gregmag

Right, and if Green did that, people would already be pulling out their hair, because it would mean he was in the lineup to begin with.

Andruw Jones did it in '96, and went on to have a good playoffs. Wasn't quite the switch out a 'player not performing' case with Klesko, Grisson, and Dye. Probably the reason you aren't finding many examples is that playoff teams are good, so they don't need to shake things up as much during the stretch run, unless somebody gets hurt. But good thought to look. I don't disagree with you about just replacing McGehee with Green in the lineup now. Casey, as you point out, has been merely mediocre in the second half rather than terrible, and when a team is doing well I don't think you make big changes unless you have a pretty compelling reason for doing so (like the fact that Yuni Betancourt is your starting shortstop). I would give Green some starts against RHPs. I do disagree, for reasons others have explained well, about your assumption that we can't know how Green will perform while we can know how McGehee will perform. We have just about the same quality of predictive evidence for both players. I think we often make the mistake of assuming that a major league player will simply keep doing what he has been doing, alongside the mistake of assuming that minor league performance doesn't tell us anything about likely major league performance. We know something about how Green is likely to perform, and we also know that McGehee (like any player) is a risk going forward. Also, what Mat Gamel's so-so performance in limited MLB opportunities has to do with Taylor Green completely escapes me. You might as well say that we should bench McGehee because Craig Counsell has had a terrible year.

a3uge, you're still just throwing out assumptions about rookies with absolutely no meaningful evidence to back them up, and now you're adding fielding into the idle speculation. One other thing -- your repeated argument that "other teams have won with a bad ______________, so we certainly can too" is very strange. It reminds me of the arguments we used to hear on behalf of every washed-up 40 year-old LHP -- that Jamie Moyer was successful as a senior citizen with no discernible stuff, so why couldn't ________ be just as successful? Yes, other successful teams have big holes. They win *in spite of* their big holes, and to some extent they're lucky when they do. They would fill those holes if they could. The mark of winning teams is that they never stop making the smartest moves they can to improve, not that they reach a certain plateau and assume they live in the best of all possible worlds. (I actually started to type "passable," which is a pretty good Freudian typo.)

So whose "average production" are we talking about here? Betancourt's? McGehee's? Those guys are nowhere close to average. The assumption that rookies can't play . . . I give up. Many people seem to believe this, and of course they can believe what they want. Taylor Green has been playing baseball all year -- for several years, in fact. He didn't just pick up a bat and glove this morning for the first time. If we're really trying to project whether McGehee or Green will produce better given the same opportunities for the rest of the year, (a) I suspect it's a pretty close call, taking all available evidence into account, and (b) of course we'll never know, because they can't both get the same opportunities. But even if rookies come into this world blind and deaf before the winds of major league experience waft talent into their nostrils, Jerry Hairston Jr. is 35, and he should play ahead of Yuni as soon as Rickie Weeks can hobble to the plate.

Just coming up with the phrase "I'm taking my talents to South Beach" should be enough to get anybody hounded into a lonely, cave-dwelling purgatory.

Woo-hoo!

Joe, that was a very nice tribute. Very well said. For those of us over a certain age, Mike Flanagan definitely brings to mind those great Oriole teams of the late Weaver era. RockCo is exactly right -- they were a class organization all the way, and he was a big part of that, sort of the unglamorous counterpart to Jim Palmer. Sad ending.

WTP, I don't get your logic in compounding the downside of rookies. Let's say we're a 90-win team this year. You're saying we'll be an 80-win team or worse with the three rookies in the lineup. Prince to Gamel I agree will cost us, but I think three wins is a reasonable estimate, assuming Gamel improves on Prince's defense. I have a hard time imagining that Green will be worse next year than McGehee has been this year. I'm pretty sure he'll be at least somewhat better, but let's call it a wash for the sake of argument. So that leaves Hart to Gindl -- Hart's a bad defender and baserunner at this point, I'm guessing about a three-win player for the year. If Gindl gave us anything at all -- an outcome we could help along by platooning him -- it seems like a bad scenario would be a two-win loss. So I can see the rookies costing us five wins, all else equal. Now, that's a lot, for sure -- but five wins vs. ten is no trivial difference. Then you have to keep in mind that these moves wouldn't occur in a vacuum. We could improve the team a lot by upgrading at ss and the bench. If we trade Hart, we get somebody for him who presumably improves the team. If we don't pay Fielder, we have more money to spend. So the rookies bring opportunity benefits with them. Getting a three-win shortstop in the shuffle would bring us back to two wins down, and bench improvements could get us close to even. I'm not actually in favor of putting all three rookies in the everyday lineup. I think we should hold on to McGehee and start him at 1b or 3b every time we see a LHP. I think we should hold onto Hart unless we're blown away, and if the blow-away offer doesn't include his replacement, I would use some of our Prince savings to fill that spot, maybe working in Gindl as a fourth or platoon OF depending on how he looks. I think this plan would employ a good mix of rookies and veterans. But even if we did go with three rookies, I don't get how that plan would somehow doom our chances. Rookies are baseball players too.

