gregmag

Jesus MadeLuis PenaLuis LaraLogan HendersonCooper PrattJett WilliamsJeferson QueroAndrew FischerBraylon PayneBishop LetsonJosh AdamczewskiMarco DingesRobert GasserShane DrohanLuke AdamsColeman CrowBrady EbelBlake BurkeTyson HardinJD Thompson The comment fields for individual players don’t seem to work on my phone, so I’ll say my piece here. I may be overreacting to Lara’s great start, but it looks too broad not to be a breakout. What he’s doing at 21 in AAA is exceptional. Speaking of age for level, I’ve been higher than most people on Payne for a long time. He’s 19 and flashing incredible tools in high A. Adamczewski and Dinges are better players right now, but not by much, and Payne has a longer runway. I’m having a hard time believing in any of our lower-level pitchers right now. At the other extreme, I’m putting a lot of stock in pitchers who are still prospect eligible and have already showed they can get major league hitters out.

I’m perplexed by your underlying assumption that everything Boston thought about Harrison before they traded him must obviously have been right. That’s been the core of everything you’ve said here, and it doesn’t make much sense. For someone who incessantly rips people for opining that the Brewers know what they’re doing, you take a very different attitude when the question is whether the Brewers’ trading partner knew what they were doing. Yeah, if I want to win the division in 2026, I’m picking the guy whose career is in front of him rather than the guy whose career is behind him. Is that the safe-looking move to casual fans? Probably not. But I don’t think GMs win by trying to placate casual fans. I think GMs win by taking smart risks that casual fans a year later claim that of course they supported at the time (see, e.g., Priester, Quinn). You can cherry-pick the few stats that make Gray look good, but if you actually consider his value — you know, how much he contributed to winning baseball games, which I thought was what we were talking about — there’s no reason to think he’ll ever help a team accomplish anything substantial again.

You keep repeating that line about binaries, but I don’t read people as making an argument that Boston was stupid because the Brewers were smart. My argument, anyway, is that Boston’s paying for Sonny Gray last offseason when they already had Kyle Harrison in hand was short-sighted based on available information at the time. The Brewers don’t have some magical pitching crystal ball. The Red Sox should have had at least some sense of Harrison’s talent. Gray is 36, coming off seasons of 1.6 and 1.4 fWAR at 34 and 35. Why would anyone pay a premium for that rather than rolling with the healthy, prospect-pedigreed 24 year-old? Your answer seems to be “that’s what big market teams do.” I agree with your premise, but I’d call that kind of big market behavior a pathology rather than a capacity. Spending trade capital and/or real money for talented players in decline is objectively less smart than spending much less money for talented players in ascent whose contracts you already own. If you can’t do at least a pretty good job of identifying and acquiring players in ascent who will likely outplay obviously declining vets, then you shouldn’t be running a MLB franchise. On a completely different note: Durbin has been one of the worst hitters in baseball, but he’s on pace for 2+ wins because of his excellent fielding at 3b, just more than a year after learning the position. You’ve gotta give him credit, as I’m sure the ever-patient Red Sox fan base will.

He has worked on improving throughout his pro career. Even during his rookie struggles, I had no doubt he would end up as a productive major league hitter. But I never imagined his ceiling was this high.

But the only opportunity here is to be an extra outfielder until Yelich gets back, which should be soon. Actually I guess they’ll probably send Black down when Yelich comes back – but Perkins will still have a reduced role. I’m a big Perkins fan, and I think his numbers this season obviously understate his ability, but I agree with the consensus that other outfielders have passed him on the depth chart. The problem with bringing up Lara now is that he, like Perkins, wouldn’t have much playing time, so why bring him up to sit on the bench? If Mitchell gets hurt, which does occasionally happen, I think Lara will be the move unless he’s really taken a downturn.

I have to say that I did not expect him to develop this quickly. His last stretch at AAA was certainly encouraging, but he still had a lot to work through. I love how Murph in this article focuses on Miz’s mindset – that seems to be the element that we couldn’t know about for sure until he got up here.

