Introducing the All-Brewers Killers team
Why are these players the way that they are?
Welcome to another week and another spicy Rich People Conversations.
Let’s converse.
The all-Brewers killers team
~Curt
The coronavirus has shaken up seemingly everything about our lives as we know them for the past month, but some things will always remain.
Death.
Taxes.
And Paul Goldschmidt socking dingers against the Brewers.
In our ongoing quest for the #content without any, ya know, actual baseball to write about, we again turn to Baseball Things That Already Happened in this week’s newsletter.
Few things unite a fanbase more than disdain for specific opposing players and teams. You may have loved Rickie Weeks and your grandma may have hated him, but you both sure as heck couldn’t stand Randall Simon for that one time he whacked a wiener!
(Fun fact: 8-year-old Curt was at that game. Wes Helms hit a walk-off, I think, but more importantly that was the day I learned this world cares not about you and will screw you over with a blindside hit with a baseball bat, even if you are a loving, harmless racing sausage.)
I spent far too much time going through splits on Baseball Reference’s play index and came up with the complete list of players that seem to have the Brewers’ number. More simply put, they are The Brewer Killers.
It’s a pretty straight-forward concept, but I went about it with a few rules.
All players had to be active (except one exception, which you will see in a bit and immediately understand why I broke the rules for him and him alone). Players were picked based on the following factors: career stats against Milwaukee, comparing those stats to their overall career totals, success in the playoffs and other big moments against the Brewers and fans’ general perception and level of annoyance with the player (aka the Jon Jay Quotient).
You’ll see each player’s tOPS+ listed alongside his batting average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage slash line. tOPS+ is the player’s OPS relative to his career average, weighted on a scale where 100 is average.
The team
Catcher: Buster Posey (.364/.429/.582, 144 tOPS+)
Buster Posey is a fantastic baseball player that is likely headed to Cooperstown. Against the Brewers, he might be the greatest player of all time. In 43 career games, he’s socked nine homers, driven in 39, walked 19 times and struck out just 23. His .364 average is the highest of any active player against the Brewers, minimum 75 PA. Posey’s first career grand slam came against Milwaukee (part of a four-homer series as a rookie) and so was his most recent, a go-ahead shot in extra innings last July.
First base: Paul Goldschmidt (.342/.447/.650, 138 tOPS+)
This one really was a more difficult call than I expected going in. Goldschmidt is maybe the poster boy for Brewer killers (some guys below might like to have a word on that), particularly at Miller Park, but Albert Pujols absolutely dominated the Crew in the same division for more than a decade and, most recently, Cody Bellinger has wrought The Sadness upon Milwaukee. All three have obliterated Brewers pitching and have dealt crushing blows against them in the playoffs.
In the end, though, I stuck with Goldschmidt. For as dominant as Pujols was, him dominating the Brewers the way he did was probably expected considering how inhuman he was from 2001-11. Goldschmidt rises far more above his normal abilities against Milwaukee, too (138 tOPS+ to Pujols’ 121). The Cardinals first baseman has 13 career homers, 11 more doubles and a 1.249 OPS in 33 games at Miller Park. He has four multi-homer games against the Crew, including last year’s three-dinger game. And who can forget his obliteration of the Brewers in the 2011 NLDS, where he hit .438 with two homers, including the grand slam that cued the Shaun Marcum Glove Flip, and a 1.339 OPS. Thank goodness Kirk Gibson started Lyle Overbay in Game 1.
Second base: Brian Dozier (.335/.392/.593, 154 tOPS+)
Sorry, Brian Dozier, you Interleague tormenter, I just don’t have as much to say about you as Paul Goldschmidt.
Shortstop: Brandon Crawford (.269/.362/.445, 129 tOPS+)
Brandon Crawford, imma let you finish, but really you’re only getting this nod because a) Troy Tulowitzki just retired so he’s ineligible, and b) Trevor Story kinda single-handedly won the Brewers a playoff series.
Crawford’s numbers don’t jump off the page at you, but he’s been a consistent, pesky thorn in the Brewers’ side for the last decade that, mind you, has never been a world-beater at the plate otherwise. His seven homers against Milwaukee are more than he has against the Dodgers, who the Giants have played six series each year of his career, and despite his pedestrian career 8.4 BB%, he walks more than 12% of the time against the Brewers.
Third base: David Freese (I’m too afraid to look up his postseason stats)
Remember, like five sentences ago, where I disqualified Troy Tulowitzki because he retired? Well, David Freese, just recently retired, too, but I make the rules here and let me be very clear about one thing.
David Freese hurt Adolescent Curt in ways that no therapy will ever be able to fix and no third baseman will ever replace him on this list.
