New Manager, Same Lousy Concept

I am absolutely baffled by the Milwaukee Brewers. Last year they made a drastic move by firing manager Ned Yost with a few games left in the season. The move seemed to be simply to shake up the team, but later on we found out that ownership had some concerns about coaching decisions which I completely agreed with. I felt that Yost just let his hitters swing for the fences and never tried to manufacture runs. I felt that he did not work on defense enough with young players. I felt that he tried to ride pitchers for too long and didn’t analyze matchups carefully enough.

Now here we are with a new manager and well into the next season. And absolutely nothing has changed. This team still swings for the fences. They are near the top of the league in strikeouts and fly ball outs. They never bunt. They never steal bases. They never hit and run. This results in long offensive droughts where this team really struggles to score and win games.

Now I understand that power is a strength of this team and that you don’t want to run your way out of big innings because you end up hitting solo home runs because your guy got thrown out trying to steal second, but just hold up a second here. How many home runs do Craig Council and Jason Kendall hit. If you have a guy on first when these guys come up, why not try to move that runner up? And bat one of your faster guys like Corey Hart one spot before them in the lineup to set up that situation more often.

Defense continues to be an issue. And we seem to be content with our current pitching situation which in my opinion has already peaked. If we are going to rely on Suppan, Bush and Looper to be our 2-3-4 guys in a pennant race, we might as well do our usual Brewer salute to the better teams in our division and wish them well as we fall back into our usual position with the Pirates.