MJLiverock

I wouldn't call a .310 OBP hitting well. During this "hot streak" Ortiz is ranked 16th among SS with regular playing time, and basically at replacement level offensively. His D is ranked 9th and overall using WAR he is 16th in your sample dates. I'm not going to get too excited about a player's hot streak being replacement level. They need to find a bat somewhere but the corners seem more likely for availability and likelihood of being DH as well. I just don't see Ortiz as any great shakes and fear once his hot streak ends his O will completely offset his D and be right back at replacement level overall.

I'm skeptical until they can win a play off series or 2, too many times we've seen the team fail in the playoffs. I am skeptical of the average offense being able to get it done vs. playoff teams when the rotations are shortened and pressure is on. Looking at the Brewers compared to other playoff teams they have a similar number of guys with OPS or Rc+ above average but the Brewers guys are barely above average while others have 5+ guys with better offense than the Brewers best guys and the black hole of offense at SS isn't enough, even with good D Ortiz is still at replacement level for WAR because his O is so bad.

Notice the Brewers were pretty much the worst on this metric in comparison to the playoff teams of a year ago. Even though the r/g outperformed the regression line vs. ISO, the playoff teams pretty much all did but at a higher r/g rate. I don't feel the excitement or see the upside of some earlier posts here -- sure it makes sense to try to maximize the skills of the players but if those skills are limited to begin with - -i.e. no power and low runs per game it doesn't translate to a lot wins if elite pitching isn't coming alongside it to limit runs given up. There is no trophy for best r/g vs. ISO, all that matters is scoring runs and this article seems to point out how difficult the Brewers had it last year and going forward. Now that pitching is weakened it is hard to see the excitement of a marginally better offense from what wasn't all that great a year ago.

I have been a fan for a long time, remember watching the Brewers clinch the AL in Baltimore in '82 and running home from school to see how the afternoon WS games played out. Is that long enough for you? I also remember the countless times the next batch of prospects is going to get them over the hump, it is always next year. I choose reality - -I ask in what way does always giving up proven talent vs. paying them and getting back lottery tickets that if they hit just equal the talent you gave up provide evidence the team will be better? This is the genesis of the rearranging deck chairs, just like the Bucks of the Herb Kohl era. Nothing has raised the ceiling here and when Adames and Williams are let go they will again point to some down the road improvement only to have those players come of age as another set of Vets are let go- -how many times do we have to see this play out?

In what way does the future look better? How have they raised their ceiling from what was a top level pitching staff and mediocre offense leading to a fringe playoff team? If all goes well with the replacements I see nothing that makes the team any better than what they had and likely will get worse as they let more established vets go and roll the dice with prospects, eventually they will miss badly on the return and then the truly bad years kick in. My belief is we've seen the high water mark and nothing has raised the level.

Yep they had the best pitching of their entire history, managed to do well in a garbage division and bow out of the expanded playoffs with a whimper each time with well known offensive issues. This was the ceiling, they are trying to maybe strive to get close but my guess is they are a mid 80 win team for now, trending down but certainly not improving on where they were which is the whole point - -they just hope to be average or slightly above if all goes well and they hit on reclamation projects and young guys perform better earlier before they trade of established guys and rinse and repeat. Did Attansio not just spend money elsewhere vs. resigning his ace pitcher? Or did they trade the ace for what they hope can provide equal WAR at a lower cost. - - i.e. not improving. Arnold basically just said they aren't going to spend more and the new guys just made it so they can jettison Adames and Williams without paying them. Peralta is next. None of these moves raise the ceiling of the team, it is just hope of getting equal replacement value in the future so no forward upward progress occurs. They aren't going to get better without keeping some established guys and letting the young guys improve around them. The Cubs won't be terrible forever, STL won't either.

Sure it was inevitable that they wouldn't pay Burnes and would trade him. It's part of the discouraging spiral of being a Brewer fan. The owner has money to invest in other sporting ventures, just not the baseball team. The team under current ownership and baseball revenue rules isn't' going to be a serious contender and hearing Arnold's comments about spending and the actions of the team the past few years solidifies it. They built a great pitching staff and paired it with a mediocre offense with massive holes and were exposed by playoff teams after shooting for their bites at the apple as a bottom rung playoff team. Even this article touting Frelic and Tourang as bright spots (more sub 700 and maybe sub 600 OPS for Turang)? Now hoping to tread water and not really improving they will move forward. They gave up a pitcher who will likely be a 3-4 WAR guy going forward and acquired to players who will likely be 1-2 WAR guys, a slick fielding, sub 700 OPS SS and a reliever with possible command issues they can fix in the lab. They'll get rid of Adames now and removes his 3-4 WAR stats and Williams from the pen and get some prospects for down the road, the sum will be treading water in the next couple years, then the prospects from the Adames and Williams trade will arrive in time for Yelich to be gone, catching getting expensive and traded off, Peralta traded off and in the end the same overall mid level talent as a team with a few bright spots but too many holes to really be a serious WS contender. The team will say they are competing and the local media will tell us how great it is the strive for 84 wins and a wildcard shot in the expanded playoff format. In the end it is all just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. The next year or 2 will look like they'll sub in the 3-4 WAR from the 2 new guys give up 4-6 WAR in Williams and Adames and hope to get 2-3 WAR from Gasser and in the end stay Meh.

