Milwaukee Brewers embarrassed by Athletics in series sweep

The Milwaukee Brewers got swept by a team that plays in front of possums and a few thousand fans.

The Oakland Athletics are possibly the worst Major League Baseball team ever assembled. They walked into American Family Field and owned the joint.

It was the first series sweep for the A’s, and we have already played two months of the season.

The Milwaukee Brewers entered the series with a one-game lead over the Pittsburgh Pirates in the NL Central. They are now down a game thanks to only scoring three runs in the first two games and then the pitching staff getting roughed up for eight runs on Sunday by the second-worst offense in the game.

To be fair, the Athletics are currently playing their best baseball. They have won three of their last four series and five games in a row.

Although, this recent stretch of winning has the A’s with only 17 on the season. They are 25.5 games out of first place in the AL West. The Athletics were eliminated from playoff contention after the season’s first pitch. Yet, they came, they saw, and they conquered a team trying to get back to the playoffs.

Yes, it is an early June series sweep, but with fewer division games this year, the Brewers needed these three wins. They do not get an extra series against the Cincinnati Reds to pad the win totals like last year.

The Milwaukee Brewers’ offensive problems are getting out of hand.

The A’s have the worst pitching staff by a country mile.

The team’s 6.40 ERA and 1.60 WHIP are the worst in the Majors. Yet, you would have thought Oakland rolled out Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder and had Dennis Eckersley closing.

The Brewers are now in the league’s bottom five in batting average, slugging percentage, and OPS. The team has just five everyday players with a wRC+ over 100 and an isolated power over the league average of .140.

They currently have a -21 run differential. Hitting professional pitching is challenging enough. The Brewers make it seem impossible.

The bullpen is once again inconsistent, which does not help. The Brewers had a chance to sweep the Baltimore Orioles on Thursday, but the bullpen blew the lead.

The relief corp could not keep Oakland from scoring in the 10th inning on Saturday and then put the team in an 8-3 hole heading into the bottom of the ninth on Sunday.

The bats finally mustered some offense in that frame, but it was too little, too late.

It did not help that Adrian Houser and Freddy Peralta did not turn in the best starts. Julio Teheran did on Saturday but got no run support.

This sweep could not have come at a worse time, as the Crew now have an eight-game stretch against the Minnesota Twins, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the Arizona Diamondbacks.

This was supposed to be a chance for the Brewers to get some distance from the Pirates in the standings–especially when the A’s took two of three from Pittsburgh before coming to Milwaukee.

Instead, the bats took a three-day vacation, and the offense hit rock bottom.

Fangraphs still gives the Brew Crew the best chance of winning the division. Even if they win the NL Central, the team will not be going very far with this offense.