This is what I want from the A-Crew on an otherwise barren Monday night. But what the hell is Halterman’s problem, not drawing a single walk? Also, they scored in a Fibonacci sequence (0 1 1 2 3 5). That’s pretty mathematically sophisticated for the complex league.

Nobody’s telling you he’s Tony Gwynn or Aaron Judge. Please stop. I’m sure you’re a smart person. If you can’t handle intelligent, nuanced analysis, maybe do some reading and get up to speed.

I’m feeling weirdly good about the Brewers’ chances in the division. The Reds and Cardinals have negative run differentials. I’m not sure how the Cubs and Pirates get better than they have played so far. Meanwhile, the Brewers have underperformed their run differential while missing key guys. Not a single offensive player has done anything unsustainable. They seem to be playing the rotation shuffle as effectively as we could have possibly hoped. The bullpen has been surprisingly shaky, but they have candidates in the minors, and the rotation shuffle gives them a lot of options for longer stints. It’s just very easy to see how they could get better.

Agreed, but the question is whether he’s stretched out enough or healthy enough or whatever the Brewers have been working on. He went 5 innings in his last start, but that was his first time going more than 3.1. The competition is stiff. The team wouldn’t be crazy to go with Drohan or Crow or Gasser. All these guys look like viable candidates to start games.

Here’s my favorite crazy Made thing right now: his season rate stats at this moment in AA are almost exactly his DSL numbers from two years ago.

Payne has been showing this talent from the beginning. He’s just had growing pains, interspersed with injuries last year. I’ve had him as a top five or six prospect in the system all along. I don’t normally boast about these things, mainly because I’m rarely right about them, but he has a package of skills at a very young age that could really take him to the heights.

The Pirates, who are presently in last place in the NL Central, would be in first place in the AL Central and AL West, second in the AL East and NL East, and tied for third in the NL West. To put the point in a different, more fun way, only one AL team, the Yankees, presently has a better record than the worst team in the NL Central. What many people don't seem to appreciate is that the NL Central was the second-strongest division in MLB last year. The AL East in 2025 was 48 games over .500. The NL Central was +32. The AL West was +2, NL East -10, NL West -26, AL Central -36. If you think it's unfair to judge a division by its worst team, we can ignore the last-place team in each division. That leaves AL East +60, NL Central +52, NL West +40, NL East +20, AL West +20, AL Central +6. The NL Central was strong at the top (#1 and #6 records in MLB) and well balanced.

What Patrick is doing now won’t keep working. Nine strikeouts and seven walks in 19 innings. BABIP of .241. Fly ball percentage up and HR percentage cut in half from last year. Maybe he’s a starter, but nothing he has done this season makes that more likely. I don’t know if this is the moment to move him to the pen, but if this is really who he is, then that’s where he should end up. His stuff played up in shorter outings during the postseason. We’ve seen him do that job well. Both Henderson and Gasser have shown flashes of dominance as starters. Drohan and Crow are promising wild cards. I have a hard time believing that Patrick is the best starting pitcher of those five.

Hmmm. Lesser Contreras threatens violence he’s already committed if the Brewers try to get him out (what a competitor!). Wild Mis up tomorrow. Should be fun. Lesser Contreras has had an interesting career. He came up for half a season while the veteran Cubs won their title. As soon as he established himself, they declined. He joined the Cardinals after a playoff season; they immediately declined. He joins the Red Sox; they’re 2-8. No wonder he makes so much noise — it’s all he’s good for.

A lot of preseason assessments of the Brewers dwelled on the team’s success last year in scoring without hitting the ball hard, emphasizing how unsustainable that is. What those assessments seemed to miss is that we had 3.5 hitters who accounted for a lot of that weak contact success — Collins, Durbin, Frelick, and Mona (the .5) — and we traded 2.5 of them. That’s a deliberate change to move on from offensive smoke and mirrors. If the guys Boston traded were spare parts to them, you have to view the guys we traded the same way. The Brewers clearly did not view Durbin and Mona (let alone Siegler) as meaningful contributors going forward.

