The HNarrative

The HNarrative
By: Sam Hnilicka

After a stretch of baseball played by The Crew which was extremely unbearable to experience many fans are starting to jump ship. Our pitching has been completely obliterated while many of hitters are mired in terrible slumps. Since July 2nd the Brewers have gone 12-18 winning only two series, and only one in the entire month of July. I say do not fear however, being only four games back of the choking Cubs and injury ridden Cards. With nearly 2 months of baseball remaining in front of us there is plenty of time for our Milwaukee club to overtake our division foes and climb atop the National League Central race. One of the most frustrating moments in July was watching the trade deadline go by where The Brewers biggest moves involved a very safe play to sure up second base with a middle of road kind of guy like Felipe Lopez, and adding a reliable and familiar arm in Vargas. Certainly neither move was even close to being as monumental as the CC trade last July, but can you blame Doug Melvin choosing to not mortgage our future so greatly two years in a row?
The most important to remember when judging the Brewers as the stand is that baseball is a game of averages. When you look at players like JJ Hardy, Jason Kendall and, worst of them all, Bill Hall who are performing well below their career numbers I believe they are due for strong finishes to the year. If we begin to see the kind of run production we were expecting from this team it will do wonders to cover up the holes we have with pitching staff, which are far too many due to a combination of injuries and poor offseason management by Doug Melvin. Only adding Braden Looper to a mediocre staff to begin with and providing no depth for spot starts when starters get hurt was an extremely costly oversight to the Brewers overall record this year. Of course guys like Carlos Villanueva and Seth McClung, who were expected to fill that roll, have underachieved a lot, but imagine if Melvin had signed just one more veteran starting pitcher and allowed Parra to mature more in a relieving roll. Our overworked bullpen would probably feel a little less tired and we wouldn’t have had to watch so many gut-wrenching innings of hurlers like Dillard, Burns, Chris Narvenot and Chris Smith.
As I said though, all is not lost. When you reference teams like the Colorado Rockies of 2007 it’s easy to see that if a team gets hot going into September anything is possible. This becomes even more exciting when you look at the track record Ken Macha has had in pulling late season heroics in Oakland. Whether or not his success in Oakland will be repeated in the Brew City has yet to be determined, but I certainly hope to be sitting inside of Miller Park in the middle of October and not for a Billy Joel/Elton John concert.