‘This is fun, baseball is fun goddammit!’- Me trying to get excited to watch the Brewers over the course of the past three weeks.
Honestly though, this team is TOUGH to watch right now. World Series caliber starting pitching getting wasted night after night after night. This Brandon Woodruff pic says it all:
Woodruff and Burnes deserve better than this team right now. Woodruff’s ERA is 1.68 and he’s getting 1.58 run support behind him. After last night, the Brewers are 2-5 in Corbin Burnes starts. You know, Corbin Burnes? The guy doing things that haven’t been done since shortly after the Civil War? That guy? Yeah. They can barely win a game he pitches. Freddy Peralta has gotten more run support than most, but even he’s been robbed of a few wins while spinning gems on the mound.
Now let’s take a long view of baseball in general for a second: Offense is down across the league. Don’t get me wrong, the Brewers are just about the worst in the league in every major offensive category, but teams in general are having a really hard time scoring runs. As evidenced by ANOTHER no hitter last night. This one from Corey Kluber in Texas. That makes 6 no hitters already this year. The record for the most no hitters in a season since 1900 is 7. It is currently May 20th.
Now the reason for that I see as two-fold, with both folds connected to each other in some sort of symbiotic offensive funk quilt. #1) The baseball itself was juiced for the last 5-7 years. MLB won’t admit to that, but basically everyone in the game knew something was going on. Home run records were being broken every year. Routine can-of-corn pop fly’s were denting scoreboards. I think I saw a pitcher bunt a double to the gap in 2018. And I think baseball’s thinking behind that was exactly what it was when they turned a blind eye to steroids from 1998-2001: Home runs=big numbers=viewers. Not terrible logic.
But, after years and years of everyone hitting home runs, baseball decided to course correct a bit this year and deaden the baseball. If you’ve watched any amount of Brewer baseball this year, you’ve noticed it. Contact off of the bat that you expect to end up in the second deck almost always die on the warning track. I can’t tell you how many ‘warning track shots’ I’ve seen Brewer players hit, but it feels like roughly a million.
Which leads us to the 2nd fold: Over the course of the past 5-7 years of a juiced ball, players have been conditioned by that, and analytics, to swing for the fences every at bat. It’s a home run or strikeout league. Honestly, it’s amazing that former Brewer legend, Chris Carter, hasn’t come out of retirement. This is the era to hit .205 with 40 home runs. Rob Deer would be Bryce Harper if he played today.
But players aren’t conditioned anymore to play a more nuanced game. To move a runner over by hitting a ball to the right side of the infield. To bunt. To try and rip an opposite field single. They’ve been trained that all that matters is hitting as many solo home runs as possible.
The problem is that when the baseball isn’t flying like it’s in zero gravity, you end up with HORRIFIC offensive numbers across the league. You end up with 6 no-hitters in less than two months. You end up with the Brewers hitting .207 as a team, and the Mariners hitting .198. You would expect that over time, players and coaches will adjust, but we’re only 53-ish games into the season. It’s going to take some time.
All of that said, the Brewers need to either adjust their approach to a more ‘old-school’ game, or they need to figure out a way to get an extra 20 feet on their fly balls. Because right now, it’s tough to watch. When they fell behind 4-3 in the 7th inning last night, you knew it was over. No chance they would be able to score two more runs in order to win the game. Try envisioning this current offense putting an inning together where they string together 4-5 hits, none of them being home runs. It’s almost impossible. Yelich is back, but it’s going to take some time for him to get in a rhythm. Hiura has been raking at AAA since they sent him down, hopefully that translates when they call him back up. I said at the end of last year that those are the two most important bats to get going in 2021. Well Yelich has barely played and Hiura has been a non-factor so far. Getting those guys even close to 70% of what they were in 2019 would go a long way to getting this team back on track. It’s only May, they’re only a game under .500, but they have a ‘spiraling’ feel to them right now that they need to fix STAT.
PS: I’m never a ‘FIRE EVERYONE!’ guy, but I realize there are a ton of Brewer fans ready to move on from hitting coach, Andy Haines. Again, I’m not asking for that, but I do think I have found his replacement if they do decide to make a switch:
It’s not complicated.
Double PS: 16-10 in April, 5-12 in the month of May. Every since I saw this guy on Twitter and Facebook, things have gone tits up for our beloved Brewers.
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