rluzinski

SNORRRREEEEEEEE.

The Brewers offense has just bored their fans to DEATH over the last week.

No perfect game, no no hitter... unfortunately, what really matters has changed little. The Brewers are still most likely going to lose. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/frown.gif

That was a great play but Gomez dove AFTER catching the ball.

This is so depressing.

It's ironic that after years of reading this message board, you would make such an accusation. The people who understand the concept of sample size know when NOT to use the metrics.

Yes, Gomez. I think people are under the impression that the sacrifice significantly increases your odds of scoring at least at least one run. That simply isn't true. Even if you assume 100% success rate for the sacrifice, it only increases your odds of scoring at least one run by around 3% in an average situation. But this was no average situation. The next two batters have a projected SLG over .500, which means that they hit much more extra base hits than the average batter. With all that speed at 1B, there was an increased chance that Weeks would score from 1st on a hit. Ignoring whether it was smart to play for 1 run when the opposition still has 6 outs left, I don't think it was the right move since it probably didn't even increase the odds of scoring at least 1 run. But of course, this is all just rough estimates. I'm not considering the odds of Morgan reaching base on the sacrifice nor other factors. There was some very in-depth analysis on the subject performed here: http://insidethebook.com/ You can read the entire chapter with Amazon's "Look Inside" feature: http://www.amazon.com/Boo...F8&qid=1304716924&sr=8-5 Based on mostly historical data, they did not find the sacrifice a very appealing option with anyone but pitchers.

Yeh sorry, should have made it clear that I was very off topic talking about whether the bunt should have been performed or not. Morgan got hurt because he got hurt. RR is not to blame. "Venters is a HORRIBLE match-up for him and Morgan is actually a good bunter unlike Gomez." So pinch hit. "Ya great point, we're averaging -.02 runs a game over the last week so I agree, you have to do anything you can to get a run. NOTHING is working right now for this team." The team isn't scoring runs right now because they just aren't scoring. It's descriptive, not predictive. In other words, we would not project the Brewers' offense to score less run today just because they have been slumping for a week. To use a slumping offense an excuse to start using sub-optimal strategy (by my estimation) just doesn't make sense.

You kind of dodged my question a little bit by talking about "the fans" and what the MLB baseball would/could realistically do. I'm not asking that. I'm asking about YOUR opinion, and what YOU would prefer. After all, YOU are a fan. Do YOU get excited by the possibility of a no-hitter vs. a one-hitter? It sometimes seems through your posts that you'd rather there wouldn't be any drama, emotions, or psychology in sports. The reason I made the connection between no-hitters and the playoffs is because I find them somewhat analogous, except on a larger scale, i.e. one-hitter : no-hitter : : best regular season team : World Series Champ. What the average fan sees as "being clutch" a lot of stat oriented people view as "being lucky." I just want to know what you think. You seem to be suggesting that I have personal preferences and I am trying to mold my favorite sport into what I want it to be. Others may do that but I attempt to remain objective. I have spent hundreds of hours of my life attempting to study the "truths" about baseball. Sometimes those truths serve to shed light on the inner workings of the sport, other times they just tell me that the answer just isn't known.I still am watching the Brewers, so apparently I am still extracting pleasure from the sport even with my non-traditional view of it. To respond to some of your other points: Like pretty much anyone else, I like the playoff system in sports in general. I enjoy the drama in sports and that's what the playoffs give you. It is important to me that the best team overall has a good shot at winning it, though. For that reason, I don't really like the best of 5 series. Make it best of seven and don't let teams get away with using only three starting pitchers. I appreciate awesome individual performances. A starting pitcher dominating his opponent is great TV. I just take exception to how baseball seems to measure domination. There is nothing particularly special about no hits vs 1 hit to me. Hudson dominated the Brewers a lot more than Loriano dominated the White Sox, IMO. I enjoy watching a Brewer have a clutch performance but that doesn't mean I think that player is necessarily a clutch player. He WAS clutch. Perhaps some players do possess some quality that allows them to perform better in high leverage situations. Trying to identify who they are is virtually impossible, though. It's not that I would PREFER that there is no such thing as clutch players, I just don't think I know who they are.

This is where RR just doesn't "get it", IMO. Instead of asking one of more the more prolific power hitters in the league too choke up and try and dink a ball somewhere, how about we just don't play smallball in the first place? While straight sacrificing with any non-pitcher is almost never the correct move, doing it in front of two power hitters makes it even a worse decision. You should be fitting your offensive strategy to you players, not the other way around.

Why would it be ideal to bunt in front of two batters with a lot of power?

