gregmag

Also, it's an old axiom that drafts are often ss heavy because the best players, especially in hs, often play ss, and ss prospects have the whole defensive spectrum to move down. My favorite fun fact along these lines is that Gorman Thomas was drafted as a ss. Even if you're a draft-for-positional-need fan, you never need fear drafting a ss.

I've just been immersing myself in all things Brewers for the first time in a while, and I find myself feeling perversely not as pessimistic as I was feeling a couple of weeks ago. This season is toast. It's over as of June 1. The thing is, if you're going to crash and burn, then crash and burn early. The team is taking some opportunities now to look at options and move pieces around. I like the Francisco trade; I don't think Gennett is a MLB starter, but maybe I'm wrong, and anyway, now is as good a time as any to give him a shot. I think the team has to be thinking seriously about dealing Hart and Ramirez, Weeks if he can perk up, and does Lohse have a no-trade? Get what you can for those guys, see what you have in your young guys -- that's the only way I know of to rebuild. Earlier in the season I was utterly depressed by prospect performances, but now I'm feeling a bit better. The Greinke trade looks with each passing day like one of the best deals the team has ever made. In addition to Hellweg and Pena, Jungmann looks like he may be figuring some things out. These are at least the kinds of young pitchers who have a chance. The hitting side is more bleak, especially at our major positions of need, but I like what Haniger is doing, I'm excited about Arcia, and I think Morris has a chance to be useful. We've been in contention mode, and I was okay with that. It's over now; the pitching hasn't panned out. The system is shallow. But we have five out of eight everyday positions very well covered at the MLB level for the next few years, and maybe half a pitching staff that projects okay in the medium term. Let's rebuild around those guys and see what happens.

But if they're going into rebuilding mode, which I hope they are, they're still going to need guys to play the games. Francisco could be a cheap option at 3b, or he could be a 400-PA 4C reserve, through two or three dark years, until which he conveniently won't be expensive. Plus he has at least some upside. If you're tanking this season, and for that matter next season, this is exactly the kind of guy you should go get.

Now that's what I was hoping for from this T-Rats group after their showing in rookie ball. Hoping for more like this down the line. Also, I'm annoyed with the organization for preempting my "promote Haniger" screed.

This argument treats the ZIPS projection like it's some kind of voodoo, which I don't think helps move the discussion in a useful way. The projection is based on a very simple assumption: that a player's past performance, adjusted for a normal rise and decline with age, accurately projects his future performance. That's a very robust assumption, based on a whole lot of data. You seem to be arguing that the methodology is faulty because players sometimes deviate from the projection, which seems to me to misconceive how projections work. Of course players deviate from their projections; nobody has a crystal ball. But a projection based on this core assumption (of course we can argue about details within a given system's methodology) is still our best hope for a sober, reasoned assessment of how a player will do going forward. There's a big hitch that no projection system can account for, and this is where I think some of the concerns about Weeks may -- may -- have merit. Different players have different decline rates. Some players just fall off the table at 30, or 32; some hold their value into their mid-30s. We have some ability to generalize about how types of players will age -- I'm not sure whether ZIPS incorporates this level of nuance -- but those generalizations can be difficult. Weeks seems to me like a fairly unusual player, a low-average, high-strikeout, high-walk, high-power, high-speed (originally) middle infielder. He may be (I really don't know) a sort of player for whom projection systems run into more problems. What I just put in statistical terms comes back to what some people are saying about Weeks: his bat has slowed down; his pitch recognition is gone. Those things may be true; that's what happens when a player declines. The tough part is that we don't really know what's going on. It's not like he's walking around in a cast or something. I for sure don't know enough about hitting mechanics to distinguish a messed-up good hitter from a steeply declining hitter. I don't even know how hard or easy it is to make the distinction. I hope it's easy, and I hope the Brewers know what they're doing. But for us? We can make as much noise as we want about how a slump equals doom, but we really don't know much -- which is why projection systems, for all their hazards, still provide our best information. What makes this discussion even more tricky is Jeff Bianchi. I think Bianchi is a tough guy to project, because he got hurt as a young hitter, and he hasn't had a lot of time since the injury, plus he's still at an age when players improve. I can see the argument for giving him a shot, especially if the team has evidence that something is wrong with Weeks that time and sunshine won't just fix. In any event, I'm much more willing to believe that Jeff Bianchi can help the team than that Scooter Gennett can help the team. Gennett has a better chance to improve than Bianchi, because he's younger; but so far his severe limitations have been very consistent.

