gregmag

You have a pretty expansive definition of “more competitive” if you think this alleged upgrade is worth anyone who has a chance to be a useful big leaguer. Leaving aside the smug condescension of “prospect hugging,” I don’t mind trading our 25th ranked prospect at all. In fact, he’s exactly the kind of prospect I’m happy to see the Brewers trade — *for someone who helps.* I don’t immediately see how replacing one mediocre backup catcher with another mediocre backup catcher helps anything.

This is mystifying. Our best A+ bat for a rental backup catcher? Who’s going to like this? The “prospects are worthless” crowd only want to acquire guys they know from ESPN; the “prospects matter” crowd only want to trade good prospects for substantial upgrades. How does this even wiggle ythe needle?

Suarez is having a career year at 33 — 143 OPS+ to 113 career. He has hit two thirds of his homers at home; his road OPS is .783. Everything about his season screams regression. He would likely be a modest offensive upgrade and a substantial defensive downgrade. I can’t see how he’s worth serious assets.

This is a heroic effort that brings out some less-discussed scenarios. Thank you!

If someone had proposed trading three prospects for a starter who would go 9-2 / 3.28, stabilize the rotation, and be a key part of turning a lost season into the best record in baseball, you would have blustered about how that’s the kind of win-now deal the Brewers don’t have the guts to make. But when the Brewers actually make that deal — and another poster points it out, giving you a chance to act superior (with, as always, nothing to back the act up) — you write it off.

Braylon Payne’s monthly splits are nuts. Excellent all-around April, but the k rate was a little high. Power completely disappeared in May — literally; zero extra-base hits. Power came back in June, but his bb/k was 1/20. In July it’s 13/10 with the most power he’s shown yet. I don’t know whether he was hurt, but he has clearly been working on things, and it’s starting to pay off.

Here's a tidbit: Since June 14, the Brewers have gone 22-7. Of the seven losses, four have been by one run, two have been by two runs, and one -- the Miz Mets game -- has been by four runs. In about a month's worth of games, the Brewers have lost decisively exactly once. (Of the wins, eight were by one run, four were by two runs, and ten were by three or more runs.)

Another repeater, Juan Martinez, shows a more dramatic version of a similar story. Pitches per plate appearance up from about 1.8 to four. Power way up, steals up, walks up, strikeouts down. Minimal increase in BABIP. Just better across the board. I’m sure all this stuff is very common in DSL repeaters, but I just happened to look at it today, and it’s kind of interesting.

Antunez’s flirtation with respectability keeps getting racier. A little thing I noticed: Moises Polanco, who has added some power and a few walks and strikeouts his second time through the DSL, has more than doubled the number of pitches he’s seeing per plate appearance, from just over two to 4.1. His BABIP is up from .315 to .363. We usually chalk that up to random fluctuation, but I wonder if his greater patience might be yielding better quality of contact. He’s also scoring and stealing less while driving in a lot more runs. Seems like they may be consciously changing his role.

I half agree with Bob. I like the idea of adding O’Hearn to replace Bauers. However, I think we are starting to underappreciate our young starting pitchers. I think Peralta is gone this winter. We can roll into next year with a rotation of Mis, Priester, Myers, Henderson, Gasser, and Patrick. Unlike SF70, I’m not confident yet about anyone beyond those six. I’m also not confident the market will properly value Myers and Patrick.

This is really good. I would add two other things about Durbin. First, as we know, he gets hit by ridiculous number of pitches. Second, he almost never grounds into double plays, which is especially impressive for such a contact oriented guy. Those two things, generally, are underappreciated stats, and Durbin is unusually good at both.

