Master Brewer Leaderboard (Cardinals Update), plus a deep, DEEP dive on baseball movies, and endless Field of Dreams takes
Our baseball movie takes may not be for the faint of heart
Do you know what’s fun? A Christian Yelich GRAND SLAM!
More to come on that on Thursday, when Jordan Treske will be joining me as a guest on Crewsing for a Brewsing.
Master Brewer Leaderboard
(The Master Brewer Leaderboard is a season long leaderboard tracking and ranking exceptional performances from Brewers players in the form of Master Brew Points 🍺, which at the end of the season will tally up to crown our Crewsing for a Brewsing Player of the Year.)
For now, though, let’s wrap up a wildly inconsistent and on the whole disappointing series against the Cardinals for the Brewers.
This was not always a pretty series, to say the least, and that falls particularly on the Brewers’ offense. There have been no signs of the long-running concerns over the teams inability to get runs on the board and avoid leaving runners on base dissipating to start the new season.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some bright spots. From this series, Rowdy Tellez again delivered some big moments, while Andrew McCutchen found some joy and was consistently the toughest out for St. Louis. Hunter Renfroe building up some momentum is also not to be overlooked.
Credit should also go to some of the more unsung bullpen arms for their performances, as Brad Boxberger and Trevor Gott were both excellent in this series, particularly in cleaning up significant messes that they inherited from struggling teammates.
With all of that said, though, official recognition from this series in the form of Master Brew points go to only one man:
Brandon Woodruff 🍺
After opening the season by tying his career-worst performance in terms of runs allowed, Brandon Woodruff was in need of a big response in his second outing of the campaign. And with the added pressure of a postponement in the Orioles series meaning that second start would be the home opener, it’s fair to say that the pressure was on for Big Woo.
With that in mind, his clean, run-less five-inning showing in Game 1 against the Cardinals is deserving of immense credit, and it was certainly the driving force in ensuring the Milwaukee fans went home happy on opening night at AmFam Field. Woody allowed just one walk, had two strikeouts, and showed remarkable control in a polar opposite performance to the prior outing in which he’d coughed up three walks and seven earned runs. The Brewers need their pitching to steady overall if they’re to really find their groove, and Woodruff followed in Corbin Burnes’ footsteps to do just that against the Cardinals. More of the same please, Woody.
Leaderboard through 10 games
Rowdy Tellez: 🍺 x2
Corbin Burnes, Josh Hader, Willy Adames, Brandon Woodruff: 🍺
So, I hear you like baseball movies?
With Andrew on vacation this week, our posting schedule is a little different to usual on the pod. As I mentioned, Jordan will join me for a more traditional episode of Brewers talk on Thursday, but until then we wanted to give you something else to fill the gap in your podcast listening habits.
So we’ve re-purposed an episode from Andrew and I’s movie podcast, Captured on Celluloid, which featured Jordan as a guest and first published in March 2020 when COVID-19 began to take hold.
With sports disappearing off the calendar, we took a deep dive into the world of baseball movies, which was particularly enlightening for me at a time when I didn’t watch baseball and knew even closer to nothing about the sport than I do now.
It was a fun conversation that I hope you’ll enjoy, but be forewarned that a couple of baseball “classics” come out worse for wear from our discussions. For long-time GSPN listeners, this episode and Field of Dreams is probably the closest I’ve ever come to matching Nets series Rohan.