gregmag

Agreed 100%, this is getting ridiculous. IMO we need to not delay the inevitable and move Ramirez to 1B now, bring up Green and deal with the bumps. Your points are a little ironic: If we were the kind of organization who committed to a player at a position and didn't move off that commitment, then we couldn't be talking about moving either Hart or Ramirez to 1b, certainly not in the (relative) middle of the season. I'm probably more comfortable with platoons than you guys are, but even if platoons are generally a bad idea, they're probably most understandable when you suddenly lose a starter. We're going to have to cover for an everyday bat, and moving guys around may be the best way to do that. I understand that you're both advocating long-term moves (Hart or Ramirez) that may make a lot of sense on their own terms. You may be right that we have a very clean solution available to the 1b problem. I'm just not sure we have a comfortable, everyday solution to the "hole in the lineup problem." Do we trust Aoki enough? Green? This is why some kind of 3b or rf platoon may be desirable, so that we can break one of those guys in and/or get a better look at him, if that's where we're going. Also, I agree with just about everybody that Ishikawa shouldn't start and shouldn't have made the team out of camp, although I admit he looks less useless now than he did a week ago.

Olney has a video blog post up on ESPN where he quotes several unnamed pitchers as saying that, with Prince gone, they feel freer to pound Braun inside. I found that interesting (despite the source), because it seems more plausible to me than the old saw that pitchers will "pitch around" a great hitter when he doesn't have "protection." Prince Fielder is a much better hitter than Aramis Ramirez, but as HiAndTight and others have noted, Ramirez is basically a 900 OPS guy until he proves he isn't. (He's also, IIRC, a notoriously slow starter, so he hasn't proved anything yet.) Do you really think the difference between superstar and merely all-star "protection" is going to be enough to make guys walk Braun at any kind of significantly increased rate? I don't. But Olney's point -- that pitchers will be more willing to pursue a higher-risk, higher-reward strategy -- makes a lot more sense to me. That strategy probably will result in a few more walks, but the pitchers' idea is that it will result in a lot more outs. The key, of course, will be how Braun adjusts. If he can make pitchers pay for their mistakes inside, while also showing enough patience to take walks (and plunks) when pitchers miss the zone, then Braun is pretty much back to where he was with Fielder. I like his chances.

Man, you can barely get out of bed without writing something arrogant and condescending. Like ten people give their honest impressions of what they've seen, and you pronounce from on high that they're all indulging in self-delusion? Amazing.

-Jack Moore This is the type of thing that won't show up in arbitration anyway. They look at archaic things like RBI, so it shouldn't be used in defense of this extension. This statement makes absolutely no logical sense. You pay a player based on what you think he's worth to you, based on the best information you have available to you. Maybe I'm mistaken and you've argued a lot of arbitration cases, but I think assuming that an adversarial process won't take available, meaningful information into account is a bad bet. Do you really think Lucroy's agent doesn't read Fangraphs? Anyway, you're bent on defending a set viewpoint, and damn the complications. I think your point that Lucroy has been nothing special offensively is demonstrably true, but you're willfully disregarding quite a few sound points that people here have made about why this nonetheless may be a very good deal for the Brewers.

I love this move. I remember when Fangraphs first ran that article about pitch-framing -- it's a huge deal, an example of marrying old-school (scouting) and new-school (statistical analysis) player evaluation techniques. I also think Lucroy brings the ever-popular "intangibles" more than most people about whom that claim is made. Whether it's Braungate or LaRussa's pathological lying, Lucroy says smart, tough things that back up his teammates. Plus his combination of relative youth and offensive underperformance of his minor league numbers suggest that he's a reasonable bet to improve with the bat.

Except he does not make consistent contact, he just has a lot of hits because he rarely walks. He does strikeout a lot at 14.6% (near league average over his career) but does not have the power numbers to show for the Ks. A .304 average is not good enough to justify the low number of walks. This is reflected in his pedestrian 106 OPS+ or 107 wRC+ Also the BA is not as good as it looks because of the high offensive era and park Young has spent his entire career in. To put the point another way, or maybe this is a complementary point: something like 65% of Young's contact results in outs. (I'm not sure of his exact BABIP.) Making outs hurts your team. Zero percent of walks result in outs. So by lacking the ability to turn some of those contact PAs into walks, Young is hurting his team at the margin. The guy uses up an unbelievable number of outs, which is to say opportunities -- 460 per 162 games. He has a career secondary average of .229. He's a bad shortstop. He basically has to hit .320 to be useful.

