Corey Hart needs to lead off. Again, the logic that Ned uses (Rickie shoudl stay in the role because he scores a lot) is garbage and it's honestly insulting. Ned is insulting all of our inteligence by telling us that. In my short two years of covering the team and getting to sit in on Ned's post game pressers, and with each quote of his I read in the paper, one thing was clear. The man thinks he's smarter than all of us. No Ned, it's not working because he's scoring. He's scoring because he's on base in front of run proders. If Corey Hart were leading off, we'd be scoring more runs because of his higher on base percentage.The other thing that really disturbs me about this team is their lack of left handed bats. My one concern heading into the season was would the Brewers be able to hit right handed pitching? So far...nope.
Bill Hall is getting closer and closer to becoming a platoon player. He's batting just .143 against righties with a measly .303 slugging percentage. The numbers Hall is putting up against righties are Jenkinseque when he'd face lefties.Joe Dillon is a nice player, provides versitiltiy to play most infield positions, and is serviceable in the corner outfield spots, but doesn't offer much after that. A few weeks ago when Joe Dillon was still in Nashville, I said if I were Melvin I'd call up Branyan before I brought back Dillon. Obviously that didn't happen, but I'm thinking it will soon.
Branyan's name will most likely come up when Melvin meets with the coaching staff tomorrow. He's mashing the ball in AAA (8 homers and 26 runs driven in) but he's inexplicibly hitting for average as well (.355). The team desperately needs another left handed bat, and every team looks for a left handed hitter with pop. I've got to assume Dillon's days are numbered.Assuming this switch happens, I believe a platoon of Branyan and Hall at third should be in the Cards, and so do other sites.
The other bat they need to get into the lineup is Tony Gwynn. They'll never do this, because it would mean sitting Braun (won't happen), relegating Corey Hart to a platoon role (they're too high on him to do that), or doing the same with Mike Cameron (they're paying him too much money to be a platoon guy). Gwynn brings a dynamic to the offense that no one else does. He hits purely for average, has a great eye, takes a lot of pitches, gets on base a lot and scores when he's on base. An ideal leadoff/2nd hitter. Gwynn should be playing regularly against righties.In order for any of these things to happen, Yost would have to swallow some pride and admit his way isn't working. For that reason I don't see these things happening, While the back end of their rotation hasn't been great (we already went over this in detail), they've done enough to at least keep them in games for the most part. Sure, Parra, Villanueva and Bush aren't getting past the 6th, sometimes even the 4th, but they're usually only surrenduring 3 or 4 runs. We thought this was an offense that would be scoring 4-6 runs on a daily basis. If that were the case, the rotation wouldn't look so bad right now.
This team needs to look at ways to get more left handed bats into the lineup when they face righties, or drastically alter their lineup. They're not scoring enough runs, yet Ned Yost seems to think thats OK. No Ned, it's not. Stop telling us it's early yet and guys will break out of this, because quite frankly, it's not early. It's now the middle of May. Do something before this season slips away from us.
