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Check-In; Aug 8 - 8:15 v. SOB's III(Home) at DYER DYER DYER Well fellas, despite all the rainouts, the season finale(s) is upon us. I have thoroughly enjoyed the season, met some wonderful people and talented athletes. For those of you continuing on to the competitive fall season, I am thrilled to be coaching/managing again and those of you that I wont see until next spring, play this game as if it was your last, and enjoy the off-season! I have updated the stats for the most part. I am missing the stats from our 8-inning come from behind victory and the double-header from this past friday. I did not see a recap and am wondering how things went. Sorry, for obvious reasons, I was not able to make it back in time, but hope everything went well. Here is the website for the stats. See you guys Friday!

My bad, I need a last name and phone number. IM me when you get the chance.

No problem, Josh. I'll post a practice schedule as soon as things slow down around here a bit. See you then.

Yes, Tuesday Thursday is confirmed.

For those wanting to attend the memorial services and viewing, that is scheduled for Wednesday Night from 4-7pm. A small service will then be from 7pm to 7:30pm. The location is the Borgwardt Advantage Funeral Home located at 110th & Forest Home in Hales Corners, WI. All of you and your families are welcome and encouraged to come, as I know he enjoyed the short amount of months and hours that he played with you all. The actual burial will be taking place around Black River Falls, WI on the following day, which is why we are having a seperate service here for friends, family, and co-workers who won't be traveling up north. I wont be playing ball Thursday, but I fully expect to be there on Friday Night, wearing his jersey and getting some sort of comfort from being on the field. I'm hoping with Kenny and the team's permission, we can honor him by letting his spirit play 2nd base for the first inning of the first game and taking the field with 9 players. That was the position he always desired playing while playing with me in Florida, though he rarely got the chance the past few seasons given the shape of his knees. Thanks again to all of you for your well wishes. This website never ceases to amaze in the quality of people and the friendships made that go beyond talking about baseball. ~Luke

Thanks for all the well wishes and to those who responded. Both sets were taken quite quickly and certainly is a big help in more ways than one. It's times like these that you realize this site is more than just Brewers discussion, but a collection of a lot of loose friendships with people you've never met. ~~Luke

I posed the the roster and mock lineup at 1:53. My pops passed away at 2:50 and therefore I had two openings for both Brent and Aaron instead of one. There is a small thread in the Milwaukee team forum.

Thanks for all the well wishes and if anybody is interested in attending the Memorial, I'll post the information here when I decide on things tomorrow morning.

Aaron and Brent, you are both welcome to fill out the team. Given the death of my Dad shortly after posting the roster/lineup, it was evident that I would need another 2 bodies instead of one and you both are added. The team is now full and I'll advise on scheduling and other matters in the coming weeks.

Due to the death of my father, I am offering up for sale our pair of tickets for both Monday and Wednesday's game. Face Value is $120.00, but I am accepting best offer as I have to help fund a funeral. Brian the Automator is aware that it may exceed face value. Given my law enforcement background, I will circumvent this by also including an autograph ball or bobblehead w/ the tickets. I can deliver anywhere within the Milwaukee area. The tickets are Club Level right behind home plate. Sec 331. This is with the in-seat waitstaff service. I have no parking or Metevante passes to offer however. Please PM me with your best offer if you are interested. I'll try and update the thread once the tickets are gone or a significant offer is accepted. I dont have a deadline, but need to move this quick.

Guys, It is with great sadness that I report that I have lost my greatest teammate and best friend, my Dad, to the Angels today. A day after scoring the go-ahead run and catching the eye of Coach God for other talents, he is gone at the age of 48. While I am having trouble putting words onto screen right now, it's somewhat of a positive release in remembering how bad he wanted to play and spend that hour with me every week on the ball field. He was just saying yesterday what a good group of guys that we have together and really appreciated Kenny for allowing him to play and for the guys for accepting what was left of his aging arms and legs onto a team of mostly 20-somethings. I don't even know what tomorrow holds, but if I can't take the field on Friday, please take the field in the first inning with 9 men and leave a spot open for him to roam 2nd base for an inning, he'll be watching! ~~Luke