This is a fantastic post. The whole discussion has been really informative. The Molitor-Young comparison provides a great example of why you can't just compare counting stats across eras without adjusting for context. To say that Young compares well to Molitor is to say that MLB in the 2000s has the same offense-defense balance it did in the 1980s. That just isn't accurate. I like the Garvey comparison; another comp from that era who comes to mind is Buddy Bell. Also Harold Baines, Vada Pinson, and Al Oliver, who were better hitters (much better in Baines' case) but didn't play a premium defensive position. All of those guys played well and stuck around forever, but they simply weren't great. Michael Young, pretty clearly to me, has never been great. Valuable? Yes. Above average? Sure. But great? Show me where Michael Young has dominated the league, or carried his team on his back. He gets a lot of hits because he piles up ABs, partially because he doesn't walk. He plays ss, which is nice, but he doesn't play it well. Nothing special here.

I agree with this. Not trying to make facts fit any version. I just think the Technicality is alot more than just the collector waited 2 days to ship sample. Shyman Das never ruled in a players favor before (at least that we're aware of), so I find it hard to believe he would just based on that. Braun more than likely did take something he shouldn't have, as I also find it difficult to believe MLB is "out to get" Braun. MLB clearly believes he's guilty of something, but it's also clear MLB failed to prove their case. I have to say, you're entitled to your opinions, but I think this is pretty condescending. I'm a fairly smart, rational person, and I have a very different view of the likeliest underlying facts. I'm not going to insult your thought process that has led to your view; I wish you wouldn't insult mine.

What Baldkin's talking about is the part that has bothered me from the beginning. Subjectively, there's only one thing we know about Ryan Braun that supports the theory that he actually did what the initial test result indicated: he's a fierce competitor in a sport where a lot of fierce competitors have used PEDs to gain an edge. That's it. Everything else cuts heavily against that scenario. In descending order of importance: The original test result was statistically implausible. He's a smart guy who knew the test was coming. He's a smart guy who apparently never needed PEDs before to put up HOF-caliber numbers and who well knew the general risks (medical and punitive) of doing so. Nothing about his performance or physical attributes / skills changed. He's never had a whiff of suspicion around him before, and he's also passed a whole bunch of drug tests. At least some reports say that, during his appeal, he offered to do absolutely everything within his power to confirm that he was clean (DNA, retest, polygraph). To speak as he did at the presser and be lying would make him either a sociopath or a multiple personality. Let's say MLB had to prove him guilty, not even by the reasonable doubt standard we use in criminal law but by a "more likely than not" standard. Let's say, further, that they were even allowed to offer up indirect and circumstantial evidence, if they had any. What would they present? Would they have a single thing to go on, other than the initial test result (and the fact that PED use in baseball generally has been sadly common)? So they present that, and then Braun's team (a) points out that the test result is facially absurd, (b) establishes that the sample was improperly handled, and (apparently) © replicates the suspicious test result. At that point, MLB would be laughed out of the room. Which seems to be why, even under the actual, much harsher "guilty until proved innoncent" standard, an arbitrator who had ruled for MLB in every one of (we think) a dozen prior appeals ruled for Braun.

I would never question how anybody else is feeling, and I can't say I don't feel some pangs of what Ajay is talking about. But maybe I'm just a hardwired process guy. To me, the way the baseball season works is that you play 162 games for one prize, and then you play five or seven for more prizes. By October, the Cards had built a superior team, and they deserved to win the World Series. But over 162 games, the Brewers were better. As for Braun . . . we've been through all this, but my takeaway is that the arbitrator said he didn't fail a valid drug test. I had a lot of fun following the team last year; I hope I have as much fun this year.

You're going far out of your way to view Braun's statements at the press conference in the most sinister possible light. Braun raised questions about the process, for good reasons. He was vague about what he was "concerned and suspicious" about. In context, he very easily could have been talking about the basic circumstances -- the way the sample may have been stored, the possibility that others could have had access to it, etc. -- and how the collector handled them. Reread the quotations you cite: Braun said nothing about the collector's character or integrity. Braun made a point of stating that he wasn't lodging an accusation, and he didn't lodge an accusation. I wish he had been more precise about the nature of his concerns, but his statements don't support your accusation of hypocrisy.

