April 1, 1970 is generally regarded as the day the Milwaukee Brewers were born, making this the Brewers' unofficial 40th birthday.  Multiple promotions have been announced to commemerate the anniversary of the club's founding, and to help celebrate, I thought I would quickly summarize the team's first 39 years.  After the first few years, click "Read More" below to continue.

1970 - The Milwaukee Brewers play their first game, and Lew Krausse becomes the first starting pitcher in franchise history.  Krausse and battery mate Jerry McNertney will re-create the franchise's first pitch on Opening Day this year.  Nice way to kick off the 40th anniversary, if you ask me.

1971 - Despite a 5-game improvement over their inauguaral season, the Brewers finish in last place for the first time, ending the year 32 games behind AL West-winning Oakland.  They were the only 90-loss team in the AL West.

1972 - Dave Bristol becomes the first Brewers manager to get fired, as the team struggles to a 10-20 start.  The team uses a total of 3 managers during the season.

1973 - A pair of firsts: Dave May is the first Brewers regular to hit .300 in a season, putting up a .303/.352/.473 line.  Jim Colborn is the first Brewers starter to win 20 games, going 20-12 with a 3.18 ERA.

1974 - An 18-year old kid named Robin Yount debuts.  A 20-year career begins with Yount struggling at the plate, hitting .250/.276/.346.

Today, things in Arizona are scheduled to finish up for the Brewers.  Spring Training coming to a close means a whole bunch of writers weighing in on what we saw in the past month, and trying to figure out which trends will continue and which were simply meaningless.

This probably shouldn't be a surprise, but comments from Doug Melvin and Ken Macha in the past couple days have led quite a few people to include Corey Hart's dismal spring performance in their postings.  Among them:

- Jon Paul Morosi, who recently picked the Brewers to finish first in the NL Central, cites the recent reports of Hart potentially not being the Opening Day right fielder, and notes that his production at the plate has taken a nosedive since being named an All-Star in 2008.

- USA Today's Bob Nightengale includes Hart in his column telling us that Spring Training results actually do matter (h/t Brew Crew Ball).  Nightengale says Hart was called into Macha's office for a pep talk on Wednesday.

- Steve Garczynski at Bernie's Crew manages to nest a crack at Jeff Suppan into a crack at Corey Hart: "I'm surprised that Corey Hart doesn't have neck pain with the way old man Edmonds has flown past him on the depth chart."  Well played.

- Bill Bender at The Sporting News' Fantasy Source Fastball blog does a "Pulse Check" on Corey Hart.  The verdict? "There's only so many ways to say Hart's lost his mojo, right?"  Ouch.  Bender stops short of telling fantasy players to steer clear of Hart completely (at least those playing in NL-only leagues), but I'd be surprised if he'd be more than roster filler for anyone's fantasy team at this point.

The good news -- for Hart, at least -- is that he managed to beat the March 31st deadline for teams to cut a player with a non-guaranteed without having to pay his full 2010 salary.  As an arbitration-eligible player, Hart could have been cut at any point and would have only been owed a fraction of the $4.8 million he was awarded in his arby case.

Yesterday, we heard Doug Melvin dance around a question about the starting outfielders, essentially refusing to say that Corey Hart is the team's right fielder.  Today, Tom Haudricourt brings us his daily notes from the manager's briefing and, guess what, Ken Macha isn't sold on Hart being his Opening Day starter in right.

Ubaldo Jimenez will be starting the Opener for Colorado, and he's been tough against right-handed hitters in his career, holding them to a .220/.301/.323 line.  Last year he was even better than that, holding righties to a line of .206/.276/.309.  The irony here is that Corey Hart was actually better against right-handed pitchers (.264/.336/.437) than he was against left-handed pitchers (248/.333/.356) last season.

Still, at this point, I don't think many people would mind if Jim Edmonds was standing in right field to start the season.  It's just a matter if Edmonds will be with the team in time for the Opener -- as Haudricourt noted, he left the team to attend to a family matter a couple days ago and hasn't been in touch with the team to let them know when he'll be back.  I just find it hard to believe that Hart would  be making $4 million to be the right-handed side of a platoon.  We've already lived through this experience recently with Kevin Mench.