I think that's exactly right. The context for the discussion (in part) is whether the Brewers should make decisions like a team that's in "win now mode" -- a team whose contention window is wide open. Your analysis seems consistent with the conclusion that they should. Of course, what decisions are wise to make in "win now mode" -- like whether to resign Prince or not -- is a different and harder questerion.

Frog, I agree that I'd like to see Peralta keep this level of production up before I get confident that he really is this good. But I don't think the comparisons you're suggesting hold much water. Peralta is young, his scouting reports back up his production, and he's healthy. Also, we aren't talking about putting him at the top of the rotation. We're probably talking about making Narveson our #4 and Peralta our #5, or maybe even breaking him in as a long reliever, with Estrada, Fiers, and de la Cruz as insurance. That's hardly pinning our hopes on him. X, I don't get why you think our only two realistic options are trading Peralta or having a bad SS. I agree that an SS upgrade is our most important offseason priority, notwithstanding Briggs' belief that since we're winning, we don't have to worry about anything, and of course Peralta is our best minor league asset. But we have other trade chips, as others have mentioned, and we're talking about upgrading a replacement-level player at best. I think at the stage Peralta's at, he has more value to us as a player than as a trade chip. I agree with Invader 3K that this is a terrible time to trade McGehee, unless of course someone flat out overbids for him. Keep him next year as a RH 1b/3b part-timer. I'm heavily on the Gamel 1b (or RF) / Green 3b bandwagon, but having a credible RH backup can only help those guys succeed. Trading Hart . . . I wouldn't have thought before the season that would be a good option, but suddenly he's a guy who has had two good years, is signed to a reasonable contract, and does things we can probably replace without too much trouble. Seems like a good thing to explore.

I'm going to join in the pile-on for Russ about his cryptic playoff projection. Only two key players on the Brewers this year seem to have dramatically outperformed reasonable expectations -- Morgan and Wolf. Braun, Fielder, and Weeks could regress some, but they aren't exactly playing over their heads. The two big factors in keeping this team strong will be the health of the rotation and rebuilding the middle of the bullpen. Of course there's uncertainty, but I'd still say we look like favorites as of now. All of that said, I think Russ is exactly right about Fielder. He's going to command an enormous salary, and players with his body type seem to decline pretty quickly after 30. He's enough of a liability on defense already that it saps a significant amount of his value. Of course we aren't going to replace his production at 1b, but we probably can replace 80 percent of his production (factoring in defense) for next to no money, and turn the savings into upgrades wherever we can't fill holes from within. Our best AAA hitting prospects are lefties, which helps a lot. I hate to see a great player leave, especially one that we developed, and I think he'll be a great hitter for another four years at least. But he won't be worth $20 million a year, and the Brewers can win without him.

I don't disagree with your assessment of Brantley. I do think it's revisionist history to suggest that people predicted accurately how Brantley would develop (you're saying you did, and I'm sure that's true). Quite a few people here, IIRC, expressed the view, repeatedly, that he wouldn't develop enough power to play regularly. In fact, he has done that. Whether he can develop further into a good regular remains to be seen. You may be right that his power is simply a tradeoff for diminished plate discipline, but I don't know whether those developments are causally related or not. My larger point is that I think a lot of prospect discussions traffic in unrealistic levels of certainty, ignoring or underplaying the ways in which players tend to improve in their early to mid-20s. Certainly several people in this discussion have made statements that seem to me way too confident in their assessments of how players will end up. You really don't think players develop additional skills during the early parts of their careers? You know a lot more about player development than I do, but that just doesn't seem right to me. It seems like a lot of players develop power as they fill out and/or refine their approaches at the plate, develop plate discipline as they gain experience and learn to recognize pitches, learn how to turn raw speed into good baserunning, etc. Maybe you mean that all of those abilities are latent all along, and I guess that could be true, but that's sort of a nature / nurture debate. Michael Brantley certainly looks to me like he has power now that he didn't have at age 20 or 21, and that development seems very ordinary. Caleb Gindl at 23 is an excellent AAA hitter, and I think that represents meaningful -- and promising -- development from where he was two years ago.