That's why we should trade for Nyjer Morgan, but we won't. Haha, that's great! But in all seriousness, I was never sure why some were so high on Dickerson. He isn't a game changer. I think some people get way too attached to porspects because they put a lot of research in to them. Kind of like falling in love with a stock. You start to justify all it's faults and get caught on a few positives and think it's can't miss. Could you at least read other people's arguments before you trash them? You're mischaracterizing the claims that people made for Dickerson's value. Show me where anyone characterized Dickerson as anything like a "game changer" or a "can't miss." You're just making that stuff up. First of all, Dickerson wasn't a "prospect"; most of the arguments about him, pro and con, referred to his major league record (although the "con" side tended to fixate weirdly on his few dozen useless PAs as a Brewer in 2010 when IIRC he was coming off an injury, ignoring his prior MLB experience, so maybe that's why you made the "prospect" error). It seems like you want to find whatever occasion you can to flog an argument about how people overvalue prospects, but you'll need to peddle that overgeneralization somewhere else. Dickerson was a fourth OF / platoon OF candidate. A bunch of us thought he was a pretty good fit for that sort of role, because he had shown some ability in the past. The team had a gaping need in CF, and Dickerson looked better to me and a lot of other people than Reed, Boggs, or Kotsay -- and, if we were talking about a "less bad" starting option, Gomez. Given the performance of that quartet last year, I'd still take Dickerson given the same circumstances (of course I'd rather have Gomez as the weak end of a platoon with Morgan, but we didn't have Morgan when these discussions were going on). Also, the defenses of Dickerson in this thread were in the context of giving him away for the overpriced, utterly useless arm of Sergio Mitre. If your point is to defend Mitre's honor, please tell us more.

That's because their view is that he was not "exonerated", they feel he got off because of procedural errors not because he was innocent. Even some players share that view. Similarly if the police illegally search my home and find illegal drugs, the fact that the evidence found can not be used to convict me and I end up being found not guilty as a result does not "exonerate" me. There's a fatal flaw in your analogy, a flaw that demonstrates the fundamental unfairness of ascribing Braun's exoneration to a "technicality." In the drug search scenario you describe, the drugs are found at your house. That's a simple fact. The illegality of the search -- lack of a warrant, failure to knock and announce, whatever -- is unrelated to the fact of the drugs' presence. (Some illegal searches may involve faults in the search that support allegations of planting evidence, which would be more like at least one possible sequence of events -- the tampering hypothesis -- that could explain Braun's initial test result, but I don't think that's what you're suggesting.) That is a "technicality," in the vernacular of cop movies; I would call it a constitutional violation. Either way, our criminal law includes safeguards that require courts and juries, in some circumstances, to disregard facts -- actual facts -- that would establish guilt. We do that for a variety of reasons: keeping the police honest, making sure the people have confidence in the fairness of the system, preventing the state from deriving benefit from violations of principles we consider important. What that sort of safeguard is NOT about, in a situation like I'm describing, is the cognitive reliability of proof. We know the drugs were there, but we disregard that fact because we've decided that other considerations outweigh our interest putting that culpable defendant away. A Ryan Braun parallel to that situation would be if we knew, for a fact, that Ryan Braun had ingested a PED, but there was something wrong with how we knew it, like if someone had violated Braun's privacy by planting a camera in his house that produced video of Braun taking the PED. If MLB had that evidence, but decided not to use it out of an abundance of scrupulous fairness (hold on a minute, I'm trying to stop laughing), that would be letting Braun off on a technicality. The real case, of course, differs decisively from that scenario. In the real case, we don't know whether or not Braun ingested a PED. That fact, necessary for establishing guilt, is unknown. The only way we could know the fact is if Braun had failed a reliable drug test. An arbitrator examined the circumstances of the case and found that doubt serious enough to throw out the test -- something that, by most accounts, had never happened before in a MLB case. That's not a "technicality." That's absence of the fact needed for conviction. The fact is, Ryan Braun did not fail a drug test. You only fail a drug test if the test satisfies the standards of reliability that the system has put in place. In this case, the test did not satisfy that standard. There is no more evidence that Ryan Braun used a banned substance than there is evidence that you or I used a banned substance. The biggest thing that I think people keep forgetting is that a test result is not direct evidence of drug use. The test is a medium; it's an indirect source of proof. We need to use tests in many areas to help us make important decisions, but whenever we do that, we look carefully at how the test indicates the underlying fact for which we're searching, what could go wrong between fact and result, how to minimize the possibility that something will go wrong, and how much risk of error -- in terms of both process and substantive results -- we're willing to tolerate and still act on the result. In this case, the result of the test was apparently unprecedented -- unprecedented through the roof -- and the procedures broke down worse than they've ever broken down before (given the unprecedented outcome of the arbitration). How any fair-minded person could act on the test result in those circumstances completely eludes me.

