gregmag

1. Aggressively shop Lind, Segura, and Rodriguez. Be very open to trading Gennett if anyone wants him; he's a stopgap, easily replaceable. 2. Trade Lucroy only for a premium offer, a major overpay. I'm not averse to keeping him. He's a good enough catcher to help substantially in the young pitchers' development. 3. Move Braun to 1b. Enough already. It's where he belongs now. Play Santana every day in RF. I like Rogers as a bench bat, but he's too old and limited to prioritize making space for. 4. Strongly consider trading Davis. This pains me, because he's my favorite player on the team, but my other favorite was Fiers. If we move Braun to 1b, we can still use Davis in lf, and I don't think he's going to lose value over the next year. But if someone wants to overpay now for a RH power bat, great. 5. In trades, always look to get back BPA (best prospects available), but put a thumb on the scale in favor of infielders. We'll soon have a potential star at ss, but we don't have a single player in the organization who is, or projects as, a quality starter at any other infield position (which isn't to say some of our minor leaguers won't develop further). (I'm not counting Lind because I want him traded.) 6. Decide on a closer -- my money is on Jeffress -- and be willing to trade another bullpen vet (Smith, Blazek) who brings back something we need more than another bullpen vet. 7. Try very hard to trade Garza. If no one bites, release him. If he throws another pitch for this team, it's a slap in the face to everyone in the organization who works hard, conducts himself professionally, and takes responsibility for his actions. This would be a great way for Stearns to assert himself. 8. Do not sign any premium free agents. Sign or trade for guys who you control for one or two years, who fill gaps, and who won't block anybody important (i.e., look for infielders and maybe a cf). But if you have a prospect who projects to produce almost as well as whatever Johnny Someguy free agent is available, just play the prospect. (I'm thinking here of Michael Reed.) 9. Figure out the rotation. Peralta, Nelson, and Jungmann are locks at this point. Davies seems like a near lock. Evaluate Thornburg, Pena, and Cravy. In a sense, everyone is auditioning next year, because we'll also have a AAA rotation full of young potential MLB guys. No one's a lock for 2017. 10. I won't do all the details, because this is in another thread, but aggressively clear the dead wood out of the 40-man roster to make room for the young guys we'll need to protect from Rule 5.

Damn Cardinals.

That was freakin' awesome. Thanks for those tidbits, 1992casey. Two come-from-behind wins in a four-game series. The team we're putting out there right now may be the worst in baseball (which of course doesn't matter for our purposes), and the Cards are supposed to be the best team in baseball. We're basically auditioning guys, and they're playing for a championship. In their park, in front of their rabid fans. I haven't been this happy about actual on-the-field events in well over a year. But of course which game did I get tickets for? That would be last night's snooze-fest loss. At least I got to see Reed and Houser make their debuts. Speaking of which, I have to give credit where it's due. The Cards PA guy announced that both players were making their MLB debuts, and the fans gave both of them nice ovations. They also cheered for Reed after his double. The "best fans in baseball" bunk annoys me as much as anyone -- I live here -- but that was pretty classy.

If he hits and the team plays next year like they did this year, I could imagine realistic trade scenarios at the deadline or next offseason. The contract, as others have said, really isn't extravagant by MLB standards, and the PED thing keeps getting further in the past.

This is perfectly expressed. I'll just add that I'm warming to the idea of trading Davis too. I'd still rather move Braun to 1b, but if we don't do that, Davis probably helps us more as a trade chip than as a player. Also, I'd love Stearns to get whatever he can for Segura. Rivera can keep ss warm for Arcia and show us whether he has a future. Just to make this a little on topic, I think I've achieved a state of zen repose re: wins and losses. I root for us to win while the game is happening, and then I appreciate the good consequences when we lose.

This is great. I completely agree with Briggs that the young starters look spent.

