Brewers need to get offense going soon
It seems crazy to judge a major-league baseball team when it has played less than 20 games. Normally, you would not do so in a 162-game season.
But MLB is not playing 162 games this season. It hopes to get through 60 games, and you can ask the St. Louis Cardinals about the difficulty of doing even that. So, as Yogi Berra once famously said, “It gets late early out there.”
Even with that caveat, it’s difficult to say exactly what the Brewers have this season. The pitching, with the occasional 12-2 hiccup against the Twins aside, has been competitive. The offense, not so much.
There is no real mystery to why the Brewers have struggled to score runs. Lorenzo Cain, a steadying influence and competent leadoff hitter, opted out after one week and went home. Ryan Braun has been a non-factor (.372 OPS in six games) thus far because of injuries.
Christian Yelich and Keston Hiura are trying to recover from poor starts while striking out at unusually high rates (league-leading 30 Ks in 71 at-bats for Hiura and 24 in 64 for Yelich entering the Saturday game against the Cubs). And, thus far, none of the veteran newcomers – Jus
tin Smoak, Omar Narváez, Avisaíl García, Eric Sogard and Brock Holt – has made any significant impact at the plate.
Add that all up and you understand why the Brewers’ offense has been MIA most of the season. In that regard, they were fortunate to be no worse than 8-10 after pulling out a dramatic 4-3 victory Friday night over the first-place Cubs at Wrigley Field.
“These players have a track record,” manager Craig Counsell said of the slump bunch. “They are not 16-year-olds where we are not sure what they are going to be.
“These players have pretty good track records, and they are going to come out of it. That’s the kind of mode I am operating under right now. I think there’s still time for that.”
Still, with the Cubs bolting to a 13-4 start, the Brewers are in jeopardy of losing contact early with the NL Central leaders. Yes, the second-place team will be rewarded with a playoff berth, also, but the Brewers will be assured of nothing if they continue to struggle offensively like this.
For any manager, it’s tough to look at the 60-game season and feel you have to do anything different at this point. Patience is a quality that normally pays off well in that job, but, again, this is not a normal situation.
That doesn’t mean Counsell is going to stop playing his struggling veterans, as if that were a choice in any event. These are the players the Brewers chose to go with in 2020, albeit over a 162-game schedule originally, and their manager isn’t going to
give up on them despite the season being changed to a 60-game sprint.
“I think taking a small sample and throwing history out the window isn’t the right thing to do at this point,” Counsell said of the past success of veteran players. “That’s part of this season, We’re going to make faster decisions and faster evaluations but we also have to be careful how fast. I guess I’m not ready yet, is what I would say (to look for alternatives).
“I think it’s easy to ask these questions when you have some players who are struggling but players have struggled in seasons before and I still think having patience with them because of the reasons we signed them and our belief in them doesn’t go away. And it can’t go away after 20 plate appearances. That just feels illogical to me.
“I’m not going to make illogical decisions. I don’t think that’s going to benefit the team. So we’re going to continue on this path right now.
“At some point, we’re going to have to make decisions faster but I don’t think we’re there yet because I don’t think 20 plate appearances is the right reason to do things.
“There are a bunch of our players whose numbers don’t look very pretty right now and everybody would acknowledge that, but we could sit here again in five days and think the offense looks pretty good because they can literally turn things around that fast with the few number of plate appearances they have right now.”
With that backdrop, the Brewers continued their 10-game trip to Chicago, Minnesota and Pittsburgh that figured to be challenging on two fronts. On the field, they had to take on two first-place teams before getting to the Pirates. Off the field, they faced more hotel time than any player was accustomed to under the tightened COVID-19 protocol rules.
“We’re going to have to come out and play some good baseball if we want to get through this and I guess make sitting in the rooms a little bit easier, not moving around,” pitcher Brandon Woodruff said. “It’s going to be big. We’re going to have to play good baseball.
“We’ve got some good teams, and teams that we’ve already played. This is a big road trip. We’re definitely going to have to come out and play some good baseball.”
And, so it goes. When everything around you feels so different, it takes a special kind of focus to do your best on the field.
It’s never going to feel right playing in front of empty stands. That’s why players must provide their own adrenaline and try to fight through the feeling that these strange games don’t really count, because they do.
Veteran infielder Jedd Gyorko was asked a few days back if it felt weird to already be playing in the second quarter of the season.
“It’s definitely weird,” he said. “This whole thing is weird, to be honest, but we’re grinding it out and we have to keep going. We still have a lot of games ahead of us. Just put our heads down and grind away.
“It’s a little cliché to say one game at a time but that’s really important in a short season. There’s not that many games.
“You can’t throw away any game; every game is so important. We stress that every day. Try to get that win and worry about the next day then.”
This year, it’s definitely going to get late early.