He did a great job with the press conference. Like I and a lot of others have said, the basic facts of the situation are: exceptionally unusual result; exceptionally botched process. That's not a technicality, and it's not just reasonable doubt, because reasonable doubt wouldn't be enough. It's invalidity of the test, period, end of story. Also, the thing that took me beyond "He's handling this well" to "I'm buying my daughter a Ryan Braun jersey" is when he said the thing about not falsely accusing the sample collector, because he should be the last guy to make a false accusation. That, my friends, is class and integrity.

This is so frustrating. If somebody asked me that question, I would have to say "not sure," because it's a factual question about which I have no direct evidence. The thing is, I would have to answer the same way if you asked me the same question about any other human being, for exactly the same reason. The problem for Braun is that the question is being asked about him. I'm not saying SportsNation shouldn't do their survey; it's news, and that's what they do. But at a fundamental level it's unfair to Braun.

My opinion would, I think, be the same. But then my opinion is that Braun most likely got off on a technicality. Assuming the facts are as reported by Tom H that the collector kept the sample refrigerated at home for two days before making the shipment and the seals on the samples were unbroken upon arriving at the lab... I believe were it Pujols, the vast majority here would be inclined to agree more with MLB than with the player. I think most would believe that despite the delay in shipping, the collector most likely did keep the chain of custody intact and most likely did store the samples in the proper environment. (I say "most likely" because we are not privy to the testimony that was presumably given by the guy who collected and stored the samples.) Because Braun wears a Brewer uniform, instead, the assumption is that he is pure like snowflakes and the sample collector is a complete idiot or corrupt. That he mixed up labels, added synthetic T, stored the pee in his kitchen refrigerator next to his leftovers, told the neighbors he had Ryan Braun's piss in his fridge, or whatever. This is baseless. It's a cheap shot at people who disagree with you, for excellent reasons, about the immediate case, and it's an attempt to inflate your own supposed objectivity at the expense of unnamed others. A lot of us have thought hard and critically about this case. Our posts make that clear. If exactly the same things happened, just fill in "Pujols" for "Braun"? I wouldn't be as emotional about it, because I dislike Pujols, but of course I would analyze the facts the same way and make the same arguments.

