing a farce. It's almost like every other professional league understands the importance of competitive balance except baseball.

As I explained earlier, WAR isn't trying to. It's context neutral, just like BA, SLG, WHIP and every other context neutral, made up stat. "If you can't accept Wolf has helped this team more than Greinke this season because WAR tells you he isn't then I think you are the one who has preconceived notions." Who's made that claim? I don't think the person you quotes was. My very first post in this thread was an attempt to guard against people criticizing WAR for not being what it's not trying to be. I failed miserably, so we end up arguing about nothing.

If we only care about how Greinke has performed so far this year, relative to the rest of the Brewer's current starting rotation, sure. I personally care more about what to expect for the rest of the year. He could get better in the 2nd half, and probably will but he's clearly not an ace. Clearly, if a lot of people disagree with that sentiment, it's probably not clear.

Nice find!

The Brewers play in the 39th largest metropolitan area in the US, have been mostly average over the last half decade or so but are doing great financially. The LA Dodgers are broke. I have nothing else.

WPA isn't TOO context sensitive. It just is what it is. It just tells you how much value the result of a specific PA had that that very instant. I'm not promoting WPA or WPA/LI over any other metric; just pointing out the differences. It's easy to say that a particular performance was worth some amount of wins but it's important to make the definition of "worth" as explicit as possible. People can then choose what they want. I have little use for a half a season's worth of WAR for instance. I'd rather see how that performance has changed a player's projected performance going forward.

Keep in mind, these are context neutral stats, so they don't tell you how each player's performance actually contributed to wins and losses. They tell you how valuable their contribution would be in an average situation. Over a long enough period of time, they become very close to the same thing, though. Also, Fangraph's WAR gives pitchers no responsibility for balls in play. Baseball Reference's WAR gives 100% responsibility. The truth is obviously in between (much closer to Fangraph's assumption over half a season). If you want to know how performance effected the odds of winning in the actual games, use WPA: http://www.fangraphs.com/...011&month=0&season1=2011 Fielder , Braun and Weeks are still the leaders. McGehee and batancourt have been terrible. If you want to know how many wins a player has contributed compared to how an average player would be expected to performance in the same situations, use WPA/LI. Same 5.

Where do I go to put money on that not happening?Probably Vegas, but if you're gutsy, an online sportsbook. What part don't you like, the home or away? If you don't like the away, keep betting on the Brewers and adjust your bet until they win, if you don't like the home it depends on whether you think the Twins will win the series or the Brewers will sweep. If you want me to set odds on my scenario, you'd probably have to give me around 15 to 1. I'd say the Twins sweeping the Brewers in Minnesota alone would be close to 10 to 1. Like I said, the Twins are generally very lucky against the Brewers, so I'd say the odds of it actually happening are better than they appear on paper. I was just suggesting that your "prediction" is highly unlikely, which you seem to already mostly realize (the Twins being "lucky" doesn't really make much sense to me). I've just never understand why sports fans and commentators like to predict things they know aren't likely. Sure, you'll be right 10% of the time but.. wrong the other 90%. Just a pet peeve of mine. If I were going to throw together a WAG of the Brewers sweeping the Twins, I'd probably start with putting the Brewer odds of winning each game at perhaps 55%. I know that doesn't sound like much but the AL has been traditionally better and the Brewers are on the road (4% right there). Anyway, the odds of the Twins sweeping is then (1-.55)^3 = .091..... 11:1 odds. Looks like your gut 10:1 guess is reasonable.

As a general rule, starting pitcher's perform worse as the game goes on, so it's no surprise that a #5 pitcher would have below average performance the third time through the order. Managers in general should have quicker hooks with mediocre/average starting pitchers, regardless of their performance in that particular game.

Where do I go to put money on that not happening?

If success is measured by runs given up, of course a high strikeout rate does not equal success. A high strikeout rate suggests the pitcher is performing well in general but it doesn't guarantee it either.

It's kind of hilarious to watch Betancourt AB's these days. Seems like he has been taking first pitches a lot more as of late. Of course, he just goes right back to hacking after that. That's why you can't really mandate plate discipline. 1-4 has reached 6 of 12 times; 5-8 is 1 for 12. I think that's just how it's going to be this year.

It's just amazing that he can be an amazing hitter and a great athlete overall but just can't track balls. And now this is where the game ends. Just great.

O no....

It's a night and day difference between this year and last. It's also one of the reasons I don't mind sacrificing in the first just so we can grab an early lead.I'd rather play for the most runs early. That's what's going to maximize the odds of winning.

Good to see the top of the order produce some runs because 5-9 is not inspiring.

I agree that some people are attempting to answer different questions. There are two general questions I see here: 1. How has Greinke's performance (not results) been in 2011? 2. How much should that performance cause us to adjust our expectations for him going forward? I disagree with the usefulness of using K rate. First of all, if you want to look at K rate, the denominator should be batters faced, not IP. Using IP inflates the K rate of a pitcher who is allowing a lot of base runners (since he faces more overall batters as a result). Not sure who even has K/BF though. K rate is SO important because: 1. A strikeout is an out 99.9% of the time. 2. Strikeout rates for a pitcher stabilizes quicker than other batting-result stats. What I mean by that is K rate is more representative of a pitcher's true skill with a smaller sample than some other stats (HR rate and BABIP for instance). If we are trying to estimate pitcher performance based on batting-results only and we only have 60 IP, I might only look at strikeouts and walks. That's not to say that the pitcher has no effect on anything else; it's just that with such a small sample, statistical noise, defense, etc... drowns out that "pitcher performance" part of it. Now, if we want to start looking at pitch-by-pitch data, that's entirely different. I have no confidence than anyone can just watch the games and tell me if a pitcher's command has been good over 60 IP, 250 batters faced and over 1,000 pitches. Any opinion they have will be heavily biased by the pitcher's aggregate results, IMO. But as Crew pointed out, just looking at spray charts isn't the whole picture either. Pitch f/x data is the way to go but I don't think we are there yet in terms of knowing how to exactly evaluate that data to determine pitcher performance.... well at least nothing publicly available at least.