Fear The Chorizo

I think a bigger question would be if Contreras would be open to a role where he'd be the primary DH/backup catcher on a roster, enabling him to have a longer career even if it meant devaluing his AAV by not being viewed as an everyday starting catcher. In that scenario, I'd entertain the Brewers giving him a longterm extension. If he wants to play everyday behind the plate then I'd trade him this or next offseason for the best prospect haul you can get. Then again, the Brewers could just play the arbitration game and have Contreras the next 3 seasons before watching him leave in free agency as a 30 yr old catcher who some other team will pay huge dollars to watch him decline....I'd honestly be just fine with that, too.

94-68, NL Central Champs The organization will continue to lean on its ability to get outs with underappreciated pitching depth in front of elite defense and a sneaky good offensive roster that doesn't have to rely on power to score enough runs to consistently be winning 6 out of every 10 games. If Yelich can stay healthy and Chourio takes the next step, there will be plenty of pop despite Adames cashing bigger paychecks out west. If healthy, I expect a breakout year of sorts for Mitchell, too. Until proven otherwise their model is a machine that grinds out more wins than the March sum of its parts always projects.

Cool read....i think another informative article could be written about actual value of contracts based on state/provincial tax hits players take for signing them. Having to pay Canadian taxes on half your games and then also be taxed for playing a good chunk of your road games in NY, Boston, Baltimore eats alot into takehome pay for Blue Jay players. They at least had Fla for one of their division road game states, but now who knows where the Rays will call home lo term after their crappy stadium got wrecked.

All of Chourio's minor league #s occurred while he was a teenager, starting with typical DSL time logged as a 17 yr old. PCA had all of 32 plate appearances in the minors as a teenager in his 1st minor league season right after getting drafted. I'm not saying PCA hasn't put up solid production when you look at counting stats as a minor leaguer - there's a reason he's already in MLB as a 23 yr old player. However, PCA's minor league hitting production shouldn't be compared to Chourio while hinting in any sort of way that PCA might develop into the same type of talent offensively. PCA has been up at MLB long enough where his age has less and less significance with room for hitting improvement at the game's highest level compared to his actual MLB service time logged, while Chourio OPS-d around 0.900 from June through the end of last season at 20 yrs old. And of course I'm a bit biased and want to be quick to react to what I feel is yet another severely overrated Cub prospect - I actually have felt this way about PCA since he initially broke into MLB in late 2023, and that was based on his less than pedestrian batted ball exit velo #s in the minor leagues. He has made some improvements in that department, but his chase rate remains a big problem. PCA's a great outfield defender who will have a good MLB career provided he avoids significant injuries that diminish him defensively - he just won't be able to hit enough to be viewed as a great all-around player.

I'm not saying PCA's ceiling is that of a 5th OF at the MLB level - he's just not going to be a perennial all star because he won't hit consistently enough to allow the rest of his elite tools to shine and be a player rival teams will hate facing for years and years. Sure, still just 23 - but he's now into his 3rd season where he's played at the MLB level, and at some point either that superstar switch has to light up or it's obvious it just isn't there in a guy to begin with. Also, it's not fair to any prospect to compare what they've done compared to what Chourio did in MLB last season as a 20 yr old...even with his first 1.5 months of struggles, what Chourio did was historic.

I like that comp, too. He's not an OMG watch out for this guy the next decade sort of prospect. Good tools, stellar defense, but he's just not going to hit enough at the MLB level to be a cornerstone offensive player

PCA is doing a great job thus far affirming my belief that spring training numbers are absolutely meaningless...and that's he's got alot more Corey Patterson to his game than most Cub fans begging for him to take a significant step forward at the MLB level will allow him to actually do it.

Cole basically could only give the Yankees a half season last year, too. Wasn't there some strangeness with his existing contract "opt out" only for the Yankees to basically keep him on his existing deal last November that included a hesitancy to give him an extension (and also a hesitancy by a Boras client to jump into free agency whenever he could)? And now he shows up to spring training with a bum elbow that needs surgery - must be nice to throw upper 90's whenever you're not rehabbing from surgery and get paid $30+ million for something a guy 10 years younger than you can give a team for 95% less cost on the field.