I was away for a few days, so these points are a little late in the day, but: In my original post that bumped this thread, I didn't refer to the Brewers' record this season as direct evidence that their farm system had improved. That would be a stupid argument, as a couple of people were kind enough to point out. I made that reference to put the quality of the Brewers' AAA player pool in context. When your MLB team is already good, and you have players at AAA who can help your MLB team, then presumably those AAA players have some value. I also didn't mean to say -- and in fact didn't say -- that anything about this season makes Callis wrong in retrospect. That, again, would be stupid. I was asking whether this season's events give us reason to feel better about our system than we did at the start of the season. That gets us into the discussion that people were having about what a prospect is and what a good system is. I don't think there's one meaningful definition; it's sort of like peak value vs. career value. But I do think the Brewers have a lot more reason to feel happy about their system than they did in April, or than they could have reasonably expected to at this point. We all know the Brewers are in win now mode. The MLB team is in great shape, but we're going to lose Prince and some relievers, and then next year we may lose Greinke and/or Marcum. For this team, at this stage in its contention cycle, having players at AAA who look ready to come up and contribute is a great thing. I don't think that fact negates the importance of our lack of blue-chippers at the lower levels, but I think it's an important fact for making any meaningful, thorough evaluation of the system as it stands now. As for Caleb Gindl . . . all the guy has done his whole career is hit and get better. He has improved as this season has gone on. He is young-ish for AAA. I see no good reason to bet against his future. Will he be an All-Star? Not based on current evidence. But could he become a platoon starter or a 350-PA fourth outfielder on a championship caliber team? I think the evidence suggests he could. When a guy shows his steady progress and consistent performance, I think the importance of scouting reports and "projection" diminishes. Also, the one thing I think a lot of knowledgeable people acknowledge less than they should about prospects is that young, good players generally continue to develop. Caleb Gindl today is probably not everything he will be. Look at -- drumroll, please -- Michael Brantley. For years, folks on this forum said he couldn't start at the MLB level for the primary reason that he lacked power. And he sure did; he was a punch-and-judy hitter at age 20. But now he's 24, he has a .119 ISO in the majors, and this year he has been an average MLB hitter as a starter. My point isn't that Mike Brantley is a great MLB player; he isn't. But he has developed an important skill that he lacked, and he's still young. I just think we sometimes tend to forget how common that is.

Do we still have the worst system in baseball, even if we don't count our draft picks? Because if we do, how is it that: (a) our mlb team has the fourth-best record in all of baseball in mid-August, and (b) our AAA team has at least seven prospects who realistically could play significant roles on next year's team: Green Gindl Peralta Schafer Fiers De la Cruz (I know he's up now, but only technically) Maldonado? I'm not counting Gamel because he's not a rookie and because his opportunity is the only one that figures to come at the expense of a player we wish we could keep. All of these other guys could -- not necessarily will, but could -- fit in as improvements to what is already a very good Brewers team.

I'm not at all sure that Operation Rookie Bench would succeed. I am sure that, based on the best tools we have for trying to figure this stuff out, Operation Rookie Bench would have a better likelihood of succeeding than continuing with the present group. To put it another way, turn your question around: How can you be sure that Kotsay will get more clutch hits? Of course we could never settle this argument one way or the other, because you can't play both groups of players at once. As for the peculiar difficulty of Kotsay's job, you're basically arguing that pinch-hitting is something that certain hitters who aren't good enough to play regularly can do better than regulars. I don't see it; I think a better hitter makes a better pinch-hitter. Also, not to beat a dead horse, Kotsay hasn't done the job well, so it isn't like you'd be running a great risk that whoever replaced him in the role would bring down the level of performance.