I want to make clear that I’m not bumping this to rag on Jason, who wrote a very reasonable pessimistic article. Around the same time, I think I said in one of the forums that I was kind of relieved to have a low stress year when I could just watch our prospects and let the Cubs have their little moment. The interesting question this raises is: what did we miss? It’s not like anything deeply weird has happened. No one is wildly exceeding a reasonably optimistic expectation. Freddy has been the best version of himself, but not a perfect version. Woodruff came back later than expected. Yelich found his form, but not his MVP form. Megill has been a solid closer and Uribe a solid setup man. Turang and Frelick have continued to develop, but they haven’t taken PCA-level leaps. Even Miz is just doing what we all hoped Miz could do. None of these things is shocking. So how did most of us, at least many of us, not see these good times coming? The best I can come up with is that the team set up an array of solid plausible outcomes, and almost nothing has gone very wrong. The fate of a major league baseball team in any given season turns on a bunch of variables – let’s say 40 variables. It’s relatively easy to imagine complete failures or amazing successes. I think it’s probably hard for most of us to imagine 35 of those 40 variables landing around the 70th percentile outcome. The Brewers are really good at making incremental gains while screwing up almost nothing. On top of that, the kind of success the Brewers build for often takes some initial churning. You have to wait for Durbin to get some reps at third base while you suffer through some Capra-Dunn faceplants. You have to figure out which relievers don’t have their stuff together and get rid of them. You have to wait for the Red Sox to make Priester available, and then you have to let him take his lumps while you get his pitches right. The Brewers’ formula is subtle, and right now we’re seeing it come together in all its nuanced glory.

I love people’s points here on the “it takes a village“ theme. I was thinking about this the other night, and I think the Brewers’ success with continuity of leadership reflects the next level of small market strategy. The first level is figuring out that for the cost of one or two player upgrades, you can instead hire a bunch of really useful front office people. The next level is making the infrastructure solid enough that continued success doesn’t depend on finding the perfect person, or a particular type of perfect person, every time someone moves on.

Man, I wish I had just a penny for every thousand online trolls who pulled this line. I could retire tomorrow. No, you don’t get an “intellectual independence” merit badge for posting a blandly petty hot take, blowing off the vastly smarter responses that you should be thanking people for spending their time typing, baselessly accusing a player of publicly lying, and then responding to a request to back up your nonsense by acting like evidence is for lesser beings. That’s not independence — it’s vacuous belligerence. Woodruff and the Brewers made a deal that was both sensible and honorable for both sides. Finding a way to crap on such a thing takes a rare gift.

Outfielders are often made and not born. I like to remember that Gorman Thomas was drafted as a shortstop.

His name sounds like a surgical tool.

Brice Turang is my favorite interview in as long as I can remember. It’s like he’s trying to read cue cards through a haze of pot smoke. Absolutely hilarious.

Yeah, normally I agree with Joseph — who knows a ton more about prospects than I do — but right now not protecting Smith is looking like a minor mistake. It’s not clear that he would be one of the Brewers’ seven best starting pitchers at this point. BrewerFan makes a great argument that losing Smith forced the Priester trade. OTOH the Brewers clearly had their eyes on Priester for a while, including at the time they cut bait on Smith. Would they have even (rightly or wrongly) given Smith a shot? They appear to have liked Priester more. We’ll see if they were right or wrong. BTW, we should probably convert this into a “tracking ex-Brewers organization starting pitchers on the White Sox” thread. Adrian Houser, who was unpitchable for the Mets last season, is having a career year. Bryse Wilson and Aaron Civale have managed the impressive achievement of making the White Sox worse.

This is a good article, and I really like your point about the value of clearing logjams, but I always feel like “who can we trade” discussions are putting the cart before the horse. Everything should start with “who do we want to get.” I’m still not sure I see much in the way of real upgrades out there. Even O’Hearn is an older guy having a career year who could easily come back to Earth. Sometimes I think teams at the trade deadline get shiny object syndrome, spurred on by listening to fans who are clamoring for the team to “do something!“ I hope the Brewers can tune out that noise at the deadline.

