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I’d love to say the league’s decision to suspend Johnny Jolly for all of the 2010 season and possibly longer will have no effect on the Packers’ competitiveness this year. I’d love to, but I can’t, because it will. The best we can hope for is that the effect will be slight.

After fronting a run defense that ranked No. 1 last season, some regression to the mean was likely for Green Bay’s line. Losing one of its three starters will make it that much more difficult to avoid a backslide. And Jolly wasn’t just a starter — he was the unit’s biggest playmaker, leading it in tackles and tossing in a team-record 11 batted passes (although run-stuffer Ryan Pickett was the most indispensable overall). Not just powerful and athletic, he also has freakishly good ball awareness for a guy who plays in the trenches. If only he showed the same presence of mind when grappling with a court-ordered probation.

The good news, such as it is, is Mike McCarthy has prepared well for Jolly’s absence by shifting Pickett to defensive end and promoting B.J. Raji to starting nose tackle, and Ted Thompson did the same by drafting two D-linemen. It’s possible Jolly wouldn’t even have started this year. But he would’ve been a hell of a fill in. Much of the Packers’ success on defense in recent years has come from maintaining a deeper-than-usual rotation of big men to ward off fourth-quarter collapses and as an insurance policy against injury. When that depth has been compromised — as in 2008, when Cullen Jenkins tore his pectoral muscle, Corey Williams left for the Browns and Justin Harrell missed most of the season — the difference has been dramatic. Jolly’s absence alone won’t sink the defense, but combined with an injury to another key starter, it could easily be the difference maker.

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Pity the modern NFL quarterback, required to possess the intellect to memorize and execute a playbook of Talmudic length and complexity — and then forbidden to display that intellect anywhere other than on the field.

Aaron Rodgers, as you may know by now, played amateur press critic the other day. Surprise surprise, he watches a lot of sports TV and has some non-publicist-approved thoughts about who knows what they’re talking about (Jon Gruden, Trent Dilfer) and who doesn’t (Tony Kornheiser, Ron Jaworsky). The predictable blowback was not long in arriving, leading to a statement of regret, though not an outright apology, from No. 12.

I get why Mike McCarthy would want his quarterback to stick to his media-training script, but Greg Bedard? You’d think a professional sportswriter would appreciate it when an athlete gets colorful and digressive in an interview. But there was Bedard in a (subscriber-only) chat with readers ripping Rodgers for generating “a complete waste of time and a distraction” with his remarks.

“Distraction” is the magic word here. Yes, the Packers have had too many of those lately. But calling Tony Kornheiser a braying jackass isn’t the same as tangling with prostitutes or getting into motorcycle crashes. Hell, even Kornheiser’s mom thinks Kornheiser’s a braying jackass — that’s his charm.

The NFL, and the pro sports establishment in general, seems to be under the impression that extreme personal boringness on the part of athletes is the key to team success and league profitability. Is it? If that’s true, it’s sad — and I don’t think it’s terribly true.

Rodgers is a bit of a goofball. He’s fond of silly pranks. He has a record label with a cheesy name. And, apparently, he gets fed up watching ESPN sometimes. Good for him, and for the fans. If a player who does absolutely everything right can’t run his mouth once in a while without consequences, the NFL really has become the No Fun League.

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First it was Spencer Havner crashing his motorcycle, possibly after knocking a couple back. Then Johnny Jolly violated his probation and got accused of dealing drugs. Now Brandon Underwood is a sexual-assault suspect.

Could we get training camp started early before we lose our entire roster to boredom, bad judgment and plain old stupidity?

Rape is a very serious accusation, which is why I’m not going to make any jokes like “Why couldn’t it have been Jarrett Bush?” or “Well, I guess he did learn something from watching all that film of Ben Roethlisberger after all.” No, sir. Just because the players we root for sometimes exercise poor impulse control doesn’t mean we, as bloggers, must do the same. Also, Bush is pretty decent on special teams.

Charges have yet to be filed, but the Journal-Sentinel beat writers have already looked into the matter and concluded that Underwood is guilty, at a minimum, of not being Packer People:

When apprised that the investigation centered on Underwood, 23, several players who wished to remain anonymous said he had been a problem since he was drafted in the sixth round in 2009 out of Cincinnati. Cornerbacks coach Joe Whitt talked last season about Underwood being immature early in his rookie season.