I'm not sure. I think Jeffress and Fredrickson were mistakes on draft day. Jeffress lacked maturity, which a smart organization should have been able to figure out. A lot of people criticized the Fredrickson pick right off the bat. For Covey I think everyone concerned gets a mulligan -- that's just a freakish situation -- but it was an identification problem if it was anything. Odorizzi has to count on the good side of the ledger, doesn't he, as a key component in the Greinke trade who still has a lot of value? Inman was on a strong developmental course when we traded him; the knock on him was there on draft day, that he just didn't have the stuff to succeed. I don't know the other later-round guys you raised well enough, and your conclusion may well be right. But I do think we can see some scouting / identification problems if we look at some of those selections.

As for what's actually going on with him -- is he hurt, is he distracted -- I have no idea. As for what the stats show: last year he had a .338 BABIP and hit .320. This year he has a .219 BABIP and he's hitting .216. That's a drastic swing between extremes: for his career he's at .305 BABIP, .272 BA. His BB and K rates are both down about ten percent from last year. His GB/FB ratio is almost unchanged from last year; line drive % is down about 15 percent (21.1% to 18.2%). What does any of that tell us? Over the 120 PAs he's had, it tells us next to nothing. He could be hurt, or distracted, or falling off; it could very, very easily be dumb luck. If you want to bet on what Lucroy will do the rest of the season, bet on his career totals, plus a bit for being at a typical player's statistical prime. IMHO, it would be kind of pointless to get worked up over a veteran player's performance over 120 PAs.

Yuni's OBP now stands at .274. He's doing more than his part to help the team lose. If he keeps hitting HR at the rate he has so far this season, and keeps getting on base at the same rate, he'll be merely a liability and not a disaster. I would put his chances of keeping up the HR pace at somewhere near zero and his chances of continuing to be an out machine at somewhere near a lock. I'm sorry to be harsh, but some people have made some bold claims about Yuni's usefulness based on too little evidence, and now we're seeing why those claims didn't hold water. Also, Brewnittle, I like the thought you put into your Bautista comparison, but IMHO logan is clearly right. You didn't talk about the single biggest glaring weakness of Yuni's game, which also happens to be the single most important part of every hitter's offensive game. Beyond that, Bautista is, in historical terms, a freak. His emergence as a superstar hitter at an advanced age is very, very rare. He's the classic exception that proves the rule. Even if Yuni's career looked much more like Bautista's than it actually does, the odds that Yuni -- or anybody -- could follow Bautista's path would be very low.

Just the whole thing about how we think about ordinary vs. impact prospects, with Burgos being a quintessential ordinary guy. Sorry if I took it too far afield. Also, thanks for bringing in Jeffress and Cruz; those same thoughts occurred to me after I posted.

