Brewers' road trip could provide fresh start after disappointing homestand
MILWAUKEE -- The remaining fans that hadn't already turned their backs to trudge up the aisles and out of Miller Park late in Sunday's game vocalized with boos their feelings about the Milwaukee Brewers after their first week.
The malfunctioning Brewers gave up six runs in an ugly ninth inning and dropped the final contest of their season-opening homestand, 10-2, to the Pittsburgh Pirates. After the first six games of the year, Milwaukee has just one win and sits alone in last place in the NL Central division as it prepares to embark on a weeklong road trip. Sunday's loss was unpleasantly similar to the 10-0 Opening Day defeat that featured the same starting pitcher, more defensive miscues and familiar offensive failings.
Starter Kyle Lohse took the ball for the first time since his ugly season debut -- 3 1/3 innings, eight earned runs against the Rockies six days prior -- and, for a while, looked sharp. Through four innings, he had given up one run on three hits with four strikeouts. But in the top of the sixth, Lohse allowed a pair of base hits to start the frame, then left a slider (in this case a "terrible pitch," he said) up in the zone that Pirates star Andrew McCutcheon smacked to right to give Pittsburgh a 4-2 lead.
A few innings later, with the margin still the same, a Khris Davis outfield error led to six runs that turned a close game into a rout. Davis dropped a Tony Sanchez line drive hit right at him, which put two Pirates on base. Three singles later, a trio of Pirates had crossed home plate and there were still two runners on when Neil Walker hammered a Tyler Thornburg offering over the right-field fence. The three-run home run provided the game's final, lopsided margin.
After the game, a downtrodden Davis said he'd gotten ahead of himself on the play, peeking at the runner on base before he'd secured the liner, which caused the ball to bounce out.
"Just a lack of concentration," he said. "That inning was a big inning and it's all my fault. No one felt worse than me."
At the plate, Davis was one of six starters to go hitless on Sunday, though he did draw two walks. The Brewers' only scoring came on a monstrous, two-run home run by Carlos Gomez in the third inning that briefly gave the team a 2-1 lead. Milwaukee managed just five hits off first-time starter Casey Sadler, who replaced new father Francisco Liriano and pitched five strong innings.
But three of those five Brewers hits were for extra bases, including a double by Hector Gomez, and Sunday's game was the first time this season they had fewer than six hits.
Afterward, manager Ron Roenicke allowed that his 1-5 team is not where it needs to be, but he said he was not worried by the poor homestand.
"We need to pitch a lot better, no question, and we need to swing the bat better," Roenicke said. "It's so early that it's hard to look at the six games we played and make an assumption that this is how we're going to play, because we've got a good club. I know we're going to play good baseball. We didn't to start with, and we know we've got a tough road trip here, so we've got to play some good baseball."
As the Brewers prepare to go on the road for the first time -- a pair of three-game series against the Cardinals and Pirates beginning Monday -- they are having a far different start to the season than they did in 2014. Last year, Milwaukee was 4-2 after its first two series and about to reel off 16 wins in its next 22 games to finish April with a 20-8 record.
That kind of run will be hard to repeat given the way Milwaukee has played so far and especially given that the 18 games remaining this April are against tough division opponents.
"It's going to be a tough road trip," Lohse said. "But we can't get too distracted by big picture stuff; just got to keep our heads down and keep grinding."
If the Brewers do that -- and whatever "keep grinding" means, it should probably include not leaving so many runners on base and avoiding big innings by their opponent, two trademarks thus far -- and get some wins, Davis believes people outside the organization will forget about the bad start. Everyone in it, he said, already has.
"We're pretty good at short-term memory," he said. "We're kind of designed for the long ball and not many of them are flying over the fence right now. We'll find our rhythm soon.
"My attitude (approaching the road trip) is we'll start off the way we did last year and then everyone will be on the bandwagon."
Even though the fans made it known they were displeased with the Brewers' performance thus far, Roenicke said he isn't disturbed.
"Obviously we're not where we want to be, but I'm just looking at game to game," Roenicke said. "We've got a long season and if we just continue to not worry about the past and just look at that next game that we're playing, over the course of the season we're going to be a lot better, so that's what I'm looking at."
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