Milwaukee is struggling to break through
When the year began, I and many other
more qualified baseball scribes pegged
the Brewers to make a leap forward
from their push to .500 at last season’s
end. They finished with a strong September,
and the core of the team was
young and poised to show even more
improvement. However, early August
finds Milwaukee’s best very much where
they were a year ago – still hovering
around .500, and still struggling to take
that next step forward.
This is not the case of a team that
has taken large risks, and seen them
not pay off, such as Washington trading
for Alfonso Soriano in the offseason.
The highest risk addition the Brewers
have made has been the addition of a
fifth type of meat – Mexican Chorizo – to
the daily sausage race at Miller Park.
Perhaps in a symbol of the team’s arrested
progress, even this lowest of lowstakes
move has apparently been
curtailed for now by baseball’s mascot
police. (Believe me if you don’t, but this
is a top story in the Milwaukee Journal-
Sentinel’s sports section.)
Nor is this the case of a team seeing
several top performers decline with age, such as the Giants and their 120-year-old
outfield. Injuries, on the other hand, have
played a factor – Brewers ace Ben Sheets has lost significant time to injury,
and it has hurt the pitching staff’s
performance, but they are only six games
behind where they were a year ago,
which pales in comparison with the Cubs’
run of injuries and their 10-game decline
in the standings.
This is simply a team that has is
showing the kind of growing pains that
are common with a team dependent on a
young talent core. However, with Sheets
and fellow starting pitcher Tomo Okha
back from the disabled list, and the Cardinals’
7.5 game division lead over the
third-place Brew Crew looking shakier
than ever, it’s tough to count out another
late-season push from this team.
A Tale of Two Cities
Perhaps the most interesting contrast
for this year’s Brewers is the team closest
to them in the standings, the Houston Astros. The Astros’ season has been
beset by drama involving tens of millions
of dollars and some of the biggest names
in Texas baseball, while the buzz around
the Brewers has been limited to the
progress of Prince Fielder, the departure
of Carlos Lee, and the aforementioned
Running of the Chorizo. And yet, the two
teams are separated by a mere half
game in the NL Central.
In Houston, Jeff Bagwell’s attempted
comeback and eventual retirement in the
Spring started out as a one- or two-hanky
story, the tearful farewell to the city’s
best-ever first baseman, but has spiraled
into a potential financial nightmare for the
team, which may lose out on an insurance
policy covering most of the salary
still owed to the big man, simply because
he tried the comeback in the first place
rather than admit the career-ending
nature of his shoulder deterioration. I’d try
to explain the specifics, but I don’t speak
the morbid language of the Insurance
industry, which even today is adjusting its
actuarial tables on me based on how
many keystrokes a typical self-employed,
right-handed, thirty-three year old man
can make before making a carpal tunnel
claim on his health insurance.
Meanwhile in Milwaukee, the young son of rotund Cecil Fielder is enjoying a
strong, well-rounded season with 20
HR bolstering a solid .287 average,
and he’s showing marked improvement
in both plate discipline and consistent
power. Pretty fine for an age-22
season. However, his progress has
been upstaged by the astounding leap
forward taken by St. Louis native Ryan Howard, who leads the NL with 36
homers, relegating Fielder to a
substrata of baseball buzz.
In Houston, ESPN was given fodder
for two months of broadcasts by the
mid-season signing of Roger Clemens
to the rotation, paying him roughly the
gross domestic product of a small thirdworld
country for his half-summer of
work. The story took on such a life and
spread so far that Clemens briefly
considered declaring himself a sovereign
nation and petitioning to join the
U.N., before reconsidering. The
Clemens reports continue on the
sports-babble networks, as he has
joined the major league team and has
pitched well, but the Astros have won
only two of his eight starts, sending him
to four unlikely losses, already matching
his entire 2004 total with the team.
The untold story here continues to be
his declining innings count – Clemens
is averaging under six innings per start,
leaving Brad Lidge and the embattled
Houston bullpen with too much ground
to cover effectively.
Meanwhile in Milwaukee, Ben
Sheets has returned from a two-month
layoff on the disabled list and immediately
threw two sparkling games –
seven and eight innings on 94 and 101
pitches, respectively – leading to two
Brewer wins. Outside of cheese country,
though, Sheets’ return has made
fewer ripples than a Chinese Olympic
high diver.
And when it came down to the July trading deadline, Houston made out as
buyers, acquiring Aubrey Huff from the
Devil Rays and inquiring about many
other players. The Brewers, by
contrast, seemed to play the middle of
the market, making one big “sell” of the
team’s leading slugger, Carlos Lee,
that will color the general perception of
the team’s prospects. However, GM
Doug Melvin got back two very useful
major league players from the Texas Rangers – young run-producing
outfielder Kevin Mench and reliever
Francisco Cordero, who have already
both contributed to a series winninggame
over the Cincinnati Reds.
Cordero in particular is positioned to
have an immediate impact as the
Brewers’ new closer, replacing the
suddenly erratic Derrick Turnbow.
Unlike the Phillies’ salary dump of
Bobby Abreu to the Yankees, the
Brewers got back players of value and
addressed immediate needs with the
trade of Lee, who was having a career
year in his contract year.
Looking to the Long Term
New owner Mark Attanasio made
two strong moves early by upping the
team’s payroll and committing longterm
to Sheets and slugging outfielder
Geoff Jenkins. This has stabilized the
team, and helped bring fans back to
the ballpark, as attendance has been
up every year of Attanasio’s ownership,
and shown an increase of nearly 8,000
fans per game from a low point in
2003.
However, many of the trends that
last year’s Brewers displayed are still
with them. Team defense, hardly a
point of pride last year, is still a big
problem as the Brewers are near the
bottom of the majors in errors committed
and unearned runs allowed. Another
bugaboo has been their scuffling
play on road trips. Last year’s team
played 11 games under .500 in away
games, and this year’s team has already hit a lower point, with a 19-34
record away from Miller Park.
By comparison, the Cardinals are a
more road-hardy team than the Brewers
this year, with an even 27-27
record. But this, for St. Louis, represents
a huge step back from our dominant
teams of 2004 and 2005 - last
year’s sterling 50-31 road mark
equaled the home record, and 2004’s
52-29 road record was unparalleled in
the league. Closing this gap would put
the Brewers on essentially equal
ground with St. Louis this year, while
recapturing the road mojo would
provide a serious lift to the Cardinals,
which desperately needs one.
Perhaps if the Brewers had made a
big stride in the standings early this
year, as the Reds have in shadowing
the Cards for much of the season after
their gloomy 2005, Carlos Lee would
have been signed and not traded.
Perhaps Melvin would have been
operating in full “Buy” mode this July.
Reportedly, the Brewers did make a
handsome contract offer to their star
outfielder at some point this year, but
not quite enough to his (and his
agent’s) liking. Perhaps the lack of
progress shown by the team helped
sew up the pocketbook by that small
amount of bargaining room that could
have landed Lee for the long term. It’s
easy to speculate, but impossible to
know. And with the ready-to-compete
players they got in return from the
Rangers, as well as the acquisitions of
veterans David Bell and Tony Graffanino
to shore up short-term holes on the
infield, the Brewers are not looking into
the rear-view mirror, but ahead still to
possible contention this year, and in
the years to come.
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