2020 Brewers: What Did We Expect ?

After experiencing a week and a half of Brewers baseball in 2020, what have we learned?

Eight games into an incredibly weird season, a weird team stands at 3-5, a record that leaves most people with many questions. That weird team is in fact the Milwaukee Brewers, a club that came into the season with considerable roster turnover and a whole lotta questions. Well, eight games in, some of those questions have already been answered.

The biggest and most obvious question were the expectations that were set for this club. Coming into the season, the Brewers lost two All-Stars, in Mike Moustakas and Yasmani Grandal. Sounds devastating right? Well, it has been to say the least. General Manager David Stearns, set out to replace them with a band of misfits and journeymen, guys who don’t exactly fit the mold of replacing two of your best bats. Names like Brock Holt, Jedd Gyorko, Omar Narvaez, Justin Smoak, and Eric Sogard, now call Milwaukee their new home. Besides Sogard (former Brewer fan favorite) don’t even try to tell me any of those players spring excitement into the air. Well, surprisingly so, many thought the Brewers could compete with their new roster. A big chunk of the fanbase even thought that the roster was improved from 2019. And throught the first weeks worth of games into the season, their presence is ever missed. The Brewers not only lost Moustakas and Grandal, but also Eric Thames, and Lorenzo Cain, who opted out of the 2020 season. All four of those players have posted All-Star worthy numbers as members of the team, so obviously the team is gonna take a huge loss. But still, besides Cain, Brewers fans still thought their team could compete. Its safe to say that it is going to be tremendously hard to repeat as a top five team in the NL.

Now, your probably thinking, wow, we’re only a week into the season, why jump to conclusions already? But I say when your season is only 60 games and the first-place team in the division is already 4.5 games ahead, why wouldn’t you jump to conclusions. Suddenly, we’re already 13 percent into the season, and the Brewers as a team have a .229 batting average. Where’s the optimism in that? It certainly doesn’t help that the team’s best player, and possibly the best player in baseball, is currently in the worst slump of his career. Christian Yelich is hitting .088 with a homer and three RBIs. Just about the opposite of what you would expect in the 2018 MVP. When nobody else is hitting, you tend to lean on the best player to pick up some slack, but Yelich’s timely clutch hitting of the past has been nowhere to be found as of lately.

We’ll see what this team is made of as the season goes along, and maybe this team does have it in them to compete. But with the offense they have displayed so far, it looks like it may be tough. But then again, still have hope Brewers fans, Yelich will eventually go on a tear, we’ll see which new guy steps up, and no matter what, this season will be a fun one

Jacob Szczap

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