Recently, Diane Firstman, creator and curator of the fabulous Value Over Replacement Grit baseball site on ESPN Sweetspot Network and a favorite of mine, was kind enough to anagram the names of some current and former Milwaukee Brewers players and managers. She made quite a few for the Brewers Bar to use, so this will be split up into a series.

Not sure what an anagram is? An anagram is created by rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once. Those good at constructing them can arrange things in a way that reflects somehow on the original subject.

Here's an example: (this is one I tried, so as not to waste one of Diane's) "Lad Afire Forgo" - would be the Brewers relief pitcher, Alfredo Figaro.
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This weeks list features 7 anagrams (without answers). See how many of these you can figure out, and I'll have the answers posted tomorrow night!

Fun With Anagrams – created by Diane Firstman (Value Over Replacement Grit)


Part 1

JOY! LUNCH ON A RAT

LANDSCAPE

NONE ROCKIER

OUCH! SCAR PAIN

TEARS INJURE GUY

YUCKY BARITONE TUNES

HERRING PAL

*Answers will be posted tomorrow night!

Once again, many, many thanks to Diane Firstman for lending one of her great talents to The Brewers Bar in providing anagrams! For more on her work, here is her bio and other information. And make sure you check out her site, - where you will be welcomed by the phrase "We are the VORG. Replacement is futile." You also can find her on twitter (appropriately under the neame @dianagram). She's pretty famous.

(Image: zazzle.com)

At 15-20, the Milwaukee Brewers still could rescue their season.  But after going 1-9 in their last 10 games, the team has incited all kinds of despair among a fan base that is restless for a winner.  Fans waited all winter for baseball and so far most of what the Brewers have done on the field hardly qualifies as baseball at all.  Technically speaking, putting nine guys in the field and showing up to play other teams is playing baseball.  However, the Brewers have often had the look of a group that isn’t sure what it’s doing on the diamond. 

Where is the team I saw in San Diego?  This bunch has had a doomed look to it lately and that doesn’t bode well for a franchise still entrenched in a losing culture despite making the playoffs a couple times in the last five or so years.  Many people blame manager Ron Roenicke, and he’s had his share of boneheaded moves this season.  Things have gotten so bad that Rickie Weeks has become an absolute pariah for frustrated fans.  But what might be the most damning indictment of the team’s character is the body language and look of the team as it’s stumbled badly at home and on the road.  That’s on the players, of course, but also on the manager to find out what the source of any malaise is and extinguish it.  Rickie Weeks finally will take a seat Monday night to rest his slump, sit back and get a breather from the game.  This evening and series will present a test for Roenicke and the Brewers.  The Pittsburgh Pirates have often been the cure to the Brewers’ ills but this year’s Pirates are five games over .500 and playing good ball.  Right now they are nearly as lean and mean as the St. Louis Cardinals and Cincinnati Reds, against whom the Brewers have looked hopelessly lost.    

Despite all signs pointing to the starting pitching being a liability coming into 2013, many fans were optimistic based on what the unheralded guys in the rotation had done in 2012.  As Enrique Bakemeyer points out in a post below, the team has gotten virtually nothing out of players who were supposed to be important pieces of the 2013 rotation (Narveson, Rogers and Fiers).  The team’s front office doggedly stuck with their internal options until Lohse was signed late in the spring.  That addition has helped, but perhaps the Brewers needed a lot more to be competitive this year.  People wanted Doug Melvin’s head when Kyle Lohse was signed, but Lohse is the Luke Skywalker of the rotation right now.  He may be our only hope. 

I didn’t necessarily expect this Brewers team to be world-beaters, but c’mon.  At least tread water until later in the season and stop making fans feel like utter morons for bothering to tune in to the games.  There have been many times this season already where in exasperation I’ve questioned why I was so excited to watch this train wreck of a team.  Imagine if you had spent a lot of money to visit Cincinnati this weekend to watch the Brewers.  Sure, the experience of going to a new stadium is a reward unto itself.  But watching your team get slaughtered on the road is not a fun time.  After one of the bleakest offseasons in memory, fans at least deserve to avoid watching their favorite team get destroyed every night.  Sure, true fans stick with the team no matter what.  That’s right.  Without true fans the Brewers would probably draw about one million per year, or perhaps they’d be in some other town by now.  True fans can also DVR and fast forward, though.  Non-winter is too fleeting in Wisconsin to live in daily agony commiserating with the Brewers. 

