I know we're all in a really great mood today, so I thought I'd throw cold water on all of that with this from a Fangraphs post:
2. The Brewers have a real chance to be terrible.
I promise I believed this before they got destroyed by Colorado in on Opening Day, and this isn’t a reaction to the beating they took yesterday. But among the 25 or so teams who are projected to at least be respectable in 2015, Milwaukee is the one that I think could just completely fall apart. As I mentioned in the division preview, this is a team with zero depth, so their 77 win projection is based on full seasons of their frontline players; that’s not a reasonable expectation, and the second-line players are almost uniformly awful.
The Brewers have no margin for error, especially in the rotation, where their options to replace a struggling or injured starter are all replacement level scrubs. With Kyle Lohse and Matt Garza on the wrong side of 30, and Mike Fiers and Jimmy Nelson on the wrong side of reliable, this is a rotation that seems likely to need multiple fill-ins throughout the year. But there just aren’t any real options, and if Lohse hits a wall — he’s 36 and playing the weak-contact game, which is a dangerous way to live — at the same time that Fiers’ arm starts barking again, they’re going to be in serious trouble.
The NL Central is not going to be an easy division this year, and unless their offense leads the league in runs scored, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Brewers won 67 games instead of 77.
Bottoming out wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but it would probably mean that the few guys we're hoping are going to help us win in the future probably won't.