That was worth a smile....thanks Jimbo

Some updated notes on the upcoming season. ~~The Fall Team appears set, though I am still looking for one full time body and an additional spot is still being saved for Matt Rink (ValpoMatt) pending his decision to sign his contract or not. ~~ I will register the team as Brewerfan.net and am looking to Johnson Controls as an additonal sponsor for the $180.00 team fee. That would leave player fees at a nominal $12.00 per person, unless you are fortunate enough to work or reside in Greenfield, then it would be $6.00. I have awesome jersey ideas at $15.00 a guy, however that is something that we may not want to invest in given it's a short 10-game season and a long off-season? Your thoughts? ~~I am really happy with the talent that we are accumulating and I think we are going to put a very competitive team on the field and represent Brewerfan.net very well. ~~Here are how things are shaping out for opening night, as it would stand right now. http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w221/lcbarritt/lineup.jpg

I'm thinking that they would have to make the Dodgers and Brewers make up the game, and then use MLB rule #33 if the Brewers lost and therefore Brewers and Cubs had the same record. http://www.baseball-reference.com/about/division_ties.shtml Excerpts from Major League Rule 33 and Major League Rule 34 Scenario #1: If there is a tie for a Division Championship and the winning percentage of the two Clubs tied for first place is higher than the winning percentage of each of the second-place Clubs in the same League, the Division Champion shall be: The Club with the higher winning percentage in head-to-head competition between the two tied Clubs during the championship season; or If the Clubs remain tied, then to the tied Club with the higher winning percentage in intradivision games during the championship season; or If the Clubs remain tied, then to the tied Club with the higher winning percentage in the last half of intraleague games during the championship season; or If the Clubs remain tied, then to the tied Club with the higher winning percentage in the last half plus one of intraleague games during the championship season, provided that such additional game was not a game between the two tied Clubs. This process will be followed game-by-game until the tie is broken.

No, we have had a rainout this year. It was already made up (Boston)

I didnt want to post a new thread on this, because i'm sure to get my answer shortly.....but what if.... The Brewers were rained out on getaway day in Los Angeles on Sunday (8/17). They start a home series on Monday vs Houston and do not return to the West Coast and no makeup would likely be scheduled. Now the season ends with the Brewers 92-69 and the Cubs at 92-70 with the 2nd best record in the NL. Would the Brewers then end the season as the Division Champions and the Cubs as the #4 seed, or would they force the Brewers to fly to the West Coast on Monday, if they lose, fly all the way home and play a tie-breaker vs the Cubs on Tuesday and start the divisional playoffs on Wednesday (which would require flying again if they lost the 1 game playoff)? I'd assume they'd have to considering the advantages of being a #1 seed vs a #4 seed. But that sure seems like a heck of a lot of travelling. Perhaps maybe they'd have to make up that game and then there is some type of tiebreaker other than playing a 1 game playoff?

Given the amount of dollars invested in these players, why risk an injury sprinting down to first base on a BB as if you were trying to beat out a double play in the 9th inning? You may need that hustle later in the inning, why waste energy/calories/whatever by sprinting to 1st base? I realize it's a cute idea, like Sosa sprinting to his outfield position, but it's exactly that, cute. It's a novelty idea, designed in my opinion to say, look at me! "I'm different, I'm sprinting. I may pull a hammy or be slightly slower trying to score from 2nd on a basehit, but damn, I sure hustled to first on that walk!" I don't get that.

I meant, Chris Becker....fixed.

Bump Please state your intention to play prior to August 1st. I still have 2-3 sure full-time openings, perhaps 4-5 depedent upon the 50/50 remarks of Matt and Kevin. In general, here is how the team is shaping out if I had to make out a roster card this evening. 1) Chris Becker. OF (committed) 2) Matt Rink?? IF (unknown) 3) Josh OF (commited) 4) Justin IF (commited) 5) Nick OF (commited) 6) Jamie IF (commited) 7) Kevin?? IF (depends on day sel.) 8) Tim OF (commited) 9) Luke C/RP (commited) 10) Steve?? Bench/PH/EH (commited/emergency) 11) Chris Bormann SP (unlikely, dep.work sched)

I feel this sentiment completely. Given a 3 game cushion now in the Wild Card race, I have this "hold on" mentality that it doesn't matter if we can catch the Cubs, just dont play 4 games worse than the Cards the rest of the way and that'll be good enough. Last year, it was catch the Cubs or else. Therefore, this year, I think a split against a team that is better, in that a better winning percentage, is completely acceptable. If for some reason, we win the division then great, but I just dont have this "must-win" feel in the series vs the Cubs. To me, the Cardinals, Phillies, and Mets series will be bigger.

Please dont strike me for long material, I honestly went through and couldnt find anything to cut that I didnt think wasn't informative.

