Chase the Music

(Real talk: I'm gonna try to have more consistent music puns as titles for these Custom of the Day posts. Stuff like 'Jays Are Gone', 'Shaved Fish' and 'Strange Rays'. Keep an eye out. Might get more obscure than ELO, which is like a 4 out of 10 on the obscurity scale.)

Right. So the Milwaukee Brewers...may not have been all that we thought they'd be.

True, they're not doing terribly, but...they're just kind of okay. Very, very okay. And from what we'd been seeing pre-season, we were expecting more than okay. And yes, the guys who were huge last year, like Chase Anderson, Zach Davies and Travis Shaw, are still doing some incredible work, and Eric Thames is submitting a more well-rounded but still-HR-heavy performance off the bat, but...the two hired guns they brought in to help the outfield are either injured or ineffective. Yelich comes back this week, but Lorenzo Cain hasn't been terrific, leaving Domingo Santana to try to mop up the rest of things.

Still, a lot of mainstays, like Orlando Arcia and Ryan Braun, are back-pedaling right off the bat, while the back end of the rotation, including Jhoulys Chacin, isn't wowing people. And yes, getting Junior Guerra back in there to balance things out is very smart, but there's still too many high ERAs and not enough consistency in this early stretch. There's a lot that's not as polished as we thought, and that's sad for a team that was supposed to take down Chicago this year.

To be fair, both Milwaukee and Chicago are currently in underdog status, as the main threat in the NL Central is now the inexplicably powerful Pittsburgh Pirates (I love this trend by the way). Getting back up will mean having to surpass the dangerous Cardinals and (more easily) the Reds, but the Brewers have more depth than they're currently letting off, and could outrun their sloppy start very soon.

Coming Tomorrow- Most of his team is going down with injuries, but he, as well as a certain 44-year-old pitcher, is keeping the fort strong.