I don't have the means to do a real statistical study of your question, but let's look at a quick and dirty snapshot: 4th and 5th of types, on other NL contenders, this season, by OPS. I don't know the teams inside-out, so I'm trying to get the right guys -- anyone can correct me: Atlanta: Hinske, .755; Heyward, .699, or McLouth, .677. Philly: Mayberry .797, Brown .728, Francisco .685 San Francisco: Burrell .760, Rowand .645 Arizona: Bloomquist (?) .686; Nady, .646 St. Louis: Craig .860, Patterson .435. The Cardinals' situation is in flux because of the Rasmus trade. Craig isn't really that good, and that's a tiny sample for Patterson, although he's pretty bad. Kotsay, at a .657 OPS, is right near the bottom of that range. He also can't defend or run. Everybody but Arizona has at least one extra OF who is clearly a better hitter than Kotsay. Obviously this is a motley bunch of players in varying career situations. Some of these guys are young, breaking-in types who are still outperforming him. There are some other bad veterans, although Rowand and Nady arguably have better recent track records. In general, I think this comparison suggests that you don't have to settle for Mark Kotsay as your extra OF. But the real question is whether Mark Kotsay is the best guy for his job that the Brewers control. I think you have to believe AAA baseball isn't really baseball at all to look at the Brewers' system and conclude that he is.

Any two of Caleb Gindl, Mat Gamel, or Taylor Green. Right now, today. Cut Kotsay, Counsell, and Lopez, bring those three guys up, and then -- to make the traditionalists happy -- try 'em all and ride the hot hand. Look, my view on this isn't about "advanced statistics." It's about simple statistics -- age and batting average will do -- plus my belief that nothing about pinch-hitting, or playing baseball in a pennant race, or playing baseball in general, is magically harder for rookies. That belief isn't quantifiable; it's just my best sense of the world from what I've seen. I'm quite sure that, if Caleb Gindl had been with the team this year and put up Mark Kotsay's numbers, many of the people who are defending Kotsay would be crying out for an experienced veteran to replace Gindl. I understand that a lot of people, like Doug Melvin, prefer veteran experience and distrust rookies. I just don't see much to support that view.

For me, what gets old is reading posts that basically amount to "I have selected certain information that I choose to emphasize over all other information, I see no need to explain or justify my selection of that information, and anyone who disagrees with me, no matter what that person actually says, is guilty of using 'advanced statistics,' which are, by the way, witchcraft." Also, your suggestion that people who use past stats to assess baseball performance "end up paying for a player past his prime" is way off the mark (in addition to being a really funny argument to make in defense of Mark Kotsay). Statistical analysis allows teams to predict aging players' declines more accurately and avoid overpaying them in their decline years. The point of using a few seasons' information rather than a few games' information to project future performance is that one is meaningful and the other is meaningless. You're absolutely right that we need to adjust those projections for expected aging decline, which only makes more clear what a bad bet Kotsay is. As for finding the diamond in the rough, tell me who the next one is. You don't know and I don't know. Teams figure that stuff out by giving people chances and extending those chances when they perform well -- like with McGehee two years ago and Axford last year. What does Mark Kotsay's awful season, wrapped around three or four timely hits, have to do with finding a diamond in the rough? I can't stress enough how happy and grateful I am for Mark Kotsay's good moments. He is indeed part of the team, and every time he helps the team is a plus. But this is a baseball discussion board. If you want to do nothing but cheerlead, that's fine, and I'll be there with you a good bit of the time. But I want to talk and read other people's thoughts about how to make this team better.

I'm sure enjoying the ride, and I'm happy to give credit where credit is due, including to players I don't think should be playing -- Kotsay's walk-off hits, Yuni's hot streak, McGehee's 3-homer game, Counsell's . . . well, hit. Props to all of them for their achievements. But we haven't won anything yet. I want to win the World Series, and if we can do things to improve our chances of winning, then we should do them. That's not negativity -- it's ambition and desire. You can decide that we live in the best of all possible worlds if that's what floats your boat. I think the best teams are the ones that never stop thinking about how to get better. Kotsay, at this late stage in his career, is a bad player. That's not negativity either; it's having eyes in my head. He doesn't hit well, he doesn't field well, and he doesn't run well. Yes, he has caught a couple of lightning bolts in a bottle, and again, I give him credit for that. But it means squat going forward. The best way to increase the likelihood of clutch hits is to have good hitters for clutch situations.

