gregmag

Not bad for a soft-tosser who will never amount to anything. I love it. Fiers is a great story and seems like a fine human. I'm very happy with the trade from our end, but I hated to see him go. Thrilled for him. I just hope his adrenaline didn't frag his arm.

Always liked him as a person and respected his intellect and temperament. I'm glad he'sclanded on his feet.

Fantastic! I already loved the kid's 3TOness and personality. Now he's a pioneer. I absolutely agree that MLB deserves credit for helping with this, as does the MJS (for which I rarely have a kind word). At the same time, it's sobering that gay men and lesbians in Mississipi and Utah won the legal right to marry before a single affiliated pro baseball player came out. This is a great day, especially for Denson and also for baseball. Now we have a lot more work to do.

Anyone know what Jon Olczak throws?

Briggs, you state your views well. I don't agree; I think you're overestimating our talent. But you could be right. The thing is, they tried it your way. Bank on an optimistic view of your talent. Patch around what you have. Think about what your team can do, not so much what other teams may be able to do better. The Brewers have been playing that strategy for four years running and for the vast majority of the team's history. That's why I think your prescription is clearly wrong. We've done it your way for years. Other smart people make a strong case for a different strategy. A version of that strategy -- build with youth -- got this team its best results since 1982. It's time to try something new.

Isn't control supposed to be Houser's weak suit? So far so good: 17 innings, 17/0 K/BB.

I've never thought we should give him away, and it's great that he's been decent since he came back from the dl. But he'll need to do that for a lot longer to be worth his salary, and I'd love to get what we can for him sometime in the next year.

Thanks for doing this, Cheez. My best guess for our most common lineup next year: cf Reed 2b Gennett 1b Braun (assuming Lind trade and position shift) lf Davis c Lucroy (assuming no trade) rf Santana ss Segura (Arcia before the end of the year) 3b Perez The hardest and most interesting thing about this exercise, I think, is that we're likely to see a lot of fluidity in the lineup next year. Right now I think Reed, Arcia, and Santana will all be starting by August, but they could all start the year at AAA. If Schafer catches fire the rest of this year, he could start next year in cf. Not likely, of course. Similarly, if Perez doesn't hit the rest of the year, he could be out. Dominguez is a possible in-house option (not looking likely right now, but he's there). 3b is pretty clearly the likeliest position to be filled by someone who isn't here yet. I don't get the point of holding onto Lind. He could very easily regress, he isn't young, he won't be cheap to resign, and his 1b defense barely passes muster now. If they don't move Braun to 1b, then sub in Rogers 1b for Santana rf in the lineup above. I like Rogers, and I'd like to see him get a shot, but I don't think any amount of wishing will make him a passable 3b. I continue to believe most people are underrating Khris Davis. As reilly mcshane pointed out, he's been average this year, and this year has involved a major injury and then getting clobbered by Parra's career year. He has been better than this before, and I think he will be again. The power he brings to the table is worth a lot more than it was five years ago. Middle infield is hard to predict. I think Gennett has a job until (a) he gets expensive or (b) somebody clearly outclasses him, which no one has yet but Rivera conceivably could. I think they'll start next year with Segura at ss, but who knows. I'd probably get what I could for him over the winter, give Rivera or Sardinas the job out of spring training, and expect Arcia to push the starter out by mid-summer.

I like this idea for the reason you give -- maximize the players' value. But how would you accommodate both of them in the rotation? You would presumably keep Peralta, Nelson, and Jungmann where they are. We dump Garza somehow. If you want both Blazek and Smith in the rotation, you have to bypass Thornburg, Davies, and Cravy. We can fudge a little bit by assuming there are six rather than five starting spots, accounting for injury. Still, two of Thornburg, Davies, and Cravy would be odd men out. (I'm not worrying about Lopez and Wagner yet, but they should be knocking on the door sometime next year.) The question (to which I don't have an answer) is how to maximize the value of all the players involved. If we start Blazek and Smith, do we hurt the development of the odd men out? This depth in young pitching is fantastic. I can't remember a Brewers team that had anything comparable. But these questions about developmental priorities are about to get a whole lot harder. This is why I like the idea of giving Thornburg some starts if he's physically up to it (see other thread). Knowing what we have in him now would be very useful.

If he's up to starting, I think it would be smart to give him a shot. We don't know what we have in him as a starter right now. We can't trust Colorado Springs numbers. That isn't to say that everybody will be Taylor Jungmann; I think Colorado Springs probably compresses stats at the low end, which means some guys who crash and burn there are just bad. But we certainly can't rely on those numbers to rule Thornburg out. As others have pointed out, however, Thornburg doesn't appear to be the same pitcher physically he was before. To me, this isn't about earned opportunity. It's about giving a player the best chance he can to succeed and help the team. If CC and company think Thornburg has a decent chance to thrive as a starter, they should give him some starts. If not, not.

