The Brewers are in third place in the NL Central and view the next few weeks as ones that will determine if they are buyers or sellers in the late July trade market. Here are the overall numbers for the Brewers' batters this year. Here's what they did last month. No one looks particularly hot or cold to me. They are a good team, even without Scott Podsednik, who has been limited and might sit out with some kind of plague. The Brewers are coming off a three-game sweep of the hapless Rockies in Colorado.
Chris Stynes will tell you it's damn hard to hit on the road after a cushy stretch on Planet Coors. If the Pirates can get a lot of movement on their pitches today, they could take advantage of this.
The Pirates will miss the Brewers' best pitcher, Ben Sheets, in the four-game, three-day series that begins today. Works for me.
For the men in wheat, game one will feature Doug Davis, a soft-tossing lefty with a handsome goat. An American-League castoff, he's won his last two starts and he's enjoying the best year of his career. He generates loads of groundballs.
The Pirates have seen him two times in 2004. In April he gave up many hits and the Brewers lost in extra innings. More recently, he threw six shutout innings to beat Kip Wells on a good day. No current Pirate has a meaningful record against Doug Davis. Chris Stynes owns a 5-for-12, one double performance. As a summary of past performance, that's exactly true; that's what happened. As a predictor of future performance, the margin of error on a sample of twelve is something like .280. All the 5-for-12 means, then, is that there is a 95% chance Stynes's "true" ability against Davis lies between .137 and .697. And that's only if you believe that hitters have "true" or "intrinsic" abilities up there in Plato's world of forms. (And this makes you an idealist. In America, we call such people "gamblers," "statisticians," or "crazy transcendentalists.") Anyway, such a thinker would consider Stynes' ability against Davis as a subset of his ability against all left-handers. He's hitting .159 this year off left-handers but .292 off them in 2001-2003. Confused? Imagine how Mac feels.
Perhaps the best case for getting him into the lineup tonight is the fact that the team has to play two. With his barky knee, Mackowiak is not a good candidate for eighteen innings a day. A manager normally uses his entire bench in the course of a doubleheader, so Stynes will be in there one way or another. Sad to say, but fans will boo and heckle him all night unless he makes a big hit or outstanding defensive play early. A lot of Pirate fans want Stynes to go away.
Why do we keep talking about Chris Stynes? My bad. No more writing about Stynes for a week, I promise. Let's talk about California-boy John Grabow, who was a maniac on Wednesday against the Cardinals. I'd like to see him do his strike-'em-out routine again this weekend.
Oliver Perez, our Amish-Mexican left-handed flamethrower, will start for the Pirates in game one. If you have been living in a submarine for the last year, Ron Cook's latest will catch you up on the who's and what's of this guy. Cook says "phenom" and other nice things. (Also note how Cook describes the Giles trade as "wonderful." Last year he called it "a horrible blunder" but, to be fair, there's no inconsistency given that he conceded Perez and Bay had a "chance" to be good. By "blunder" Cook alluded to not trading Kendall. If Littlefield sealed the deal by making the Padres grateful for not taking on Kendall's contract, then he deserves some serious credit as a horse trader. Or maybe he got lucky. Who knows. Either way, it's not sensible to make conclusive judgments on a trade that happened less than a year ago. We can only say: so far, so good wonderful.)
Joe Rutter also has game-day coverage of Oliver Perez's gradual emergence.
The Brewers tagged Perez on May 1 in a game the Bucs eventually won in overtime. Even with that rough start, the Brewers have a collective .641 OPS off Oliver. Better is the lack of power: they have no home runs and two doubles in fifty-three at-bats against him. How'd they score five runs off him in early May? They bunched up some singles. Here's hoping that doesn't happen tonight.
In game two, an unknown pitcher will take the mound for the Brewers. Their AAA ace, Ben Hendrickson, pitched Tuesday night so he'll receive no Sean Burnett-type callup. My wild-ass guess is going to be Matt Kinney, an enormous (6'5" 230 lb) 27-year-old righthander who started the season in the rotation. The Pirates haven't seen him this year, but Simon had two homers off him in a previous life. He hasn't been very good as a starter. With Wes Obermueller due up this weekend and struggling, perhaps they will give Kinney a shot to prove he's worth another turn in the rotation.
Dr. Jekyll Josh Fogg beat the Brewers on May 22. Geoff Jenkins likes Josh Fogg a lot.
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