Monday, February 23, 2009

Know Your Victim Part 2: The Brewers

The main competition to the Cubs the past two seasons, the Brewers have gone through a bit of a face lift in the offseason. They went all in to make the playoffs last season, trading for CC Sabathia to bolster their starting staff. It worked, because they did win the NL Wild Card mostly because Sabathia lost one game the entire time he was on the Brewers. Unfortunately for the Brewers (but lucky for everyone else) they didn't have the money to sign Sabathia or often injured fellow ace Ben Sheets. 

They do return a decent offense, Prince Fielder is one of the better power hitters in the NL even if he might eat himself into the American League by 2011. Outfielder Ryan Braun is one of the best hitters in the game, and now that he is in left field his defense isn't ruining most of his run production. Corey Hart fell off at the end of last season, but he is a decent hitter in right field, despite being pretty bad at defense. Other than those three, the Brewers have a collection of pretty average hitters including Mike Cameron, Rickie Weeks, and Bill Hall.

As far as starting pitching goes the Brewers aren't very good. This season's ace will be Yovani Gallardo who had a good start to last season before tearing his ACL. He has the possibility to be a fringe ace, more likely a two starter on a serious contender. He will be joined by a crack staff that includes Dave Bush, Manny Parra, Braden Looper, and Jeff Suppan. Parra was a halfway decent pitcher last season until the last two months of the season. That had a lot to do with him never pitching a full major league season before. The other three aren't good pitchers no matter what excuses people can try and make.

It gets worse, their bullpen is one of the worst around, but might not be as bad as some other ones in this division. Trevor Hoffman is a bit over the hill, but he still can get the jobs done as closer. Blowing leads was one of the biggest problems for the Brewers last season and they hope Hoffman can cut down on that a bit. Aside from him they don't have much, their situation was so desperate that they needed to resign Eric Gagne who figures to be their setup man. 

This team isn't going to do much this season unless they have career years from the starting pitching staff, and the bullpen is able to hold leads. I don't see that happening, which means the Brewers will finish with about 72 or so wins and finish in fifth place.

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