gregmag

This season has been about three things: acquiring talent, developing talent at the minor league level, and identifying talent at the MLB level. The acquiring piece has gone brilliantly, as other threads have discussed. The developing piece has been a mixed bag, with quite a few major prospects underperforming expectations, but some of that may be due to aggressive placements. The part that I'm most pleasantly surprised about is the identifying piece. We now have a bunch of guys at the MLB level who are young and/or under team control for four or five more years and look like they might be part of the next good Brewers team: Villar Arcia Santana Broxton Perez Susac Pina Guerra Davies Nelson Barnes Knebel That's a long way from a championship core, and we can reasonably debate whether my list gets all the right guys. I've left off players I expect to be traded in the next year, mainly Gennett and Thornburg. But all the guys on that list have established some level of positive MLB value, and they're all young enough or raw enough to contribute more than they have so far. That's a longer, better list than I would have expected a year ago.

MLB would much rather let the criminal justice system punish a "lone nut" than acknowledge any kind of wrongdoing at the franchise level. The other teams must be okay with that, because the Commissioner is just the owners' bagman.

He did that with Broxton for a while as well. Remember everyone complaining about Kirk N playing all the time? Perhaps he's just trying to get the younger guys who have been struggling into a position to succeed in some fashion. Then they can build on that success. It's really something that probably works best on a case-by-case basis. It's probably a good strategy for some players, but not others. You just have to know the player and feel you understand what makes them tick and what will get them to respond. I think this is exactly right, and I may have even written something similar (or I may have just written it in my fevered brain). I yield to no one in my Broxton fanaticism, but I had no problem with CC soft-platooning him, and I have the same view on Santana, whom I'm also high on. Let these guys operate at first in more of a comfort zone, and gradually move them toward full-time roles. As long as it's not too lengthy or too rigid, it seems like a great approach.

What's most interesting about that is the linkage of Cordell to the Brewers' general talent acquisition strategy. Stearns loves him some KATOH.

I just dislike the guy on general principles. Apparently he has now signed with the Mets, which is very convenient for me, since I also hate them on general principles.

Anyone who actually reads this board knows that statement is obviously false. Even if its falsity weren't obvious, you haven't even tried to back it up. Making an obviously false, unsupported claim about how true and well-supported your own views are makes you look not very credible. When your false, unsupported, self-aggrandizing claim also insults the "majority of people on this board," it makes you look . . . just not good. There's strong, serious evidence that Garza has declined sharply over the past several years. People have made those arguments, and the arguments the other way, very well on this board. You should read it sometime.

Very cool. Makeup is a funny thing.

Also, he can play a little centerfield.

What I like about this -- well, it's a good analysis on its own terms, but what I really like about it is that I don't agree with your optimism, and it really doesn't matter. You've made a thoughtful "win now" argument, and your prescription is build from within and maybe add a cheap LH bat in free agency. I'm a "win later" guy, I don't believe winning now is an option, and my prescription doesn't differ much. We might quibble about which LH bat(s) to add, especially if they might block or supplant young guys that I liked better than you, but that's just conjecture. It used to be that "win now" arguments were all about breaking the bank to sign (inevitably second-tier) free agents and trading youth for experience. I think we've gotten to a point, with baseball analysis generally and the Brewers' present situation in particular, where nobody really wants to do that. Having a broad young talent base changes the ground of strategic arguments. Now it's all about which of the young guys different people like better and how soon we think they can help.

I agree that right now he projects best as a super utility guy. I love the idea of having a player like that, especially when you have other guys (mainly Villar) who can also move around the diamond. My one problem with discussions like this is that people tend to treat a snapshot as if it were a movie. Young players develop. Perez is 25, and he's made a leap, in conjunction with getting more playing time. That happens, and sometimes a guy like that will keep getting better. Perez has a better chance than most to keep improving, because he has a somewhat broad set of skills. He is what he is now, and certainly that's important to assess. But you can't just look at what he's doing now and say that's it; he's that player. He could regress, but right now the Brewers are in a great position to make a bet on his continued improvement.

Ray down to Wisconsin? Didn't see this reported. More games remaining?

My god Gennett is terrible. I can't wait to be rid of him.

I don't have time right now to do this topic justice, but Clancy, I just want to say that's a great post, extremely thoughtful, and I agree with most of it. I've long advocated moving Braun to 1b, but Santana may be the better fit there. I'm hoping Brinson is ready soonish; I can't share your faith in Cooper. I'd rather throw Reed out there as a stopgap. At this point I'm also leaning toward Villar 2b / Perez 3b, but I've heard good arguments for both configurations. I think you're right that the rotation next year will be a mess and a proving ground. That's been by far the biggest problem this year. We need to look at everyone with a pulse to try to identify more guys who can at least keep the team in the game.

You can't? You have to point at her?

So I talk smack about Garza, and of course he proceeds to go toss his best five innings since the Bush administration. Maybe Bush I.

There was a minute there when his stats for a few starts made him look like something, and oddly that always stuck with me. Thoughts with his family.