We've outscored opponents 96 to 47 during the streak. Using the simple pythagorean formula, we would have been expected to go 16-4 with that differential. That strikes me as a totally routine difference; I would think that teams in big winning or losing streaks always deviate somewhat from what the run differentials would predict. I expected the deviation to be greater, because we've won almost half our games in the streak by one or two runs. I guess that's how streaks happen -- you play really well, and you get all the breaks going your way in close games. What maybe amazes me more is that only twice during the streak have we scored more than seven runs. We've averaged just under five runs per game during the streak; that's not going to get you to 18-2 very often. But giving up under two and a half runs per game definitely will get you there. What a freakish turnaround -- no Brewers team ever has been built around pitching. I do think this means we shouldn't be complacent about the quality of our offense, although getting Rickie back will be huge, as we've gotten squat from 2b in his absence. Is this sustainable? Of course not; no one plays .900 baseball, and we don't get another six games against the Astros. But I think it's as legitimate as hot streaks ever are.

Then are you defining "value" to mean only winning the division? What if a guy plays for a second-place team? A third-place team that wins 90 games? What if a team is leading the division, the MVP candidate plays at the same level all year, but the team's second and third best players get hurt and the team ends up finishing under .500? How do you draw the line to decide when a player qualifies for MVP? Also, you're using the word "statistically" in an odd way. Did anybody ever suggest that the MVP should be chosen in a way that doesn't focus on statistics? After all, wins and losses are statistics too. You're just arguing for a particular kind of statistical analysis, one in which the team's record trumps all other statistics. To put it another way, you want a "best player statistically award" too, but you just want to limit the award to the best player on the best team. The argument you're making obviously has a lot of supporters, and you're making a strong case for it. I've just never gotten the argument, because it seems to assume that its underlying logic is simple and straightforward, when really it's quite tricky and, I think, underdeveloped.

Of course you can. If someone (presumably an offensive player) is the best player in the league in a given year, he's the MVP and it doesn't matter how good his teammates are.Then it shouldn't be called Most Valuable Player, it should be called Best Statistical Player.But winning games has value whether a team wins 60 games or 110. This is one of the reasons that WARP is useful as a simple concept, whatever you think of any given version of WARP as a calculation. A "five win" player is going to put five wins in his team's column whether the team is in last place or first. Production is production; good production is valuable. So of course a player on a 100-loss team can be the most valuable player, if that player does more to help his team win games than any other player in the league. Besides, what's the alternative -- to give the MVP to a guy who doesn't deserve it because he's lucky enough to have great teammates?

Very nice.

You're right, FF -- opinions by definition can't be "wrong." I also agree with you that condescension is bad. But let's break this down: -- To call a 24 year-old 2b/3b, former organizational player of the year, who is putting up a 1.000 OPS in AAA a "AAA scrub" is an opinion, but it's an opinion that I think most reasonable people would agree requires strong support. To assert that opinion with no support borders, at best, on bad faith. -- The statement that "pitching in the PCL is horrific" is also an opinion, but it's a very broad, highly controversial claim, and again, to assert it with no support suggests that the asserter has no interest in constructive discussion. -- The statement that "every AAA scrub that comes up here . . . struggle(s) and falter(s)" is demonstrably false, as people have documented in this thread. The fact that the poster makes no effort to refute factual statements made in this thread that belie his claim demonstrates bad faith. -- The statement that "[g]uys hitting over .300 and over .400 OBP in AAA are a dime a dozen" is demonstrably false. -- The dismissive references to "some people" and "the masses" and "I told ya so" are themselves deliberately insulting and condescending. So IMHO this poster doesn't deserve constructive, engaged responses. Whether he deserves condescension is a matter of taste and tactics. For my money he's a troll, he deserves nothing, and from now on I'm ignoring him.

I didn't mean that I blame RR for bad Yuni, just that I don't credit him for good Yuni -- which probably no one does; I was just making a poor effort to come up with a contrasting example. You're right that, during the time when Yuni was killing the team, RR didn't really have other options, and at this point I doubt one manager in twenty would bench Yuni for Hairston tomorrow.