By Sam Walker, The Wall Street Journal Baseball's missing statistic: Home run trajectory Via AP If there was a poll taken to choose this season's most magnificent home run, there would be three early favorites: the shot Alex Rodriguez hit in August that nearly tagged a trash compactor at Yankee Stadium, Wily Mo Pena's June blast to deep center at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, and the ball Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox knocked clear over a left-field light tower at Fenway Park. These Ruthian clouts, in addition to being among the longest anyone has seen in these stadiums, have something else in common: Nobody knows precisely how far they flew. And if they say they do, they're definitely not scientists. It's one of the great enduring absurdities of baseball: As much as the game is ruled by numbers and endlessly deconstructed by statisticians, most ball clubs don't have any reliable method for determining how far a batted ball has traveled once it leaves the field of play. When they aren't making crude geometric calculations on scratch paper or just purely guessing, team officials rely on survey diagrams that are nearly 20 years old or even send out members of the grounds crew to clamber around the outfield with spools of measuring tape. Accuracy has become such a problem that some teams have stopped trying to estimate distances entirely. "There are so many variables," says Glenn Geffner, a spokesman for the Red Sox, a team that no longer measures home runs. "These numbers mean nothing when they're announced." Of course, tracking homers isn't a simple process, and it usually involves calculating how far a ball would have gone if it had hit flat ground instead of bouncing off a light pole or hitting the picture window of a restaurant in the stadium's upper deck. And the numbers aren't the least bit relevant to the outcome of a game. Still, the true distance of an epic homer is precisely the sort of barstool topic that fans are intensely curious about. But at a time when sports such as tennis and golf are using lasers, microchips and computer models to determine the trajectories of shots, baseball is running out of excuses. Not only does the technology exist, but the necessary equipment has already been installed at nearly a dozen ballparks. Ed Plumacher, president of QuesTec, a company that has fitted cameras in 11 major league stadiums to monitor the performance of umpires, says that with an investment of about $15,000 per stadium in new software, this system could measure home-run distances to within one meter. The only trouble, he says: "I haven't found anybody who wants to pay for it." It isn't that baseball hasn't tried. In 1988, the league, in partnership with IBM, launched a program called "Tale of the Tape" where survey crews were sent to map the outfield dimensions of every ballpark and make charts teams could use for reference. Though the system was inexact, it gave measurements a modicum of credibility for about 10 years. But since the program ended, teams have been left to fend for themselves. While some have taken pains to be as accurate as possible -- the Chicago White Sox, for one, enlisted a team of engineering students from the Illinois Institute of Technology to survey their ballpark in 2002 -- most of their improvisations fall short of what could be considered scientifically rigorous. On the rare occasions when the Anaheim Angels decide to announce a measurement, they turn to a survey chart that was prepared before an extensive ballpark renovation. Unlike most teams, the Baltimore Orioles count the distance only to the point where the ball was stopped by some object in the outfield, rather than how far the ball would have flown if it hadn't been impeded. And the Minnesota Twins still use a chart prepared two decades ago by a graduate student from the University of Minnesota math department, even though they've lost the specially designed calculator they were given to factor in the arc of the ball. This June, when Cincinnati's Wily Mo Pena hit a majestic bomb off the centerfield "batter's eye" at Busch Stadium, the St. Louis Cardinals dug out their official yardstick: a photocopy of a photocopy (of a photocopy) of the original IBM survey from 17 years ago. Back then, the farthest distance the surveyors thought to measure was the base of the batter's eye in centerfield, which was 470 feet. So to make the estimate, team officials took that number, added 18 feet to approximate the extra height and four more to account for the distance the ball might have flown if it landed on flat ground. The result? A thoroughly unscientific 492. "We like to joke that it's accurate to plus or minus 20 feet," says a Cardinals spokesman. One problem with the whole enterprise is that when definitive measurements are taken, they're often anticlimactic. The home run that launched the whole concept of the "tape measure" shot was, by most accounts, a 1953 blast by Mickey Mantle on a windy day at Washington's Griffith Stadium. The distance (paced off by a Yankees public-relations man) was reported to be an unfathomable 565 feet, and would go on to become the gold standard by which all other epic home runs were measured. The only problem: It was an exaggeration. According to Yale physics professor Robert K. Adair, the farthest a modern player can expect to hit a regulation baseball thrown by a big-league pitcher under normal conditions (barring, say, a freakish gust of wind) is about 500 feet. After investigating the matter in his seminal 1994 book on baseball physics, he concluded that the actual distance of Mantle's home run was more like 506 feet. Nonetheless, the damage was done. Even today baseball fans often seem disappointed, if not downright skeptical, when the mammoth blast they've just seen is determined to have fallen short of the 500-foot threshold. After Alex Rodriguez hit his towering home run to left field off Texas pitcher Juan Dominguez on Aug. 13, he called it the hardest ball he'd ever hit. Yankees officials, working from past measurements of the ballpark, quickly estimated the ball had landed 485 feet from home plate. But after hearing that number from reporters after the game, team owner George Steinbrenner wasn't buying it. "It must have gone farther than that," he said. The distance of this home run has since become a contentious subject among Yankee fans and has unleashed a comedy of inexactitude. One fan arrived at a distance of 502 feet by examining satellite maps on Google Earth. Yankees TV broadcaster Jim Kaat tried to pace off the distance by using his shoes as measuring sticks. His verdict: 520 feet. As the controversy built, Yankees officials decided to settle the issue by trotting out their tool of last resort: The "fishtail" -- a lengthy spool of industrial measuring tape. And since the ball landed on flat ground, they were able to make an unusually precise reading. That method put the distance at 487 feet, which the team adopted as the final word. If Major League Baseball or any of its teams was determined to tackle this problem for good, there's no question it could be done. When the White Sox began looking at measurement options, they were presented with a $300,000 radar system used to track missiles. For considerably less money ($2,795, to be exact) any team could buy a hand-held Impulse Laser rangefinder from Laser Technology Inc. in Centennial, Colo., that weighs less than 3 pounds, runs on batteries, and is accurate to within 2 inches. By standing on home plate after the game or even between innings, a team official could measure the distance of almost any home run with the push of a button. In 2000, a company called SportVision installed a system at the All-Star Game in Atlanta for ESPN that converted the field into a digital grid and instantly plotted the speed and trajectory of home runs. The company says the distances it calculated were accurate to within 2 feet. During this year's postseason, baseball's Advanced Media division is hoping to demonstrate a refined version of this system that could someday be installed in every MLB ballpark. Not everyone in baseball is enamored of the idea of calibrating every longball. Larry Babcock, the baseball-information manager for the Angels, says the team stopped measuring routine homers a few years ago, in part because so many were being hit that it was getting sort of tedious. And for the most part, the distances weren't very interesting. "If the wall says 330 feet and you see it land just above that, I don't see why you need to announce 332." Rich Levin, a spokesman for Major League Baseball, says measuring every home run decisively might take something away from the game. There's a lot of romance surrounding the distances of famous home-run balls, he says, "and I think the lack of precise measurement adds to that." Nevertheless, when Manny Ramirez launched that asteroid over the light tower at Fenway on April 19, the Red Sox, true to their policy, did not speculate on how far it traveled, even if lots of people would have liked to know. When a reporter asked him to comment on the home run after the game, Boston center fielder Johnny Damon responded with a question of his own.