It’s amazing/depressing to look at how hard a guy like Al Harris is working to stay in the league, and then turn around and look at how hard so many young, healthy guys are working to get themselves tossed out of it.

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A quick programming note: True/Slant, which hosts Unpacked and lots of other blogs, just got bought by Forbes Media. (That’s the new boss at left.) Lewis Dvorkin, who runs this whole pretzel factory, just took questions from us bloggers in a conference call about what it means. Packer (and Brewer) fans, it’s not looking good. 

Surprising no one, Lewis said that Forbes is going to overhaul True/Slant’s roster of blogs, keeping the ones that fit with its content and 86ing the ones that don’t. In my estimation, it’s pretty clear where Unpacked falls. “They actually have a fairly big operation when it comes to sports/athletes and their money, that sort of thing, but they’re really not covering the day-in-day-out of the sports world,” he said. (In case you’re wondering, Lewis said it was okay to quote from the call, although he didn’t sound thrilled about the idea.)

He did say that True/Slant will help migrate the blogs that aren’t chosen to enter the Promised Land onto new WordPress sites if their proprietors so choose. I’m not surprised by that generous touch. In the year I’ve been doing this blog, the folks in charge, particularly Coates Bateman, have been nothing but supportive, enthusiastic, friendly and available around the clock to a degree that makes me despair for their personal lives. Whether I’m writing for them or not, I wish them success.

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The Green Bay Packers failed to win their division in 2009. They gave up 51 points in a playoff game. They allowed more sacks than any other team. They lost to the lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Their special teams were something close to a joke.

This is the same team that’s now being hailed by no less a mandarin than Sports Illustrated’s Peter King as the likely Super Bowl champion heading into 2010. Its on-field leader, Aaron Rodgers, is enjoying even richer acclaim: He’s lately been recognized as the most statistically efficient passer of all time, the NFC North’s next player of the year, and a future great in the eyes of Bart Starr.

Why does all this advance hype bother me so much? After all, I think the team we’re going to see is closer to the one King expects than the one that wheezed its way to a 4-4 start last year. The defense, already dominant last year, should be exponentially better with a full year of experience in Dom Capers’ 3-4 scheme. The secondary, our weakest point by far, should benefit from the return of at least one and possibly all three of last year’s injured cornerbacks, keeping Jarrett Bush and Josh Bell where they belong, ie. on the bench.

But what new weaknesses will emerge? Where will the injuries hit? Whose development will unexpectedly reverse its trajectory? No one would have foreseen heading into last season that our sure-handed receivers would suffer through an extended bout of butterfingers, or that Mason Crosby would become allergic to the right hashmark. Already, this off-season, we’ve seen the core of our No. 1 ranked run defense rejiggered, a change apparently necessitated by Johnny Jolly’s mishigas.

The parity-era NFL defies predictions. If the Packers go from being favorites in May to actually playing in the Super Bowl next January, it will be have as much to do with good luck — something no prognosticator can foresee — as with talent, youth, coaching, etc.

Yes: It’s a matryoshka, a traditional Russian nesting doll, made up of members of the Packers’ offense. Delighted as I was to discover it, I couldn’t help but wonder: Brandon Jackson? How’d he make the cut? The guy’s not even a starter! Well, that just goes to show why Russia doesn’t have an NFL franchise of its own yet.

Nevertheless, I had to buy it, mostly because I owe Unpacked correspondent Ben Perlstein a birthday present. After haggling the vendor down a few hundred rubles, I offered him some friendly advice. First, I told him, you’re gonna wanna replace Jackson with Jermichael Finley. Second, you’re gonna wanna lay in as many of these as possible, because the Packers are going to win the Super Bowl this year. Little did I know Peter King would soon be agreeing with me about that.

Manny Parra reveals himself to be the optimal sub-optimal option, but Hoffman brings the pain. Ouch.