Whatever macro automatically updates old power 50s to list the players' current ages is diabolical and depressing.

After I posted, I figured I had ranked the two big pitchers too high. You make fair points about the others, but so far I'll stick with where I've got them. I can't see ranking guys like Taylor and Coulter above Santana. The bottom two are lottery tickets, but they appear to have higher upside than the guys at the bottom of the current community list. I know I may be overrating Collymore, but he isn't 21 yet; I'll take a flyer on his figuring it out in the next couple of years.

I had to write this down to keep track. The haul so far, in what seems to be approximate order of quality (I could be wrong): Brett Phillips, cf, 21 (5-30-94), AA Domingo Santana, rf, 23 (8-5-92), AAA Josh Hader, lhsp, 21 (4-7-94), AA Zach Davies, rhsp, 22 (2-2-93), AAA Malik Collymore, 2b/of, 20 (4-29-95), R+ Adrian Houser, rhsp, 22 (2-2-93), AA Yhonathan Barrios, rhrp, 23 (12-1-91), AAA It seems pretty clear that Mark A. reached a compromise on rebuilding. Get young guys with upside, but guys who aren't four years away. I'd say that's at least reasonable, given that (a) we already have some decent young talent, especially in the rotation, on the MLB roster, and (b) our top prospects list was weighted toward the lower levels. Anyway, I'm interested in two questions: Where do these guys fall on our prospect list, and where does the system rank now? I don't have great answers, and I haven't kept up with the minors overall lately, so I'm mainly interested in what others have to say. My wild shot at the rankings: 2. Phillips 4. Santana 5. Hader 8. Davies 24. Collymore 26. Houser My thinking: Phillips is pretty clear. Santana has gotten a lot of iffy reviews, but he's been a top-100 guy, his numbers are impressive, and his power upside is hugely valuable. Hader has to be our top pitching prospect now; he's Medeiros at a higher level of experience. Davies is an upper-level guy with great results in AAA. Do you take him over Devin Williams or Lopez? I compromised. Collymore has intriguing enough upside to put him ahead of somebody like Rivera, but I don't think I take him over Gatewood just yet. Houser looks like a bit of a mess, but he still has mid-rotation upside, which not a lot of our lower level guys do. Could Barrios sneak onto the bottom of the list? A year ago maybe, but not now IMHO. He seems like a Magnifico type, and those guys don't sniff our list now. Where does this leave our system? Hell if I know. Has to be upper half, right? 12-15?

Haniger is now 24. His OPS has decreased significantly at every level of the minors. In 475 career PA at AA over two seasons he has a .741 OPS. My sense is that he can stick in CF, but he's not a big defensive asset there. He has a chance to be a major league player, but his profile at this moment looks like a fourth OF. Whether or not that assessment is right, the fact that he was a first rounder is completely irrelevant to his trade value, and it was irrelevant last year. You get picked where you get picked, and then you play games. Haniger, now and a year ago, has to be judged on his record. As for Parra, we start with his gold glove defense and ability to play all three OF positions. Offensively he put up an excellent season at 24, then two about league average seasons at 25 and 26. A league-average hitter with his defensive profile is a legit starter in this league. Then he stunk, for the first and only time in his MLB career, for the first two-thirds of his age 27 season. He came over to Milwaukee and reverted to what he had been the prior two years, a league average hitter. This year, of course, he has played at an all-star level. Those are facts and conservative assessments based on facts. They strongly suggest that you're dramatically overrating Haniger and dramatically underrating Parra.

This is a lot more than I was expecting. Also, I'm into the (apparent) fact that the Brewers aren't going cheap. They presumably could have dealt Broxton for pure salary relief, but instead they sent some money along and got a prospect with some upside. I'm loving this deadline.

Yikes. I think you're right, but I can't quickly find a reference. If that's right, then trading Parra involves throwing the discounted potential value of the comp pick away. That's a bit of a poison pill. But the reports say they're dealing him, which means either they don't like the risk that he'll take the QO or they like Davies better than the comp pick.

That seems like a slight underpay for Parra. It suggests that maybe the teams don't see the QO scenario the way we're seeing it. If it happens, I'll be interested to see what the O's do with him over the winter. The upside is that going after pitching with Parra is the right balance after the Gomez trade, plus we have to assume our scouts like what they've seen of Davies.

I like that okay. I've been assuming that well is poisoned now, but Parra makes a ton of sense for them. I wonder if the relative muteness of the exchanges between DM and Alderson signals that a deal is still possible. To hear Mets fans tell it (on Amazin' Alley), the real villain in the Gomez saga is Mets management. The major problem I see is that the Mets might undervalue Parra relative to Gomez more than other teams. I was just saying in another thread that the QO / comp pick possibility (raised by Colby and And That) increases Parra's trade value. But the Mets may not value the comp pick highly, and more important, they may be too cheap to pull the trigger on the QO.

