Is it better to be lucky, or good? History has, time and again, proven this to be a trick question. The truth is, if you want to succeed in anything, you need to be both lucky and good. Building a championship baseball team is no exception. The 1994 Montreal Expos and 2001 Seattle Mariners might […]
Author: Colin Anderle
Meeting the Deadline
If Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports is to be believed, the Brewers could be the biggest sellers of the 2016 Trade Deadline. Teams are already beating a path to One Brewers’ Way, as Rosenthal reported earlier this month, and the list of players who could possibly find their way out of Milwaukee is long and […]
Freeing Wily
Approximately three months into the season it’s become quite clear: the 2016 Brewers are a different animal than last year’s team. For one thing, the second Wild Card spot is a distant–but not unrealistic–dream. The farm system, which lay barren for years, is flourishing with young impact talent. But perhaps the most notable change in […]
Junior Guerra Just Might Be For Real
To engineer a successful Major League franchise takes talent, there is no doubt about that. But like any avenue of life, you don’t reach the top unless you mix that talent with a generous heaping of good fortune. Sometimes, you take a chance, and that chance pays off far beyond what you could have ever […]
The TKO of Taylor Jungmann
On the whole, 2015 was a season largely devoid of bright spots on the field for the Milwaukee Brewers. But the lone exception to this nightmare was the brilliant debut of rookie pitcher Taylor Jungmann. Jungmann debuted last June, and upon his arrival in Milwaukee he proceeded to blow the lid off of everybody’s expectations: […]
The Post-Sabermetric Value of Aaron Hill
In the modern era, Major League Baseball abhors that which cannot be easily measured or quantified. The 2015 Kansas City Royals were a perfect example of that. PECOTA said they’d be a losing team. Fangraphs said they’d be a losing team. ESPN, well, you get the picture. Only, something funny happened: the Royals instead rolled […]
The 2016 Milwaukee Brewers Fantasy Team Preview
Relatively speaking, the PECOTA forecasting system likes the 2016 Brewers. While they are still projected to finish well short of the playoffs, a 78-84 final record would represent a ten-win improvement on the tire fire that was 2015. A lot of people are sleeping on the Brewers, or so the projections seem to think. But […]
I Don’t Know Who’s on Third For the Brewers
Last month, I broke down the first significant playing-time battle for the Brewers coming into Spring Training: center field. Today, we’re going to look at third base, a position the team threw to the wolves last year with the late-July trade of Aramis Ramirez. Down the stretch, playing time at the hot corner went to Hernan Perez and […]
Put Him In, Coach: Breaking Down the Spring Training Battle for Centerfield
Last week’s trade of Khris Davis to Oakland has sent a ripple effect through Milwaukee’s 2016 outfield depth chart, affecting everybody and every position. Davis was projected to serve as the team’s everyday leftfielder. One of the possible solutions is reportedly for Ryan Braun, who was moved from left field to right two years ago, […]
You Bet His Life: Setting Odds for Jonathan Lucroy’s New Employer
Jonathan Lucroy has kept the hot stove roaring into late January. First, Baseball Prospectus launched their new defensive catching metrics, and we were all reminded –despite his down 2015 — Lucroy has a long and deeply established track record as one of the best pitch framers of the modern era. Then, Lucroy had the audacity to […]