The Fed waited far too long to raise rates to try and get a handle on inflation, and even after they did they didn't raise them high enough to actually get prices headed back down - not to just keep slowly increasing, but to actually drop. Them starting those rate increases from a point of basically zero was still an after-affect of the last bad recession from the housing market crash. This goes back years, not months - and the market still has a significant amount of a bubble baked into it because of monetary policy that wasn't allowing a typical economic downturn to happen in financial markets. We are overdue for a recession that also includes a market correction that isn't self-imposed like the COVID shutdown was, and trying to soften or ease into/out of it just risks it being more painful than it otherwise would be for people who don't have yachts. My point doesn't discount the fact that imposing new tariffs of any kind from the US' perspective on foreign goods is impacting the markets right now - especially until there's some sort of certainty on what those will look like in the long run. Kind of the same way that tariffs imposed on US goods by other countries in the long term had been baked into the global economy. Fundamentals of the economy are still really solid, which is why the weird threat of making trees from Canada or bottles of red from France cost alot more to get through customs and into the US marketplace isn't going to be a sustained anchor on what the markets do or don't do. The uncertainty of what may or may not come next is the biggest drag - but once that does clear up and if we wind up seeing a better overall economic playing field for US goods to compete in because of it, stock prices will bounce right back up the other direction.

Corrections and extended bear markets inevitably happen with the market even when every single economic lever is is pulled in the direction to try and avoid them at the expense of the rest of the economy. The fact things are so volatile and swing so wildly based on what anybody is saying points to how long those levers were left unchanged in effort to avoid natural market swings that would more accurately mirror what the rest of the US economy has been feeling for years. Despite the shock of the last few weeks of a market swing down, it's a blip when you look at market performance over the past 5 years - it feels like a profit taking cycle before all of a sudden a whole bunch of capital gets dumped back into the market and we're going the other direction again.

The #'s absolutely bear it out - without unicorn Ohtani in the NL, Chourio was the NL MVP the last 4 months of the season....as a 20 yr old

Trying to time the market based on politics is too risky for my investing stomach, regardless of party - if all it takes is one trade agreement announcement or actual concrete policy going into effect to restore enough certainty for an index to recoup a month of losses in one day (or lose a month of gains), it's too late to try and either take cash back out from under your mattress or grab a wheelbarrow and take it out of funds. More often than not, staying in the market and riding whatever happens out with continued investment winds up being the best option. I think the bigger concern is banks trying to figure out how to get out from under massive commercial real estate losses that are continuing to mount without it leaking into the housing market. Everything that's happening in D.C. right now is little more than reshuffling deck chairs with the markets compared to what would happen if banks start going under again. All that being said, it's less than an ideal time to be less than a few years from retirement and wonder what to do to best protect and continue growing that nest egg. That has been the case for several years not because market uncertainty, but persistently increasing prices on everything across the board. However, as nate indicated even a slipping market is a good opportunity to make some money in the long run.

I've said it in other threads - if Garret Mitchell can find a way to stay healthy, he's capable of putting up a handful of prime seasons in the 30/30, approaching 40/40 club and playing gold glove caliber defense.

I actually think it's gotten alot of fanfare....and what is so shocking is the public sector and associated companies heavily reliant on govt contracts have been allowed to balloon to the level they have under both political party administrations where it's acceptable to run multi trillion dollar deficits, continue printing money, and then act like we don't know why things cost so much. The budget deficits are about alot more than government employee payrolls, but in the absence of reasonable reforms to entitlement programs that would require cooperative legislation, slashing the beauracracy while daylighting some of the nonsense receiving tax dollars is the next best thing to do at the moment to shake things up in the public sector. Mass layoffs will always have tough stories for individuals who were cut, both public and private sector. Most of the time it's not about those people themselves not doing effective work in the roles they were in, it's that the roles they were in didn't provide enough value to a project, program, or activity to justify its cost. The public sector can't be allowed to be sheltered from those type of staffing resets, which is exactly what this is. Quality employees/people who are let go by employers find a way to land on their feet and ultimately their careers benefit from these type of job upheavals, too.

The Dodgers aren't the only team with deferrerals, yes, but they are the only team with the quantity of deferrals they currently have, headlined by a guy getting paid $2m of his $70M salary now and still fielding a real dollars 2025 payroll over $300M. The time to make changes was 1994, yes...but the next time to make changes is this upcoming cba negotiation. And I'd be just fine with a missed season or two to get the right changes made. I'd also add that it would be pretty easy as part of the next cba round for mlb to reimburse deferred money deals to teams worried about how they'd find a way to ever finance them ( in the dodgers' case im pretty sure theyd be able to find the spare change layong around), provided the deferred contract garbage ends in the new cba.