To the folks who are spinning this "technicality" thing as if we still have good reason to believe Ryan Braun used a PED: We don't. We. Don't. There is exactly as much direct, documentary evidence that Ryan Braun used a PED as there is that Rickie Weeks used a PED, or Aaron Rodgers used a PED, or Mother Teresa used a PED: none. Zero. What there was, was a test result. A test result is information filtered through a process. As xis and pebadger have explained very carefully and well, testing for substances in the body is a particularly tricky process. The reason you take great care with such a test isn't that we're trying to let guilty players off the hook. The reason you take great care is because, if you don't do the test right, it becomes very easy to reach a wrong result. Here are the two important things I think we know: (1) Braun's test results were extremely unusual. (2) The procedures around the test were extremely sloppy. I say "extremely sloppy" because of the one thing we absolutely do know: The neutral arbitrator ruled in Braun's favor. Apparently that doesn't happen much. It may never have happened before. Do you really think the arbitrator is going to deviate that far from a standard judgment over a small error? Or when there's not a very strong basis for believing that the error caused the suspicious result? Do you actually believe that? I'm livid at MLB right now. If I were Braun's lawyer, I would be begging him to let me bring a lawsuit over the leak, but I suspect he'd tell me that he has bigger fish to fry in this life -- and he would be right. That doesn't make the leak any more excusable. The fact that MLB has not announced an internal investigation over the leak is outrageous. The fact that they haven't issued a public apology to Braun about the leak is appalling. The fact that, instead of doing those things, they're out there trying to drag his name back through the mud, and cover their own miserable, incompetent butts, is loathsome. The idea that MLB has ever had better ethics than your average petty criminal has never been one I could take very seriously. In the old, old days, MLB was a national leader in organized racism. During that time, the game went through a period where it was basically a riverboat casino. In the merely old days, MLB chained players to draconian contracts while the owners got rich. Now MLB runs a sham competition designed to squeeze advertising revenue out of the biggest population centers, basically professional wrestling with less fun costumes. MLB made boatloads of money off PEDs in the 90s and 00s; now they pontificate like Louie at Rick's Cafe. I think MLB's response to this fiasco is bad faith under the CBA. I want the MLBPA to issue a statement tomorrow that it will fight tooth and nail in the next CBA negotiation to remove all requirements for drug testing. Would that facilitate juicing? Of course it would. But who cares? MLB's commitment to maintaining fair competitive conditions was always laughable, and now it's been revealed as nothing more than amateur kabuki theater. I find myself thinking, over and over: I love this beautiful game. Because that's my only good answer to the question I keep asking, over and over: Why do I even bother with this stupid, corrupt sport?

Hallelujah!

To me, what's important in the background of this discussion is just how bad the team's weak points were last year. Betancourt, McGehee, Counsell, Kotsay . . . these guys were a horrible drag on the team. I don't think DM pulled any genius moves, but to improve those spots you don't really have to. Replacing those four with Gonzalez, Ramirez, Izturis, and Aoki, with Green waiting in the wings looks to me like a substantial improvement. Of course losing Fielder is a big deal. But some people seem to approach that loss almost mystically, like Fielder's value is immeasurable or something. It isn't; it's as finite and concrete as any player's value. Fangraphs had Fielder worth 5.5 wins last year. If that seems low to you, remember that the guy is an absolute liability in the field and on the basepaths, which has always cut into his value. So let's say Fielder's presence gets you 6 wins. If you're pessimistic about Gamel / backup options, I'd say 2 wins is a pretty dire projection. (This isn't about WAR. If those numbers seem wrong to you, fine, but you need to back up your critique.) So, if things break badly, that's four wins -- a major loss. But the upgrades at other positions should make up for it. Ramirez over McGehee alone would have gotten us three games, and while I expect Aramis to regress somewhat, even if he's pretty bad he'll make up for half the loss of Fielder -- because McGehee was a disaster. The biggest danger this season, it seems to me, comes from pitching health. JohnBriggs mentioned the failure to add rotation depth, which I think is kind of a silly complaint given that we have five healthy returning starters, and what good pitcher is going to sign up for sixth starter duty . . . but he makes a good underlying point that we can't possibly have the health luck that we had last year. A lot will depend on whether Peralta is ready to step up. Similar thing with the bullpen -- if some of our minor leaguers can contribute, then our depth is fine. It isn't like Hawkins and Saito were world-beaters -- they only pitched 75 innings between them, well enough to improve the team by a win, but they're old and thus likely to regress.

Love Mike Cameron. I like when good players are also good guys, and you had to see through some of the traditional stats to see how good he was. I'm so glad he had a couple of years in Milwaukee. Invader3k is right -- he's a great coaching / managing candidate if he wants to go that route. But for now, I hope he gets to relax and enjoy the fruits of an excellent career.