TC07's mention of the prospects we traded away got me thinking about the earlier discussion. If we want the Brewers to draft impact talent, as opposed to fairly ordinary talent, isn't a corollary that we want them to they trade fairly ordinary talent in pursuit of impact players? Lawrie is a credible starter who appears to have a real chance of becoming a star. He's only 23. He's also a lunkhead, and he hasn't built at all yet on his great debut, but he has time. Brantley and Escobar are credible MLB starters, neither of whom offers any reason at this point to believe he's going to be more than that. Cain is sort of in the same category as Brantley and Escobar, except that he seems to have a greater chance either to flame out (because he's just beginning to establish himself as a starter) or to break out. But he's 27; he's not close to Lawrie's category. LaPorta is a bust. He's a 28 year-old one-dimensional power hitter whose one dimension hasn't developed. Odorizzi is still a wild card. He could be nothing, or he could be an all-star. I really liked Cain and Brantley as they were coming up, and I root for them, but I can't fault DM for trading them when he did for what he got. I'd rather have the CF we have. Escobar doesn't appear to be anything special, and while we failed to replace him immediately, I'd certainly rather have the ss we have now (whom we got, of course, for the guy we got for Escobar). Selling high on LaPorta turns out to have been very smart. Lawrie for Marcum may have been a terrible trade. On the other hand, if Lawrie doesn't develop, it's fine. We could still end up lamenting losing Odorizzi, but it's hard to argue that we didn't get value for him. On balance, I think DM's choices about which prospects to package for impact talent look sound to me.

I get the love for Scooter. He's hitting .350. But it's going to run its course. This isn't a guy whose best tool is his ability to hit for average. This is a guy whose only tool is his ability to hit for average. Let's consider the record: He has negligible power. Here are his ISO numbers, year by year: .154, .106, .102, .060. Yes, .060 so far this year, in his supposed breakout season, in the PCL. He doesn't steal bases. Since going 14 of 18 in A ball in 2010, he has gone 26 of 44, which is much worse than just standing still. He draws an unintentional walk fewer than five times per 100 PA, which is abysmal. Someone who has seen him or understands infield defense better than I do can correct me, but my secondhand sense is that he has a mediocre defensive rep. Now, if Scooter can hit .320 in MLB, the team can carry his considerable liabilities, and maybe he can help a little. But does anyone actually believe he's a .320 MLB hitter? His BA has actually decreased a bit at every level until this year's 100-PA binge: .309, .300, .293, and now .350. His career average is .303. But let's say he really is better than he ever was. Let's say he's a true .310 hitter at his present level. What is that? A .310 hitter in the PCL, if things go well for him, is probably a .285 hitter in MLB. I'd say that's optimistic, but let's go with it. You're talking about a regular 2b, not great defensively, who hits .285 with no power, no speed, and no walks. That's your basic useless player. That's Jim Gantner after his star, such as it was, fell. But maybe he'll improve, right? Well, most players do improve through their mid-20s. But Scooter hasn't given us any reason -- other than 100 PAs' worth of singles in the PCL -- to suggest how he could get better. He's 23, certainly young enough to improve but not young for a prospect. You can't look at his body and see promise; he's getting everything he can out of his body (and good for him). He's gotten worse at every minor league level before this year. I look at Gennett, and I see a rich man's Eric Farris. The reason not to give him a shot has nothing to do with Weeks. The reason not to give him a shot is that the strong weight of the evidence suggests he'd be a very bad major league player.

You've been Yuni's staunchest defender, and I've been maybe his harshest critic (tied with maybe 100 other people), so I think you well deserve this moment of vindication. Yuni has provided reasonable corner IF production for very little money. He has exceeded expectations, and he has helped the team. Nobody could reasonably ask any more of him. All of that said, I'll be very surprised if much of anything in your post above turns out to be right. I agree, and I think most people do, that Yuni was a good MLB player at 24-25. But you're arguing that, six years later, we should completely ignore the subsequent, world-historically terrible career of a man who frequently puts up just this sort of short power binge and, instead, assume that the simple effect of not having to play ss has shaved six years off his age curve. That makes no sense to me. I really hope you're right, though.

Patrick, I'm really getting tired of your insinuations that everyone who disagrees with you is simply blinkered by bias. I made a rational argument; you offered, IMHO, a fairly vacant response that's on a par with, IMHO, your other carelessly reasoned posts in this thread. I don't disagree with you because I'm a Brewers fan; I've lived for a few years, and I've had a lot of experience and training in filtering out bias. I disagree with you because, based on the best thinking I can do, I believe you're more than likely wrong. I'm not ascribing your views to, say, a narcissistic desire for attention; I respect you as an intelligent peer, and so I assume your views are honestly and sincerely held. Please do me the favor of not ascribing my contrary views to petty bias.

