Milwaukee Brewers 2011 Season Preview

Hopefully we'll be seeing more of this in 2011 - both the walk-off bomb and the home run (get it?)!

Otherwise known as "Way more words than you ever wanted to read about the Milwaukee Brewers."  I figured a good way to wrap up my baseball preview extravaganza would be to profile my favorite team and talk about their chances this season.  Partially this is because, for the first time in my living memory, the Beermakers actually have a reasonable chance to contend for the World Series this year.  I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this - obviously, as a fan I'm thrilled, but this is a lot of pressure that I'm not used to come Opening Day!

I'm also a little late on my schedule this week.  It turns out that writing small novels each night when you're not used to it is somewhat taxing, and Wednesday night I needed to recharge the sleep batteries a little bit.

If you haven't already, check out my AL and NL season previews from earlier in the week.  For the most part, I did those without reading a whole lot of the myriad season previews by other sportswriters and bloggers, which I have done since.  This means that you could look at my previews in two lights: 1) they are pure, unbiased, uncontaminated, fresh perspectives on all of the teams, or 2) they are a bunch of baloney and WAY different that what a lot of the experts are predicting.  Probably a little bit of both - I guess we'll find out at the end of the year!


One more thing - as with all of my opinions and analysis, most of this is pretty much off the cuff and shoddily researched, though I have done SOME sifting through stats and such.  If you want a more balanced, reasoned, and researched preview of the Brew Crew, I would recommend checking out a lot of content at BrewCrewBall or one of the other myriad baseball blogs floating around.  One more administrative item before I begin - I pulled any and all images here off of Google Image Search, so don't sue me if they're yours!


With that, let's get into it!

2011 Baseball Preview Part Deux: National League

As promised, I'm back to tackle my previews and predictions of the teams on the senior circuit, leading up to Opening Day on Thursday.  Part Deux of my Preview (and you have to pronounce it duouh, as in Hot Shots, Part Deux) will work just like the first post on the AL from yesterday - I'll list how I think each of the divisions will play out as well as one question mark and one strength for each team.

Since the NL has 2 more teams than the AL and it took me long enough last night, let's get started!

2011 Baseball Preview Part 1: American League

I'm making this up as I go, but the structure of these team-by-team previews will go something like this: I'll predict the order teams will finish for each division, and elaborate on each team with some question marks for the season, some exclamation points for each team, and the bottom line (I thought about continuing the grammatical theme and calling that the period, but that sort of fell flat as I soon I thought more about it).  I'm not gonna be like most sportswriters and predict actual records for two reasons: 1) first and foremost, I'm lazy and that sounds like a lot of work, and 2) because it'll be less embarrassing at the end of the year when I look back to find out how wrong I was now.  I will give a rough guess as to how many games back from first each team will be, though.  Oh, and another warning - I'm not gonna explain baseball statistics here.  I know it's like a foreign language, I'm sorry.  If you're really curious, I would head over to Baseball Reference for explanations.

So let's get into it, starting with the evil Empire of baseball divisions...

Baseball Preview Week!

In honor of Opening Day (T-minus 3 days!), and also partly to give myself something to write about, I decided to designate this week Baseball Preview Week here at the Hanke Daily Herald World Headquarters.  The schedule will go something like this (unless I get lazy and it goes nothing like this):

Monday: American League Team Previews and Predictions
Tuesday: National League Team Previews and Predictions
Wednesday/Thursday: Milwaukee Brewers In-Depth Extravanganza

As you can see, I'm not above letting my personal biases stomp all over decorum and objectiveness.

Organizing the Bookshelf (the real one - not the link above)

You know you're big-time geeks and/or have no social life when the big event of your weekend is reorganizing the bookshelves after a major shopping spree at a used book store and a Border's that is going out of business.  I seem to dimly recall a time when I did things like go to bars and parties on the weekends.  (In some cases, the foggy memory may be less because of the time between then and now and more due to the beverages consumed at said parties/bars!)  However, there's always a great sense of accomplishment and a weird feeling of pride when the job is done and you can step back and admire a newly organized library.

Of course, it's also a great way to find out ways that you and your spouse are very different...

The NCAA and the Color of Money

So, how's your bracket?  It was one of the more entertaining first weekends of the NCAAM BBall tourney, in my opinion, but it just wouldn't be March Madness if one of my Final Four picks wasn't out before 5 PM on the first day (Louisville in this case).  Despite that, I actually have a pretty good bracket this year so far (90th percentile on ESPN.com), but with both Louisville and Pitt out, I probably have a slow, painful fall to the bottom to look forward to.  Thank goodness it's illegal to spend money on March Madness brackets - if I wanted to donate $X to my friends, I would just give them it to them straight.  Anyways, with the NCAA basketball tournaments (men's and women's - Title IX is our friend) beginning over the weekend, I thought it would be a great time to muse on the role of money in collegiate athletics. 

So About that Daily part...

Yeah, so the plan to post regular content up here hasn't gone so well so far.  I am planning on rectifying that.  We'll see..