Prince Needs to Shoulder Some Blame

Tom Hardicourt, the Brewer beat writer and an absolute must follow on Twitter if you are a fan of the Crew pointed out that the Brewers have scored 128 runs, but half of those runs have been scored in 5 games. If you are not a math major, take away those five games and the Brewers are averaging 3.2 runs. I think the biggest reason why the offense and maybe the pitching is to is Prince Fielder.

Let's take a look at Prince Fielder's stats this year.  .234 BA 2 HR 9 RBI for the month of April.  That is a huge fat rut-roh.  I mean I understand that Fielder is a slow starter and when it's all the chips are down in September, he will be probably end up something like .275 35-43 HR 100+ RBI.  So in no way thing this is a post to diss Fielder, rather I am just making the point that this team will not win without Fielder hitting the baseball. 

People can bitch all they want about the pitching staff and the horrible numbers thrown up by the starters plus the four wins that Trevor Hoffman surrendered (cannot blame anyone else about those).  But I believe that pitchers are at their best when they are getting run support, only the true aces of Major League Baseball can do the 2-1 1-0 games like its their job. Doug Davis, Randy Wolf and others try too hard when they are involved in tight games and it leads to bad things.

Baseball is a funny sport where you need more than one player to carry a team but at the same time, Fielder's performance has been known to propel the team.  To bust out the advanced stats, Fielder's Wins Above Replacement (WAR) meaning how many wins is Fielder's play worth.  5.1 in 2007, 2.8 in 2008, and an all-time high 6.8 for Fielder. I believe the team sees Prince as a leader and when he does well, it somehow inspires the team to play better.

The Crew sits at 10-15 right now and we all agreed that the beginning of the schedule would be tough.  I would say like to see the Brewers try to take the series from either the Los Angeles Dodgers or the Arizona Diamondbacks. I do not expect both but if the Crew could gain some momentum heading into a six game home stand, it could be a sign of good things.

-Charlie.