It’s been a rough week or so for Brewers ace Yovani Gallardo, getting held up in a parking lot last week, but FanGraphs has given the future of the Crew’s pitching staff some well deserved dap for his outstanding performances, which I’ve been trumpting all year long.

Check it out, it’s a good read.

For FanSided’s August collaborative post, the question put to us was who should be a September call-up for your team?

Fortunately for us, FanSided’s wonderful Wally Fish not only posts my response, but makes a counterpoint as well.

Check it out, its an interesting read, particularly for fans of the Crew.

The Brewers had an opportunity Sunday to wrap up a sweep on a Division Leader and playoff-bound squad, in the form of the Padres, but fell short, losing 7-3 on Sunday.

As the Journal-Sentinel states in this almost laughably morose and pessimistic gamer, Manny Parra struggled again through a rough start, as the top five of San Diego’s order did all the damage, driving in seven runs over Parra’s 6-innings, including gopher balls by Adrian Gonzalez and Chase Headley.

For the Brewers part three innings of shutout ball from the bullpen were a welcome sight, at least and Ryan Braun’s three RBI, including a home run were also a highlight.

And honestly, for all of Sunday’s frustrations, the weekend had to be considered a big plus, with some positive outings from recently acquired Chris Dickerson, and an outstanding outing from Mike McClendon on Saturday, giving hope for this bullpen’s future.

The Brewers missed the deadline to sign their first round pick from this year’s draft, as Dylan Covey was not inked to a contract.

While this would normally be a time for groans and exasperated sighs, it really has to be the most unique signing story of this season, as this article expands upon.

Long-story short, during their diligence of Covey, the Brewers discovered that their young righty-hurler was suffering for Type-1 Diabetes, something that caught the family by total surprise.

As a result of that revelation, the Covey’s — not Milwaukee — decided it would better for Dylan to begin his treated life for the ailment closer to home.

Covey’s father echoed that. “They still wanted him,” he said. “They expressed that. But they knew they were going to have to do some special things for Dylan.”

This is an unfortunate situation for all involved, from the stance that this is some tough news to find out unexpectedly.

Still, the Brewers will be awarded an additional compensatory first-rounder next year, and of-c0urse, will still have the opportunity to draft Covey in the future. So this story could very well still be in the opening chapters yet.

The deadline for draft picks to sign is today (Monday), and Dylan Covey is still un-nked for Milwaukee.

The Journal Sentinel sounds less than optimistic that a deal gets done, but we’ll update this as more news comes.

Web hosting can be a hassle. There’s no way to precisely project incoming traffic, for starters. Also, if your server gets rocked by an influx of traffic or is for some reason experiencing technical difficulties, you want someone you can get in touch with no matter the time of day. Easier said than done, because even in the age of cell phones, texting, Twitter and Facebook, it can be hard to track down family and friends, let alone the help at your hosting company. Fortunately, we here at FanSided haven’t had those problems since we started working with exclusively with the good folks at Site 5. In fact, we were almost growing faster than we could keep up with and experiencing some server issues as a result — until they stepped in. Nowadays, we never have any significant issues with our server at all and the Site 5 team offers us fantastic support essentially 24/7/365. They are definitely an All-Star hosting company that will keep your site in the game. Site 5 has the FanSided Network stamp of approval and is our exclusive hosting company.

Disclaimer: Site5.com is a FanSided partner and paying sponsor of the FanSided Network.This post is one of a series of sponsor endorsed posts relating to Site5.com hosting.

The Brewers have been playing a little bit better ball this past week or so, only getting one disastrous start from the rotation — in Manny Parra’s meltdown in the Cubs revenge game for Tuesday’s blowout — and getting the better end of a few close matchups.

That was the case again this weekend against the Astros, as the Brewers got their worst start of the series from Yovani Gallardo — if that were the case more often, they would be in a much better position this season — and won a pair of close games with timely hits, winning 6-5 on Friday, 5-2 Saturday and 11-6 on Sunday.

This winning baseball thing is pretty easy, huh??

Let me restate that I will be using some advanced statistics pretty regularly in this blog, and one of the most useful for recapping what happened (not what WILL happen) is WPA, or Win Probability Added. Here is a link to a FanGraphs post that gives a brief rundown of what it is and has links to much more material.

Top Shelf (Star of the Series): Prince Fielder, .824 WPA, 4-for-11, 1 2B, 3 Runs, 5 RBI

This was an easy one, as Fielder was positive in all three games, and had the game-winner on Friday night.

Fielder’s two-run single to give the Crew a 6-5 win — on the heels of Joe Inglett’s surprising 2-run homer to cut the deficit to one-run — was worth .659 WPA and was the series’ most important play by a large margin.

