2013-06-30 Brewers (Lohse) at Pirates (Morton), 12:35 PM CDT [Brewers lose, 2-1, 14 innings]

[valpocrewsader]

Take that, Cardinals! Go Bucs. #ne1butcards

[trwi7]

At PNC Park, Pirate cheerleaders shoot hot dogs out of the t-shirt guns. Fans love it - girls told us to not eat them as they are nasty

 

 

"No footlongs."

[brewcrewdue80]

Disgusting stat of the day.

14ip by Pittsburgh pitchers. 143 pitches to complete. 0BBs by any of our 47PAs. Avgs out to 3.04pitches every PA.

13.1 IP by Brewers Pitchers. 234 pitches to complete. Exactly 47PAs by Pitt batters as well. 4.97pitches every PA.

 

Can that be attributed to a team who've given up and just hacking away at everything to just get it over with?

 

Was there potentially a record set in the fewest amount of pitches to cover 14IP in this game all-time? It's ridiculous 143 pitches to cover 14ip! 10pitches an inning!...every inning for 14 innings!

[brewmann04]

I hope the get that top 3 pick,but this team is just awful.

[brewmann04]

I hope the get that top 3 pick,but this team is just awful.

[hawing]

Take that, Cardinals! Go Bucs. #ne1butcards

Got that right. As much as I hate to see other fanbases happy at the Brewers' expense, Pittsburgh fans must be beside themselves with joy right now. Reminds me of when the Brewers swept STL in four games in 2008.

 

If you are ready for your big year, Pirates, take it all the way. No Cardinals.

[TooLiveBrew]

Man, Logan Schafer can play some outfield. The running catch and laser throw home a couple nights ago was stunning, and now a brilliant piece of thievery three feet above the fence.

The catch.

 

The boy can go get 'em out there.

 

Also, PLEASE tell me someone can make a .gif of the fan in the front row wearing a Bucs cap backwards & a light-blue shirt (right behind Schafer as he makes the catch) from 0:53-1:02 or so. Too funny.

[owbc]

This team has almost reached a 100-loss pace. Wow.

[TooLiveBrew]

This team has almost reached a 100-loss pace. Wow.

Yep. This past offseason, a lot of jokes were made about how bad the Astros are, & what a mess they are & 'good thing we're not run like the Astros' when the rebuild-or-not-rebuild discussions came up. Taking a look at the standings... not so funny now.

[Invader3K]

This team has almost reached a 100-loss pace. Wow.

Yep. This past offseason, a lot of jokes were made about how bad the Astros are, & what a mess they are & 'good thing we're not run like the Astros' when the rebuild-or-not-rebuild discussions came up. Taking a look at the standings... not so funny now.

 

Well, to be fair, this team has been much worse than expected. I think most of the "experts" before the season had this being pegged as at least a 75-ish win team. The pitching was much worse than expected at the start of the year, and injuries have really taken their toll. I'm not saying that absolved Melvin and Co. of blame, but I don't think anyone thought this franchise with be flirting with 100 losses this year.

[brewcrewdue80]

This team has almost reached a 100-loss pace. Wow.

Yep. This past offseason, a lot of jokes were made about how bad the Astros are, & what a mess they are & 'good thing we're not run like the Astros' when the rebuild-or-not-rebuild discussions came up. Taking a look at the standings... not so funny now.

 

Well, to be fair, this team has been much worse than expected. I think most of the "experts" before the season had this being pegged as at least a 75-ish win team. The pitching was much worse than expected at the start of the year, and injuries have really taken their toll. I'm not saying that absolved Melvin and Co. of blame, but I don't think anyone thought this franchise with be flirting with 100 losses this year.

 

Agreed. You take Hart/Gamel/Green from the lineup and insert Yuni and Alex Gonzalez and you have the makings of what is going on with this team.

Pitching injuries too. For a team of unheralded young guys to watch all of them go down in some way or form doesn't help. We've had #1,#2, And #3 almost the entire season. Yet have used 11 different starters. So that's 8 different starters at #4/5 combined having to go through. Braun injured doesn't help. On a team projected to win 75games with all the pieces healthy taking a 3WAR player like Hart and replacing him with -3 or More WAR type is 6 wins right there.

