1959 Milwaukee Brewers - Mgr: Joe Bukal - 33 Cards

Unless you are Cardinal fan the 2011 Brew Crew are the perfect example as to why the present Wild Card format stinks.  Milwaukee had a fantastic 96 win campaign and won the NL Central by 6 games only to lose in the the LCS to the wilcard Redbirds.  Now if there were 2 wild card teams and they played a quick best of 3 set the road to the World Series would have been much tougher.  Right now the only penalty the wild card team gets is no HFA.  Ok, I'm now off my soap box.  I will say that the Brewers decided to gear up for one last run knowing full well that they would lose star 1st baseman Prince Fielder to free agency after the season.  Fielder's signing with Detroit proved that theory true.  Fielder (.299-38-120) had a mammoth season as did NL MVP Ryan Braun (.332-33-111-33 steals).  Of course Braun's positive test for PED's not only costs the Milwaukee his services for 50 games next season, but it also cost them the chance to spend their free agent money on Fielder instead.  Those two big boppers had Corey Hart (26) and Rickie Weeks (20) backing them up in the lineup with some decent power.  Centerfielder Nyjer Morgan (.304) was the only regular not to post double figures in homers.  The bench has two solid performers in Mark Kotsay and Jerry Hairston Jr., but not much else.  Thankfully all of their starters play in 120 or more games.  

The pitching staff finished middle of the road in ERA, but only one of their starters (Chris Narveson) had an ERA over 4.00.  Randy Wolf (13-10, 3.69) and Yovani Gallard (17-10, 3.52) were the co-aces.  Zack Greinke was a unbeatable at home (11-0, 3.13), but merely average on the road (5-6, 4.70).  The pen was below average until they stole K-Rod from the Mets in June.  With K-Rod handling the 8th inning duties the pen became lights out and had it's ERA drop 1.50 from June until the end of the season.  K-Rod (4-0, 1.86) was dominant as the setup man and John Axford (2-2, 1.95, 46 Sv) was lights out as the closer.  They lack of a lefty specialist out of the pen hurts this team in key matchup situations.  The bullpen will be key since they had just 1 complete game, a Gallardo shutout, the whole season.

Manager Joe Bukal, returning for his 3rd season with the Brew-Crew has himself a well balanced team that might be the best Milwaukee offering ever to play in KOD.

In total I had to add 33 cards to round out the set.  Milwaukee made a lot of successful moves during the season + Topps issued a lot of landscape oriented cards which do not show well inside the game.  Those cards had to be scrapped and new ones needed to be created from scratch.  As outlined in the previous post I created custom backgrounds for 11 players who had team picture day shots taken with a white screen background.  See if you can pick those 11 out of the cards posted below.