I intend to make this the least confrontational post in the history of the Internets to begin (substantively) with the following sentence: You're talking about my mom here. Well, almost. She's actually 83, and my dad is 84. They watch or listen to just about every game. The thing is, they've enjoyed Brewers baseball, consistently, since the late 70s. Through all the doomed seasons, they've had fun with it. They're very smart people, and fairly knowledgeable about baseball, but they aren't obsessive. Now, when the team goes to the post-season, they get wigged-out excited just like the rest of us. But you know what they don't care about? Whether the team wins 64 or 74 or 84 games and misses the playoffs. Those extra 10 or even 20 wins, in an ultimately futile season, make them a little happier on those 10 or 20 nights, but not that much. Briggs, you make this point, over and over, about how rebuilding is basically unfair to elderly fans. I sympathize on an emotional level with where you seem to be coming from, and I think Ennder's crude ageism in this discussion was out of line. (No, not all people over 50 are worthless. Worthless people over 50 are worthless, just like worthless people under 50.) But really, what's your point? That elderly people have an irrational attachment to winning a few extra meaningless games? I have to say, that seems like an (unintentional) insult to elderly people, and I know it to be inaccurate. That we should be quicker to assume, for the sake of people who won't be around much longer, that the Brewers really can compete, if only we sign that last mid-rotation starter? Come on. Elderly people, in my experience, tend to be realistic verging on fatalistic. They're the least naiive people out there, and you'd have to be naiive to think that the Brewers, with their roster and resources of July 1, 2015, could have a snowball's chance in a St. Louis summer of contending for the Wild Card in 2016. Moreover, as someone said above: We've been doing it your way. For years. We've signed middling free agents, held onto veterans until their trade value tanked, and (until the last couple of years) undervalued player development and the minor league system. Have the results actually been fun for you? If so, you have a much stronger constitution than I do. I was okay with a lot of those moves, because what the hell do I know, and it was (contrary to the refrains of some reflexive critics around here) a plan. But it failed. Your preferred approach to building a competitive, entertaining baseball organization hasn't worked. Do you really want to throw good resources after bad in pursuit of the same plan, especially when three teams in our division are close to peaking together (and the fourth can't give them a fight)? I give Doug Melvin and Mark Attanasio great credit for their successes. Their latest success is that they appear to have recognized that what they were doing didn't work. Bruce Seid's last draft focused on upside like we hadn't seen in years. Ray Montgomery's first was more of the same. Then Doug traded away a quarter of our active roster down this doomed stretch, something this organization has never had the guts and wherewithal to do before. Now Mark has hired a radically different sort of GM, based -- lest we fear all venerable wisdom is out the window -- on simple, proven principles of sound management: know your stuff, have talent, make a plan, elicit respect from your peers. Others have expressed the reasonable concern that Mark A. will roll Stearns. I get it, but I doubt it. Stearns sounds like a guy who would get another GM job in a year or two if we didn't grab him. He didn't need this gig so badly that he'd put up with micromanagement from the owner. More important, like I said, I think the owner gets that he made a lot of mistakes in the past. Until I see evidence to the contrary, I'll assume these guys are on the same page. It looks like a smart page to me.

No. First of all, "nearly every thread" is a gross exaggeration, as far as I can tell. I'm not going to bring race up gratuitously -- I've made it my internal rule not to be the first to bring it up in any conversation -- but I'm going to respond to points about race if I want to, where it's relevant to baseball. If you don't like that line of discussion, you can ignore it, but you don't get to shut it down because it annoys or offends you. If it gets gratuitous, or out of the boundaries of baseball discussion, the mods can and (I assume) will shut it down.

Do these pitches that are getting called strikes on our guys (9th inning) look as bad on TV as they look on Gamecast? My goodness.

The irony here is that LaRussa's Cardinals teams, in the latter part of his tenure, were whiter than their home uniforms. People here in St. Louis will forgive the Cardinals anything, but usually there's an annual "why don't the Cards have any black players" think piece. Getting Heyward was a big change. I think you're wrong to accuse Dave Stewart of calling people racist with that tweet. First of all, would you have a problem if a white GM called people out for not interviewing his well-regarded young white assistant GM? If not, then what clear basis do you have for criticizing Stewart? Second, assuming Stewart is thinking about race to some extent (which I assume he is), what exactly is wrong with reminding people that there's a good African-American candidate out there for a job few African-Americans have held? Encouraging racial diversity doesn't equal calling people racist. Third, assuming Stewart thinks racism is a factor in MLB hiring for GMs, I bet he's thinking about systemic rather than malicious racism -- the kind of culture where white guys tend to play golf with, socialize with, work with other white guys, not because they necessarily have a racist bone in their bodies but because of circumstances, habits, and reinforced practices over time. IMHO most racism that matters in baseball (and elsewhere) is like that, not a sin but a social condition. The best cure for that kind of racism, which nobody (or almost nobody) affirmatively wants to exist, is simply to point it out. If that's what Stewart is doing, then good for him.

Here's an excellent piece from Baseball Prospectus Milwaukee that puts Garza's handling of this latest event in the context of his history: http://milwaukee.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2015/09/11/brewers-lay-out-an-unwelcome-matt/ The author concludes (I'm paraphrasing) that Garza has crossed a character line that should make the Brewers want to dump him before next season. I agree. From a pure talent standpoint, the smartest move would be to let him try to regain his value in the first half of next year (though I'm not sure how his fastball command is coming back). But this team seems to be trying to build a culture where guys get fair opportunities and have to show something in order to play. Garza's diva act dumps all over that ethos. Eat most of his salary, get anything you can for him, and move forward with better pitchers and better people.

