Baseball fans of every team ever are likely to start panicking in situations like this. They had a rough week! Every team has them. But their response, however irrational, is a human response. That’s life, as you say. Why do you ridicule them for it? Commenting on job situations, suggesting they be disciplined? That’s just bizarre man!

You showed be the trends. The offense has regressed this month. The pitching has too. These are significant problems! Contending teams peak in the second half (see: 2011, Milwaukee) A mediocre July of 7-9, while not dreadful, is not going to get it done. As you say, we may see worse baseball yet!

89 wins is not going to get it done either. And you do not state that while they have a sizeable chance of exceeding it, they have a 60.2% chance of finishing between 83 and 88 wins as presented by your chart! Enough for a wild card in today’s MLB, but not something I’m satisfied with. And I doubt the team would be either! An entire season coming down to one game, which is hardly the postseason, isn’t a great outcome.

“Sorry about that. Those are the facts.” This is something Colbert might have said ca. 201! I see your statistics, and my interpretation differs from yours. I don’t like this forceful tone you use. For one, I see a team that over-performed underlying stats until late May, and a team that has undergone a correction since as their underlying numbers have suggested a better record. Seems like we should be neutral. Neither optimistic nor pessimistic.

But you’re jamming optimism down our throats here! This team is better than I expected, but I still stand by the prediction of a wild card team at best. I’d love to be wrong, but I am a realist. I am not writing the team off. But I am not blindly optimistic and I do feel this past series was a microcosm of much larger issues the team has which are evident in their run differential and

I don’t need to say anything with you, thanks! I’ll keep saying this: the Brewers are a good team, but must correct a lot in order to win the division, and make a deep playoff run. That’s a perfectly moderate response which won’t cause great arguments like your forceful cheeriness. It is both well-reasoned and borne out in numbers you present above.

Your ideas to correct things are ones I agree with though: Burnes and Woody into the rotation plus Arcia back in the majors over the sea-change (Machado, DeGrom) moves. Those plus less sexy upgrades (Eovaldi, bullpen arms Yates or perhaps Familia, reliable offensive help at 2B and C) would make me agree with your assessment of “very good”. I’ll just stick with good for now.