gregmag

“Anyone who disagrees with me is just whining. You’re only trying to win if you make exactly the moves that I decree we should make. I am morally superior to everyone who does not see the situation the way I do.” This kind of thing is why I would pay good money to just skip the weekend and have it be 6:01 Monday night right now.

It’s hard to engage with this discussion, because your premise seems to be that despite facts that we can all see, your subjective view, which by definition nobody else can see because we aren’t you, proves that the Brewers offense is much worse than the facts indicate. I respect that you see it the way you see it, but you can’t reasonably expect any other person to just take your subjective word for it and spend energy discussing the topic on your subjective terms.

Let’s head to head to head to head Adams, Bitonti, Burke, and Fischer. One of these guys is likely the Brewers’ 1b of the future, and it may be a very near future with Bauers likely gone and Vaughn late in arby. Which one (or more) are you betting on and holding onto? I know you’re up for trading Fischer, especially if some team (cough, Angels) overvalues his shiny production. But which of these guys do you want for the Brewers? If Braylon Payne can control his strikeouts, he’s a potential star. How do we assess his likelihood of doing that? On one hand, his K rate this year is just as bad as last year, about 30%. On the other hand, he has held that rate constant while improving dramatically this year, especially in the power department, and he’s only 19. What does knowledge about past prospects with similar profiles tell us about whether he can fix the big hole in his game?

The first of these sentences is mind boggling. Players tend to improve until around age 26-27. Quality of competition improves as you move up through the minors. Playing when you're still developing against better competition is harder. To be a 22 year-old in AAA is fairly unusual. I don't know other teams' minor league rosters, so I picked two at random in addition to the Brewers: Minnesota and Miami. The Brewers, who are aggressive promoters, have rostered 27 position players at AAA this year (which includes rehab assignments). Five, including Jett, are seasonal age 22 or younger: Adams, Chourio on rehab, Lara, Pratt, and Williams. The Twins have rostered 29 position players at AAA. Three are seasonal age 22 or younger: Gabriel Gonzalez, Walker Jenkins, and old friend Hendry Mendez The Marlins have rostered 29 position players at AAA. One is seasonal age 22: Cam Cannarella, who has had 42 AAA plate appearances. Of the top 100 batters in the international league in OPS, six are seasonal age 22 and three are 21. To take this from another angle, people seem to think Marco Dinges, Andrew Fischer, and Josiah Ragsdale have substantial trade value -- much more than you're arguing Williams has. All three of those guys are 22, all have played most of their games this year at high-A, and all are now at AA. Huh -- why aren't they all instead at AAA like Jett Williams? Presumably because the Brewers don't think they're ready to succeed there. The Mets and Brewers have pushed Williams harder. You think his numbers wouldn't look shinier if he split the season between Wisconsin and Biloxi? So yeah, despite your collegial, self effacing, and on-brand "who cares," being 22 in AAA is generally a huge deal. Development isn't linear. A guy has a down year when he's that young for his league? Not surprising; he's still fairly early on his development curve, and he's playing against more experienced, more fully developed competition. Now, your second quoted sentence provides a reason the general age/level analysis might not apply to Jett: He's short. Your whole sweeping argument that every team in baseball will obviously assess Jett Williams as having minimal trade value boils down to one simple idea: Height is destiny. Everyone can assess the force of that idea themselves. I'll stick to my view that Williams is a hard player to assess, which suggests that teams will likely vary significantly in how they assess him.

No it isn't. It's not some kind of magic cleanser, but it's nuanced. The Brewers sure thought Priester's and Harrison's prospect pedigrees were worth giving up significant value. Everyone in baseball knows that young players' development isn't linear or uniform. Williams made top 100 lists for reasons. This is looking like a lost season that sure isn't helping his value, but different teams are going to make different assessments of how valid the reasons evaluators have liked Williams still are.

Returning to the hill I will die on: Payne is 19, in his second full pro season, and he's one of the best players in High A. Adamczewski is 21, and he moved up to AA just over a month ago. Those are seasonal ages; the age gap between the two is actually smaller, about 1.25 years. So Payne is just about a year ahead of Adamczewski in terms of age for level. That's a big deal in terms of development curves. I'm normally not in the tank for tools, and I'm sure not coming here to bash Adamczewski, whom I love for the same reasons everyone else does. But with Payne, everyone seems fixated on his one weakness while undervaluing his strengths in every other area. Compared to a great prospect in Adamczewski, Payne is younger, faster, massively more valuable defensively, with more power. His K rate at 30 percent is bad, but he has kept that rate constant from last year -- just a tiny bit lower -- while massively jacking up both his power (ISO doubled, from .142 to .284) and his batting average (up from .240 to .288), which bodes well for his ability to continue improving. It's a fascinating contrast in profiles. Adamczewski is closer to MLB, has a higher floor, and has an All-Star ceiling. Payne has higher bust potential with the bat, but he also has more paths to being at least a useful player, and he has a superstar ceiling. I put both of them in the near-untouchable category, but if I only get to keep one, I'm keeping Payne.

P.S. — I can’t for the life of me figure out how to use the sarcasm font on my phone.