I guess we'll just have to disagree. Elias and MLB have it at 407 feet, which is not the first row, but apparently their un-biased work and experience of the ballpark are not enough of a convincing factor that this was nothing near a double off the wall, then no amount of chat about the subject is going to convince otherwise. I personally think the reaction of the front row is the ball bounding back off the 8th/10th row of the seats, but again, the feed was quite grainy and really tough to make out what anybody in that section was doing. I'm relying on the give-up actions of the outfielders, the reaction of Braun, the umpires, Franklin, LaRue, and the MLB/Elias sports Bureau estimations that the home run was closer to 410 feet than 385.

Somebody who agrees with me! That seems to happen everywhere. Example: I ask somebody for directions, "Where's the Taco Bell" and get this response. "Oh, it's going to be up the street on the right hand side." Oooook? It's going to be, or it is? I'm not sure why I pick up on this, but it drives me nuts. Is this technically poor grammar? If so, that's kind of hard to swallow for somebody in the communications profession.

If it has, it hit that guy in the red shirt and tan pants and he has the worst reflexes of anyone I have ever seen. I dispatch EMS all the time at Miller Park for drunk fans who had no clue a ball was coming their way. See that woman in the black shirt in the first row who's leaning to get out of the way and the guy behind her that's stretching out his arms to catch the ball? I believe that is where the ball settled. If it is hitting in the first row, why is Ankiel not attempting to make jumping catch to save the game? It's because he knew it was out, so does the left-fielder who gives up 6 steps from the wall. This belief of a potential double is really unfounded.