A movie has came out recently titled the Human Centipede where an evil doctor does some pretty gruesome grizzly stuff to people where I think I couldn't handle watching it the whole way through. There are some horror movies that are like that where there is just too much gore to handle for one person and they must shut it off. Brewer fans feel like they are in that kind of horror movie when they watched Jeff Suppan pitch in the last couple of years and today he was released by the club.
Suppan signed a big Christmas day deal and I remember being fairly excited for the deal. Suppan had just came off an excellent performance in the 2006 MLB Playoffs and he seemed to have the leadership we needed at the time. I wish Santa would have slapped me in the face to remind me that it indeed was Jeff Suppan not Nolan Ryan. To take a look at what Suppan did for the Crew in his years, his stats say it all...
Not once did Suppan have an ERA below 4.50, I can understand being in the fours with how people hit the ball but 4.5? That is not even giving your team a chance to win. Not to mention, Suppan gave up over 200 hits and 100 runs in his three full seasons with the team. Therefore you get the high ERA but still, just unacceptable numbers for a guy who got over 40 million dollars. The one thing I am happy about is Doug Melvin and Mark Attanasio admitted his mistake and moved on from it because it took awhile to finally own up that we made a mistake bringing this guy in.
Granted it took awhile, Suppan started over 30 games for the team in three years and not once did he get regulated to the bullpen even though he had above a 4.5 ERA going for him. Soup needed to be benched last season but the Crew were too hasty to admit fault for their actions especially after they swallowed Bill Hall's enormous contract like Jenna Jameson. Soup never deserved to be out there after his 10 run disaster against Washington. Yes, he did go on the DL with a phantom injury but we all know they needed that opportunity to do that so he wasn't a part of their rotation. At least, this year they realized Soup wasn't heading anywhere and only gave him two chances to start.
The beginning of all of it, they gave Suppan the role of the garbage reliever and actually he didn't do a terrible job at it. Then, Ken Macha felt more comfortable with putting Suppan into different relief roles and that's when the wheels came off. I cannot blame Macha for this because he thought Soup had got it together and maybe became a reliable arm out of the bullpen.
Finally, I do want to thank Soup for being a class act. I know we rip on you a lot Jeff but trust me, it's not you, it's the contract.
-Charlie.
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