Know Your Enemy: Milwaukee Brewers
Some people are fans of the Brewers. We here at SSHP are not. This is our series preview to the 2020 series, so White Sox fans can know their enemy.
Your Team
The Milwaukee Brewers
Milwaukee is a cute town that Chicagoans like to drive up to for day visits. The Brewers are a big rival of our hated enemy, the Chicago Cubs, so we automatically feel a sort of kinship with them. However, with the 60-game MLB COVID restructure we’ll have to take our enemies where we can get them. For the most part, Sox fans don’t mind the Brewers as a team.
Some individual players? OK, maybe.
One thing that unites Sox and Cubs fans is a universal dislike of Ryan Braun. Some people didn’t like Ryan Braun because he’s been a pretty good ballplayer throughout his career, who made a lot of noise by by combining power and average (at his peak in 2011, he was hitting .332). Many of us remember Ryan Braun as a big, fat cheater who was connected to the Biogenesis of America clinic that gave a lot of players a lot of PEDs. Now, a lot of players got busted during the Biogenesis thing (hi, A-Rod). For the most part it ended up as a small blight on their record, they apologized, and everyone moved on. Braun was determined to go down in spectacular fashion over it.
Not only did he test positive and win an appeal after questioning a test collector’s handling of the sample (getting said collector fired, and then talking shit about him in the media), but his name then appeared in the records of Biogenesis. After that and some more investigation, Braun was suspended, fined, and forced to sit out 50 regular season games and the postseason. No one remembers a lot of those guys who got caught cheating. But most remember Braun, mostly due to the fact that he got someone fired and their reputation ruined. Braun just had to make that speech during spring training where he publicly blasted Dino Laurenzi Jr., who he had accused of mishandling his sample.
So, fuck Ryan Braun.
Then there’s Josh Hader. We all remember that during the All-Star Game a bunch of racist, sexist, and homophobic shit he said on Twitter surfaced. Lowlights include multiple uses of the n-word (hey white people, can we knock this off? We know it’s wrong, stop doing it), misogyny, homophobia, and KKK. I felt bad for his family, who were AT the ASG when all this broke. What a way to find out that your family member sucks (or they already knew. Either’s possible). There was this moment when Gleyber Torres and Nelson Cruz were (probably) reading the tweets:
Hader did the “young and stupid” apology. I dunno know, guys. I’ve been young and stupid and I've known my entire life that it’s bad to say the n-word.
Fuck Josh Hader, too.
Enemy manager
He’s definitely a lot less colorful than some of our other enemy managers. He kind of screwed around in the front office for a little bit before becoming a part-timer on the radio broadcasts. In 2015, Counsell took over after Ron Roenicke was fired (Roenicke is now managing for the Red Sox, and you can see for yourself how great that’s going).
Under Counsell, the Brewers have been on a steady upward trend. In his first two seasons they went 61-78 and 73-89 before breaking out in 2017, going 86-76, and missing the wild card by one game. Counsell endeared himself to everyone in 2018, when the Brewers beat the Cubs 3-1 in a tiebreaker game to win the NL Central.
Your Enemy’s 2019 record
89-73
After starting 2019 with the highest expectations in a long time, the Brewers came in second in the NLC behind the Cards. They finished the season with a rough loss to the Nationals in the wild card game. You can’t really blame the Brewers here; the Nationals had the wildest 2019 season.
The Brew Crew went 10-9 against the Cubs in 2019, which is always great news.
Also in 2019, Christian Yelich became the first Brewer to hit 30 home runs before the All-Star Break (the previous record was held by Prince Fielder, with 29). This helped to propel Yelich to his second NL batting title, but he fell short of a second consecutive NL MVP.
The 2019 Brewers were a perfect showcase of how offense can carry a team while the bullpen figures it out. They were able to carry the team through some rough early months.
Enemy pitchers
The Brewers are in a tight spot going in to the series. Their games vs. St. Louis were postponed due to some positive COVID tests on the Cards, so they’ve had a long stretch of off-days. That can either be really good (yay, rest!) or really bad (ugh, rest).
Monday’s starter for the Brewers is Brett Anderson. He’s set to square off against Carlos Rodón, who had a shaky outing against Cleveland. Rodón is pitching with an extra day of rest, so hopefully that does good things for him (we’re also just going to ignore his exhibition outing vs. the Brewers, because it didn’t count). Anderson is coming off the 10-day IL for a finger and has yet to make a start in 2020.
Lucas Giolito is tapped for Tuesday’s start against Brandon Woodruff. Woodruff was the Opening Day starter against the Cubs, giving up four hits, two earned runs, and a walk in five innings (plus give strikeouts). His most recent start was against the Pirates on July 29, where he only allowed one hit and one walk over 6 ⅓ innings, striking out 10 of the 21 batters he saw.
Adrian Houser got bumped from Monday to Wednesday, so he’ll be facing Dallas Keuchel. Houser recently went five innings vs. Pittsburgh, giving up one run, one hit, and striking out four.
What sucks for the Sox
We’re still leaving too many runners on base. The Sox offense needs to capitalize, especially with the bases loaded and no outs. The young batters will eventually catch up, but the veterans need to step it up and show them how it’s done (looking at you, José Abreu, Yasmani Grandal, and Edwin Encarnación).
Let’s not forget how things went for the Sox during the exhibition game, either.
What might not suck for the Sox
Lorenzo Cain has opted out of the remaining 2020 season, and I’m not going to miss his Gold Glove defense. That dread will come back in 2021.
Yelich has been struggling at the plate, and as long as he doesn’t figure out what’s wrong during this game, that’s one strong bat we don’t have to worry about.
Hear it from Sox fans
