Commentary Archives - Page 6 of 6

After 16 games, what do we know about the Milwaukee Brewers? They’re up, they’re down. In the end, they’re pretty mediocre. They’ve won more than they’ve lost, but they’ve also feasted on teams like the 7-11 Toronto Blue Jays.

The concern about this team is that we expected them to be the best (or one of the best) teams offensively this season. They haven’t been that so far. Other than a couple of blow-outs of the Blue Jays, they’ve been very average. You’ll see that in stats listed below. Very average in number of runs scored, hits, home runs… you know, all of the metrics you’d use to measure the effectiveness of an offense.

The performance of Rollie Fingers is one of many things not going as expected early in 1982.

The 3-6 Brewers have a day off today, and depending on how you look at it that’s either a good thing or a bad thing. They’re in the midst of a five-game losing streak, and everything possible is going wrong. Starting pitching is struggling. Relief pitching, including Rollie Fingers, has been awful. The offense, until the final game of the Rangers’ series, has done nothing of late.

On one hand, it’s good to get a day off to shift focus. It also helps guys like Robin Yount, Larry Hisle, Charlie Moore and Jim Slaton get healthy.

On the other, it just gives you another day to think about how badly things are going. Many players will tell you that when in the middle of a losing streak, they want to get back out there as soon as they can to end it. Too much downtime can just make it worse.

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