It seemed late last year that he might be getting more coherent in interviews. It seems now like that was a false alarm, and I’m very relieved. The grim world we live in cannot afford to lose any comedy gold.

I love this deal. It reflects the reality that MLB salary structures never actually line up with a player's present ability. The typical way salaries work after the six years of team control is that teams pay players for what they did before. That's mostly unwise for teams, because they aren't getting what the player did before. Most players past team control are in their late 20s or early 30s, when they're likely to decline. The Brewers are trying the opposite approach by paying players for what the team thinks they're going to do later. This has one inevitable disadvantage in common with the other approach: You don't actually know what you're going to get. But it has two advantages. First, it just costs less money. Fifty million dollars over eight years? Even the Brewers won't be too bothered if that contract turns into the worst-case scenario. Second, the team is paying for players at an age when they tend to improve, not decline. You won't like this analysis if you're a big believer in the value of proven major leaguers and/or the worthlessness of players who haven't made the majors yet. The Brewers aren't believers in those things, and they've done pretty well betting in the other direction. The Pratt contract, though unusual in a lot of ways people have discussed here, is really just another instance of the Brewers' consistent approach.

I'm glad for the turn this discussion took. I'm very sympathetic with Playing Catch's premise that too much online discussion is negative and mean. But to me, this article is fantastic. Wit and whimsy are great ways of making a criticism into something more than a rant or a cheap shot. I've never seen an umpire make a call as blatantly bad as Bucknor's last night. You have to be able to have some fun with that, which is a gracious alternative to just getting angry about it.

I’m a huge Perkins fan, but I think this is the right decision. In the statcast era, some aspects of spring performance mean more than they used to. Lockridge has clearly figured out how to tap into some power. It makes sense to see if he can actually sustain that at the highest level. I’m glad Murphy can make these decisions based on indicators of performance rather than seniority. Mitchell’s obviously a weird player. I take Jopal’s point that he’s a vet and needs to perform now at the major league level, but he just hasn’t played much the last couple of years, and clearly he’s still figuring stuff out that a lot of guys get past (if he’s going to get past them at all) at a younger age. I could definitely see the wisdom in sending him to AAA for a month to get more swings in. OTOH, I think it would suck more for Perkins to get sent down after making the opening day roster.

To say that "Tauchman plays all three OF spots" is tenuous. In 2023, at age 32, Tauchman played mostly cf. In 2024, at age 33, he played 67 games at the corner spots, mostly in rf, and only 15 in cf. In 2025, at age 34, he played only in rf. (Also, FWIW, in his one really good defensive season, way back in 2019, he played 78 games at the corners, 14 in cf.) It's not impossible that a 35-year old whose teams have aggressively moved him off cf for two years could play meaningful innings at the position, but it's pretty unlikely. I don't think teams would look at Tauchman and Perkins and see fungible players. Tauchman is a corner of bat. Perkins is a defense-first cf and also six years younger. I'm not sure Perkins has trade value, but if he does, it's because some team wants to pay for cf defense. Also, if Tauchman opts out, he's a free agent, right? So wouldn't we have to assess his value based on what some team ended up paying him (or not)?

They probably should trade one of McGee, because two of him is entirely too many. Kidding aside, thank you for this breakdown. That’s a really good roster, and the pitching staff is borderline unholy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a AAA pitching staff where every guy could be a reasonable candidate to call up because the team affirmatively wants him. Maybe not Rodriguez, but he has actually started games in the majors.

Two things : first, Bitonti has a 60-grade arm? Second, I don’t think we emphasize this enough: The Brewers are the best system in baseball; the Brewers never draft high because they’re always winning; and only four of the Brewers’ top 30 prospects came from trades. Those three facts should not be able to live together.

Priceless. Carlos Gomez vs. Brian McCann is about the easiest moral choice I can imagine.

I think Rengifo vs. Urias is pretty easy to understand. Urias has been a better player, but he’s entering his age 32 season. Rengifo is three years younger. If you buy that Rengifo’s struggles last year were an outlier, they’re pretty comparable now. You trust the 29 year-old to hold more of that value than the 32 year-old.