Is there any reason we don't think about giving Burgos a shot? To pick one scenario, which yes plays into a longtime bias of mine, wouldn't we get better potential value by giving Burgos five starts to see what he has than by dejectedly rolling Matt Garza out to numb our senses and dreams every five days?

Any gm would have traded Jean Segura last winter. No one argued for not trading Jean Segura last winter. Anyone who pretends that he would have advised against trading Segura last winter is the kind of fabulist who would pretend Khris Davis is a first-division starter. Oh wait.

Weeks was asked to switch to lf late in the season, having never played of in his career. It was a stupid idea, and he was right to say no. Say what you want about Weeks as a hitter, but he worked hard, kept his head down, and played the right way. Hell, he could have been a Cardinal if he'd been sanctimonious and white.

This is making me so happy. I've had an irrational love for Broxton ever since we got him. Seeing him succeed like this is the highlight of my baseball year. A few random thoughts: The Cameron comparison occurred to me too. Broxton is more extreme, a 3TO guy who right now making Russell Branyan look like Juan Pierre. Branyan, for his career, had just over half his plate appearances end in a homer, walk, or strikeout. For this season, Broxton is at 57 percent. Broxton is a great test case for the importance of contact skills. At this point, I think we have good evidence of what he does well: power looks very good, speed looks elite, walk rate looks elite, plus defender. Basically he's good at everything except hitting for contact, which I'm still inclined to think he's very bad at, even though he's improved over the course of the year. Can pitchers get a hitter like that into checkmate by just throwing him good breaking balls near the edge of the zone? We'll see. There's another thread about Counsell, which I've been ignoring because manager threads always seem to produce more light than heat. But in this thread, I'll say that I think Counsell deserves credit for how he's handled Broxton. I know some people have been annoyed that Broxton hasn't played more. But I think getting him the platoon advantage for so many PAs probably helped him get his confidence up. I'll be annoyed if Counsell does anything close to a hard platoon the rest of the way, but I suspect we'll keep seeing a lot of Keon. Bill James made up a stat years ago called secondary average. It's a fun stat, designed to complement batting average. It's (TB - H + BB + SB - CS) / AB. Basically it's supposed to measure a player's rate of accumulating every kind of extra base. The mean tends to end up similar to mean BA, around .250 -.260, but the standard deviation is much higher. Yuni B. had a .163 career SEC. Barry Bonds finished at .606, which I think is the highest ever. Keon's at .492 for the year. I think we have a good sense of what type of player he's going to be; the question is whether he'll be a good enough player of the type to succeed long term. I'm glad he's earned a chance to try.

I would love to see an in-depth interview with him, maybe after another week or two, about how he perceives the move and how he explains his improvement (assuming it continues). It could be a really useful data point about how a certain type of prospect responds to a certain type of adversity.

They won't be in Brevard County any more. So while they still may be in a pitcher's league (though not guaranteed). at least they won't be in an extreme pitcher's park. So placement in A+ should be less of an issue. This is a great point, and such a good thing to be able to say. Obviously we still have uncertainty about the conditions in which our A+ team will play. But if there's a decent chance the conditions will be more balanced, that's cause for optimism. Re: the mention above of moving Gatewood back to 3b, does anyone have information about the nature of his move to 1b? Did they decide he's better off developing there, or was it purely a convenient temporary move and they still think he can stick at 3b?

Both guys from the Hill trade have been terrible thus far. What does Deseguin throw?

Gomez won't come sign here if it takes a laundry list of "ifs" to have the starting gig. and we shouldn't want him for the same reason. Any team in baseball could have space for anyone if five different things went wrong. Even if they all happened, playing Broxton, Perez, and Liriano would make more sense for a rebuild.

The thing about Scooter now, if he keeps playing like this, is that he isn't really good at anything but he isn't bad at anything. He hits for an okay average, has a little pop, seems to have overcome his allergy to lefties, draws almost a passable number of walks, plays what I'm told grades out as adequate defense, and even steals the occasional base. Those last four things are new this year, and he's still young enough for the modest improvements to be plausibly real. As a starting 2b he won't hurt you. He may only be the 20th guy at the position, but there are 30 teams. We just need to find a team that (a) has a gaping hole at 2b and (b) is willing to let go of a prospect or two. The more I think about it, the more he seems as good as gone. Nothing about him seems consistent with the kinds of players Counsell and Stearns seem to like: athletic, versatile, preferably young and/or with five or six years of team control. If you play him next year, you have to not play one of Villar, Perez, or Santana, or arguably Broxton / Brinson if we think Villar could handle cf. Every one of those guys is younger than Gennett (well, Broxton only by six days) with more team control and some combination of greater athleticism, greater established skill(s), and greater upside. Gennett has improved modestly this year, which suggests we have a pretty good idea of what he is. Leaving aside the tendency of second basemen for early declines, maybe he gets ten percent better next year, which would make him about a league average player. What good does that do the Brewers? In contrast, Villar is already playing at a star level and Broxton, Perez, and Santana all have breakout potential. Gennett's the ultimate placeholder, a Jim Gantner for our time. That kind of player does the Brewers no good, but he could be valuable to a good team that has a dumpster fire at 2b.