The amount of revenue the Dodgers are getting from Japan and Asia for basically having all their best players is most likely comparable to their annual stateside TV deal...they are the farthest team from going bankrupt no matter what changes get made to a future CBA. They are like a cartel running out of room to put all the money coming in

MLB has to get broadcast/TV revenue sharing squared away. As a fan of the smallest market team in baseball, I'd be OK with a new CBA that doesn't include a salary cap or luxury tax structure, includes a $100m salary floor, and fully shares broadcast revenue across the league. Big market teams will still have payroll advantages but the current deferred money advantage the Dodgers have baked into their revenue stream to skirt even crazier luxury tax penalties would be significantly impacted. Right now, it's honestly like mlb has built in relegation and there's no chance a handful of huge market clubs don't make the playoffs every year. In the playoffs anything can happen for baseball, but when roughly 25 teams besides the huge market teams who win divisions annually are vying for 7 mostly wildcard spots that wind up opening with best of 3 game series to even reach the division series round, it's getting too predictable. Mainly, this is a Dodgers problem....

With the current economic disparity in baseball, I don't see why Attanasio's comments should be viewed negatively at all. He doesn't even own more than half of the Brewers, the smallest market in all of mlb, and people are ticked he isn't trying to spend $40m more on payroll? What's the point when any larger market team could suddenly decide to spend $80m more much more easily and outbid them for players they may be targeting? Until mlb does something to actually even the playing field between a team getting close to $350m annually for their games being televised and a team getting $20m annually, I have zero problem with Mark A. being as open and honest about what the Brewers can and can't do in terms of player payroll.

I think people underestimate how much of a grind a MLB regular season is, particularly for younger players who haven't been through it. The idea of Frelick being 25lbs heavier now that he was at the end of last season isn't very far-fetched considering he probably dropped weight over the course of the season from where he was entering Spring Training in 2024. Knowing MMA contestants routinely are able to gain a couple dozen pounds in a few days between weigh ins and the actual fights doesn't make putting on 25 lbs seem that impossible. Properly hydrating your existing frame compared to it being in a mildly dehydrated or fatigued state is typically good for 10+lbs on a normal frame, too.

I don't think Chourio was moved too fast at all - expecting any prospect/young player, no matter how talented, to never have any extended stretch of struggles adapting to a new league (particularly MLB) is unrealistic. Had Chourio continued struggling through the AS Break and wound up finishing last season in AAA instead of putting up borderline MVP-caliber production from July - September in Milwaukee, then yeah I'd say his Opening Day promotion as a 20-yr old was probably a bit too hasty. Start Made at A ball stateside this season and let his performance dictate his progression the same way Chourio's did. It wasn't until Chourio's 2nd MiLB season where many people started going "OMG!!!" when he started destroying A+ and AA pitching as a 19 yr old. Made won't turn 18 until May of this year.

Despite their occasional disfunction, the Eagles were by far the most talented roster heading into the playoffs (Lions would've been in that conversation if not for all their injureis) - with good gameplans and efficient play from Hurts, they proved just that.

The Eagles are just better....way better

Also, last i checked trees grow in other places besides Canada...and if the US was ever truly pinched by a group of countries economically it has plenty of its own resources and manufacturing capacity over time to start drawing from to help offset any pain for long enough to cripple the other countries first. Other countries depend on the US to buy both raw materials and finished goods far more than the US needs specific countries to provide those items at the cheapest possible cost. That's why these tariff threats work to at least get other govt leaders to the table to discuss issues related to trade, and frankly completely unrelated issues.

Which is exactly what it is - and it's also way too soon to assume what's being done at present is economically damaging.

For Contreras, it guarantees him more $ this season than what he would have gotten with a losing arby case, and also guarantees a nice pay bump aligning with what he would be valued at assuming another all star caliber 2025 season - if he gets hurt in May he's still guaranteed a 2026 salary based on his 2024 production. For the Brewers it gives them cost certainty both this year and more importantly next, when other teams that might be looking to trade for him will now know exactly what his 2026 salary will be.