After getting yet another MRI on his "fatigued" shoulder on Friday, LaTroy Hawkins will have arthroscopic surgery next week.  According to Jordan Schelling at MLB.com, Hawkins' rotator cuff and labrum will be repaired. 

As expected, Hawkins' season will be over.  He hopes to be ready for 2011, but if the doctors find significant damage to the labrum and rotator cuff, you have to wonder if he'll ever be able to pitch effectively again.  Those injuries are nearly impossible to completely recover from if a pitcher is in his 20's, let alone in his late 30's like Hawkins.

There were already a lot of people upset with the Hawkins signing before this came out, so this news probably won't help Doug Melvin's public approval numbers.

Tonight's game isn't even over yet, and while it'll no longer be his fault if the Brewers lose, this question is bound to come up in the next 24 hours.  How sure are we that everything is okay when it comes to Yovani Gallardo's oblique?

I'd say he's been inconsistent since returning from the disabled list, but that'd be putting it nicely.  Outside of a couple of good outings against very poor teams in the Pirates and Cubs, the numbers have been uncharacteristically bad since his return.

Before suffering the oblique injury on the 4th of July: 8-4, 2.58 ERA, 111.2 IP, 32 ER, 112 K, 48 BB, .626 OPS against, 1.773 WPA.

Those numbers aren't just good, they're Cy Young contender good.

After that point, heading into Friday's start?  3-1, 4.55 ERA, 27.2 IP, 14 ER, 32 K, 7 BB, .720 OPS against, -0.099 WPA.  Add in his line against the Padres, and you have an ERA of 5.81 in 31 IP, with 33 K and 12 BB.  His WPA in Friday night's start alone was -0.558.

To me, the lack of control has been especially worrisome.  You had a feeling things wouldn't go well for Yo when he was hanging curveballs in the first inning.  Here are the pitch f/x strikezone plots for the home runs hit by Adrian Gonzalez and Chase Headley that inning:

Yo hung those curveballs to Gonzalez and Headley just about as badly as you can hang a breaking pitch -- almost exactly in the middle of the zone, and both were almost in the same exact spot.

Am I overreacting a bit?  Gallardo's numbers likely would have come back down to earth even without the oblique injury, but considering the Brewers pushed him back long before I was comfortable with the idea, I'm probably just quick to blame it on that.  Still, the fact that he's given up 14 runs in his past three starts with nine walks makes me worried.

I do think it's important that the Brewers continue to gradually increase Yo's yearly innings workload, but at this rate, I wouldn't be opposed to the idea of possibly shutting him down in mid-September -- especially if we see more outings like tonight's.

Now that a few days have passed since the signing deadline for 2010 draft picks, bonus totals are starting to come in for teams across the league.  According to Baseball America's Jim Callis, the Brewers spent less money on 2010 draft signings than any other team in baseball.  In fact, the $2.432 million they spent on signing bonuses was over $1 million less than the total spent by the next-lowest team, the Twins (Minnesota spent $3.511M). 

While it's reasonable to think that the Brewers only finished last in draft spending because Dylan Covey didn't take his $2 million, Callis later notes that on average, teams spent $6.5 million on bonuses -- even if they did get Covey to sign, they'd still be way below that average.

These numbers are disappointing to see, but it's not all that surprising.  When the Brewers opened the season with a payroll hovering around $90 million, owner Mark Attanasio made it clear that they were spending as much as they could without having to operate in the red (and even that was assuming they'd hit 3 million fans again, which they won't sniff this year).  There's only so much money to go around, and if you're going to spend that much on the big league club, draft bonuses are going to suffer.

Ultimately, this can be blamed on the payroll being bloated by the contracts of Jeff Suppan and Bill Hall, who are now playing for other teams while the Brewers foot the bill.  The good news is that those contracts (among others) are off the books after next season, and the team's payroll should be much lower next season.  That means more money that could be spent on draft bonuses, which is good considering the team will likely have two Top 15 picks.

In the end, this was generally considered a bad draft year to begin with, so it's not like the Brewers lost out on a lot by going cheap.  Could they have rolled the dice on someone like Stetson Allie or A.J. Cole, who fell to the second round due to bonus demands?  Sure.  But all indications are that the money will be better spent next year.

At this point in the season, the Brewers can only play spoiler to teams still in the race.  Thanks to John Axford getting his 6th multi-inning save of the season on Tuesday night, they were able to do so against the Cardinals, knocking St. Louis to 2 games behind Cincinnati.

Axford's 18 saves have him at 13th in the National League -- not bad for a guy who took over the role nearly two months into the season.  Most of Axford's value has been in being able to nail down those multi-inning situations, and that's something that's rare in this era of one-inning specialists.  Here's how Axford compares to the 12 guys ahead of him in saves when it comes to multi-inning efforts:

Sometimes, things just don't work out.  You could call it the motto of the Brewers' 2010 season, I guess.

Free agent signings haven't worked out the way the front office had planned.  Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun have gone through prolonged slumps.  And now, the team's top pick in this year's draft, Dylan Covey, decided not to sign with the Brewers after discovering he has Type 1 Diabetes.

Monday night brought a lot of emotions and kneejerk reactions when the news started to come out that Covey wasn't signing.  Were the Brewers being cheap over a few hundred thousand dollars?  Did Covey see the slew of outrageously overslot bonuses being handed out behind him and suddenly want more?  At first we heard it wasn't about the money, but it's easy to be skeptical about that when contract negotiations break down.  Whenever someone says it's not about the money, it actually is about the money 99% of the time.

This was part of that 1%.