The strategy of trying to catch lightning in a bottle with players past their prime or attempting to be comeback player of the year is not a great way to build a serious contender. All the talk of bites and the apple mean nothing when the team refuses to improve a glaringly weak offense not matter how many times beat writers and some fans claim they are trying or the offense isn't bad. We all see it, complain about it, but in the end it doesn't seem to matter.

I cover stocks and work in the finance area and found it funny that much of the criticism leveled at Apple in 2012 and 2013 was related to not having a cheap phone and not having a bigger screen phone and now that both have come out the same bashers complain about the c and the bigger phone. The demand mix between the C and S last year skewed heavily toward to the S, so much that they were out of stock in many stores while the C filled the shelves. I think it sort of proved that Apple was right all along and that their customers aren't looking for the cheapest devices and will pay up. I wonder if this bigger size will result in a similar phenomenon. The bigger sizes tend to be more popular in Asia where the phablets are the one internet enabled device a customer may have, no owning a desktop/laptop/tablet/phone, etc. Apple doesn't sell the most smart phones, but they do make the most profits doing so. So many of the pure volume phones are very low end Android models that barely classify as a smart phone so the unit #'s of market share are skewed. It doesn't matter that some Android phones had NFC capabilities prior because there really wasn't anywhere to use it. The interesting thing about NFC being on the phones now makes it a viable payment system because merchants covet iPhone users because of their much higher spend rates vs. Android users so they will be willing to start down the path of accepting payments that way. Every year at Christmas the stats come out showing how high the percentage of $'s spent onlinie skews toward iPhone purchases vs. Android and the amount of $'s spent in the app store for Apple dwarfs the Android market. Notice how quickly Apple signed up major banks and credit card networks to work with ApplePay.

Monty, I often agree with many of your posts and believe you bring a good business perspective to the team management discussions but I gotta disagree with this post. You jump right to the Rays as some model the Brewers should be following. The Rays really haven't had some greater success than the Brewers, they made it to the WS and lost, they won't be sniffing the playoffs this year, much like the Brewers of last year. All it takes is one or two missed prospects on flipping guys like David Price or James Shields out and suddenly the talent level drops. It isn't like there are no risks or even that the method has worked greatly for the Rays or others like the A's. But I agree this argument has been hashed round and round. But I really wouldn't compare the Brewer's method to anything like the Yankees method. The Brewers tried to build from within and went out and signed FA's to fill in areas where their own system failed to produce - - Pitching, 3B. Suppan has been the only really bad one. I don't think the Brewers have ever signed the top free agent on the market. I was originally against the Lohse signing but he has produced better than I expected and now any decent starting pither is going to cost $12MM+ per year. I don't know that any of these signings of Wolf, Garza, Lohse, Ramirez, precluded anyone else that would have been better uses of the money. Fielder wasn't going to sign and the team was too good to just trade him away and defer any chance for playoffs even further down the line. And extending their own second tier guys? Like who Braun, Lucroy, Gomez, Gallardo? I would say those have worked pretty well. Even the Rays extended Longoria early. I think the Brewers have been more a of a hybrid of trying to build from within and supplement with FA's where necessary, but not breaking the bank and crippling the franchise to sign some vet to a 7 year $200MM deal. They haven't had a deep roster to trade from, which is more on the scouting and again highlights the risk of prospect development. I will give them credit for dealing Aoki for Smith and being willing to count on Davis in the outfield. As guys like Schaefer /Gindl/Green/Gamel have flamed out they got Parra for what may well be a future 4th OFer and had to fill in 3B with Ramirez. If everything had gone perfect, Sheets not getting hurt and netting picks, Sabathia's pick not getting knocked back and losing out on Trout, the Indians taking Green instead of Brantley, Gamel not blowing out his knee 2x, Salome not quitting, any of the many 1st round Pitchers taken actually being a stud, Hart not falling part ruining trade value and/or 1B possibilites, etc. things would look vastly different.

