What do you do when something is broken? You fix it of course. That's obvious as shit. So how come the Brewers don't fix 1st base? As soon as they selected Prince Fielder in the first round of the 2002 draft they had to know they weren't going to keep him around forever. He progressed quickly through the minors and made his Major League debut in 2005 and was the every day (and I mean every day - this guy didn't take a day off. NEVER! Not even if there was a fire) first baseman from 2006-2011. They should have drafted his successor and groomed him to take over when Prince left for the money. Well you all know what happened in the last 3 seasons so I'm not going to repeat it. Because it isn't pretty. Hunter Morris was a bust and every non-first baseman that they chose to play the position failed miserably. So for 2014 they signed two veteran players who actually knew how to play the position. They were missing that and veteran leadership in 2013 and that resulted in a lost season. We all know how the 2014 season ended and that offense was to blame for that. And like it or not, the finger points in the direction of 1st base. Every other position performed (with some exceptions) but that is supposed to be a position of production. And 1st base didn't produce.
You can't fault Doug Melvin here. Hunter Morris was the Southern League MVP in 2012 while playing for the Huntsville Stars. He was supposed to be the answer and all the Brewers had to do is keep the base warm until Morris ascended to the throne. Well that never happened, so Melvin did the best he could Lyle Overbay was a fan favorite at Miller Park in 2004 and 2005, so bringing him back as a veteran presence and the left side of a platoon made perfect sense. The "Oooooooooooo!!!!" chants did return to Miller Park and it would have been a good move if they got a better player to form the right side of that platoon. Mark Reynolds came exactly as advertised - he hit homeruns but couldn't bat his weight and he struck out more than me at the bar on a Saturday night. If you like that sort of thing then you have more problems than the only psychiatrist in Punxsutawney can deal with (although he does have an alcoholic now).
I want guys who can get on base AND drive in runs. That's a recipe for success. Solo homeruns just don't cut it for me. Sure Reynolds did have 21 homeruns, but he only had 54 RBIs (meaning that 21 of those were himself). While the blame is certainly on his teammates for not getting on base in front of him, I think we can also blame him for not getting the job done when guys were on base when he was at the plate. Overbay was the best pinch hitter on the team and he showed some real discipline at the plate (his .328 OBP doesn't jump out at you, but it's nearly 100 points higher than his batting avg of .233). He seemed to come up big in the situations that mattered, which is what you want from a part time player. I have no problem with anything that he did. My problem is Reynolds. It's not that he failed because he was what he thought he would be. But that's the problem. We shouldn't even be signing guys like that. It's a waste of time and the results aren't good enough to justify having him on your team.
I don't need to go into any more detail about these asshats. If you watched any Brewers games this year then you know that Overbay and Reynolds were better than whatever nonsense we have thrown at first base over the past 3 years. But crap is a nicer way of saying shit. It doesn't matter what word you choose - it's the same thing in the end. They weren't special. They just were. And that's the problem. We needed something special to make the playoffs and instead we won 82 games and sat at home during October. That's the reality of it. I haven't even touched on their defensive skills because they were above average. It's nothing to shout from the balcony because they got the job done. Reynolds was adequate filling in at 3rd when Ramirez was injured and also did a nice job at 1st. Overbay was hindered by his age and didn't have the range of his youth, but he still made plays. They were decent 1st basemen. But decent doesn't make you a great team. Average doesn't make you special. I'm not saying that these two players cost the Brewers success in 2014, but they certainly were a factor.
Check out my 3rd video, which recaps 1st Base for the 2014 Milwaukee Brewers, recorded in my car on Friday January 16th on the way to work:
What I didn't realize at the time is that the audio somehow got all mucked up during recording. When I looked at this video the next day, I realized that many parts of it were inaudible, so I could either record a new video or dub over new audio. Since I didn't know exactly what I said, I thought it would be funnier to record new audio because it wouldn't sync up with my lips and it would be like when they dub English over Chinese in martial arts movies. While it's not quite that funny in my video, it was more fun to me than recording a new video.
Lyle Overbay #24 - .242 batting avg, 9 HRs, 38 RBIs, 20 doubles, a great veteran presence in the clubhouse, stellar defense at 1st base and sure to elicit a lot of "Ooooo" faces from every man and woman at Miller Park this season.
.233 batting avg, 4 HRs, 35 RBIs, 14 doubles, 64 starts at 1st, the best pinch hitter since Lenny Harris and still able to get those "Oooooo" faces going despite his age.
Mark Reynolds #7 - .221 batting avg, 21 HRs, 54 RBIs, 145 strikeouts, able to decently play 1st and 3rd base and be the first baseball player to strikeout 9 times in a regulation game (9 innings).
.196 batting avg (a career low), 22 HRs, 45 RBI, 122 strikeouts, 72 starts at 1st, 29 starts at 3rd and has more strikeouts than a mentally challenged blind kid.
You'll notice that I made very little mention of Jonathon Lucroy in this article. He only played 19 games at 1st (16 starts), so he wasn't much of a factor over there. You have to think that number is going to increase in the future, so he might be a bigger part of the talk at this position if I ever choose to do these articles again. But this is focusing on the past and the past sucked balls. But it happens. I'm done talking about this because I've already wasted too much of my life on the 2014 season.
1st base didn't break the 2014 Milwaukee Brewers but it was one of the cracks that lead to the whole damn thing breaking apart. You can still stay intact with one crack. Sure it looks ghetto as fuck if you don't get that shit fixed, but you can still operate with no setbacks. If you have 3-4 cracks then it isn't stable anymore and it becomes a very fragile piece. That's what happened. It was in danger all season and in September it broke. At the worst possible time too. But do things ever break at the right time? Hell no. There's no such thing as the right time when it comes to breaking things. Except when you're mad. When your're mad it feels great to break things.
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