Season Preview: Milwaukee Brewers

Well we've got 15 days left until Opening Day, which means it's season preview time. We'll be running it down team by team, with an added new wrinkle this time around: the beer of choice for fans of the team to enjoy whilst watching their team take the field! Nothing like that to help get you through a baseball season, especially if you're from Pittsburgh. Up next: the Milwaukee Brewers


Lineup: This should be the best lineup in the division. Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder make this merry-go-round move, but the speedy Carlos Gomez and (we think) ready to (finally!) break out Rickie Weeks will be superb complementary pieces. Corey Hart had a down year last season, but if he makes one simple fix (swing more! His in-the-strike-zone swing percentage dipped 8% from 2008-2009 and his overall swing percentage dipped from 54% to 46%) then he should rebound to his above-average past. Casey McGehee, despite the goofy spelling of his last name, was a good contributor last season, and should be a serviceable stopgap for prospect Mat Gamel. And speaking of prospects, SS Alcides Escobar is a wizard with the glove and should be able to hit for some decent average this season. Gregg Zaun is the only distinct negative here, but he's a catcher, and there aren't a lot of teams who can count on having a reliable hitter behind the dish, so that doesn't concern us too much.


Rotation: What does concern us is the pitching. Yovani Gallardo is a stud, and the unquestioned ace of what is, unfortunately, an extremely mediocre staff. Randy Wolf was a nice free agent signing, but right now, he looks like their second-best starter...and that's not a recipe for contention. Doug Davis and Jeff Suppan (whom we always confuse, despite their being altogether dissimilar save for a distinct tendency towards 'average') will man the 3 and 4 spots here, and the 5th spot will likely go to Manny Parra or Dave Bush. Honestly, we'd rather see them admit the mistake that was the Suppan signing and send him to the bullpen and use both Parra and Bush as full-time starters, but the likelihood of a middle-market team like the Brewers admitting a sunk cost on an investment (however ill-advised) as expensive as Suppan is extremely slim. So they've got six nominal starters, but no one to be especially excited for.


Bullpen: The same is true of the bullpen. Trevor Hoffman continues to break his own all-time saves record with every game he closes out, but he's 43. And that, if you're unclear, is never, ever a good thing for a professional athlete. LaTroy Hawkins is the setup man here, which let's just move on before we start laughing too hard to finish this; Carlos Villanueva (whom we still feel should be a starter for a team with enormous rotation deficiencies viz the Brew Crew) is a potent arm in the 'pen, and you could do worse than Todd Coffey. But David Riske and Schott Schoeneweis are has-beens, and unless Claudio Vargas proves that 2009 wasn't a fluke, there are not a lot of reliable options here. 


Overall: This team can hit with the best of them, but the pitching is lacking save for a few (ok, very few) bright spots. Yovani Gallardo, Carlos Villanueva, Claudio Vargas, and maybe Randy Wolf are the only really reliable arms here, which won't be enough to compensate for the impressive lineup that the latter-day Harvey's Wallbangers will be trotting out. 


Predicted Record: 77-85, 4th place NL Central


Beer: Miller High Life. Yeah, it's cheap and not, like, a good beer. But when it's ice cold (like the early season in Milwaukee) then it's an enormously refreshing brew (which is key come the humid Milwaukee winters). Plus, y'know, Miller sponsors their park, so there's that. And all of that was a prelude to the fact that this franchise probably won't have the money to retain the wonderfully talented - but prohibitively expensive - core of Prince Fielder, Ryan Braun, and Yovani Gallardo. So...um...at least the beer is cheap!

Catching up on Pitching

So we were checking out Rotoworld and there happens to be a bit about Scott Kazmir's imminent trade.  Which, first of all, shocked us, because we had no idea this was actually in the works, let alone going to happen.  We wrote about this a bit earlier in the year; you can check it out here if you're so inclined.  But we'd like to append that post by saying that this is strange timing for the Rays.  According to the ever-so-fun www.coolstandings.com, they have just a 15% chance of making the playoffs, but according to Baseball Prosepctus' Hit List and their third-order winning percentage (which are part and parcel, really, but there you are) they should be much better than they are right now.  And there's enough of the season left to get on a hot streak and steal at least a Wild Card spot.  So the question we ask, then, is why?  Why trade him now?  We know Kazmir's been awful all year, but can't they at least stick him in the bullpen?  It's like what we said when Papelbon and Delcarmen were having issues with the idea of acquiring Billy Wagner; what team can't use an extra flame throwing arm in the bullpen, let alone when that arm is a left one? 

Anyway, we just don't like the idea of a team that's still in contention shipping off potentially valuable parts.  What we do like are the Twins getting involved with literally every person that's ever toed the rubber in their lives that has been put on waivers.  Ron Mahay, Brad Penny, Trevor Hoffman, John Smoltz before he was claimed....each of these has and more have been linked to the Twins in recent days.  And why not?  They're not far back, they have a 16.6% chance of making the playoffs, and their biggest weakness is pitching.  We love the fact that they're at least kicking the tires on every bit of available help they can find, regardless of how much help that player might be (we're looking at you, Mahay).  That's not to say that we're particularly hoping the Twins make the playoffs...we just like that their collective head is in the right place.  

The third piece of news we want to address here is that the Yankees have reportedly removed the "Joba rules"* which means that Joba Chamberlain will now be allowed to pitch every fifth day.  We have a couple of things to say about this...first and foremost being that the Joba rules were a stupid idea in the first place.  Why did they ever have it in their heads that the guy couldn't handle a starter's workload?  There's a difference between managing a young pitcher's innings and jerking him around from role to role; the guy was a starter at Nebraska, and dominated in the bullpen as potentially great starting pitchers should do.  One of those two things carries more weight, and it ain't the latter.

*We'd never heard this term used before, and we dislike it almost as much as the rules themselves.

Look, starting pitchers are more valuable than relievers.  And when you have a guy on your hands who can be a great starting pitcher...you use him.  You don't play games with his regimen, you don't tell him that he's going to be a setup man for a couple months and a starter the rest.  You let him develop a groove, let him get comfortable in the majors.  The Yankees never did that with Joba, and it's to his credit that he's survived the adversity.  

But this is why we have mixed feelings about the lifiting of the 'rules': Joba's been terrible lately.  Whether it's fatigue or just a rough patch or injury, we have no way of knowing, but, really, keeping him off the field has been the better course of action.  And now that he's been bad for a couple of starts, they decide it's a good time to lift the silly rules that were imposed upon him in the first place?  It's just weird timing is all.  And it's not like they need an extra boost to make the playoffs; they have a 6-game lead on the Sawx and a 98+% chance of making the playoffs in one form or another.  Maybe this will prove to be exactly what Joba needs; maybe he'll put it together once he goes out there every fifth day.  Or maybe there really is something wrong with him and the Yankees are upping his workload just in time to ruin him for the playoffs.  It's a big gamble they're making...and we're excited to see how it plays out.  Stretch run baseball...it's a beautiful thing.