gregmag

They probably should trade one of McGee, because two of him is entirely too many. Kidding aside, thank you for this breakdown. That’s a really good roster, and the pitching staff is borderline unholy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a AAA pitching staff where every guy could be a reasonable candidate to call up because the team affirmatively wants him. Maybe not Rodriguez, but he has actually started games in the majors.

Two things : first, Bitonti has a 60-grade arm? Second, I don’t think we emphasize this enough: The Brewers are the best system in baseball; the Brewers never draft high because they’re always winning; and only four of the Brewers’ top 30 prospects came from trades. Those three facts should not be able to live together.

Priceless. Carlos Gomez vs. Brian McCann is about the easiest moral choice I can imagine.

I think Rengifo vs. Urias is pretty easy to understand. Urias has been a better player, but he’s entering his age 32 season. Rengifo is three years younger. If you buy that Rengifo’s struggles last year were an outlier, they’re pretty comparable now. You trust the 29 year-old to hold more of that value than the 32 year-old.

Jack, this is such a great story. I love when you’re able to combine your expertise and ability to find an interesting angle with the great quotes you’re able to get in interviews. Just a terrific read.

Counterpoint: He just put up the second-best OPS in his league while playing at nearly a year below league-average age, he’s healthy after working through the freakiest of injuries (unless you think his face is a ball magnet or his feet will slip in every clubhouse party), he has the offensive skill the Brewers most lack and plays the position they most need, and at AAA he’ll be on call by definition. There’s no way he doesn’t see the majors by June! Or, you know, we could be intellectually honest and look at the whole picture, which seems like it’s mostly down to his K rate and defensive performance as he starts at AAA.

Why on earth would a one-year deal for Sanchez, in what is likely Contreras’s final Brewers season, make it more likely that they would trade Quero?

Broxton was a power guy, though. He was so fascinating. Dude couldn’t make contact if he was swinging at a beach ball, but he was great at everything else. I miss watching him play.

This is an unbelievably arrogant comment. People here have been making all kinds of nuanced assessments of Harrison, and people here make all kinds of nuanced assessments of other prospects all the time, and you know that perfectly well. If the only way you can feel smart is by taking cheap shots at the community to aggrandize your own supposed superior wisdom, maybe don't.

A few words in praise of Mona. Dude made positive contributions to division winning teams two seasons out of three. He did whatever the team asked him to do whenever they asked him to do it, and he stayed super positive through all of it. I also don’t think he ever got enough credit for his curious resemblance to Malcolm X. I’m really going to miss him. My general take on the trade is that Caleb Durbin is a nice, useful player, but he’s not the kind of player you ever let stand in the way of getting a guy with serious upside. I think they really like Harrison. They like him enough that, yeah, it would have worked out better for this deal to be on the table in a year, but it’s on the table now, so you make it now. It’s possible you lose a win or two at 3b in 2026. That’s what you’re risking. So you figure out how to beat that risk, or you compensate for the loss some other way. Good teams can mitigate risk in exchange for upside.

Even stacking the deck with negative characterizations as you’ve done here, that sounds like a pretty decent return for an expensive closer we didn’t need.

Trigger warning please!

Wow, I sure am glad someone here is “inclined towards independent thought.” The rest of us lemmings will all try to bask in your unique example.

People say the same thing over and over: The Brewers have a regular season strategy. They need to spend more / trade prospects to win in the postseason . (The fact that the Brewers won a big playoff series last year, then lost in the NLCS to the one team neither they nor anyone else can outspend, seems to have made no dent in this claim.) But can anyone present any evidence to support the relentless, numbingly repeated narrative that spending big and/or trading prospects will win the Brewers a World Series? Have other small market teams won the World Series that way? Small-market teams don’t really win the World Series, which maybe should tell us something, but — well, the Royals did. Did they win by spending and trading prospects? When the Brewers have spent some money (Rhys Hoskins, Lorenzo Cain), has that had the desired effect? When the Brewers have traded big prospects (e.g., for Zach Greinke), has that worked? (Well, it worked for the Royals, but that’s the exact opposite of the relentless narrative, so never mind.) Last year, the Brewers actually traded a bunch of prospects. Did those deals help them win the World Series? The Priester deal may yet help to get us there, but he was an unproven young guy himself. Did Danny Jansen move the needle? Shelby Miller? Brandon Lockridge? And how are we feeling these days about the Reese Olsen deal? Ah, but what about the deadline deals the Brewers didn’t make? Certainly three of our top prospects could have netted Eugenio Suarez. Did his heroics win the World Series for the Mariners? What about spending? If the Brewers had ponied up for guys they traded, would they have more likely won the World Series? Is there a good argument that Corbin Burnes was the missing piece last October? Josh Hader? Devin Williams? I can see a case for Adames, given how badly Ortiz cratered for us, even though Adames didn’t even help his own team reach the playoffs. But it had better be a damn good case, because having Adames in 2025 means he’s breaking your bank for four more years at the position where you have your most and best prospects. Or is there someone else out there whom the Brewers could have signed to a big free agent contract who would have put them over the line? I’ll give you Ohtani and Sosa, who of course would both be here if Mark A. weren’t such a cheapskate. But seriously, who? I understand that it’s impossible to prove a hypothetical, but you should at least be able to support it. Is there any concrete information at all that gives the spend / trade prospects narrative any substance?

You make a sound point that some logjams clear themselves up. However, your comparison requires some context. As of preseason 2020, MLB.com ranked the Brewers’ farm system dead last, and we had zero top-100 prospects.

