The Milwaukee Brewers and Minnesota Twins tangle Sunday at Target Field.
Milwaukee backers will say it's too early in the season to panic but most experts will agree that their is no time like the present to start piling up victories. Something appears out of kilter for the Brewers early on but the team didn't catch fire until the latter part of 2011 and they managed to win the National League Central. A 6-2 victory over Minnesota on Saturday gave the Brew Crew back to back victories after losing three of four. The bats score when Milwaukee wins and that trend continued Saturday with starter Michael Fiers picking up win number two with one run allowed on four hits and a pair of walks over seven frames. The offense mustered ten hits and three walks with Ryan Braun hammering two homers while Aramis Ramirez and Cody Ransom also went deep. The Brewers hand the ball to Zach Greinke who is riding a string of three solid outings in which he has allowed just two runs on 17 hits with 27 strikeouts covering 20 innings of work.
Minnesota has followed a mini hot streak with a mini slow streak and the concern is preventing the recent slide from turning in to a full blown slump. A 6-2 defeat at the hands of visiting Milwaukee has saddled the Twins with four consecutive losses and defeats in five of six overall. In this stretch, both the arms and bats have struggled which we saw once again on Saturday with starter Liam Hendricks suffering from defensive lapses with two of his five runs allowed being unearned. That was too much for the offense to overcome with only six hits and four bases on balls to their credit. The Twins offense consisted of run scoring singles off the bats of Ben Revere and Josh Willingham. Nick Blackburn toes the rubber for the tenth time on the year with one quality start to his credit. Blackburn has won consecutive starts despite giving up six runs on 13 hits over ten frames.
Greinke has the better numbers on the mound although he has had some issues away from Miller Park while Blackburn has strugggled for the most part regardless of the venue. I am going with the Brewers and Greinke but laying big road chalk isn't my style...
No comments:
Post a Comment