Offensive questions marks

[igor67]

I had thought about doing some projections with the Brewers having just reached the halfway point, but instead I wanted to take a look at what I think are some bad trends in the offensive performance. Stat number one is positive especially after the power outage to start the season, we are 3rd in HRs for the NL. We are only 9th however in runs. Those two statistics should necessarily track completely together. However they should be somewhat close (I would argue a range between 1st to 5th in runs would be reasonable). Well why the difference? I good candidate seems to be batting average where we rank only 12th. This is only compounded by a paltry rank of 11th in walks. Leading to an overall 12th rank in OBP. Most other things like stolen bases and doubles we rank middle of the pack, so I don't see them as any kind of concern, I choose to look more at components then the slash stats, because looking at the individual players we have some just plain wacky stat lines. Our lead-off hitter at this point has only one offensive skill- taking walks or getting HBP. His OBP is so mediocre at this point it makes his SB ability completely irrelevant. Hardy has actually worked himself up from a slow start to have one of the most balanced lines on the team. He doesn't do anything particularly well, but doesn't do anything poorly. The concern starts to build because Braun hitting 3rd is great except he is completely allergic to walk. His batting average is high enough that he isn't an OBP sink, but if you are Prince hitting 4th and none of the 3 hitters before you in the line up has an OBP over .340, what are you supposed to drive in? And Prince is one of the few players who actually draws walks. His power is down, but overall he's got enough average, and good power to still be a force.

Moving onto Hart. A little appreciated fact is that Hart and Braun have the exact same number of walks 16. At this point they have very similar sorts of skills sets though Braun has way more power. It's not clear why Harts walk rate has dipped so much either, it was never huge, but he's generally been pretty close to the 1 BB/ 10 AB mark. At this point Branyan is doing everything when he's been in the lin-up, while Hall has unfortunately had such a weak performance in everything but HRs that it has not been pretty. Looking at the totals Cameron has also fallen prey to this batting average funk giving what would otherwise be very good secondary numbers a bad OBP. Finally there's Kendall who could legitimately merit some discussion of going higher in the order since he has maintained a solid batting average and shown continued ability to draw walks giving him the highest OBP for a regular not named Prince (3rd if you count Russell)!

I see largely that we've got two different problems. One that we've had a number of players who have had freakishly low batting averages (Cameron, Weeks, Hall) Of those there's reason to think all of their averages must go up, but one does have to wonder about Weeks. Hall one wonders what his level is as well at this point since his plate discipline has always been somewhat sketchy. The other serious issue is that the line-up as constructed has a dearth of players who take walks. This one is less obviously fixable without new players. In a couple of prominent cases (Braun and Hart) you wouldn't dream of getting someone else anyways.