What's the Cause of This Slide?

After a great 24-10 start, the Brewers have seemingly fallen apart, going 10-20 and causing Brewer fans everywhere to seriously question the talent level of the current club. Let's look at what might be causing the slide and try to determine if we should expect more of the same.

30 games, 17 on the road and 13 at home. Some very tough opponents sprinkled in there but the SOS for those 30 games was still only a hair over .500 (thanks, Texas). As a rough guess, I'd say a fair expectation (assuming the Brewers really are a 85 win team) might have been about 14 or 15 wins. They missed the mark by maybe 4 or 5 wins. Just bad luck? Let's look at the run distributions:



The NL average RPG (runs per game) has been about 4.5 runs. It looks like the Crew's offense has been as below average as the pitching staff. The pythagorean suggests a 11-19 record but those 12 runs scored early accounts for most of the discrepancy. The Brewers have earned that 10-20 record.

This is where I was supposed to look at which players have over performing during the slump and which have under performing. But as I type this, the Brewers have just won a tough game against the Tigers on the road. Stay tuned for my next post, where I write about what factors contributed to the Brewers resurgence. :)