Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Tough Home Stand

Home Stand

Home Stand

Brewer fans may have to settle for 3-3 as a "sucessful" home stand.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Road Trip Probabilities

I'm being lazy again and just using Baseball Prospectus's AEQR and AEQRA from their adjusted standings page:

Road Trip

While the Cardinals have 4 more wins and 8 less losses than the Reds, their raw stats suggest that they are pretty close in overall talent. It might be tempting to think that the Crew should beat these guys up, but a 4-4 or 5-3 road trip would be about what's expected.

Hardball Times: First Half Brewer Review

"The Brewers, like many teams, have their share of underachieving and overachieving players. Still, enough of their success looks legitimate that there's no obvious reason to expect them to decline dramatically, provided they can stay mostly healthy. They seem unlikely to top 95 wins this season, but 88-90 wins are very much within their capabilities. It will likely be up to the rest of the NL Central to catch up to them—and are any of the other NL Central teams capable of 90 wins?"

Link

At this point, the Cubs would have to finish 39-26 for 90 wins. That's a .600 winning percentage. I wouldn't expect it but it wouldn't be impossible, either.

It's going to be an interesting race for the NL Central, in my opinion.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Nate Silver Likes the Brewers Over the Cubs

With every talking head screaming about the resurgent Cubs, it's nice to see an objective analysis still giving the nod to the Crew:
"Although this sort of point-by-point comparision can inherently be misleading, it’s surprisingly hard to construct an argument that the Cubs have more talent top-to-bottom than the Brewers. Couple that with the three-and-a-half games that the Brewers have in hand, and I would rate them as perhaps 5:2 favorites to hold onto the Central..."

BP: Cubs versus Brewers

Of course, this probably presumes that Sheets doesn't miss more than two or three starts. Let's hope that is the case.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Who Doesn't Love Come From behind Wins?


















It looks like Prince sure does!

Sheets left tonight's game with a strained finger. He watched the rest of the game on the bench, so you have to think it's not too serious. I'd expect him to miss maybe one start, with Yo working on a normal four day's rest.

Ten games up and a 3.5 lead in the Central. Sounds good to me.

Here's the video of Prince enjoying the win by interrupting Graffy's post game interview:

Friday, July 13, 2007

Series Probabilities: Rockies @ Brewers

Series Probabilities

Pitching Match ups:

Friday: J. Francis (L) vs C. Capuano (L)
Saturday: R. Lopez (R) vs. B. Sheets (R)
Sunday: A. Cook (R) vs. J. Suppan (R)

Let's start the second half on the right foot.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Ichiro Worth the Cash?

Dave Cameron's analysis of Ichiro's pending deal with the Mariners:

U.S.S. Mariner: Ichiro, $20 million a year

CFer Ichiro is tons more valuable than RFer Ichiro (provided his defense is up to it).

The Brewers' REAL Problem

You just have to know where to look:

Monday and Tuesday Record

If they could simply play all week like they have on Monday and Tuesday, instead of being only 10 games over .500 and holding onto a slim 4.5 game lead in the NL Central, the Crew would be 59 - 29 and running away with the division.

I don't know if it's late-week fatigue or lack of focus and desire, but Yost and Melvin need to get to the bottom of this. If the Brewers keep playing like a mediocre team for the majority of the week, it won't be long before they are one.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Size and Shape of Strike Zone Dependant on Batter Handedness

A very interesting article from John Walsh at the Hardball Times:
"Are [umpires] now calling the strike zone according to the rulebook? We can try to answer this question by actually measuring the strike zone as called by major league umpires and compare that to the rulebook strike zone. This is of more than purely academic interest: one of the reasons given for the huge increase in offensive production in the 1990s is the ever-shrinking strike zone. We can't now go back and see if that claim is accurate or not, but we can measure the strike zone today and in the future and see how it changes and how it affects offense."

Hardball Times: Strike Zone: Fact vs. Fiction

A summary of his findings:

Strike Zone

The view is from behind the batter, so umpires appear to be calling the outside pitch against lefties as strikes, among other inconsistencies. The end result is that right handed hitters have a larger strike zone to defend than lefties.

As the author notes, there's still some problems with the data itself, so I consider this an interesting work in progress.

Friday, July 06, 2007

Series Probabilities: Brewers @ Nationals

Series Probabilities

Pitching Probables:
Game 1: Bush (R) vs. Bacsik (L)
Game 2: Suppan (R) vs. Simontacchi (R)
Game 3: Capuano (L) vs. Redding (R)