I watch a lot of baseball. Perhaps too much baseball. We are now over 100 games into the season and I still can't really distinguish between Barnes, Hughes and Drake. When I see them on the mound I realize, "oh yeah, it's that guy." but in my mind they just blend together. I can't really say which has a better fastball or which has a better sinker. They seem to all have the same mix of pitches. I am sure there are minor differences but they just don't stick.

What does stick is that they all have one syllable in their last names, I think they all pitched for Pittsburgh at one time (or maybe only two out of the three did.), they all are tall white guys with no facial hair and they all sort of suck.

This isn't over powering sucking, like Bullpen Wily, but it is that basic giving up games in the late innings sucking. It feels like they all have ERAs around 4 to 5. They all have WHIPS above 1.25 and they all walk way too many batters. But each one has had a warm streak of about 10 games which makes you think, "Hey, maybe this one will be ok." and then you don't remember which one is on the warm streak by the next game. And generally they mess it up before they really differentiate themselves.

So, not purely because they are easier to differentiate, but also because they are statistically better, the Brewers should stick to multi-syllabic relief pitchers when ever possible and try to get more of them. Hader, Knebel, and Swarzak all have better stat lines and all have names I can remember.

But this goes beyond Milwaukee. In checking out the saves leaders in the National League (I know the stat is meaningless but it was the easiest one to find and I am lazy) the top seven relievers and seventeen out of the top twenty relievers have two or more syllables in their last name.

So there may be many things to think about as we approach the trade deadline, but probably the most important one is, "How many syllables are in the last name of the relief pitcher?"