Game Thirty One: Braves 2, Brewers 1

Box Score

I decided to ignore tonight's game and only check the box score when it was over. I may have to do this more often.

The Brewers have yet to win in the month of May, have lost six in a row, and have scored seven runs in the process. If the Brewers keep up this pace they will be the worst offensive team in the history of professional sports. That will not happen. But even outside of this stretch, scoring runs has been a problem. I'm kind of at a loss for why.

The Brewers have plenty of talent on their roster. Rickie Weeks, Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder, Casey McGehee, and Corey Hart are all established major league hitters. Jonathan Lucroy is having a great start to the season, and even though Carlos Gomez and Yuniesky Betancourt are generally black holes, their ability to pull in matter is not so great that no offense can escape. The should be a good offensive team, but instead they are frequently awful at scoring runs. How bad? They are currently on pace to score 670 runs, which (by 56 runs) would be their worst offensive output since 2004...when they won 64 games. For the time being I refuse to believe the Brewers have regressed to the beginning of the Ned Yost era. For now.

So what is the solution to the Brewers' woes? I have no idea. As we all learned from Bull Durham, baseball is a simple sport: You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. As far as I can tell there are three reasons the Brewers are having problems with hitting the ball, in order from most to least likely:

1) They are in a collective funk
2) They are facing excellent starting pitching
3) They are not good

There could be other issues, but I don't know what.

Moving aside from the offensive woes, the Brewers are on the brink of panic time. Not only do they trail St. Louis by 4.5 games, but wouldn't you know it, they get to travel there next for a three game series! And they get to face Jamie Garcia (3-0, 2.48 ERA), Kyle Lohse (3-1, 2.44 ERA), and Kyle McClennan (4-0, 3.79 ERA)! In the event of a sweep, the Brewers would be 7.5 games out of first. It doesn't matter that it's only May: that would be a huge problem. Let's just say I'm not looking forward to the next three games.