The Milwaukee Brewers have issued a clear statement of intent over the past two months. With new general manager David Stearns and assistant general manager Matt Arnold, the organization has signaled the beginning of a new era in franchise history — one that will seemingly embrace new analytical and operational trends in professional baseball. Stearns […]
Tag: Editorials
Observations From A 2011 Brewers Commemorative DVD
While I was tidying up this weekend, I found a hidden gem in one of my many piles of random junk: The Next Step, the Milwaukee Brewers’ commemorative DVD for the 2011 season. It contains everything expected out of a commemorative DVD — awkward interviews, corny cliches, overly dramatic music, the whole thing — and […]
On Watching Alcides Escobar and Royals Devil Magic
This October, just like last October, watching Alcides Escobar play for the Royals has felt like a revelation. Escobar has been electric at the top of the order for the Royals in the American League Championship Series. He has led off each of the first two games with a hit for the Royals, and he […]
Feeling vs Thinking: Remaining Invested In A Rebuild
My baseball fandom has never been about wins and losses. I remember living and dying with every pitch down the stretch in 2008 or during the NLCS against the St. Louis Cardinals in 2011; however, those are obviously isolated incidents. The Milwaukee Brewers have only made the postseason twice in 33 years. If I regularly […]
Rolling Out The Barrel: Unwritten Rules Aren’t Just For Players
Good morning, and welcome to the final Rolling Out the Barrel of the 2015 regular season. Just one last series remains, as Milwaukee will close the books on a disastrous campaign with a three-game set against Chicago at a stadium that will almost assuredly earn the pejorative moniker of Wrigley Park North this weekend. We’ve […]
The Narrative Problem: Ryan Braun and PEDs
Countless articles have been written about performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and baseball. Users have been called cheaters, while the decline in offensive production across Major League Baseball has been tied to a perceived decline in PED usage. In Milwaukee, specifically, the poor performance by Ryan Braun in 2014 — a .266/.324/.453 slash line in 580 plate […]
Ryan Braun, The 2011 MVP, and The Vagaries Of The MVP
On November 22, 2011, Major League Baseball named Ryan Braun the National League’s Most Valuable Player. Braun became the fourth player to win the award in Brewers history and the first since Robin Yount earned it, back in 1989. In 2011, the Brewers’ right fielder finished with 20 of the 32 first-place votes, which accumulated him a total […]
The Blue Jays’ monster month and the 2011 Brewers
I am mesmerized by these Toronto Blue Jays. On July 28th, the Jays fell to 50-51 and eight games behind the Yankees in the American League East. After thumping Detroit 9-2 Sunday to complete a three-game sweep in which the scored an absurd 29 runs, the Jays are now 24-5 since dropping below .500. They […]
Contention & Building Through The Bullpen
The notion of market inefficiency flooded the baseball lexicon following the publication of Moneyball in 2003. It chronicled the unlikely success of the Oakland Athletics, a small-market team that built contending rosters through identifying gaps in market value. That is, the Athletics needed to uncover under-appreciated skill sets and construct a roster around them. The Athletics blazed a trail that […]
The 2006 Brewers and the Search for Hope
The Brewers have felt hopeless this season for the first time, at least to me, in a decade. Since the trading deadline in particular, with many of the club’s best players offloaded for prospects, contention has seemed stuck over the horizon, just out of reach. The major-league lineup isn’t competitive, and the next wave of […]