But the Cubs DID SOMETHING! They SPENT! They WENT FOR IT! They showed the fans they were serious about showing the fans they were serious about winning. They had an excellent young 3b, and they’ve shrewdly managed their assets by replacing him with an older, less productive, more expensive player AND turning him into a replacement-level utility man. He was only poised to help the team win tomorrow (and a bunch of days after that). Serious teams pay top dollar for PROVEN MAJOR LEAGUE VETERANS who helped OTHER teams win BEFORE.

You’re right, and I think a few more names belong in the conversation, if we limit it to guys at AA and AAA (of course this all may require some revising after the deadline): C: Wood, at least as a backup; Maybe Miller too lf: Adamczewski cf: Ragsdale wild card: Jett - could conceivably end up at 2b, 3b, or cf sp: Hardin

It doesn’t have to be a problem. You have 18-21 outfield starts each week; let’s call it 20. It’s late in the season with October coming, so guys can use the occasional day off – certainly a historically fragile guy like Mitchell and a guy who seems prone to slip into bad habits like Chourio. With Frelick out, you can go with something like Chourio 6 Mitchell 6 Lara 4 Lockridge 4 If Lockridge takes time to shake the rust off, finding starts for Lara gets even easier. The immediate problem arises if you want to keep playing Bauers in the outfield. I don’t think his recent offense justifies playing him there over a bunch of guys who can defend rings around him, but that’s me. (It would sure be nice to have the DH spot available for some Bauers and Vaughn starts.) When Frelick gets back, that’s a different conversation. But really, what are the odds of Chourio, Frelick, Lockridge, AND Mitchell staying healthy through the World Series?

This time every year, people who want to make aggressive deadline trades recite a mantra: “Prospects are just that – prospects.“ Which, first of all, is meaningless, because a thing is always what it is. But I take the point to be that you can never count on prospects to develop into anything. The unstated premise seems to be that you can always or usually count on veterans to keep doing whatever good things they did before. Yesterday I was looking for something or other and ended up seeing the MLB pipeline top 100 for 2022. It got me thinking, so I did a quick snapshot; people who know how to work with data could do a bigger, vastly better version of it. The question is, what value can you rely on getting from veterans as opposed to prospects? My snapshot was to look at the 2022 top 10 prospects and the 2022 top 10 MVP finishers in each league to see how much value each group provided between 2023 and 2026 (prior to yesterday’s games). I used bWAR because it was the easiest thing to access. Here’s what I found, assuming my math is right: Top ten 2022 AL MVP: 154 Top ten 2022 NL MVP: 121 Top ten 2022 prospects: 110 In this snapshot, the prospects were indeed the least reliable group — but not by nearly as much as the “just that” mantra implies. The prospects were also a more volatile group — higher standard deviation. But overall, the prospect group was right there with the cream of the NL and within shouting distance of the (Ohtani and Judge led) cream of the AL. Does this pattern hold for other years? I don’t know. You could also play around with the window; to me, a 3.5 year window starting right after the MVP seasons and a year after top prospect rankings seemed pretty sensible, but I could be wrong. My biggest question is what happens when you get down to, say, the 75th to 100th best prospects and veterans. Anyway, this is a quick pass at starting a somewhat informed discussion.

Those are all great cases — Cone, Verlander, Sutton. I think they meet all the criteria. The ‘82 Brewers lost, but I think everyone was ecstatic about getting to the World Series. All starting pitchers, which makes sense. At the level the Brewers have reached, you’re really trading to swing two or three postseason games. Position players and closers are far less likely to do that. I’m seeing the Skubal argument a lot more clearly, and I’m feeling more secure in my resistance to trading potential difference-makers for a bat or reliever.

I know you’re kidding, but I was actually thinking about this. There is a drag factor once teams clinch. Put it this way: My wife got me tickets to come up to Milwaukee for the final home series of the season, and I’m very intrigued about whom I’ll get to see. Unless the Brewers collapse between now and then, I ain’t seeing Miz.

(This isn’t a trade rumor of proposal, so I figured it belonged here.) The Brewers as currently constructed are highly likely to win the division and a good bet to get as far as the NLCS, given that they did so last year and are probably better now. When we talk about improving the team now, beyond maintenance changes like getting a McCullers type to eat some innings, we’re talking about getting to, and hopefully winning, the World Series. The argument that the Brewers should go “all in” at the deadline is an argument that one or more deadline trades would be substantially likely to elevate the Brewers at least from NLCS loser to NLCS winner and maybe to a championship. Has that ever happened before? Has any team as good as the Brewers already are ever made a deadline deal that you can point to and say there’s a good chance that trade lifted them from top four in the postseason to top two? I can’t think of one, but I’m miles from having a comprehensive knowledge of MLB, and obviously this question involves some subjectivity – you can never say for sure that one deadline trade does or doesn’t make the difference. But I’m curious if others can think of cases where that even arguably happened. If the Brewers embrace this “all in” strategy, it would be nice to know the strategy has worked before.

I’m watching the beginning of the game. This guy repeatedly pronounced “Made” like “Shade” until he heard the PA announcer pronounce it correctly. He identified the Shuckers as a Marlins affiliate until someone passed him a note. He called Josh A. — while he was standing at the plate — a right-handed hitter. If you’ve seen Derry Girls, he sounds like Colm if Colm was a drooling idiot instead of a blowhard. He recites payers’ names, ages, and batting averages as if he’s a captured soldier refusing to give up information.