I’d list my 95 theses against David Freese but none of us need to be reminded of what will never be erased from our memories.
Outfield: Jay Bruce (.258/.344/.520, 120 tOPS+)
While Freese is the postseason villain and guys like Goldschmidt and Arenado absolutely wreck Brewers pitching in ways unmatched, it’s Jay Bruce who is the true, consistent tormenter. The numbers, sure, are pretty good. 35 homers, 24 doubles, 90 runs and 89 RBIs in 571 PA. Eighth on the all-time list of homers against the Brewers despite being 54th in PA. Four career walk-offs against Milwaukee, the most of any active player.
But more than anything, there’s an indescribable quality to Bruce’s ability to produce hit after hit for more than a decade now. In fact, he might just win a poll among fans of who the biggest Brewers killer is. It’s just a way of life.
Outfield: Odubel Herrera (.333/.405/.604, 164 tOPS+)
I was somewhat unaware of just how much Herrera, a man with actual, serious problems, dominated the Brewers. That 164 tOPS+ is absolutely absurd, as is the fact that he has 18 extra-base hits in 111 career at-bats.
Outfield: Yasiel Puig (.319/.385/.595, 136 tOPS+)
Puig could qualify for both teams in this newsletter, as he has a .424 average in 74 PA against Minnesota.
But only against one of these teams has he dominated in the regular season, scored a walk-off run from first on a single and, um, hit a homer to effectively end their season one game shy of their first World Series appearance since 1982.
There were other outfielders who contended for this last outfield spot, but none with Puig’s complete body of work.
The bench
Cody Bellinger: The 2018 NLCS MVP with a 1.107 OPS and six homers in 74 regular season PA.
Albert Pujols: The active leader with 42 homers against and an 11-year reign of terror in the NL Central.
Maikel Franco: A 146 tOPS+ against the Brewers, including a .554 slugging percentage and 1.234 OPS at Miller Park.
Nolan Arenado: 1.128 regular season OPS against the Brewers leads all active players, including a .701 slugging percentage. Arenado has a 150 tOPS+ against Milwaukee; his next-highest against an NL team is 121. But he went just 2-11 with five strikeouts and a -0.196 win percentage added as the Brewers swept the Rockies in the 2018 NLDS.
Trevor Story: For as bad of a time as Arenado and the rest of the Rockies did in that series, none had a worse go of things than Trevor Story. 2-12 with six strikeouts, including a pivotal one in the ninth inning in Game 1, and a -0.35 WPA. That said, no player has hit more homers in seven or fewer games in one season against Milwaukee than Story, who had seven ding dongs, ironically, during the 2018 regular season.
Jon Jay: Few guys are as pesky as Jay, he of a .303 career average against and seven runs scored in the 2011 NLCS.
Adam Eaton: And few have done as much damage as Eaton relative to their career numbers, as he has a .338/.417/.608 slash line and 161 tOPS+ in 85 PA.
Yangervis Solarte: My guy has a career .723 OPS but a 1.035 mark against the Brewers. He’s like the fourth third baseman on this list but can you ignore those numbers?
Pitchers
The starting rotation
Carlos Martinez: Prior to even looking up any stats, I threw Carlos Martinez’s name on here. In the age before he and his luscious, colored hair were moved to the bullpen, I was convinced Martinez was going to spin a no-no every time he faced the Brewers. He’s got a 2.23 ERA and 9.8 strikeouts per nine innings in 15 career starts.
Adam Wainwright: Adam-Wainwright-Facing-The-Brewers could win a Cy Young. 35 starts. 2.45 ERA. 17 wins. 4.1 K:BB.
Lance Lynn: We really should have seen Lynn’s career-long dominance of Milwaukee coming after the 2011 NLCS. He allowed no runs in 5.1 innings as a rookie in that series. Now, he sits with a 10-3 record and 2.20 ERA with 16 career starts.
Michael Wacha: Look, I tried not to put any Cardinals on this list. But here we are with four of them. 14 starts, 15 games, a 3.38 ERA and zero losses. I’m far from a #PitcherWinz kinda guy, but the dude has never lost a start to Milwaukee despite being in the division for seven years. Maybe the Brewers never should’ve gotten rid of Travis Ishikawa.
Jose Quintana: The Cubs have spent the last 2 1/2 seasons lining up Quintana to start in literally every series against the Brewers. And also a Game 163. Which the Brewers won.
Also, Quintana taking a brief respite from his Brewers dominance led to this, a rare Good Tweet by Adam.
Cole Hamels: The career numbers (3.53 ERA in 20 starts) aren’t absolutely incredible, but his eight-inning, two-hit, nine-strikeout masterpiece in the Brewers first playoff game in 26 years is probably the best postseason start against Milwaukee ever.