Thanks for the work. This is fun. To echo two points others have made that jump out at me: (1) The AAA pitching staff is utterly loaded. (We'll have to make sure nobody gets irreparably damaged by Colorado Springs.) (2) I have to think the Brewers will part ways with Herrera, keep Sardinas as a MLB utility guy, and play Rivera at 2b in AAA.

Our trade for Lind looks like a viable model for the kind of strategy some are advocating here. Trade for a guy coming off a so-so year on a contract that won't kill you if he flops and will look very good if he bounces back. If you can pull the same thing through FA, great, although it's tougher when the player has more leverage. The irony is that we (presumably) got Lind with the idea we could contend, but now he's our best remaining trade chip.

Has everyone considered what a lucky season we've had? I think a fair consensus view at the start of the season was that the Brewers were slightly worse than a .500 team. If everything had gone right for us, we might have been at the fringe of the Wild Card race in mid-July, with no real hope of a championship but too good to persuade Attanasio not to buy at the deadline. Instead, everything went wrong right out of the gate. Guys got hurt. Guys underperformed. Both of our vet starters completely cratered. We were the worst team in baseball long enough to put us beyond any hope of climbing out of our hole. Counsell talked about the Wild Card when he took over, but managers have to do that. We were safely out of the race in the strongest division in baseball. Those circumstances set us on a clear rebuilding course. Attanasio, whom we had pegged as the second coming of Herb Kohl, saw fit to trade six of our MLB players, completely gutting our lineup but getting guys about whom so far it looks like our scouts and analysts really did their homework. Has watching the team lose been fun? Not a bit. But it's gotten us somewhere. The only places worth getting to are confidence that you've built a contender or the knowledge that you need to rebuild to get there. Of course we aren't getting the top pick in next year's draft. We aren't getting it because we don't deserve it; we aren't anywhere near the worst team in baseball. Tanking hard enough to conceal that fact would be both hard and shameful. But we are bad, and we constructively tore down enough to make a top-10 pick a good bet. I'll take that, on top of a handful of young, hungry, promising players trying to prove themselves, any non-contending September of my life.

I just love what I've seen of Santana's approach. I haven't watched every game, so my view is very limited, but I've rarely seen him reach for a lousy pitch. What excites me most about this is that he seems very focused on doing what he needs to do to stick in the lineup. See lots of pitches, select your pitch to hit, then rely on your incredible strength to do damage. Take walks when your pitch doesn't come. This is simple stuff, but a lot of veterans can't master it. The question now is whether he has the physiological discipline to repeat those constructive moves and avoid falling into bad habits. As for the trade, I want to see Carlos and Mike succeed, and I like Melvin's philosophy discussed above, but I'm not sure how Astros fans could be too thrilled right now. Carlos hasn't done anything for them to this point. Fiers' no-hitter, as often happens, will probably end up having come at a high cost. He's only pitched into the 7th once besides the no-hitter. His K/BB has gone south. Some of this is just adjustment to the tougher league, and it's too soon to say for sure how the no-hitter affected him; but in the two starts since, he has 10 K's and 7 walks in 11 innings. I really hope his arm bounces back in time for the post-season, but I'm worried. They have him for four more years, which is big. But so far I think the trade has done more for our future than Houston's present, and by the end of the season we may well have ended up with the best MLB performer in the deal after the trade.

Helena-Billings must be the first time in the annals of pro baseball that two Armenian-American second basemen have squared off against one another. How the national media has slept through this historic moment I can't imagine.

I've always disliked him personally, so this doesn't surprise me. Fine him for every day he refuses to do his job, which is whatever the hell his manager tells him to do. Whining prima donna has-been punk.

danzig, you make a good point. But sometimes, at least, isn't that something a manager should be able to manage? It's like any other percentage play. You're tied in the 6th inning, other team has the bases loaded, one out, your closer has the platoon advantage over the next two hitters, and your closer is a lot better pitcher than your next-best option . . . sure, there could be a situation later in the game that makes you regret using him then, but probably not. In contrast, if you save he closer for the 9th, you can always say you "didn't waste him," but you aren't really taking stock of the cost, especially for games you lost in the middle innings. This all matters less if you're a team like the Royals, with three closer-quality guys. Actually it doesn't matter much with the Brewers. I don't mind that we save Rodriguez for the 9th, because I doubt he's much if at all better than Smith and Jeffress anyway. (No disrespect to him; they're all very good.) It was more frustrating when we'd run Kameron Loe or somebody out there to lose games in the 8th, but when your top three relievers are close in quality, I doubt you lose much flexibility by giving them set roles.