In one of the old baseball abstracts, Bill James recounted a conversation where someone asked Robin Yount who he thought should pick all-stars. James admired Robin‘s response, which was basically that the answer to that question depended on who the game was supposed to be for. It’s an exhibition game, designed to entertain the fans, so Robin thought it made great sense for the fans to vote on All-Stars. That seems especially thoughtful coming from a Hall of Famer who only ever made three All-Star teams. Miz is a deserving All-Star given the purpose of the game. He’s entirely humble about it. I’m very happy for him. I don’t think he’ll forget that he’s going to need to do a lot more of this if he’s really going to make his mark.

He just looks like he’s done. He’s 36. He was last good when he was 33. He’s limited to first and second base, so not a super-sub, and he’s quite a bit worse than the guys we have at both of those positions. If I needed a sub or a pinch-hitter right now, I’d prefer Monasterio. I’m not a big Hoskins fan. I’m less enthusiastic than some people here about guys who can occasionally hit home runs in bunches but can’t really do anything else. However, that’s not quite fair, because Hoskins does see a lot of pitches and draw some walks. He’s okay; I’m just not sure how much you lose moving from Hoskins to a Vaughn-Bauers platoon. I guess we’re about to find out.

I’m never going to tell anyone how to feel about anything. If you don’t feel trust, you don’t feel trust. But I’m looking at Ashby’s game logs, and I don’t see how they support your factual statement. I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “zero command.” Catching too much plate and giving up hard contact? Hits aren’t a perfect proxy for that, but they’re a decent one. In 13 appearances, Ashby has given up more hits than innings pitched twice. Runs? He’s been scored on in three out of 13, although one of those was a single run in two innings Tuesday, not exactly a meltdown. Walks? He has walked guys in five appearances. But again, three of those were single walks in two- or three-inning stints. He was bad on Wednesday vs. LA. He was bad on June 19 vs. the Cubs. He wasn’t great on Tuesday vs. LA, but his line there (2 2 1 1 1 3) doesn’t say “problem” to me. Maybe he got knocked around in ways that don’t show up in the box scores. (Then again, maybe some of those hits and walks were seeing-eye grounders and blown strike calls.) I think you can fairly say he was bad in the LA series, but only one of his prior 11 appearances was bad. You can fairly say he’s been worse against the two best teams in the league. I just don’t see how you can say his command is zero every three or four appearances.

Vaughn will probably settle in at a level that doesn’t fix anything, but he’s just been very instrumental in winning two games against the Dodgers. He struck the main blow against Yamamoto. His rbi tonight got us on the board, and Hoskins wouldn’t have made that game-saving play in the sixth. Even if this is the end of Vaughn’s good run, I’m happy about the trade. We dealt from surplus to get a guy who has helped. If he craters, we have other stopgaps to try.

The most obnoxious aspect of the post that started this thread isn’t that it’s substantively foolish. We all say foolish things sometimes. The most obnoxious aspect of the post is that it’s willfully dishonest. Plenty of people have criticized Arnold for not adding a power bat and for the Priester trade. The BF podcast repeatedly (and quite reasonably) criticized those decisions. Lots of posters on the site did so as well. The fact that those moves are looking pretty good right now doesn’t negate the fair grounds on which people have questioned them. What the OP was really saying, when you parse the whole post, was not “When are people going to start criticizing Arnold for his (at least arguable) mistakes?” — because the OP knows as well as anyone that people routinely do so — but rather “When are people going to laud my distinctive brilliance in flogging this hot take that Arnold is a poor GM?” If the OP had asked that foolish question honestly, then we could have piled on a little but then just all bonded about our shared fallibilty. The clumsy, preening dishonesty is what warrants the continued pile-on.

Really excellent analysis, Jack, and especially interesting to read having followed your and Spencer‘s commentary on Woodruff’s rehab games. “In the third inning, he got ahead of Dane Myers with two cutters over the outer third, before punching him out with a boring two-seamer up and in.” I actually thought that two-seamer was pretty exciting. I’ll see myself out.