Perhaps he was telling the truth about Braun, but his mannerisms and everything he said in the rest of the interview ruined any chance of believing his statement about Braun. He never takes his sun glasses off, he rarely looked the interviewer in the eye, he calls himself a "nutritionist", he claims he never saw the papers that they show him and that MLB has never tried to contact him or his attorneys (I'm pretty positive that they have contacted his lawyers). He walks away from an interview like a guilty person would tend to do. He reaks of being untruthful. It reminded me of one of those news stories where they try to go after dead beat dads. Your argument in this thread seems kind of strange to me, given that this whole case is based on notes written by this same guy whom you're now saying we shouldn't trust. If his word is absolutely meaningless, then why are we even having this conversation? I expect your answer might be that the notes are reliable documentary evidence of his state of mind at the time they were written. That may or may not be right, but if it is, one could defend the value of this latest statement the same way. It isn't self-serving; the guy has nothing to gain by throwing Braun a lifeline. It's basically the same kind of statement as the original notes: a gratuitous, apparently unmotivated expression in the ordinary course of business and/or conversation.

I was seriously just thinking about how I'm always bashing Yuni, and he's actually hit as well as we could have expected anyone to hit in his role, and I should say something nice about him. Sorry, cosmos. It won't happen again.

Harold, I have some disagreements with what you wrote, but congratulations on a good piece of work and a high-profile publication. Well done!

I think Morris is pretty clearly a preferable alternative to what we've been running out there. Also, with respect, the fact that he was 3 for 26 in spring training doesn't seem to me like it means anything. I think you and others are right to point out that signing any kind of veteran, established 1b likely would not have been worth the costs. OTOH, yesterday we played arguably the worst position player in baseball at the easiest position to find hitting. That doesn't have to happen. The bar ain't high. Grab some injury-prone AAAA guy who has hit before and see if you catch lightning in a bottle, then release him if he flops. One time in ten you might catch lightning, one time in maybe three or four the guy at least gives a decent account of himself. DM used to be good at moves like that -- Doug Davis, Podsednik, etc. Finally, I don't get the continued insistence that it doesn't matter what we do about any of this, because we'd still probably be losing anyway. Good organizations do everything they can to maximize the quality of their rosters. No, the Brewers can't just snap their fingers and create a 100-win team, but they can work at the margins to get better.

Well...that might be a minor issue, but the real reason is that Melvin and Roenicke didn't have an MLB-ready #3 first baseman after #1 and #2 went down. Got it! How could they have neglected such a pivotal slot in our organization. Quite obviously, championships are won and lost by the #3 first baseman. Good call. If you actually have anything to say, as distinct from this smug, vacuous posturing, I would be interested to know what you think about the topic at hand. I don't think we can simply blame the 1-5 record on injuries. We had Braun for three of those games, Ramirez for four, and -- as others have said -- time to come up with a better stopgap than Gonzalez and Yuni at 1b. Yes, we've had some bad luck. But you can't just shrug off poor roster construction on the theory that it probably won't matter. When you carry an extra pitcher and also a useless 25th man, while also starting an atrocious hitter at 1b, you're courting trouble, IMHO.

Geno -- yes, me too. Also love the thread title.