Taking you 3 best hitters to begin the season:Hart(all season), ARam(all season long nagging) and Braun(majority season long nagging injury): away from their expected production in your lineup is never going to result in a good thing.

 

How would the Cardinals be doing if Carlos Beltran,Matt Holiday, and Yadier Molina were struck with the same injuries. One out for season, two with nagging injuries and DL stints?

How would the Pirates be doing if Andrew McCutchen,Starling Marte, and Pedro Alvarez were struck with the same injuries.

Cinncinatti? with Votto, Choo, and Bruce?

 

This season sucks but should understandbly so. Already knew going in to this season that as constructed before signing Lohse this was a team that win 65 games or 90games. Being healthy. We're not, and the young pitching wild card in that equation have performed to the 65game expectations.

 

Like I said somewhere else, as a Brewerfan, I can look at this as being the best case scenario for the team. To get a top 5 draft pick on a team that should have fallen in to a 10-17th selection based on expectations. To force the team to sell and finally trade away pieces a smarter GM would have done last season or years prior rather than keep for the next season because they may win enough games to contend.

Tomorrow opens the International Signing period. MLB tiered the pool based on reverse order of finish so Milwaukee has the 17th most money to spend(barring trading away pool money) Hopefully that helps by signing an impact Latin Player or two that otherwise they never would have been in the market for.

It's like this season as bad as it's going, allows the dumbest of GMs to fix the organization while blindly trying, and Melvin I hope isn't the dumbest of GMs in my scenario.

[brewmann04]

I hope they add a Latin Position player. But right now no reason to want this team to get to 500 and blow a top 5 Pick in the 2014 draft.

[TooLiveBrew]

This team has almost reached a 100-loss pace. Wow.

Yep. This past offseason, a lot of jokes were made about how bad the Astros are, & what a mess they are & 'good thing we're not run like the Astros' when the rebuild-or-not-rebuild discussions came up. Taking a look at the standings... not so funny now.

 

Well, to be fair, this team has been much worse than expected. I think most of the "experts" before the season had this being pegged as at least a 75-ish win team. The pitching was much worse than expected at the start of the year, and injuries have really taken their toll. I'm not saying that absolved Melvin and Co. of blame, but I don't think anyone thought this franchise with be flirting with 100 losses this year.

They've been worse than expected, but not that much worse than expected imo. I think 75 wins is a fair statement of about what I was expecting. And once you're a team that's not talented enough to project to be better than .500, I think it doesn't take a whole lot to slip from a win total in the 70s to one in the 60s (aka 100-ish-loss pace).

 

As to brewcrewdue's argument about losing your best players, well yeah. But it's overstating things to say the team has been without Braun for the majority of the season -- he's produced at a fairly normal clip for him, & is currently 7th on the team in PAs. I mean, for the flip side of the 'what if?' angle, what if the Cardinals had a couple players break out in major ways offensively like Gomez & Segura? It's too convenient to take the things that have gone wrong for the Brewers & just dismiss them because 'what if?'

 

The only point I was trying to make is that it was really easy to laugh about how poorly-run one of the expected cellar dwellers was coming into the season. But the problem this year (as always) isn't about the offense. It's about a complete lack of pitching depth up & down the organization, and that's how you wind up fighting to get out of the cellar. The Brewers could rebound next season & have good fortune with regards to positional player health, but if they still don't have the pitching, the upside again will be 75-80 wins... and being stuck in no-man's land as an organization.

 

I agree the silver lining here is the shot at a top-5 draft pick, and frankly a forced rebuild (if that's how this season winds up playing out) would be a welcome change as far as I'm concerned. The problem I still would have is that it took a worst-case scenario to wake up the organization to just how thin the talent is beyond the core players. So great, maybe they rebuild/re-tool as they should have been planning to do all along, but if that wasn't the gameplan in the first place, then has the problem really been solved?