The worst thing a team can do is try random things to "shake things up" when an offense is in a week-long slump. You can try to justify it with the ol' "But what they are doing now isn't working!" but that is much to reactionary, IMO. Of course, this might be a good time for RR to "reevaluate" his batting order and offensive strategies. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif

Actually it doesn't. I did a research/article on this for another website about 3 years back, and divided the games by 0-1 runs, 2-3 runs, 4-5 runs (being average) 6-7 runs, 8-9 runs, or 10 or more runs. What I found (to my surprise) was that the teams that scored a lot of runs, but did so with a lower slugging percentage actually were more to the extremes, having more games where they'd score 0-3 runs, but also more games where they'd score 8 or more. This caught me completely by surprise in all honesty, to see the so called 'slugging' teams show more consistency in their run scoring distribution. It's not on this computer, it's on my old PC downstairs, so I'll look later and see if I can dig it up and share it. You might have found that to be true for a particular sample but I don't really see how that's possible in reality. If you picture the most extreme examples of each, you have a team that only hits HR and a team that only hits singles. You can quickly simulate that in excel and I would think you'd find the HR team to have a higher variance. Of course, If I am going to throw out that hypothesis, I should just test it, huh? My suspicion is that the difference in variance is so small between the two that you would need a massive sample to see the difference. As for what is the average runs/game variance, there are plenty of ways to estimate that based on average runs/game. Seems like baseball fans are always surprised by how often their favorite team scores 3 runs or less. Here's an old blog post of mine addressing fans' criticism of the 2006 Brewers offense: http://rluzinski.blogspot.com/2006/05/runs-per-game-and-consistency.html I think it has to do with fans' expectation that runs/game follow a normal distribution? It simple can't as you can't score less than 0 runs per game but you WILL score 10 or more runs at least a few times. That means that your average runs/game might be 4.5 but you will score less than 4 runs in more than 50% of your games. That's just reality.

I didn't renew and am 0-3 in the games I've attended so far. Add that to their start and I'm not exactly torn up about it, no. I look forward to Gomez back in the 2 spot tomorrow, bunting away. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/frown.gif

I hear you. I also dislike the sacrifice bunt as a matter of course. You want to trust your bullpen, but with RR managing his bullpen like Ned Yost lately, I guess you need to play for the multi-run inning, even if the hitters don't accommodate. If you look at the table I linked to earlier, you aren't even optimizing your odds to get at least one run either, on average. You are just taking those multirun innings and shifting them to one run and zero run innings. It's like this secret that no one has told traditional managers like RR.

The Brewers might be terrible, mediocre, average or great. Hard to say at this point. They have certainly played terribly for the last week, though.

I don't like sacrifice bunting there because the numbers say it generally doesn't increase the likelihood of scoring at least 1 run. It also cuts down on multirun innings. And even as late as the 8th, you often will need more than 1 run win win anyway (like today). I don't mean to suggest there isn't a time and a place for sacrificing but RR basically sacrifices no matter WHAT the situation is. It's like his wife bought him "MLB Managing 101" and he just blindly follows its the simple rules it gave him. Sacrificing in front of two HUGE power hitting players really makes it a very bad call, IMO.

Can someone please pass this along to RR please: http://www.tangotiger.net/RE9902score.html

RR's smartball just broke Morgan.

I actually think the shifts have worked out more often than not. That's a good point. And I like that he was willing to try something ambitious there.

Good to see we are still giving outs away in front of Braun and Fielder. SIGH. Has anything RR done this year worked?

After reading hundreds of your posts over the years (longtime lurker), I have to question: are you in favor of playoffs in sports? Or should we just declare the regular season champs the World Champions and kind of do the playoffs just for kicks and giggles? After all, 162 games is a far larger sample size than a couple of playoff series', so it doesn't really make sense to give all the glory to the playoff winner. I'm kind of surprised a comment about the significance of no hits vs. one would prompt a question about the playoffs but here goes: It's all about what the fans find the most entertaining, right? There is just too much entertainment value to the playoffs to just get rid of them. Of course, you also have to keep the regular season relevant and you want to make sure the better teams have a good shot at winning it. If you let 16 teams in the playoffs and it's a COMPLETE crapshoot, that would suck the entertainment value out the entire sport. So the question isn't whether you should have a playoff, it's how often do you want the best teams, to win it.

Our offense has been overly reliant on the HR for the past few seasons, and it probably will be this year as well. That leads to periods where we score a lot, and periods where we have a hard time scoring, depending on when the big bats are hot. I don't believe that a high SLG offense makes the team more susceptible to long periods of high or low run production (not that it would really matter in terms of total games won). Hot and cold streaks are almost completely random. Having a power-heavy lineup might slightly increase the variance in runs/game (score 5 or more runs or 3 or less a little more often). That WOULD result in less overall runs. That usually becomes pretty irrelevant though, as a high SLG offense usually is going to score more runs than their small ball counterpart anyway. I believe that relying on one or two batters for a larger than average amount of your run production also increases the variance in runs/game. In the most extreme case, if you have 9 average batters, their random hot and cold streaks would have a tendency to balance each other out in terms of runs/game. On the other end, if one batter is ALL your production, his cold streak is the entire offense's cold streak. The Brewers offense kind of looks like this: Fielder Braun . . . Weeks Hart . . . . . . everyone else It would be interesting to see how that compares with other teams.

SS for sure. I think something good be done at 3B as well, since McGee is nothinh special. Here's his "rest of season" ZiPS projection: .269/.322/.419/.741 Add that to his below average defense (and getting worse) and he probably doesn't bring much to the table. Of course, he makes $500k, so he's not really supposed to.

So funny how if the Brewers had one less hit, ESPN would be cutting into the game live and everyone would be watching. One hit? Bleh... who cares.