Rock Co., I keep finding myself writing contrary posts to you the past few days -- please know it's not personal. You just make your points clearly and with good detail, which gives those of us who might respectfully disagree with you a lot to chew on. A few points here: First, Beane didn't write Moneyball. Michael Lewis did. Lewis is no cutout, either; he's a heavy-duty writer. So whatever sins we can properly lay at Beane's feet, we can't say he wrote or engineered his big star turn. Second, I think you're drawing a really broad caricature of sabermetrics types, which fits no one whom I personally know. The thing about sabermetrics types is that, while we can be overzealous, obnoxious, and flat-out wrong, we're generally not stupid. I think Moneyball is mostly right in the credit it gives Beane, but I don't think he has been any kind of super-GM, and I think he has made a whole lot of bad moves. In my experience, statheads have been among the Beane's sharpest critics, because statheads, when they're on their game, follow evidence and logic wherever they may lead. Finally, you seem to be falling into the trap that you accuse Beane's fans of falling into -- taking your position to an absurd extreme. He got the keys to the Cadillac, got lucky, and only deserves credit for doing some cool things? Come on. For whatever mistakes the man has made, he still deserves credit IMHO for bringing advanced stats into the front office, attacking the game's economic structure with an economically based team-building strategy, and winning some. That doesn't warrant a statue or anything, but I think it made for a pretty excellent book. I do think you're right to praise Terry Ryan. The two guys just have different styles and strengths. If I were starting out as a baseball executive, I would want to study both of them, among others.

What prospect with comparable numbers to Gindl has "flopped"? Matt LaPorta, I guess. "Decent numbers" is a big generalization -- I suppose you could say Eric Farris has had "decent numbers" if you wanted to. But if we're trying to be more precise than that, what Caleb Gindl precisely did is OPS .862 in AAA as a 22 year-old. You're acting like that's random, meaningless information. I think it's very significant information. Of course past performance is no guarantee of future performance, but that's equally true of major league performance. This generic dismissal of rookies based on nothing more than broad generalizations doesn't make any sense to me. First of all, not all rookies are created equal. Of course age matters. Older players, wherever they have been playing, are more experienced and (presumably) more mature. Aoki is in a completely different category; as someone pointed out, he has been playing under MLB conditions in Japan. Yes, all of the guys we're talking about will need to get acquainted with better breaking stuff than they've ever seen on a regular basis, and that's important. But they all have well-developed approaches, and they've made adjustments already at multiple levels. People often act as if doubting rookies is some kind of safe assumption. It isn't. Going with a veteran can be every bit as risky as going with a rookie. The fallacy is that, if you go with a rookie and he flops, you can look at the foregone veteran and assume that he would have performed up to his past standards. But that just isn't reliable -- look at McGehee and Kotsay last year. It is quite possible that the Brewers could doom their chances this year by not giving enough PT to Aoki, Gamel, Green, Schafer, and/or Gindl. No safe assumption is available, so we need to make smart decisions instead.

Why worry about someone who is a platoon player at best? Maybe clancy, like probably the substantial majority of people who have thought about Taylor Green, isn't as persuaded as you seem to be that Green "is a platoon player at best." Do you actually have a big pile of support for that very bold judgment -- which you appear to suggest is obviously true -- or are you just shooting down somebody else's opinion because yours is different? I'm not saying Green isn't a platoon player; but we're talking about a guy who won the system player of the year award, then hurt his wrist and struggled for quite a while, then came back and tore up AAA. I'm saying I don't know. How anybody could confidently predict what a player with that record would be able to do in MLB eludes me. The one thing that worries me about Gamel is that he's coming up as a 1b. I agree with everybody who points out that he has hit consistently well in the minors, that his mediocre MLB totals mean next to nothing, and that he needs a chance to settle in and show his stuff. All of that said, I worry that his bat may not play as what we're hoping for: a six-year solution at 1b. If he hits like 2010-11 Corey Hart, then sure; that's not an All-Star at 1b, but it works. But if he OPSs under .800 as a 26 year-old -- which wouldn't be a terrible showing, in absolute terms -- then I think he'll have a hard time sticking. I'm really right at the margin of optimism and pessimism about him.

I imagine the panel has to provide some kind of written decision for the parties. If that's right, the time lapse just represents the time it takes the arbitrators to deliberate and write. They would need to provide thorough support for a decision either way, which means the time lapse doesn't tell us anything about which way the case will come out.

That said... I think Yost would have been a far superior option to Macha in the 2009-2010 timeframe. Macha screwed things up with JJ Hardy, IMO. Had Yost been kept on, the Brewers would still have had an All Star shortstop. JJ Hardy screwed things up with JJ Hardy. It took him being run out of two cities to actually get back into shape and work on his game again.I'm not challenging you at all -- I would be very happy to know you were right about this, because it would mean this wasn't so much of a screw-up by the Brewers -- but I haven't heard this sort of account about Hardy before. Is this just your sense of what happened, or are you basing this on specific information?