Having lost seven straight and tumbled down to a pitiful fifth place in the NLCentral, it’s gotten to the level where stat-head Fangraphs contributors have taken notice of the Brewers’ sub-sub-optimal-ness. Dave Cameron today calls to “Break Up the Brewers” and decisively dangle Princey on the market. The comments there at Fangraphs get a little touchy on the lack of data analysis & original research in the post, and for what it’s worth there’s little Brewers-specific consensus in the thread. Commenter Kenny nicely runs down all the teams that could use a boost at the widely-understood-to-be-quite-deep 1B position and comes up somewhat empty-handed…  similarly, hometown fan Steve from Bernie’s Crew went on-record last week even, proclaiming there’s “No Shame in Rebuilding“.

While clearly I am about as frustrated as can be with this team’s all-around pitching and its offensive Achilles heel, viz. a lack of clutch hitting, I’m just not in the “rebuild” camp yet. Although this latest blown save (Hoffman’s 5th in 10 chances, you won’t believe how bad the stats are, click through for the carnage) is simply as painful as it gets.

Again, perhaps there are stacks of data suggesting I’m wrong. But the data re: our sporadic offensive prowess is not uncompelling. Head over to Fangraphs’ Standard Statistics view of NL Teams > Offense (year to date) and click around on the sortable columns — this is a broad brush, but the Brewers lead the league in Hits, are second in Runs behind the defending champion Phillies, are second in RBIs, and over in the Advanced view, can be seen to be second in .OPS, and over in the Batted Balls view, sit proudly at fourth in BABIP. As I acknowledge, there are probably ways to put these achievements on offense in fuller context alongside our gaping deficits on team defense & pitching in ways that spell out a compelling case for rebuilding, but I’d like to see us make a run in the Central (likely for runner-up behind the Cardinals, assuming they get it together) while we have Princey yet in uniform this year.

T-Hoff, afraid it's time to go, you're hurting everything, please understand.

Follow-up on my previous post, in which I gnashed and yet advocated for Parra not to be pushed into a 9th-inning role — due to our 3rd starter Doug Davis’ late-breaking & quite-scary chest ailment, Parra was quickly slotted-in as our 5th starter. In today’s game @CIN Manny acquitted himself awfully well, allowing four hits and one run in four all-right innings. But Ohh Goodness Gracious, also as covered last week, T-Hoff just this minute blew a 4-2 lead to cost us the game in the bottom of the 9th. Disciples of Uecker has it right: Time for Trevor to Retire. I can’t write any more about this right now, feels a bit raw, but that was beyond taste & reason & emotional bounds. Much more coverage to come of this latest debacle.

Watching it happen live was surreal, just batting practice. Beat writer Haudricourt tweets the carnage: “Trevor Hoffman in 14 games: 1-3, 13.15 ERA and five blown saves in 10 opportunities.” That’s unsightly. Jim at Bernie’s Crew has lost patience, Kyle at BCB says he’s done, the major blogs have all turned on him. My Goodness. BCB commenter Capt Science quips: “let’s stay positive. maybe hoffman is working his way up the blown save leaderboard. does someone have a baseball-reference subscription? where does he sit on that?” Then answers his own quip. Good stuff on a lousy front. Gallows humor, you know.

If you’re in the mood for yet more mascochism with Trevor, Aaron Gleeman writes it up for Circling the Bases: “Much like watching Ken Griffey Jr. flail away in Seattle, it’s sad to see one of the greatest relievers of all time get knocked around like he’s throwing batting practice.” At least the broad consensus is that this is it. There’s comfort — unlike the situation of, say, Qualls in ARI or Wood in CLE — in knowing it’s over. I hope and expect so at least. Haudicourt officially puts the onus on Hoffman and has the requisite salavation-less post-game quotes. There is no hope to be found in those. There is a worthy bit of hope in the talent evinced by Marco Estrada (file photo sporting a Nats cap but called up from AAA), who retired eight or nine straight in relief.

Whatever you do, don’t go back to MLBRumors and read the details of his contract re-upping from last Fall :: “Hoffman, 42 in a week, experienced a resurgence in 2009 despite spending most of April on the DL with an oblique injury.  His strikeout and walk rates actually worsened a bit, but he was able to drastically limit hits and home runs.  The Brewers are betting big bucks that those hit and home run rate reductions are somewhat sustainable.” Yaargh (pulls at collar awkwardly). That’s the weight to contracts — $8m this year and next, and all we can do is ask for some of it back out of some sense of distorted charity. This is one case where a small-market team handcuffed itself, unfortunately, by opening our wallet too wide for relief pitching. Mega-ouch all around. We end this cruel afternoon 15-24, or .385, having lost our eighth in a row and downgraded by Baseball Prospectus forecasts from a super-slim 13% to a hilariously meager 7% chance of making the playoffs.

