gregmag

Playing “major league baseball’” in Texas right now is a great hustle.

I only listened to that game on the radio, but I will never forget it. I was in school in Michigan, so I was able to get the Blue Jays’ radio feed, back in the days when you had to practically use your body as an antenna to try to pick up out of town games. The Brewers had their best shot at the playoffs in years, but then the Blue Jays traded for David Cone, which was really deflating. Cone was set to pitch the next day, so he was charting pitches in the dugout. I remember feeling like the Brewers’ outburst that night was a defiant gesture against their fading postseason hopes. The Jays won the division, Bando gift-wrapped Molitor for them in the off-season, and that was basically the end of the Brewers for the better part of two decades.

The big question with Frelick is whether his injury was impeding him and whether he’s over it now. Okay, that’s two questions. If we get 2025 Sal Frelick back, that’s a better baseball player than 2026 Luis Lara. BTW, I don’t mean to rag on Lara; I love him. It’s more that I think Frelick’s situation has some nuance to it, and setting up Lara for success is also complicated.

These incessant pop-up ads with audio that’s impossible to turn off are intolerable. It’s bad enough that I need to take a break from this site for a while. I don’t mind video ads, but ads that make it impossible to browse for fear that I’m gonna disturb whatever room I’m in are way too much.

I don’t get the point of the comparison. Durbin and Collins are doing exactly what most of us would’ve expected. Mona and Seigler are running with opportunities they were buried too deep in the depth chart to get here – happy for them. Rengifo has had a great 87 plate appearances – good for him. As Cheez points out, the guy who actually replaced him here has been better in that time. We all know that Contreras and Yelich are struggling. So what’s the point – that we should’ve gotten rid of those guys instead of some of the guys we got rid of? That our coaching is screwed up? Seems unlikely that a couple of vets would get screwed up by coaching, and in Yelich’s case, you can’t coach age. Most of those other guys are either 21 and raw, on the upswing recently, or doing pretty much what you would expect. The exception is Frelick, but we may find out that he was playing hurt. I just don’t see anything here.

That young man has a distinctive charisma. It’s really interesting to watch him grow up in public. He strikes me as a very smart, disciplined player who hasn’t figured out how to deal with frustration. He’s been taking some hacks that I don’t think he would’ve taken when he first came up, digging himself deeper into his slump. But he seems to feel at home in the outfield. He knows he’s already a star out there.

Now that Max Scherzer has bumped Walter Johnson from tenth place on the career strikeout list, everyone in the top ten pitched at least as recently as the 80s, and none pitched in MLB before the 60s. The earliest career ending in the group is Gaylord Perry, 1983.

Yeah, Lara needs a reset. You can tell from his body language that he’s frustrated. We worried about his playing time, but I think he’s had to play too much in Frelick’s absence. Something like two days on, one day off would be ideal. Take some swings, have some issues, then watch and learn.

Long-term I’ll take Chourio. I think Sveum’s post puts the question in good perspective. Two years in age is huge. Development isn’t linear; the fact that Chourio hasn’t improved from 20-22 doesn’t say much if anything about what he can do from 23 on. In addition, Crow-Armstrong relies a lot on raw speed, which is usually the quickest tool to deteriorate.

I’m fine with questioning the Brewers’ decision makers (cough, deadline fiasco, cough), but I don’t see any reason to assume they don’t consider stuff that fans have been talking about since the beginning of time. Hot streaks aren’t some mystical phenomenon that transcends human understanding. Hot streaks happen for reasons, and they end for reasons. The org’s job is to understand those reasons as well as possible and make decisions based on that understanding. I can’t say the Brewers are making the right decisions, but I’m pretty confident they’re following the right process.

If only that were true. These are the same folks who would have traded Turang, Chourio, Mitchell, etc. for rentals at past deadlines. The only way we won’t have to hear them cry about “going for it“ is if we keep doing it their way, deplete our development pipeline, and drop out of contention. We’re not close to there yet, but yesterday was a great start.

I would be very grateful if the mods would stop this troll from starting a new thread every time a media outlet validates his numbingly repeated opinion.

Whatever any of us thinks about this trade, kudos to Brandon Sproat for making such a strong effort to justify it.

Has anyone ever picked up a hitter at the deadline whom you can reasonably argue made the difference in getting that team to the World Series? I asked the hive mind last week about deadline trades that actually moved the needle as far as the 2026 Brewers need to move it — from losing the LCS to winning it. What people came up with were basically some starting pitchers: Cone, Verlander, Sutton IIRC. We could all be forgetting someone, of course, and I certainly can’t sit here and say it’s impossible to pick up a hitter who could get a team over that line. But if a strategy has rarely if ever worked before, I have a hard time getting upset about not pursuing it.

What about Michael Brantley? Or to a lesser extent Mitch Haniger and Khris Davis? (If we aren’t just talking about Cardinals trades; you also get Lewis Brinson and Monte Harrison for your side of the argument!) Like most of us, I’m good with the Sabathia trade, because he was world-historically amazing and was the biggest factor in making the Brewers relevant after years of awfulness. But Michael Brantley had himself a career. He would have been huge for us. It wasn’t an accident, either. People say “oh, he was just the PTBNL,” but he was the designated prize if the trade worked out for the Brewers. We absolutely lost that trade in objective value terms — total wins added.