On the topic of Edmonds, take a few seconds to vote in our poll on the main page.  How many games a week should Edmonds be starting this year?

And there was much rejoicing.

Jeff Suppan was placed on the 15-day DL today, retroactive to March 26th, according to Adam McCalvy.  At first it seemed like one of those fishy late-Spring "injuries" that seem to come up when a team doesn't want to cut a guy but doesn't have room for him, but Tom Haudricourt certainly doesn't make it seem like that's the case.  The THwitter says an MRI found a "cervical disk problem" that causes "periodic sciatic pain."

This is probably the best possible outcome for the Brewers.  For now, the 5th starter race comes down to Manny Parra and Chris Narveson, and the Brewers don't lose the long-term depth of keeping Suppan around, as opposed to just cutting him.  Even better, with Suppan on the disabled list, the Brewers can effectively keep him away from Ken Macha, who might otherwise be inclined to choose Suppan for that last rotation spot.

At the very least, it provides the Brewers with more time to find a sucker taker on the trade market.  By the time Suppan gets back, perhaps Parra or Narveson will have pitched well enough to avoid the possibility of having Suppan make any starts at all.  Hey, a guy can dream.

With today's news about Jeff Suppan's "stiff neck" and promises from those in Arizona of some kind of announcement still to come, I had high hopes for Doug Melvin's appearance on WSSP 1250's "The Big Show" today.  Best case scenario, Melvin lets us know what's going to happen with Soup.  At the very least, we'd hopefully have a little light shed on the situation.

No such luck.  Doug was in midseason "GM-speak" form, not really saying anything of substance and dancing around the harder questions. Not only did we not get any answers, but we were left with even more questions.

When asked about the starting rotation, Melvin basically told us what we already know -- our top four are Yovani Gallardo, Randy Wolf, Doug Davis, and Dave Bush.  Melvin reiterated that the 5th spot won't be needed until April 15th, and he still has five days to make some final decisions.  He said "it'll be determined later on what specific roles will be," but it sure sounded like Chris Narveson is at least headed for a bullpen role.  Melvin did add that everyone has to be ready at any point, because the #5 spot in the rotation is seldom held by the same person all year.

When asked who the odd man out will be, he again said he still has some time to determine that, and that it's a tougher call than he's had to make in the past.  They then asked how much Suppan's salary plays in to the decision, and Melvin said it won't be the sole decision maker, adding "We have released high-payroll players before."

So nothing really happening on the pitching front, at least for now.  The juicy nugget came when Melvin was asked about the starting outfield, and I'm going to transcribe this word-for-word, just to make sure I'm not taking anything out of context.

The question: who will be the starting outfielders?

The answer: "It's probably going to be Gomez and Braun and, uh, right now we're looking at our other options. We're gonna... we have more left-handed bats this year so some left-handed hitters may play, uhm, more often than they have in the past. Edmonds has had a good spring, Corey Hart has not had a good spring up to this point. Jody Gerut has struggled, uh, and that. But we'll wait and see, you know. We'll determine that when the season starts. I think our outfield has a chance to be fairly productive in that regard. It's going to be a different look than what we've had in the past, there's going to be a bit more left-handedness to it, going to be a bit more speed, probably not as much power but, you know, there's still five days left here... we still have that amount of time left before we make some final decisions about the roster."

Well, then.

I thought I was crazy when I first heard that answer -- did I just hear Melvin quickly rattle off Gomez and Braun as starters in the outfield, and dance around the idea of Corey Hart keeping his job in right field?  Looking back, yeah, I did.  And WSSP ran with that soundbite as the main selling point of this interview on their site (if you want to listen to the whole interview, here it is).

Even though Hart has been abysmal this spring and Jim Edmonds has been hitting pretty well while talking about all the playing time he's expecting, for some reason I still had a hard time believing anyone other than Hart would be standing in right field on Opening Day.  Now?  I'm not so sure. 

This is definitely shaping up to be an interesting final week of Spring Training, to say the least.  On top of deciding how to handle Jeff Suppan, the Brewers now have to decide what they're going to do with Corey Hart -- if neither sees significant playing time, that's over $16 million sitting around, basically doing nothing but collecting checks.