Despair creeps upon Milwaukee baseball

Before I weigh in on what I’ve seen watching the games online, how it matches up with the heavy truth of our under-whelming record, and the still-hot big-picture questions facing the team (Prince Fielder’s slow-ish start & borderline-terrifying free agency situation, Trevor Hoffman’s epic explosion/implosion, bullpen catastrophes galore and starting rotation under-performance, generally gloomy & goofy vibes all around I’m afraid), some comprehensive “where-we-stand” links to get us started from other websites ::

• Bernie’s Crew has a user-friendly overview of team stats in the categories of offense, starting pitching, and relief pitching. Not much about which to cheer lustily I’m afraid.
• JSOnline beat writer Tom Haudricourt tweets, re: a recent game: “I was just about to say the Braves going up 1-0 didn’t bode well for the Brewers, who are 12-1 when scoring first and 3-16 otherwise.” Re: strange split struggles in Miller Park, he adds on the hometown paper’s official Crew blog: “It was the 10th loss in 14 home games for the Brewers. Since taking two of three against Colorado to open their home season, the Brewers have lost two of three to St. Louis, been swept in three games by Chicago, dropped two of three to Pittsburgh and now two in a row by Atlanta.” (ATL took the third too, booooo.)
• Macro-Brew harnesses a nice stat-approach to highlight what is evident to the eye even without employing Aquinas’ theory of intentionality: the bullpen is preposterous. Totally “cooked“.

… running down the hot topics ::

1. Princey’s future with the team: Mr. Fielder, I have felt closeness to your team-inspiring intensity, your evident hustle, and your mammoth tee-off of a swing, but as MLB Rumors has detailed, the number $200m is getting thrown around w/r/t your next contract (you may have heard you’re a free agent after next summer), and you’re not really doing much to mitigate it, and Boras doesn’t have a public-spirited mission in mind for the world, and we’re ultimately a small-market team, so peace be with you. Peace be upon you. I can see you in (speculated) Fenway in exchange for Buchholz etc., even if the Sox faithful (I see you Will) claim to prefer A-Gon. Personally I hope we hold on to him through this season if we can (reckon there might be clandestine trade chatter already underway at high levels), then look to openly shop our star first baseman around this point next year assuming we don’t have the horses, but obviously it’s impossible to exhaustively or sufficiently the lay of the land in full context in advance, and only the team ownership has full knowledge of what the offers resemble in their pleasant fullness (much like the Prince himself). This year, his strikeouts are up to 35 (already one-quarter of his 2009 total of 138) and his .OPS is down to an unhappy .759 on the year so far, but Goodness Gracious I love watching him at the plate, he’s still got tons of swagger to my eyes, and (this is cliche at this point) everyone knows he starts slowish. I’m still psyched for him to help power us this year.
   

   Princey hustles positively (not pictured: Scott Boras)

2. Trevor Hoffman, closer of crisis: I co-sign the judgment of the Disciples of Uecker: I’m afraid it’s time for a radical change. Based on watching T-Hoff serve up grapefruit fastballs in two of four of his excruciating blown saves and watching them get hammered by pro hitters (I mean hammered to a severe degree), I’m never going to be comfortable handing him the ball again in late innings …. those 85 mph batting-practice goofballs aren’t going to get their life or plate placement back without some serious work, say down in AAA. Much respect to the all-time saves leader, but the statistical & visual evidence screams to go with another option, and clearly it can’t be LaTroy Hawkins, our previous 8th-inning veteran who is “puzzled” by his drop in velocity and now has been shut-down for a DL stint after giving up a grand slam to blow a save in epic fashion vs. LAD. Various observers are entitled to express a preference for the new 9th-inning-guy, and the pure data might even point towards a favorite between candidates Villanueva, Coffey, Parra, and Stetter — my personal preference, based on anecdotal evidence, is to go with Coffey (video of his sprint to the mound) in the 9th, Stetter etc. in the 8th, and keep the hard-throwing Villanueva & Parra for long relief, which is obviously needed…
3. Starting rotation: MLB Rumors surveys the carnage of the status quo, finds that YoGa has been “fantastic”, and as for the rest concludes it’s less carnage-ridden than last year, but there’s a big but: “The Brewers have a solid but unremarkable rotation at this point, though they’re surely hoping to see Wolf and Bush limit their free passes.” I don’t see that we have another option here other than hope Wolf & Davis indeed turn into worthy two- and three-starters… I’m not ready to sell low on Davis yet, just as I’m not ready to go into semi-long-term rebuilding mode yet as long as Prince is hitting behind Braun (who’s been awesome, one of the top-hitting outfielders in the bigs, outta sight and a huge relief to watch him excel, plus Casey is smacking it in above-average ways too, way to go McGehee).