I'm in the same place as TLB. Five games into the season, and it doesn't even seem like management is trying. When Yuni B is starting a game at 1b, that's when you call up Morris, because at that point the slim chance that Morris might be ready to contribute at this level far outstrips the chance that Yuni will ever help with anything. I remember when Harry Dalton ran out of rope. He was a great GM for quite a while; he was instrumental in getting the team to a competitive place it had never seen before. But eventually his limits -- sticking with bad veterans (Gantner), overrating his players' trade value (Surhoff, IIRC) -- took over his good sense, and he had to go. Maybe that's where DM has gotten to. I've always been much more positive than negative about him, and I realize that some of the present difficulty comes down to context that he either couldn't control or created for defensible reasons. But I have to say, it feels like he isn't even trying to think creatively or attend to details anymore. Half the lineup and the bullpen look hopeless at this point, and the starting pitching was always a gamble. I hope this is just my depression talking, and the pitching comes around, and some guys get hot . . . but this team looks like it's losing on its merits, and it looks like it could lose 100 games.

I think rams' point about Strasburg is perfectly reasonable given why he's making the comparison. I wish people wouldn't call statements "silly" when they're just expressing disagreement. Rams didn't say Roache is Strasburg. He said that a categorical rule against ranking people, or ranking them highly, or whatever, is unwise. I agree with him. We're talking about evidence of MLB potential. I'm a huge fan of projections from performance, but the main premise of such projections is that baseball is baseball. As rams points out, Roache has played enough baseball to support an assessment of his potential. A high ranking isn't some kind of honor that a player needs to earn; it's a predictive judgment. Now, after, and in response to, rams' "silly" Strasburg point, some people made what seem to me like some reasonable points about why we should hedge our bets on Roache, in particular, until he has a pro record. The main one is his injury. I don't know enough about sports medicine to know whether we can account accurately for Roache's injury in making a projection or assigning a ranking. I would think we could factor in past experiences of other, similarly injured players, but maybe wrist injuries are too hard to account for. Anyway, I see both sides of the Roache-Morris debate. I think Morris has clearly established a better chance of making an MLB roster and making some kind of contribution. I think Roache has probably established a better chance of being a star, bearing in mind that we're talking about long odds at this point.

I was all ready to be reasonable about the Lohse thing, but forget it. This is stone idiotic.

IIRC, what Davis said, in response to a question, was that he had tried 1B and it didn't go well. I may be misremembering, but I don't think he said he "couldn't play" the position, and anyway, his opinion about that isn't the one I care about. I can imagine concluding based on substantial evidence that Davis couldn't play 1B. Some people can't. But generally speaking, it's the easiest and least important defensive position on the diamond. Given how much sense it makes to get Davis into the lineup there -- we have an MVP in LF, we're talking about playing an out-machine backup ss at 1B -- I would want to make a very serious effort to convert Davis to 1B before concluding that it wasn't an option. If that means train him on the job in Milwaukee, fine; if it means starting him at 1B at AAA, fine. I've long advocated moving Hart, so I'm in favor of moving him when he gets back, unless during that time Davis proves he can't play 1B AND Morris proves he can't hit AAA pitching. Sitting here right now, I think the odds that keeping Hart would be better for the Brewers than moving him, all things (production, salary, future flexibility, talent distribution) considered, seem very long.

I could not agree more with this. Very sound analysis. I would just add that the Brewers don't appear to be an innings-eater away from the playoffs at this point. Either they're going to catch lightning in a bottle, or they're going to miss by a lot.

Fluff makes good points about Morris, but I ultimately disagree; I think they should give him a real shot. He's an older guy, drafted out of college. It's fairly likely that last year was a fluke -- he was league MVP, to some extent a year like that will be an outlier -- but it's reasonably possible that he figured some things out last year and that he can sustain something like that level of performance (adjusted for MLB, of course). In any event, I don't see any cost to trying him there (with one exception that I'll mention in a minute). None of the vets that people are talking about is a world-beater; they aren't going to make the difference between the playoffs and not. In that circumstance, why not figure out who might -- might -- be able to help you medium / long-term? The one caveat is that we have other young guys who may also be able to help. What I've said about Morris goes just as well for Green or Davis. I'm more of a believer in Green than a lot of people; I think his wrist injury deflated his numbers for a couple of years. These three guys seem kind of clustered to me. Mainly I would like to see one or more of them get a shot.