Kyle Lohse? Really? sigh. Another Cardinal castoff

I think the Brewers are becoming like the Minnesota Vikings. Let's just grab other team castoffs and hope they do well.

I'm not very excited about Kyle Lohse at all.  I see another Greg Suppan in the works. MAYBE he will win one more game for the Brewers as he is about 1 game better then the average replacement player.

Yea - he will chew up innings but that is about it.

The guy gives up way to many flyballs and St.Louis is where flyballs go to die.  Milwaukee is where flyballs go out of the park and is one of the best homerun parks in the majors.

I was reading a blub in Baseball Prospectus last night about Lohse and the writer was commenting on whoever's team Lohse lands on will have a Suppan-ish pitcher.  AWESOME!!

Lohse had Yadier Molina catching him last year who is one of the very best at framing pitchers which is important for control pitchers but the Brewers have two very very good catchers themselves with Lucroy (5th best) and Maldanado (7th best) but then since Lohse is not a strikeout pitcher he relies on defense and the Cards had very very good defense, Brewers? not so much in the infield but the outfield which will get a lot of work (hopefully facing us as opposed to running away from us) is in fact the best defensive OF in the NL at 9 runs above average.

I believe the Brewers will have a hard time making it to .500 this year. The bright side is that last year the bullpen was chaos.  Why will it be different?  Because bullpens are 100% random.  It's been proven that year in year out for every teams a bullpen is basically a random event.

Every team has a closer that is randomly good, great and sometimes awful. The rest are just a bunch of grade "C" pitchers being random.  Last year the Brewers were randomly pitiful.  Maybe this year they will be randomly average.

The other bright note is that Rickie Weeks will have a better year which will account for 2 or 3 more wins.  The rest of the hitters all had better then average years so they will probably not be as good as last year.

Lucroy is not a .330 hitter like last year and will be closer to .270
Hart will be out a little
Weeks will be better
Shortstop . . . who is it?
Aramis Ramirez is freakishly consistent - no change
Braun had an MVP year
Gomez is hitting for more power which is good AND bad
Aoki was a surprise, can he steal 30 bases again?

I put the Brewers at 80 wins hopefully not in last place(remember, Houston went to the AL).

I think the Lohse deal hurt the Brewers in the long run but helped them in the short run with dealing with the chaos in the starting rotation.

Baseball Prospectus projects Lohse to have a 4.48 ERA and be 8-12 this year.
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In other news - we're going to be Arbitron family. Sort of like a Nielsen Family except for radio.  COOL.  FEAR US.  DJ and I each have our little log sheets (or will soon).
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My brother and mom had some snow yesterday.  In fact 16.5 inches more then their previous record on this date.  18.5 inches in Springfield ILL.  All I can do is laugh.

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Does human survival justify the extermination of another species??  Just curious.