The relievers
Kenley Jansen: Milwaukee hadn’t score upon Kenley Jansen in 23.2 career innings, including 4.2 in the playoffs, until 2019.
Steve Cishek: A career 1.65 ERA in 41 games, although he did give up the go-ahead single (with inherited runners) in Game 163. Which the Brewers won.
Aroldis Chapman: It’s hard to forget Jon Lucroy’s walk-off homer off Chapman in 2013, but that one swing produced two of the three runs Milwaukee has scored off the flamethrower in 41 innings. That’s a 0.66 ERA, which is good! (Or bad, depending on your point of view here).
Pat Neshek: The only person above Jake in the Park Center High School Graduate Greatness Rankings, Neshek is not only a little old place where we can get together, but it’s also an arm that has a 0.78 ERA in 23 innings against the Brewers.
Marc Rzepczynski: Brewers fans will forever associate this lefty with pivotal strikeouts of Prince Fielder in one-batter appearances in late-and-close situations in Games 3 and 5 of the 2011 NLCS. He then picked up the win in the series-ending Game 6 after stabilizing a game in which, for some reason, Ron Roenicke threw out a completely-spent Shaun Marcum, Chris Narveson and Kameron Loe in the first five innings and let the game get largely out of hand.
Man. This really isn’t very therapeutic. Like, at all.
Michael Lorenzen: He’s just here to hit. Lorenzen has a .375/.412/.938 slash with three dingers in 17 PA against the Brewers. As a pitcher. Barry Larkin, a Hall of Famer, had a grand total of one homer against the team in 230 PA (!!!).
Some Other Guys
Here are, uh, some other guys that also fit the bill. If I were boring I’d probably call this the honorable mentions.
Edwin Encarnacion, Bryan Reynolds, Hunter Renfroe, Bill Hamilton, Rene Rivera, Derek Dietrich, Josh Harrison, Joe Panik, Joc Pederson, Jon Cueto, Dan Straily, Sonny Gray, Trevor Williams, Bryan Shaw, Chad Kuhl.
WHAT IS ON YUNI B’S BATTLING GLOVES?
~Curt~
This next part is pretty simple, but yet I feel like I have to do some serious explaining to do. Probably because it’s a very nice April day outside and there should be baseball on, but instead I’m fixated on Yuniesky Betancourt’s batting gloves.
I stumbled across this photo of our beloved prince (not to be confused with the beloved Prince). It was taken after Yuni B’s go-ahead bloop single in Game 5 of the 2011 NLDS.
Now that’s all good and things of that sort, but the real question here is: WHAT DO HIS GLOVES SAY?
We’ve definitely got “Yunis” right there on the velcro strap. Now, “Yuni’s” would make sense, right? They’re “Yuni’s” gloves, after all.
But look a bit more closely you can start to see my dilemma here. There’s a letter after that ‘s”. And another after that, it looks like. Is that sixth letter another ‘s’? Does that say “Yuniss”??
I couldn’t simply stop the search at this point. There’s something on his gloves, but what??? The search kept going and I found another photo of Yuni from that series.
Alright. So. Additional letters after “Yunis” confirmed. Unfortunately, that’s really all we can deduce from that photo—and, also, this is where things started to thin out.
In a sweep of the far corners of the internet for all Yuniesky Betancourt images, I figured out that, as recently as late-September of the 2011 season, he didn’t have anything written on his gloves (and had different ones entirely).
There was one fairly clear shot from the NLCS of Yuni B’s *left* glove. I’d suspect that the writing before the slash mark is “Maura”, the name of his mother, who received permission from the Cuban government to join her son in Miami.
This was the last clear image of the batting gloves that I could find. I have scoured and scoured for longer than I would like to admit. Sadly, for now, our quest ends here. Please bring baseball back. I’ve gone mad.
Chime in: What do you think the right glove says? Is it even possible to ever know?? If I stare at it long enough will I finally figure out??? Is that first ‘s’ not actually an ‘s’???? Am I thinking way too hard about thi—wait, don’t answer that one.
PHOTOS: “Opening Day” at Target Field
~Tom~
Andy Kaufer, a friend of Rich People Conversations and former St. Ambrose of Woodbury Crusader (Tom’s grade school), is a talented photographer and, like the rest of us, an avid baseball fan. He ventured to Target Field last week to check out what #OpeningDayAtHome looked like from downtown Minneapolis and snapped a few photos along the way that he shared with the newsletter.
Enjoy. And while you’re at it, check out more of his work at Instagram — @KaufDropMedia.
We miss you, sweet prince.
I’d swipe right.
The streets aren’t wet from rain. Those are my tears.
The only place where you can buy baseball tickets without $196 in processing fees.