Searching For West Bend Silver Linings During the Brewers’ Darkest Hour

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Brewers.com

Jean Segura

There’s no sugarcoating it: Things are as bad as they’ve ever been for the Milwaukee Brewers. The team’s 2-11 record represents not only the worst record in baseball, but the worst start in franchise history, and the team has nobody to blame but themselves. Between the shoddy pitching and the non-existent offense, they’ve earned every single one of those loses. And with three of the team’s opening-day starters already on the DL—Carlos Gomez because of a hamstring, Jonathan Lucroy because of a fractured toe and Scooter Gennett because he showered wrong—there’s no end to the misery in sight. Brewers fans waited five long months for the baseball season to begin, and just two weeks in it’s already over. At least last year’s team had the decency to wait until the end of the season before their meltdown.

So the brutal truth is the Brewers are not making the playoffs this year. For reasons Mike Petriello outlines in a fangraphs post that’s so depressing no Brewers fan should ever click on it, the team’s wildcard hopes have already been all but shot dead, barring the most unlikely (and immediate) of miracles.

But it's funny how this dreadful, awful, Yadier Molina smirk of a season becomes a lot more tolerable once you accept this reality. Baseball is a cruel game. Sometimes enjoying it means recalibrating your expectations. For better or worse, we are not St. Louis fans, who will accept nothing less than the postseason each and every year. We can’t expect to win every time. But if you can lower your expectations—and I mean really lower them, lower than any of us would have ever imagined we’d have to just two weeks ago—there's still plenty of cause for Brewers fans to be hopeful about the future. Here are six reasons Brewers fans should cheer up.

The team will get better.

This is so obvious it shouldn’t even need to be said, but with the team mired in such a drastic losing streak it’s comforting to hear nonetheless: Eventually this team will begin playing better ball. We’ll pitch some quality starts. We’ll get some home runs. We’ll make some spectacular plays. Players will reach arbitrary milestones we’ll celebrate, and Bob Uecker will go on ridiculous tangents we’ll tweet about. We’ll win some games, and with those wins—however meaningless they are—will come the sense of exhilaration fans have been denied so far this season. At some point, hopefully sooner than later, this season will stop feeling like a funeral.

This team wasn’t going to contend anyway.

The Brewers were always long shots to make the playoffs this year; it’s only within the last week that we’ve come to terms with how badly the deck was stacked against us. This team was always likely to fail; they just failed earlier than we thought they would. But pointing at these last two weeks for costing us the playoffs is like blaming the rain for scaring off The Great Pumpkin. The Great Pumpkin was never going to come, so let’s stop dwelling on it.

This could force a rebuild.

The Brewers management has always resisted the idea of rebuilding completely. Instead they’ve clung to their stars in the hopes of putting together a team that maybe, hopefully, under just the right magic circumstances, might content. And sometimes that approach has paid off, but this year’s early and spectacular implosion could be the wake up that finally shakes them from that stubborn course. Even if the team stops short of a full rebuild, they’ve got enough movable pieces that they should be able to acquire at least a few prospects, maybe even some great ones. This team will almost certainly be better down the line for being so shitty right now.

There are still reasons to be vested in how this team performs.

Baseball is about the long haul. Even if the playoffs are out of the picture, how the Brewers play for the rest of the season will have a direct impact on the team’s future. The wins may be meaningless, but there are still reasons to root for players like Matt Garza, Kyle Lohse and Aramis Ramirez to bounce back. The better they play, the more market value the carry, and the riper they are for a potential trade that could help restock the team’s thin farm system. And while it’s a lot to hope for, if Ryan Braun returns to his former All Star glory, there’s a chance that some contending team might be willing to take his hefty contract off of our hands. How these players perform will shape what our team looks like going forward.

Seats are cheaper when the team sucks.

If you’re the remotely thrifty sort, you know that the price you pay for Brewers tickets is inversely proportional to the quality of the product on the team. When the team is making a playoff push, cheap tickets can be hard to come by. But during drier years, consolation comes in the form of lower ticket prices. The team runs constant specials, while sellers offer premium seats at huge discounts on sites like Stubhub. Most of us would rather pay a little extra to see the team in winning form, but at least bad play is good news for your wallet.

Jean Segura has bounced back.

This may seem like small consolation, but Jean Segura has been hitting, and that’s a huge relief following a dismal 2014 season that had even some of his biggest supporters writing him off as a one-season wonder. No Brewer needed the redemption more. After adjusting his swing, he’s hitting a robust .292 and getting on base reliably. He even hit one of the team’s rare homeruns. He may be the shortstop we were hoping for after all.

Carlos Gomez will return.

Carlos Gomez is on track to return from the DL on May 1. His return will make the Brewers a better team, of course, but almost more importantly, it’ll lift the mood around the crew. And while he’s not immune from the occasional frustrated bat crack, Gomez is one of the few players who consistently seems to enjoy being on the field. If any player can help break the gloom surrounding this team, it’s him. He can’t come back soon enough.