Wednesday's HNarrative

The HNarrative
By: Sam Hnilicka

Could someone please explain to me why Billy Castro still has a job? I have absolutely nothing against the man Billy Castro, but it is fairly clear that he is not cut out to be a major league pitching coach, especially with as fragile of a staff that the Brewers boast. Our team ERA is a staggering 4.81, which when you consider the NL average ERA to be 4.23, it is clear the Brewers pitching staff has struggled this year, and it definitely has driven up the numbers in our loss column. It is even more concerning when you notice the Brewers team ERA of 4.81 is second to last only to the *gulp* Nationals.

Now of course you can’t put all the blame on Billy Castro. In fact I’m fairly convinced our pitching staff would be in the same shambles no matter who was their pitching coach. But the fact remains that there needs to be some sort of shakeup in order to liven up this staff. When Castro was initially hired I thought that he would be a serviceable replacement for a year or two, and maybe longer if he turned out to be good. He didn’t turn out to be good. Now it’s especially tough to sit here and criticize a man who has been with the Brewers since he was three years old, but just because a man has worked on a GM assembly line for 25 years does that mean he should be promoted to CFO? And if GM’s finances go into the can shouldn’t that CFO be fired?

And what the hell happened to Billy’s familiarity with our existing pitching staff? Gallardo has struggled during portions of the year and most would say he has underperformed his (probably unfairly) high expectations. Parra of course had a terrible couple months before getting rejuvenated down in Nashville, where Billy Castro was far, far away from. Suppan and Bush both performed relatively well in the first half, but have both been hit by the injury bug in recent weeks. And the one guy who Castro did not have that familiarity with, Looper, has done extremely well. You could make the same argument for our bullpen where imports like Coffey and Hoffman have excelled, but Villanueva and McClung have both regressed. It’s clear that for whatever reason most hurlers whom Billy had had previous contact with have floundered, while established veterans have done well.

Just like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting the Brewers have to leave their old running mates behind the dust and move onto a better life. Bill may not be as obnoxious as Ben Affleck, but he certainly holds us back in the same way. As I said at the beginning I like BC as a man but I’m sure that the holy trinity (Doug Melvin, Mark Attanasio, and the wily Ken Macha) would agree that he is not the long term answer for the Brewers pitching coach and they would be wise to get rid of him before the year is over.

Finally I’d like to correct something in my last blog. The brewers only won one series in the stretch I referenced (July 2nd through August 10th). Maybe I did screwed up because I didn’t want to type the following sentence, but here it goes. The Brewers did not win any series in the month of July. Ok, now that I got that bandaid ripped off I’d also like to thank espn.com and baseball-reference.com for providing tons of stats for me to sift through. Before I go, if Ted Thompson is reading this please sign Michael Vick so that our offense would be unstoppable next year? Thanks, and remember, I sided with you over Favre Ted, so you owe me.