The Weekly Dispatch: No Lie Better Told Than the Truth

The Weekly Dispatch is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others.

The response from many in the Brewers' fourth estate has been deployed before, and amounts to a series of baseball cliches. 'It's a long season,' 'Every team slumps from time to time,' 'Baseball is a difficult game,' even 'You can't win 'em all.'  These are all factual, if not platitudinous statements which provide cold comfort to a suffering interested public.

It is absolutely accurate that baseball teams 1) have an excruciatingly-long season, 2) go through rough stretches of play, 3) participate in one of the most difficult games ever devised and that, as of publication, 4) no team has ever gone 162-0. But these facts simply do not fit the situation, like Tom Callahan putting on a sportcoat.

The Milwaukee Brewers are a team on fire, and this is not fine.

As the week lurched on, I wondered when manager Craig Counsell would get himself kicked out of a contest, and it happened in about as perfunctory a manner as possible in Friday night's playing both down and dead to the woeful Washington Nationals. Granted, anyone's managerial ire will be prompted by the joint umpirical incompetence of home plate officiant Ramon De Jesus and crew chief Alfonso Marquez, but this was a team sliding out of first place, with a manager on the cusp of meeting Phil Garner's club record for wins for a week, a lineup that had been shut out three times in six games and, on more than one occasion in the last month, pulled some Mike McCarthy classic 'make the score look closer than the game really was' efforts.

Was this swoon really all that surprising? Well, no: they've been blown out more than they've been the ones doing the blowing out, they've been especially pinched by the Manfred Man and do not hold a winning record against a team we can reasonably expect to be playing meaningful baseball in October. (The teams against which the Brewers have a winning record: the Baltimore Orioles, Cincinnati Reds, Miami Marlins and Pittsburgh Pirates. They are .500 against the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals and, after Friday night's debacle, the Nationals.)

This was also a Brewers club that entered the season with nearly the same roster makeup as the one dismissed by the Atlanta Braves last fall. The Brewers' bet was contingent on two things: One, a razor-thin margin of error; the Brewers needed an all-time collective performance from its pitching staff to overcome its deficiencies at the plate and win the NL Central in '21. The Brewers would not only need it a second time, but they'd also need the pitching to hold up both in effectiveness and against injury. That has not happened for obvious reasons, and may have been a bridge too far in the first place.

The Brewers also, secondly, needed franchise player Christian Yelich to return to something resembling his MVP form and better approaches up and down the lineup. They added Andrew McCutchen and Hunter Renfroe to provide protection against left-handed pitching and added pop, respectively. How is that working out?

2021 slash (pitchers excluded): .233/.317/.396, OPS+ 96
2022: .230/.306/.393, OPS+ 95

Andy Haines was, in fact, a scapegoat. Hitting coaches are only as effective as they are allowed to be, and it has been strongly suggested on background to this writer that the issue with offensive performance is flawed at the higher levels of Brewers baseball operations. (Yes, even bloggers can have sources.) 

Fool me once, and so on.

Back to the heart of the matter: fact-truth and losing streaks. Yes, every team struggles in the course of a season. There are chapters every year that are painful to write, and more painful to read. There isn't a club in Major League Baseball that doesn't have bad body language, look lifeless or otherwise just have a series of Job-grade bad breaks. 

The Milwaukee Brewers have had 24 losing streaks of at least seven games in the last 30 years. Every team struggles, but not every team does this. Yes, it is true that this happened in 2011 and 2018 en route to division championships, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Final records for those clubs in the current stadium era, excluding the outliers:  

2015: 68-94
2014: 82-80
2012: 83-79
2010: 77-85
2006: 75-87
2005: 81-81
2004: 67-94
2002: 56-106
2001: 68-94

There are some really, really bad teams here. There are also some interesting notes to correlate:

2002: Davey Lopes is fired and replaced by Jerry Royster.
2005: Rich Dauer and Rich Donnelly leave the Brewers coaching staff after the season.
2006: Robin Yount and Butch Wyneger leave the Brewers coaching staff after the season.
2010: Ken Macha, Willie Randolph and Rick Peterson leave the Brewers after the season.
2015: After an offseason organizational review in which Johnny Narron and Garth Iorg are dismissed, Ron Roenicke inexplicably survives and is fired about a month into the season. Craig Counsell takes over.

Even after those division championship seasons, there were changes: Dale Sveum left after 2011 (presumably because he didn't get the job when Macha was fired) and Darnell Coles departed after 2018 (so, too, did Derek Johnson, but he left for the Reds courtesy a contractual loophole, not anything to do with performance.)

If history is any indicator, Craig Counsell pulling a Norman Dale Friday night is a tacit concession that this clubhouse and organization are in need of a shake-up. It didn't take an eight-game stretch for David Stearns and Matt Arnold to go get Willy Adames in 2021, but going and getting a player two years in a row serves to lay bare what is only thinly-veiled now: the Brewers are leaking oil, and fans are not unjustified in not showing up to home games (15th in MLB in 2022, lagging behind top-10 attendance paces set since 2017; you can't blame the schedule, three other clubs have drawn more in 27 home games) and wondering aloud if things shouldn't change.

In most other seasons and under most circumstances, I'd come down hard on the 'FIRE SO-AND-SO' crowd. The law firm of Timmons and Dawson hasn't had enough time -- or perhaps license -- to do what they can do transform the offense. Chris Hook is not to blame for the injuries to the pitching staff. The starting rotation hasn't been an outright liability, they were merely asked to do the historical for a second consecutive season.

Mark Attanasio was too new and trusting an owner to pull the trigger on Doug Melvin until it was about four to six (or more!) seasons too late. Craig Counsell probably should have a few manager of the year awards and is everything one could ask for in a homegrown success story, but the reality of the matter is that, as the tenured manager in the National League with zero pennants to show for it, it's not unfair to ask if he may have lost the clubhouse in the wake of several relative successes.

The coaches have changed, but the principal actors are all the same: Counsell, Arnold, Stearns, Tod Johnson, Tom Flanagan. It's not unfair to ask, based on overall performance since the gang got together in 2017, if this is the leadership team that can get the Brewers from being more than their 2020s cover band of the 2000s Oakland Athletics. Not all experts are sages.

Further, it's not unfair for fans -- the ones who turn the stiles, pay bloated parking prices and even-more-bloated prices for concessions and Fanatics' and FOCO's poorly-manufactured, zero-quality-control Brewers swag -- to be vocal about expecting more from their investment, especially when the stadium has a roof so that those who travel to Milwaukee for games while paying about $5/gallon to get there. Put a dysfunctional or otherwise underperforming product on the field, and you won't get people from West Allis to show up. Why should anyone from Wausau?

What is unfair is to deride critics as hitting the panic button, to deflect or attempt to disarm criticism by talking about season length or otherwise paltering by way of factual, but glib statements. Not all the critics are irrational. If losing doesn't force reevaluation, or prompt those who can to press for answers and insights, then we're all no more than wrestling marks. The difference is that we don't have an equivalent domestic alternative to MLB in the way that WWE has AEW. (Can you imagine Vince McMahon's product with Bob Manfred's antitrust exemption?)

The fact is that this Brewers club is not in good shape right now. The Brewers front office made a bad bet, overvalued its roster and after five years together, the key stakeholders in baseball operations should be held to higher expectations than merely showing up for October baseball. 

The fact is also that this team will not be this bad for the next three months. But history suggests that, with this kind of slide, there may and should be some significant changes coming to the organization. Facts can no longer hide the truth. What's more, they shouldn't.