… what would be great here would be to link to some easy-to-watch, light-on-annoying-advertisements video highlights to complement the above, but the official MLB Brewers page (loads with sound) makes it horribly difficult to watch simple video tidbits like that. Going to another online streaming-video site for lower-quality recaps isn’t a great user experience either. Making video fan-friendly (truly so) and open-source and as non-commercial as realistically-possible would be a great look for MLB, but clearly they’re more interested in preserving their monopoly on their video content via their aesthetically-unfortunate and overly-restrictive copyright policy (only click that if you’re emotionally prepared to feel forcibly disconnected from the pro baseball family). We should introduce the top-down MLB corporate team & their consultants to the collaborative, forward-thinking folks at the Center for Social Media and Creative Commons and others.

In lieu of fun and educational video streams, we’ll go back to the original mission of this here Brewers blog, and try to spotlight specific areas on which the team needs to improve in upcoming games. OK OK look, it’s tempting to throw up our hands and say “that would be pretty much offense, starting pitching, relief pitching, and defense”, and that would all be spot-on, but let’s hold ourselves to a higher standard of fandom and aspire to continual team improvement (with an eye towards overtaking the Reds for second, at least, if not the fearsome Cards in first, and at bare minimum facilitating the Cubs’ ongoing project of continual auto-humiliation). With that caveat, here are my top-top-fix-priorities, feel free to refine & enhance in the comments ::

A. Hitting with runners in scoring position – our last series we were again not on our game here, going just 3-14, .214 in this situation. Seems to me this is a first step towards addressing the feast-or-famine nature of our offense, as well as the poor play at home. Easier typed than done, we know. What would be helpful is an intermediate stat, one that made it easy for the community of Brewers observers to see out of those 14 at-bats above, how many we made quality contact with the ball, and how many were (subjectively) middling contact, and how many were whiffs. Obviously this wouldn’t tell the whole story, but like I said, it would be an intermediate step, one that ideally I’d like to have without transcribing every at-bat for posterity. Maybe it can be wrangled from the free data offerings of Baseball-Reference, or maybe teams keep this close to the vest.

B. Keeping the walk rate down from the starters, and for YoGa specifically, keeping his pitch count relatively lower on a consistent basis. That said, managing our starters to throw more to contact has a sizable downside in that our infield defense isn’t understood to be great, esp. at the corners, but what we’re rambling about here is some semi-scientific fan-boosting angles for change, so hey, us fan-boosters can hope. Again, it would be much better to have accessible stats on how many runs against us were made possible by explicit defensive errors vs. by preventable defense lapses vs. by impossible-to-defend well-hit balls, etc., but defensive metrics in baseball are of course even thornier than the selective offensive contact rates sketched above.

C. As per Haudricourt’s observation above, score first or perish trying. It’s one of those oddball stat things where it seems to work, I guess. I’ve already outed myself as a fan of smallball strategies, and with relative speedsters Weeks & Gomez & Escobar in uniform this year, I wish that Ken Macha was borderline reckless on the basepaths and gave them the perpetual greenlight to steal and give Prince & Ryan the chance to knock them in from second base for Runs… but respectively they only have 3, 6, and 0 (!!) stolen bases in the team’s 34 games played to date. While it’s good news the team was a surgical 18-19 in SBs as of the beginning of this month, I’d like to see management less conservative on the basepaths as an admittedly-shaky quick-fix to our young team’s offensive psyche. I could be very very wrong on the tactics here.