So what is this magical play for tomorrow formula supposed to yield? And who is doing it with great success? The A's? Twins? Rays? Royals? Pirates? haven't seen them win any WS of late and frankly have been hit or miss on being decent to poor with few occurrences of being great, pretty much like the Brewers of the last 6 or 7 years. These small market teams aren't going to be multi year WS winners and put together dynasties because eventually the flipping for prospects misses a few times, no matter how good the scouting department is, and suddenly an air pocket develops in the talent pool to make up for FA's that can't be kept. Remember how stacked the Brewers Huntsville team seemed a few years back? Have any of them made an impact at the ML level? Michael Brantley, I guess would be the best and he wasn't that highly thought of in comparison to the rest. I have no problem with any of the trades the Brewers have made to make a couple playoff pushes in the past 6 years. This team this year pushing like it has is a surprise to almost everyone, the collapse is disappointing, but it isn't like they mortgaged the future this year in anyway either. I can't imagine how ticked some of you would be if you were an A's fan and facing missing the playoffs after all the trades that supposedly made them a lock. I don't want to be continually playing for the future and watching the AA team hoping by some miracle all the hyped players make it the big leagues and produce. Sure it is fun when the big league team stinks and after two decades of seeing no improvement it is all anyone is left with. Sometimes I wonder if some fans have an obsession with delaying gratification with the desire to constantly be building for some future date that never comes or only if everything lines up perfectly then and only then consider it a go for it year. I think the minor league system is weak but it isn't as bad as after the last period of being a playoff or near caliber team of the early 80's when the ML roster was old and there was nothing coming. I am not against prospects or being judicious in spending money but I also don't believe every prospect traded away is damaging the long term success of the team or that every vet traded for a prospect would have netted the Brewers the next Adam Wainwright either: Partially because the scouting department has been missing a lot more than some of the better teams, and partially because baseball scouting in really hard and everyone misses a lot. Because of the low hit rates on prospects I don't to constantly place all my bets on them panning out at the expense of the near term higher chance of success of a good major league roster, which is why the go for it years have been fine in my view.

Exactly. If a nut job wants to shoot a bunch of people or blow up a bomb they can easily just do it to the line of people waiting to get into the stadium and kill/wound many just like if they were inside the stadium.

So is Jason Rogers a legit 3B or even a 1b solution for the Brewers? It seems I see his name in the box scores popping up a lot and looking at his stats he has hit at every level with a decent OBP, especially for Brewer prospects, with a bit of pop. He doesn't seem to get a lot of hype and isn't ranked too highly on the prospect rankings above. I don't know anything about the guy as a result but his stats caught my eye and wondered if anyone thinks he may be the future 3rd or 1b for the MLB team.

1) Make the DH universal in both leagues but tie the actual player in the DH role to the pitcher. If the pitcher is pulled the DH must be subbed for with a bench player or the new pitcher takes his spot in the lineup. I do like the NL strategy of dealing with the pitcher in the line up but can't stand watching pitchers flail uselessly while at bat. 2) Make Pete Rose eligible for the Hall of Fame. I understand the ban from baseball for gambling and want to keep any fear of impropriety involving fixing games away from the game but lets not pretend his on the field accomplishments don't exist or make him HoF worthy. 3) Getting busted for PED's does make a contract voidable but the list of PED's is narrowed and has lesser punishments for things like Aderrall, amphetimines, weird supplement issues, etc. Also some PED's are allowable under doctor supervision as treatment for injuries. 4) Write language to voters of the HoF to consider only the players on field accomplishments and numbers. I don't care if the guy is a saint or complete tool off the field or if they took PED's. If they were one of the best players of their generation they get in. No more moralizing about behavior or did or didn't a guy take PEDs. 5) Keep interleague play, each team in a division plays the exact same interleague schedule, usually against one specific corresponding division. Keep the All Star Game winner as WS home field advantage. Yes I know it is arbitrary but so is comparing records or teams playing different schedules in different leagues and so is just alternating it annually. I would allow players to re enter the game if it goes extra innings. The pitcher would always have a DH for them in the All Star game. After 12 innings the game moves to HR derby mode, 3 players from each team get 5 swings apiece, most combined HR wins. (Chris Berman is not allowed to comment)

For some reason today while thinking about Lackey becoming a Cardinal I immediately thought of Chris Carpenter. Not so much as a pitching style but as a guy who could easily assume the mantel of acting like a jerk, being holier than thou, and totally beloved by Cardinal fans as a "Classy guy and upholder of the unwritten rules." A guy who can find a beef with every other team but someone he's portrayed as they guy being wronged. http://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/02/06/after-bruising-years-lackey-ready-take-mound/nhKG5WSols2ANMt1GKtKUP/story.html I just hope he doesn't somehow find a couple year hot streak like you mentioned that seems to go along with the Sainthood.