Prince had three walks to go along with his four hits on the weekend, and while he only had one extra-base hit, this goes to show that context is important, as his single with one out in the 9th was the difference.

On the Rail (Schmoe of the Series): None

If this were to go to anyone, it’d probably have to be Gallardo, who coughed up four runs on eight hits over six innings with seven strikeouts and one walk. Hardly a mess, just not his best start of the season by any means, and it contextually was the worst performance of the series by a Brewers player.

Seeing as how the team won all three games, including his start with a fair amount of ease, it would be unjust to simply name him the LVP and as such, we’ll just declare the entire weekend a total success for the Crew, which it WAS, without question.

There is no day off for the Brewers today, as the lowly D-Backs hit Milwaukee, allowing the good fans of the Brew City the opportunity to see (for the only time this season) a bullpen that is markedly worse than their own.

Just to give you an idea to this point in the season, the Brewers bullpen ERA of 5.23 is a the 2nd-highest in the majors, but is a bit unfortunate, as their FIP of 4.07 is merely average. I’ll have to do a post on this subject this week… but anyway, for those of you that would refuse to call the ‘Pen anything other than dreadful, let’s just say that the D-Back’s reliever ERA of 6.45 is well over a run higher than the Brewers, and the FIP of 5.33 is two-thirds of a run higher than the next worst team (Boston).

So, even though Chad Qualls is gone, soak up the ‘Zona pen. It should have you feeling better about LaTroy Hawkins, Trevor Hoffman and Co.

Sláinte!

FanGraphs’ R.J. Anderson has posted this story pertaining to the surprising value of Crew benchman Joe Inglett.
While I can’t say I agree, really (the sample size is just WAY to small to make any kind of definitive statement about Inglett’s true value, as he has just one year of even 300 PAs, and has just 821 career PAs) the general tone of the article is hard to argue.
At the very least, Inglett is average and plays a bunch of positions. Those guys are always valuable.
Anyway, thought I’d pass it on.

As promised, here are my thoughts on what the Brewers accomplished over the trade deadline, which, of course, was nothing.
Now, I don’t want to say that the Brewers really screwed up this deadline. I just want to say that it appears as if they might have.
Here’s a quote from Brewers assistant GM Gord Ash:

“There were deals to make if you just wanted to make one,” Ash added. “But we didn’t feel like they would help the ballclub now or in the future. You still have the waiver transactions that may come into play. It’s hard to forecast that.”

Continue reading this post »

In stark contrast to last night’s laugher, the Milwaukee Brewers found themselves in a tight matchup Tuesday, having to hold off the Cubs for a 4-3 victory.
I have to admit, when the game was over and I first went and checked out the FanGraphs’ win probability chart from this game, I thought it was for another game, because for a 4-3 game, it appeared as if the game was lacking both game-altering plays and any real drama.
Here’s the chart, so you can see what I mean:

An unusual chart for a 4-3 game.

If the game were a particularly entertaining one, you’d expect to see most of the chart resembling the first three innings, and a closer look at the chart shows that for the 4-3 final line, there really just were not very many big moments. Things got pretty hairy in the Cubs half of the 8th and 9th, but really, that only amounted to one brief moment following Marlon Byrd’s single in the 8th inning, where the Cubs had  a win expectancy above 25 percent.

It’s probably also worth noting that of the games five biggest WPA changing plays, only one belonged to a Brewer. Peculiar, since Milwaukee was the winning team.

I don’t have any grand thoughts on this, or see it as illustrating some great principle. No, I just find it curious. Here is the Mets-Braves graph from last night, which is what you’d expect to see in a tight game:

THIS is what a 1-run game WPA graph should look like

Anyway, to discuss the actual events of the game, the most notable performance has the outstanding work of one Chris Narveson, who in 5.2 innings gave up just six hits, one walk and one run, while striking out six. At this point, any successful outing by a Brewers pitcher not named Yovani Gallardo is headline worthy, so we’ll have to give recognition to Kameron Loe as well, in his four outs relieving Zach Braddock and Todd Coffey over the last out of the seventh and a more disquieting, but successful eighth inning.
Prince Fielder’s RBI single in the third inning was top Brewers play by WPA, worth .134, which essentially was his final WPA output, and the only notable number on the Crew, unless you count Jim Edmonds soft -.122, which was well earned, as Edmonds couldn’t manage a hit in any of the three RISP situations he faced during the game.
Anyway, a good pitching game from a starter and the prospects of a sweep in Chicago have to have Brewer fans excited a bit for today’s contest. While Manny Parra hardly inspires psalms about his greatness, I teased yesterday that Narveson was a longshot to keep the momentum, so I’ll just say that he faces a tough opponent in Ryan Dempster.
Slainte!