The voice of summer in MKE

That’s it for now, our beloved Crewers take on the gully Phillies tonight in Brew City. Coming soon, blog posts on other statistical metrics we need in user-friendly formats, more critiques of the agonizing MLB.com web interface & video policies, more thoughts on the economic realities of being a small market team at the median of payroll spending in the league, and a look at the Brewers’ at-bat music choices (a personal pleasant obsession). Go Brewers, and Bless You, Go Mr. Uecker, in your recovery from heart surgery.

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If you would have told me three days ago that the Packers would make it through the entire draft without taking an outside linebacker or cornerback, I wouldn’t have believed you. But that’s where we are.

That’s not a terrible thing. It does seem like Ted Thompson overestimated his chances of being able to get a quality OLB in the second round and had to resort to Plan B. But the pick he made, defensive end Michael Neal, was pure Thompson: taking the best player available rather than reaching to fill a need, and when in doubt, scooping up a defensive lineman in keeping with his (well-validated) belief that a deep rotation of big men is the key to a stout run defense.

Overall, everything we did either addressed a need or complemented an existing strength. The only real head-scratcher was using our fourth-round pick on a tight end, Andrew Quarless. Although he sounds like a genuine talent who fell down draft boards owing to personal problems he’s put behind him, Quarless will find himself playing behind a rising superstar in Jermichael Finley (who expressed some displeasure at the move on Twitter, although he later made nice).

Between Finley, Quarless, Donald Lee and Spencer Havner, we’re now as loaded at tight end as we are at wide receiver. I wonder if Thompson picked Quarless with an eye to dealing Donald Lee, whose production over the last couple seasons has been disappointing. Other trade candidates are Daryn Colledge and James Jones. The selection of Brian Bulaga and Marshall Newhouse makes a Colledge trade seem likely. Either Bulaga should be ready to compete for the starting left guard job or else train as the primary backup at tackle, allowing T.J. Lang to shift to guard, where Mike McCarthy apparently sees him landing long term. Either way, at this point Colledge, an established but relatively youthful veteran, probably has more value to another team at this point, and may well benefit from a fresh start. On his own, he may not be worth all that much, but packaged with Lee or Jones, who has never played up to expectations, he might really be enticing enough to net us a linebacker, cornerback or return specialist. (I’m not including John Kuhn on the list of trade bait because few other teams seem to value fullbacks as much as the Packers do.)

Flashy trades aren’t the sort of thing one expects from Thompson, of course. But you have to hope he has a better plan for bolstering the remaining weaknesses in our defense than hoping Brad Jones and Pat Lee both make developmental leaps.

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How do we feel about the Packers drafting tackle Brian Bulaga of Iowa with their first-round pick? Pretty darn good, I’d say.

Maybe the right word is “relieved.” Finally, the question that’s been looming so large for so long over this organization has been answered. Kind of. The snap consensus out there seems to be that Bulaga is a cinch to start at right tackle after a year or two of seasoning but might never be left tackle material.The reason for that consensus is the same one that caused Bulaga to fall all the way to No. 23 after long being viewed as a potential top-15 pick: His unusually short arms. (Unusually short for an NFL tackle, that is; on, say, a 5-foot-8 part-time sports blogger, they would be freakishly long.)

I don’t place a ton of stock in that. Chad Clifton also has shortish arms, and he’s managed pretty well. Details like that get magnified enormously in the atmosphere of the draft, where scouts and general managers are desperate for any respite from the uncertainty that hems them in on all sides. You  can’t know if a guy is going to report overweight or put his off-field issues behind him, but you can be positive Brian Bulaga is still going to have 32-inch arms come September.

The bottom line is the Packers were in the market for a tackle in the high rounds, and one of the four widely considered to represent the elite of the draft class fell into our lap. Ted Thompson would’ve been a fool not to take him. Our need at tackle may not be quite as immediate as our need at outside linebacker or cornerback, but don’t kid yourself: If Clifton and Mark Tauscher are healthy enough to start all 16 games this season, I will gay-marry James Campen.

Speaking of which: Mr. Campen, you are officially on the hot seat. The excuse that your job performance as offensive line coach has been limited by the talent Thompson has given you just went out the window. If you can’t have Bulaga ready to start at right tackle by opening day 2011, and ready to fill in at guard by October, you might want to think about looking for work as a bouncer.