To add to this article’s very reasonable analysis: Think about all the players the Brewers have either traded or not resigned in Peralta’s situation. To this point, not one of them has come close to earning the big contracts that most of them got: Prince Fielder had one great year, one decent year, and then got hurt. Corbin Burnes had one very good year, was off to an excellent start last year, and then got hurt. He has a good chance to come back and make his contract look good. The Brewers could’ve used his pitching in 2024 – but then they would’ve been without Joey Ortiz’s very good 2024 season as the starting third baseman. Willy Adames was very good last year, his first post-Brewers season. He’s the one guy on this list whom the Brewers really missed, taking into account how he did, what they got to replace him (not much in his case, because they chose not to trade him), where they were in the standings, and what they got from the replacement at his position. Let’s see how his contract looks going forward. Josh Hader has mostly been good after leaving. However, the Brewers seem to have replaced his contribution very easily. Devin Williams stunk up the joint last year. I would bet on him to recover. But again, the Brewers’ bullpen didn’t miss a beat in his absence. Carlos Gomez did almost nothing after leaving. Jonathan Lucroy did almost nothing after leaving. Then we get to lesser veteran “stars” whom the Brewers let go after good seasons, like Hunter Renfroe and Adam Lind. Those two did almost nothing after leaving. I can’t immediately recall any such guys who made us question our decisions, although I may be forgetting someone. Looking at these players’ results, I can’t see any good case against the Brewers’ strategy of cutting bait on veterans when they get expensive, because when they get expensive also tends to be when they decline. The two big veteran extensions the team has handed out, to Ryan Braun and Christian Yelich, made sense in that those guys were the highest level players in this group (not to mention the ones who meant the most to the Brewers). But even those contracts look like not the greatest baseball decisions. MLB’s rules make players cheaper when they’re better and more expensive when they’re worse. You don’t have to be the cheapskates the Brewers are always accused of being to see the wisdom in taking advantage of that structure.

I would add that even those scenarios assume that Boston would want to trade a key vet hitter to get a key vet pitcher, which isn’t impossible but doesn’t make a lot of intuitive sense. Teams that trade for key veterans want to be seen as “going for it,” which is why they usually trade prospects, not vets, to get vets. Anyway, the line of discussion you’re ably responding to strikes me as pointless. I remember a decade ago when the Brewers traded arguably their best hitter from the prior season, an Established Big League Power Bat, for three A-ball prospects — the exact opposite of the kind of move some folks here want the team to make now. The vet, Adam Lind, got old and never did squat again. One of the prospects — “which are exactly that, prospects,” we hear over and over, and are therefore inconsequential— was Freddy Peralta.

Yankees just resigned Bellinger, so they would probably deal Spencer Jones. He’s a whole foot taller than Jett Williams. All kidding aside, he’s a young, blocked, power hitting corner of, which seems like a good profile to pursue. He does strike out a ton.

Well, yes, Williams is a short infielder. On the other hand, he was drafted much higher and has been rated much higher as a prospect than Durbin ever was, which may reflect the fact that he’s a shortstop who can also play cf and that (according to the first couple of scouting reports I’ve found) he has more power. That doesn’t sound to me like a clone. These are two top draft picks who have become top prospects in a very strong system. They do things the Brewers can use, and they come with full periods of team control. By all means, get more if you can, but I would take this deal for Freddy in a heartbeat.

Yeah, I was just about to post about Polanco. The Mets could use Baty different ways, but the most common read I’m seeing is super utility. That’s absolutely someone they would part with in the right deal. I think a deal focused on him would make a ton of sense for the Brewers. He’s a young, controllable guy with power, but not only power, and he fits a need – I would be OK rolling with Durbin, but we need to improve our overall infield depth one way or another. I’ve never really understood the emphasis on a starting pitcher in a Peralta trade, since one of the reasons I’m OK trading Peralta is that we’ve got a lot of good young starting pitching.

When it comes to competitive integrity, I miss the steroid era. At least all the players had access to the same drugs.

Super fun to relive this. Thanks Michael!

This is a great analysis, but I too think the Yankees’ acquisition of Weathers does not significantly diminish the chances that they’ll trade for Peralta. Reading some Yankees fan boards, a lot of people seem to think Weathers is an injury risk, a potential bullpen piece, and/or just not reliable. He has the look of back-of-the-rotation depth rather than a frontline piece on the order of Peralta. I understand the basis for Jack’s view that the Brewers might have liked a couple of the prospects in the Weathers trade, but neither of those guys seems like a piece whose absence becomes a dealbreaker, or even much of a deal complicator, for a Peralta trade with Milwaukee. FWIW, I’m strongly in favor of trading Freddy, and I agree with the people who would rather focus the trade on a young outfielder with power, or maybe an infielder who can complement the guys we have, rather than another starting pitcher. A big part of my comfort with trading Freddy is that I think the young starters we already have can, given the way the Brewers mix and match players, substantially or even fully replace Freddy‘s on field value this season.

With our pitching staff, I don’t think we’ll kill our infield defense to pay $15-$20m to an aging one-dimensional slugger. Adding power would be great, but not at the cost of subtracting everything else.

He’s coming off a career year. He’s hitting the age when players in general starts to decline and pitchers are more likely to get hurt. We have a ton of decent rotation options. Obviously the answer depends on the return, but it seems very likely that we can trade him for value that’s harder to generate from what we already have.