I'm gonna need someone to explain baseball to me pretty soon. At least Milwaukee Brewers baseball.

Here's the situation.

The team absolutely sucks. Hitting, pitching, fielding, running, spitting in the dugout, swinging weighted bats in the on deck circle, grabbing your crotch, turning around your rally cap, giving high fives after the game is over.

Pretty much however you want to measure it this team sucks.

We love them with all our heart, and because of that, we should take notice when a couple of things happen that are supposed to be helpful.

The owner, who lives 2,000 miles away, shows up at a road city to announce that nobody is getting fired on Monday. That Monday he was talking about was yesterday.

Also, the two best players on the team show up one day at the door to the manager's office. You can imagine the flips in Ken Macha's stomach when Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder knocked on his door. What could this be about?

Have these guys fallen in love with each other and they want a team meeting to announce it? Is Prince vowing to have a burger at Braun's restaurant every time he hits a home run? What's up?

What Braun and Fielder want is to switch places in the batting order. That's right. Fielder moves to third and Braun moves to cleanup. The idea of the switch got a lot of attention and was the lead item in a coverage story of the Brewers. The concept was that it could shake things up and maybe get the Brewers back on the track.

Braun and Fielder switched, went a combined one for seven, and then switched back.

Now, I've spent a lot of my life watching and writing about sports. I've seen slumps come and go. I've read lots of things about slumps, both individual slumps and team slumps.

My brother is the founder of the Sports Psychiatry Section of the American Medical Association. I've talked at length with him about performance and about slumps. Nothing in any of his research or treatment protocols suggests that changing your number three and number four hitters is a solution for a slump like this one.

This slump is not a little bitty booboo on your arm. This is a savage slash that is hemorrhaging blood all over the damn floor and nobody has a bandage or a mop anywhere in site. We are way past triage on this one.

Listening to the magpies on the sports talk radio shows and it seems clear that the solution is an easy one. First fire Macha. Then fire Doug Melvin. Then concoct a brew of secret stadium sauce, ground stone from the old County Stadium site, water from Jones Island and the thread used to stitch up Bob Uecker and make the players drink it before every game.

Fortunately cooler heads have prevailed. At least through Monday.

One thing nobody seems willing to talk about is that maybe the Brewers just aren't very good. They've got a couple of guys who can hit the ball and maybe one pitcher you can really count on. But to create a baseball team from those meager elements is a big stretch.

It is possible that the team just isn't very good. Maybe some of them have gotten old and are way past their due date. Maybe some of them just don't have major league stuff. Maybe that new pitching coach with all his fancy ideas and spreadsheets is not Annie Sullivan. (Annie was the woman who taught Helen Keller and the woman upon whom the play "The Miracle Worker" is based.)

If I had a dime for every time I've heard someone say "we're a much better team on paper" I'd hire Simon Cowell to make me a major music star.

But, as we all know, these games aren't played on paper. That theory could very easily be the Big Lie.

It's possible, of course, that the Brewers really are better than they appear to be and that something will soon happen to change their fortunes around.

But it's also possible that they just suck.