It’s bad enough that this club has such an expansive history of sucking.  But to raise the bar on expectations only to shatter any semblance of hope this early in the season is crushing.  The Brewers aren’t doing their marketing department any favors in selling tickets, that’s for sure.  I can’t blame fans for staying away a bit until this team shows them something.  St. Louis fans are spoiled beyond belief.  When is it going to be our turn?  If you don’t like the way the Brewers get their heads bashed in every night, don’t buy a ticket.  Maybe attend when they start playing like they give a shit.

Fuck!!  This team is so damn difficult. 

Make it easy on us, Brewers.  Throw us long-suffering Wisconsin baseball fans a bone.  Put your fighting faces on.  Look like you want it more than the other team, and then kick them when they’re down.  Play the game hard.  Don’t surrender our summer in May, fer chrissakes. 

(Rickie Weeks, in 144 PA:  K% 28.5 % / Contact % 71.8%)


Given what we've learned about the rate of stabilization of certain statistics - K%, for instance, stabilizes at ~150 PA Weeks's K% after 144 PA is 28.5%- there are already quite a few plate discipline and batted-ball-related stats we can look at as they are beginning to settle, right around the 150 PA mark. (On the same chart, BB% stabilizes at ~200 PA. Weeks's 13.9% is certainly high, but he's always had a healthy BB%, with his career average being 10.7%).

Now, Weeks's Contact% is 71.8% - the lowest it has ever been. From 2007 - 2012, the biggest fluctuation between two seasons has been a 2% decrease (between 09-08 seasons) - between 2009 & 2012, there has never been more than a 1.4% fluctuation, one of them being an increase of a % point from 2011-2012. So far, in 2013, his Contact rate has dropped 3.5% from last season, and his K-Rate is the highest it's ever been.

According to Charlie Adams, in an article written for Beyond the Box Score last month* (associated with the chart I linked earlier in this piece).  - there is a reasonably strong correlation between K% & Contact %… Improved Contact% / Decreased K% and vice-versa.*

(*=Adams modified it to players with 50 or more PA, at that time to figure it out. Currently, after 166 PA  from Jackson, his K% is still 2 pts lower than his previous season / contact rate is up by 3.7% (19.9/38.3). So this still holds up. Also, you may have noticed this is addressed to those involved in fantasy baseball. Not that it should matter, in this case. His piece was based off this Paul Swydan piece at fangraphs in mid April about Austin Jackson and the rate at which certain stats stabilize.)  

Since the chart shows that Contact % begins to stabilize after 75 plate appearances, paired with the accumulation of almost 150 PA for Weeks, (where K% stabilizes), and given the proof of a significant enough Contact%-K% correlation, Rickie's career-low 71.8% contact% is most likely going to be what we'll see this season.


The good news is, it's not all terrible contact! Hardly any of those pesky Infield pop-ups, and a career-high 22.0% line-drive rate! A .250 BABIP is well below his career .303 mark, and .035 points less than last season. He's not the baserunner he used to be, and his GB% is historically very high at 53.7%, so hopefully that will move closer to career-norm. And his FB% is also something to look at. At 24.4%, he's well below his 36.3% career average. Unless something else is going on. For instance, one thing to keep an eye on is that his 2.7% decrease in contact with pitches inside the strike zone (80.4%) in relation to last year's (84.1%), which is also nearly the same amount of a decrease from his career rate of 84.0%. This probably warrants a closer look at his splits from more recent plate appearances with regards to plate discipline, to see if maybe his zone contact has improved some.
 

#TeamTTORickie (Although, Three True Outcomes Rickie has a lot of catching up to do with the HRs!)

(Photo: Mike McGinnis/Getty Images North America)

As of this writing, the Brewers pitching staff is last in the league in earned run average, as well as runs allowed.  While the bullpen has had its ups and downs, the starting pitching has been remarkably ineffective – with the notable exception of Kyle Lohse.  Although he’s cooled down somewhat, Lohse is still the only starter with an ERA under 4.00.  Also, Lohse has pitched only 2.2 fewer innings than Yovani Gallardo, and Gallardo has had one more start.

A couple months ago, some Brewers fans were less than thrilled that Lohse got a three-year contract, but where would they be now without him?  At the beginning of spring training, the starting rotation was supposed to be Gallardo, Marco Estrada, and some combination of Wily Peralta, Mike Fiers, Chris Narveson, and Mark Rogers.  It seemed like the Brewers were going to ask a lot of several untested pitchers, but you never know with pitching.