Closers are made, not born. We have guys with closer potential who could be here a while, and that causes a cascade of other guys with potential to move up into more prominent roles. We have a whole bunch of young, controllable bullpen arms on the roster. I think we'd be foolish not to use the rebuild to figure out how to maximize their contributions. I'm glad they didn't just give Rodriguez away, but I'm all for getting what they can for him in the off season.

The Hellweg debate is raging fast and furious in the AFL thread. Your take on Rivera sounds reasonable, but I wouldn't take the chance if I could avoid it. My only question about Centeno is whether they'd be comfortable going with two catchers on the 40-man. Let me play the parlor game. With Davies added, the roster stands at 38. Here's what I would do right now, building in what I take to be strong realistic assumptions (like the idea of adding Barnes given his AFL assignment): REMOVE Centeno Guilmet Jiminez Kintzler Lohse Clark Herrera Schafer I'm going bold with JohnBriggs and dumping our third catcher. I'm also dumping Clark, because he's the kind of AAA/AAAA guy you can pick up off the scrap heap if you need to. I strongly doubt Hellweg or Dominguez ever puts anything together, but for right now we can afford to keep them around. That may change by spring, but so may a lot of things. ADD Reed Arcia Barnes Barrios Houser Lopez Magnifico Roache Ventura Wang Wang's on the bubble; I don't want to lose him, but I don't know whether anyone would think it wise to jerk him around with another year lost to Rule 5. I would prefer not to lose Matos, but I don't think he's shown enough for anyone to grab him. I could imagine someone taking a flyer on Ross, Suter, or Hall, but I don't see how they supplant anyone we have. You could argue that one of them is worth more than Hellweg's potential, but I'm willing to roll the dice. I would be sorry to lose Matos, McFarland, or Brennan, but I don't think they're vulnerable. I can't remember a year when we had the ability to improve the 40-man roster as much as I think the changes above would improve it. Aging, replaceable parts out; shiny prospects in.

I hadn't noticed how good Barnes' K numbers have been. I guess it's easy to lose sight of a decent pitcher on that Biloxi roster. His ERA (3.52) and WHIP (1.381) aren't great, but his .376 BABIP probably inflates those numbers; FIP is 2.49. I'm completely clueless about him. Can anyone give a quick account of what he throws and what he needs to show to make the roster?

At the risk of saying something painfully obvious, pitching is not categorically the most important part of the game. Offense is half the game; pitching and defense are the other half. You can absolutely win with a team weighted toward offense. But your offense (or pitching, if you're trying to develop that way) can only be so good, which means your pitching (or offense) can only get so bad. Yeah, the Brewers leaned too heavily on offense in their last attempt to build a winner. Their failure isn't a universal truth; it's a data point. Taking the particulars of your last failure too seriously is a sure ticket to your next failure. The only absolute in baseball, IMHO, is run differential. You can maximize run differential a bunch of different ways. As for the topic of this thread, the Brewers seem to have learned something valuable about position players since their last developmental burst: load up on players at skill positions with offensive potential to move down the defensive spectrum. Sss and cfs who can outhit their positions are golden. We've also been drafting younger guys the past few years, which makes the immediate lack of power bats a lesser concern (see Brantley, Michael). Trying to jam square pegs into round holes is indeed foolish. Trying to fit round pegs into square holes makes a lot more sense. The position that worries me most is catcher. We have zilch at c, and that's not a problem we can fix with anyone we have.

Of course race has something to do with what we're talking about, and maybe culture more broadly. For my part, I get very frustrated when people try to rule discussions of race out of bounds because it "offends them." Racism offends me. The keepers of The Right Way To Play are almost always white jerks. What brought this home to me was when the Cardinals started dumping on Mike Cameron, by all accounts one of the solidest human beings in MLB, for the untucking thing. Nyjer got it, Gomez gets it, and jerks like Carpenter and McCann are always the ones who dish it out. Do the math. Carlos needs to learn to walk away from stupid fights sometimes, but I love his attitude, passion, and style. The game needs to adjust to guys like him, not the other way around.

The Brewers have actually gotten a lot better at getting their pitching prospects through the system. Having two major pitching prospects hurt is bad, but we have a good number of healthy ones. This falls into the category of accepted risks. The Brewers knew what they were getting, and they decided the promise was worth the pain. I hope they're right.

Cool to see Franly Mallen in Helena. Looks like "rest the prospects night" in Arizona. Denson building some nice small-sample data for the "coming out helps your power" thesis. Is it my imagination, or has Belonis gone slightly berserk since his birthday? Hiram Burgos and Ariel Pena are looking awfully useful.