I'm where I think Peavey is. That is, part of Parra's trade value for us is the opportunity cost of extending Parra a QO and getting the comp pick. Any team that would trade for him should be in a position to realize that opportunity. So we need more than the rental cost for Parra. Now, losing the rental cost would be bad for us, since keeping Parra is useless to us right now. So the price at which we should trade him is the rental value plus the value of the comp pick, discounted by the risk that he takes the QO and then plays his value down and also by some measure of the cost to the Brewers of sitting on the asset this year.

Given how Santana has played at AAA, Braun to 1b next year makes a lot of sense. I advocated that move before last year. Now I think it all comes down to their evaluation of Santana. He's about to turn 23. Next year looks like a developmental season. They'll hopefully be breaking in Phillips in 2017. That all says to me that Braun should be at 1b next year.

Yeah, all those home runs and stolen bases were just painful to watch. Especially because sometimes he didn't do those things -- what kind of player is that? It sure is funny how he fooled the baseball writers into two straight top-15 MVP finishes.

This has never happened before. I can never remember a deadline where we actually traded so many useful trade chips. I can never remember a trade where we got back all guys who were 21-22 with (is this right?) 5-6 years of team control. Some guys with warts, but all with upside. Two bats and two arms. Spread of minor league levels. This is like the perfect trade (except I'm irrationally sad to lose Fiers). I was okay with the Mets deal. After it fell apart I thought DM and/or Alderson had really screwed us. I can't believe this happened. Merry bad baseball Christmas, everyone!

Hear, hear. Carlos Gomez is the anti-Cardinal. He plays baseball with joy, abandon, and a sense of fun. Besides his great play for us, I'll always try to remember what a blast it was to watch him. Mike Fiers is a different kind of fun. He's this apparently low-talent, goofball-looking guy who inexplicably just gets people out. Trading him in this deal makes sense, but I was secretly, irrationally hoping we'd keep him. Aramis . . . he's just a Hall of Famer, or close to it. Watching him get old has been interesting. I hope I (keep) get(ting) old with half his drive and bearing. And now, apparently, Parra. I remember being annoyed by him when we beat the D-Backs, just because he didn't seem that great but kept doing good things. Nobody thought much of him when he came over here, but he just went out and kicked absolute butt in every facet of the game for a year. I'll root for him wherever he goes. I have nothing sentimental to say about Cotts. Just putting that out there.

I think danzig was the voice of reason above, as he so often is. As to the guys we control for another year -- Gomez, Lind, Rodriguez -- whether or not we trade them by the deadline is much less important than what happens with the front office over the winter. Given the big variable of a likely new GM hire, it's not possible to say confidently that waiting 'til the winter to trade those guys is a bad idea, especially if you're someone who doesn't trust DM to make good deals. Now, it's possible that Mark A. won't allow DM or his replacement to trade those guys now or over the winter. That would be a bigger problem, and it would validate a lot of the angst people are expressing. But we can't know that until the winter. Parra we'll know about sooner. Until Friday, though, I can't take anyone's conclusory judgment seriously. We don't know what DM has passed on. We don't know what offers are on the table. The comments from analysts and anonymous insiders amount to nothing -- sometimes less than nothing, in the case of sources who have motives to posture. Don't get me wrong; I'm climbing the walls here. Also, I want deals to happen now, because that would suggest that smart people thought we'd never get better deals than we're getting now. Waiting 'til the winter to find out the team's true philosophy would suck. But that's all cognitive bias. My inner rational guy is telling my inner wall-climbing guy to chill out. Just one other thing about Mark A. I've said this before, but I think it's worth repeating every once in a while. People, especially smart, successful people, learn from experience. Maybe Mark A. believes, at this moment, that rebuilding is a fool's errand. I get that (though I disagree with it); hell, we're less than a year removed from leading the division. But as others have noted, our division is a beast now. A couple of seasons of getting creamed without a rebuild should convince a smart businessman like Mark A. to change his approach. What's more, he may already be starting to learn and adapt. We don't know. To put it a different way, Mark A. isn't stupid. What scares me is the possibility that Mark A.'s conservative approach to the team might be informed and rational, in the sense that he'll make more money if he can keep the team consistently mediocre than if he shoots for a championship. If that were true, then we wouldn't be dealing with the imagined problem that he's stupid; we'd be dealing with the very real problem that his rational incentives diverged from ours. I really hope that's not the case.

I always liked Capuano. He worked hard, pitched well when he was right, and IIRC really enjoyed Milwaukee. Plus he was a very smart and interesting guy by pro athlete standards. If this is the end for him, I suspect he has some good ideas in place about how to enjoy retirement.