As it turned out, Rogers never made it out of spring training when his velocity dropped.  Last week, Rogers was pulled from his latest minor league rehab start after nine pitches with “tingling in his arm.”  Narveson has also been on the DL, only pitching two innings out of the bullpen this season.  Fiers never got going and was optioned.  Peralta has been perfectly acceptable, considering this was the first time he made an opening day roster.  Including today’s loss to the Reds, he’s had five quality starts.  Of those early starting rotation candidates, it still feels like Peralta has the most upside, but who knows where he’ll be at the All-Star break?

Still, even if Brewers pitching hasn’t been inspiring so far, it’s easy to imagine how it might have been even worse.  Lohse does have two victories against the Giants and Padres.  Would those have gone in the “W” column if it was Fiers holding down that spot in the rotation?  And even though they’ve lost games they “should have” won, the Brewers have also had a couple of questionable victories.  They outslugged the Giants on one occasion when Brewers pitchers gave up seven earned runs.   Then there was that game against the Pirates when Milwaukee gave up eight earned runs, but the offense powered them to victory.

If those games go the wrong way, and the Brewers could be 11-24, at the bottom of the division, well behind the Cubs.  Five games under .500 don’t seem like such a big hole by comparison.  There’s always a bright side in baseball if you’re willing to look hard enough.  Would it be crass to mention that it’s still early?

(Image: Amazon.com)

The back cover of Brewers beat writer Tom Haudricourt’s latest book, 100 Things Brewers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, bills it as “The Ultimate Resource Guide for True Brewers Fans.”  It certainly is a resource, but true Brewers fans won’t find much in the book they don’t already know.  The format of the book – a breezy list of events/trivia (interspersed with sidebars and photos) that can be read in a few days – is probably best suited for casual fans looking to deepen their knowledge, or younger folks who aren’t familiar with the pre-21st century Brewers.

Haudricourt’s previous book, Brewers Essential, was released in early 2008, before Milwaukee ended its long playoff drought.  That book is a more or less chronological story of significant events in Brewers history, beginning with Bud Selig buying the defunct Seattle Pilots.  Most of the stories in that book are also included in 100 Things…: the ’82 World Series, Hank Aaron’s final seasons, Bob Uecker, Juan Nieves’ no-hitter, the Molitor-Yount-Ganter era, decline in the 1990s, Miller Park's construction, etc.

As for the story of the Brewers after 2007, most of what’s in 100 Things… is common knowledge.  There are perhaps some details you didn’t catch when these stories were first reported – like Doug Melvin telling the Indians if they were going to trade CC Sabathia, the deal had to be done that day, and they couldn’t shop him around to other teams.  But other items like Ryan Braun’s MVP, the trades for Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum, and John Axford’s path to the big leagues are all a matter of public record.

100 Things… is strongest in its final third, when it recounts more arcane material, and there’s a better chance of coming across something you didn’t know.  For example, I had no idea Terry Francona played for the Brewers, or that he got ejected from a game in the middle of being walked intentionally in 1989 (Thing #95).  An item on Jeff Juden’s brief and ignominious tenure with the Brewers in 1998 (Thing #92) is another story fans may not remember.  Such pieces of obscure knowledge are the most interesting, but they are relatively few, and appear late in the book.

It should be noted the list format lends itself to a fair amount of repetition.  Each Thing is written as a self-contained unit, and they often refer to previous Things, giving the book a certain “yeah, you just said that” quality.  Thing #83 is about Ben Sheets’ introduction to Brewers fans at County Stadium’s last game, and includes a paragraph about how Sheets would go on to set a franchise record of 18 strikeouts in one game.  That 2004 game against the Atlanta Braves was Thing #77.  The acquisition of Sabathia is Thing #32, and refers to his eventual wild-card-clinching complete game against the Cubs on the final day of the 2008 season…which was Thing #9.  Over the course of 260 pages, the redundancy factor becomes difficult to ignore.

In all, 100 Things… is a crisply written compilation of Brewers cultural artifacts, most of which are conventional wisdom, with some interesting tidbits here and there.  It would be perfect for light reading on vacation, as a gift, or summer reading for a student.  Fans should keep in mind, though, that the word “resource” is emphasized on the back cover – not “essential” – and adjust their expectations accordingly.