Five Reasons Behind the Brewers Recent Stumble

"Usually reliable Hunter Renfroe"?  He's terrible going back on balls, often covering for this weakness by simply letting balls go over his head and turning to play them off the wall.  One of the reasons the Red Sox were willing to part with him were the 12 errors he had for them last season.  Granted a lot of those were throwing errors, but he doesn't cover a lot of ground either. 

As for Adames, he's turned in to an all or nothing guy with the bat and has accuracy issues throwing.  I'm beginning to think Turang may indeed end up sticking at SS.

It wasn't just the loss of Hader, the new guys have been underwhelming so far.

But remember, this was a team that lost 8 in a row in early June and looked bad doing it with Hader.  Once that happened it was only a matter of time when a similar stretch would return.  They were bad going into the break as well.

I was never all that confident that they would hold off the Cardinals or play well enough to make the playoffs.  I'm less optimistic now.

I agree with Adames being excellent this year at defense. I would say #2 should be that the teams approach of relying so heavily on HR and encouraging swing for the moon batting is the  problem.  While Adames may be the poster-child for that approach, it is a team-wide issue.  I posted in another thread that given that the team has starting pitching where the top 3 are elite and the top 5 match up well with almost any other club (i.e Run prevention with better defense) and with a goal of keeping the score close/low that they should be more focused on situational hitting and getting runners in the "old way".  Instead they seem to think that solo HR are the route to go. I know that they are have been putting a high amount of capital into contact hitters in the draft, but at the MLB level they have stayed with the all or nothing approach.  Sure, the talent of the team may be that higher BA/contact isn't possible, but the current approach seems to be too hit or miss or miss or miss or miss or miss or miss.

#4 IMO is a huge part of it, particularly the walks. even the hit batters. Sunday for example, Burnes has two out w/two strikes on the hitter then hits him. No big deal, except that's followed by an 8-or-9 pitch AB & walk. So now you're facing two extra hitters. You could easily make the argument the HBP cost him (via pitch count) a full extra inning of work. Multiply that by several games, & it makes a huge difference not only in runs given up but in the BP workload, and in who you have to use & when. That stuff just filters down & affects the whole staff more than people realize.

Agree w/ the Adames comments. He seems to "get it" as far as his approach, then after a couple ABs backslides again. Whenever I hear one of the "most HRs by a shortstop in MLB" comments I want to throw something. It's the mentality of over-valuing something like that that I fear leaks into his consciousness & causes the wild inconsistencies.

As to #5, I think it's the players who need to move on. Hard as it may be to put behind you the feelings of confusion or disagreement with the trade, it's mandatory if you want to accomplish anything. It's (probably) already cost them a week of bad baseball. Reporters & (some) fans moving on, good luck with that. Sometimes you just gotta ignore stuff.

I agree that the recent slide is a true team effort involving failures from the starting pitchers, relief pitchers, defense, and hitting. 

I disagree with the statement that the offense has been great since the break. It was great in the first 8 games, scoring 55 runs (even with a shutout in the one loss) while going 7-1.
 

But in the next 7 games they scored just 28 runs against some of the worst run prevention teams in the league and lost 6 of those games. In all but one of those games the only runs came across on home runs. With the games generally being close, the inability to score without home runs has been costly. Four runs per game isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great, especially considering the pitchers they were facing. 
 

I also don’t agree that the effect of the Hader trade has been purely intangible. The Brewers strength for much of the season has been getting narrow leads and having Boxberger, Williams, and Hader bring them home. I even commented on a game thread a couple of weeks ago that I was concerned that the Brewers were relying too heavily on this pattern, and that they weren’t winning enough games by building leads big enough to not need saves from the back of the bullpen. 
 

The Hader trade shook up the roles in the bullpen by throwing the new pitchers into the mix and changing the roles of the incumbents. In 3 of the losses since the break, the pitchers were used differently than they were before the trade and games were lost in the late innings. Of course, we can’t say for sure that Hader’s presence would have made a difference. But, it might have 

Using Sunday’s game as an example, when Burnes could only go 6 innings because of inefficiency early in the game, the score was 1-1 after 6.  Before the trade, Counsell probably would have gone with Boxberger, Williams, and Hader, hoping to get 3 scoreless innings and scratch out a run somewhere in there to get the win. Without Hader he went with Bush and Rogers, who gave up the tie breaking run  (in part because Renfroe failed to make the play on what looked like a playable fly ball)  If Hader had been here they might have gotten the three scoreless innings and might have won in 9.

There were similar situations in the last two losses to the Pirates where runs surrendered by the bullpen affected the outcome.