Little Slide Rooter

Javy walked! That's a sign.

I'm Ok with a run of bad luck. Bad luck can only last for so long (anyone makes any goat jokes gon' get cut.) It's the bad pitching I'm worried about.

It's too late for them. Round up Brian Matusz, Daniel Moskos, Mike Minor, and Brandon Beachy, and lock them in a room with Bosio. We'll have a new star studded rotation in no time.

To do what with the five or six who are already on the roster? That will be our bullpen help.

But don't worry. We at least tie it up, maybe even retake the lead before they run far, far away with it.

Screw bullpen help, we're going to need 2-3 starting pitchers.

I feel as though we're almost better off cycling through a new set of Paul Maholms, Jason Hammls, and Scott Feldmans each year than trying to get fancy with proven pitchers.

It's Chris Bosio. He must have asked for a raise, and they denied him, so he's gone all Pied Piper on them. He's instructing the pitchers to do the opposite of what they'd been doing. The moment he feels appreciated again, it will all be rectified.

He also gave up five to a below average offense. Fortunately that does not suddenly make him a bad pitcher or bad target. Momentary/Single game results over a handful innings for a guy with his background are tertiary at best. Such as Chris Sale being rocked for 8 runs by an even worse offense the night before.

Christ, the board's becoming a support group. Look, the Nationals dropped 10 in a row. But they're good, so they bounced back. The Pirates tanked to the point they were ready to sell. But they're good, so they bounced back. Now it's our turn to suck. But we're good, so we're going to bounce back. And being that we'll still have a sizable division lead, it will still be them trying to catch us.

Clearly Maddon's not yelling hard enough. The only thing that can help us now is somebody to yell at Maddon for his piss poor yelling ability. I wonder what Ozzie Guillen's up to. Now there's a man who knew how to yell at other men. We can bring him on as Special assistant inn charge of supervising men who yell at men. And being bilingual, his yelling technique should be equally effective on hispanic men as it Caucasian men. Though if Kawasaki requires yelling at, that could make things complicated. Impossible? Oh, no. Just complicated. But that's not important. What is important is that men will be yelled at by other men, and it will be glorious.

Attaboy Rizz. Somebody get that man a lawn chair.

So we can add Jon Lester to the list of pitchers who have become horrible for no reason.

Eh, more like a younger Nelson Cruz. But in any case, good, offer them Vogelbach and someone else. He can still mash. Won't happen. It's one thing to trade a player, even a star to a rival if it benefits both sides. But Ryan Braun is more than a baseball player to Milwaukee. He's an icon. Warts and all, they adore him. If they were to trade him to Chicago, who Milwaukee views as its rival in terms of more than sports (which is absolutely adorable,) the PR backlash would be tremendous, and I'm not so sure that the Brewers could survive it.

How horrible of an idea is Ervin Santana, assuming we relieve the Twins of the bulk of his contract, rather than a big time prospect or prospect package?

We should have been on that horsefeathers.

Some posters who will remain nameless have a habit of embarrassing themselves in the heat of a game thread. Though equal parts annoying and comical, I've seen people react a lot worse while watching a game (or string of games) that's not going our way. But to take it the next step and take on this over the top 'oh God, what if we're bad now' anxiety is just irrational. Me, I may not have any kind of advanced stats to explain why everything bad is actually good and everything good is great. But I can tell you that we have a team built to win a lot more games than not both the remainder of this season, and even more beyond that. But what I can deduce is that our big bats remain mostly productive. Soon, we'll have our lead off hitter back. When this happens, the lineup as a whole falls back into place. By this, I mean that with Fowler gone, we've had to compensate at the top of the order at the expense of the bottom, and replacing the bottom of the order with filler. We're not going to have to do that now. Our starting pitching may not return to where it was the first 2 months of the season, but it's going to stabilize in between, and when the smoke clears, we'll have a rotation good enough to give up less runs than produced by the offense on a regular basis. Our bullpen is a bullpen. We have a reliable back end. Edwards seems to be getting more comfortable as a high-ish leverage guy, and I don't not trust Wood and Cahill with a lead of 3 runs or more. The rest is a revolving door, but the other 2-3 guys in pretty much every bullpen are just that. Our big problem there is that we'd relied on Grimm as a near sure thing in the back end, and that hasn't happened. If he pulls it together, great. If not, we'll make up for it via trade. We probably will anyway. So here's what's happening. Worst case scenario, we enter the ASB with a 5.5 game lead. We're going to the playoffs. Probably as the division champs, but if not, there aren't enough teams than are better than us in wild card contention. At that point, we may win, we may not. Now I know that some of you 20-40 somethings have been waiting well over a century for a Championship, but that can never be guaranteed. If we win, awesome. If not, we can take it however we choose. But the fact remains that going forward, we'll have Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Addison Russell, Willson Contreras, Kyle Schwarber, probably Javy Baez, maybe Jorge Soler, another year of Ben Zobrist. There also Jason Heyward, who can't possibly be this bad. We also have Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, and Kyle Hendricks. Maybe Super Jake's gone forever. If so, we have another year of serviceable, back end starter Jake. And we have the resources to upgrade by a lot. The bottom line is that this team was not built to win A World Series. It was built to remain in position to reach the playoffs for many, many years to come, in which case, it's a crap shoot.

The bad news is that Jake might not be getting that monster contract. The good news is that a Cy Young trophy has to be worth something on EBay. Maybe he should ask Brandon Webb what the going rate is.

+defense? That's just it- per BBR, all pitchers seem defaulted with a 0.0 WAR, suggesting that they don't factor in the pitcher as a defensive position, which he becomes the moment the ball leaves his hand. Unless they lump it in with his WAR as a pitcher.

We need something horrifying as a slump breaker. This is all I've got:

Of our until recently, historically dominant starting pitching, Lester's the only one worthy of the benefit of the doubt that his last start was but an anomaly. If he implodes again, we could be looking at a rotation of Hendricks-Warren-Beeler-whatever spare parts Theo can scrape off the street while they frantically work on a trade or trades.

http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/raining_david_tennant.gif

Will you shut the hell up about cursing them out? Seriously. Like I said, they're beyond the point of a mere tongue lashing. The only way to whip them back into to shape is with a whip.

Yelling won't be enough for this sorry lot. No. Suckage of this magnitude is going to call for physical punishment. I want to see the fear in their young eyes as Maddon pulls out the kendo stick, and goes all Steve Blackman on all 25 of them.

And Noah Sydegaard was pulled after 4.2 with an apparent injury. If I can't revel in our own glory, then dammit, I'm going to revel in the misery of others.