Article: Forum Friday: Guest Edition! Where'd that early-season offense go?

[DuWayne Steurer]

Welcome Brewer Fanatics to a guest addition of Forum Friday. I'm happy to fill in for Chris this week and recap the week for the Brewers faithful, and faithful we must be, after the week the Brewers have been through. But with Adames and Renfroe back from IL, and Narvaez coming back soon, maybe the Brewers luck will turn around soon.

As the Brewers round the one-third stretch of the season, hanging on by a thread to their one-half game lead in the NL Central division, the busiest topic of discussion this week is undoubtedly the Brewers offense. With so many key pieces of the Brewers hitting corps sidelined for various reasons, the Brewers have struggled to put up runs. With Renfroe back and Adames finally returned, there's reason to be optimistic, and Narvaez should also return from the Covid-19 reserved list soon.  As @nate82 pointed out in the offense thread, the Brewers key bats have outperformed most of the high-dollar free agents that were signed this off-season, aside from perhaps Trevor Story. However, there's not much debate in Brewer land that Andrew McCutchen shouldn't be playing every day and hitting cleanup, and a look in at any game thread the last week will show you that there's almost a clear consensus that the Brewer Fanatic faithful all roundly agree that McCutchen should be sitting versus righties and hitting deeper in the order. 

As contributor @monty57 points out, some trade targets that could be available, and have been discussed both in the "offense" thread and the trade forum, are Andrew Benintendi, Josh Bell, and Trey Mancini. (Shameless plug for Tim Muma's Trey Mancini article here). As the summer wears on and the trade deadline nears, trade talk will definitely heat up on the forum and potential targets will be tossed around. 

With a lot of the forty man roster banged up, a lot of the forum chatter has been devoted to keeping up to date on player movement and injury updates. @BruisedCrewdropped a tweet from Adam McCalvy today with an update on injured starter Brandon Woodruff, who has been surprisingly, ably replaced for a pair of starts by Jason Alexander. If Woodruff is to be out for any period of time, hopefully Alexander can continue his run of success. 

Over in the minor league forum, the Dominican Summer League and Arizona Rookie League started on Monday. @damuelle has a thread with all the news, roster moves, and more to keep us up to date with what's going on there. A couple of great posts from @Smichaelis9 and @CheeseheadInQC that provided some great scouting reports on some of the fresh new faces we'll see and hear about down on the farm.  Thanks posters!

And if you haven't heard yet, Jackson Chourio is putting up PlayStation numbers down in Carolina, giving us another week of talking about how he may be the next "Soto, Vlad Jr., Acuna", in the words of @Brewcrew82 (among others!) He's quickly made the leap up Baseball America's Top 100, and along with Joey Wiemer, Brice Turang, and Sal Frelick, the Brewers now sport four players in BA's top 100.  Thanks to contributors like @Mass Haas and @Julio Muchacho who put a lot of time and effort into putting together a lot of quality minor league reading. It's appreciated. 

We're at the one-third point of the season, and despite the recent setbacks, the Brewers are still in first place, heading to Washington to take on the Nats for three games.  As @RoCoBrewfan (that's me) said in a game thread just a few days ago, "any day with baseball is a happy day". We're all Brewer fans here. Except that one guy. He's a Cardinal fan, but we let him post here because he seems like an alright guy. Thanks for reading. Go Brew Crew. 

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