DuWayne Steurer

Just a few days after calling out the Rays for being cheap, Blake Snell signs a 5 year, 50 million dollar extension that buys out the first year of his free agency, and lets him become a free agent in his age 30 season. He gets a nice payday, and if he continues to be dominant he has a chance to Jackpot one more time.

Its arguable the aav is "below market value" but ahhh.. Lets look at a few things here Nobody knows what Trouts value will be when he's 39. Its the biggest contract in mlb (and sports) history. It's possible he could have gotten more but at that point it seems like youre just digging change outta the couch.

Badgers get a 5 seed, and a favorable draw. I like their chances of getting to the sweet 16. Or getting bumped in the first round. Virginia is beatable in the round of 16. The play a style that doesn't necessarily favor the Badgers, but suits UW's style. Let's see if they can get that far....

They could be better at contesting shots, and it absolutely does hurt them against a team that has a lot of good shooters. That being said they're 52-18, and they have the best record in the league. On most nights, they have the firepower to outscore even good teams. That's their strategy, and it works. They have the best defensive rating in the league. That's not a mirage. That's something they've accomplished over 70 games. For all the talk that "the Bucks will get killed in the playoff" the Bucks are 9-4 vs Toronto, Boston, Philly, and Indiana, the teams that have any real chance of challenging them in the Eastern Conference.

Yeah, Mirotic isnt fitting in yet. Especially with Brogdon being out now, hope he finds some rhythm and a role before the playoffs start.

Embiid shooting 13 threes is exactly what you want. He shot 4 of 13 from 3. Thats less than a point per possession when hes chucking from deep. If he's putting the ball up from range that often the defense is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. The Bucks got beat on the boards, shot poorly most of the game, and didn't get much scoring from any one other than Giannis until they were playing from too far behind.

Language please....

The Badgers will be a 5 or 6 seed. They would go further in the nit but nobody dreams of winning an nit title.

According to ESPN, that was the first time in NBA history that a team came back from 20 points down at the half and won a game by 15 points on the road

Exactly. Bigger/better strike zone, and shorten pitching change times. This three batter minimum nonsense doesn't help the game. Can't wait for a pitcher to come in, get in trouble, have to muddle through an extra batter or two (making him unavailable to pitch the next day), and then have an even worse pitcher come in to relieve him. Great stuff. I am optimistic that this rule will never see the field. Hopefully, it will get negotiated away for something less stupid, and something the players actually agree to. Which is why this nonsense won't even speed up the game. Managers don't pull a pitcher just for fun. It's because hes either struggling or about to face a horrible match-up. Williams starts the 8th in a 3-1 lead. Walks first rh hitter, walks 2nd rh hitter. LH on deck. Disaster waiting to happen. Force him to stay in the game for another batter and that inning could last a half hour. One example, but plenty of similar situations arise. Its stuff like that, not eliminating the loogy. If youve noticed, that role is dying off anyhow. Brewers dont have one, didnt have one last year. Teams want more outs from a reliever, not less. But it just makes strategic sense that an outing will often wrap around part of one inning and the next, based on lineup. This rule takes away a manager's ability to manage. A side effect is burning out your late inning guys, because you cant risk a late inning trying to sneak by with a Barnes or Williams. Finally, Ive never bought the whole argument of "young people will tune in if the game is shorter." Its not an action sport, and will never appeal to masses of young people. Theres barely any baseball diamonds around anywhere, kids dont play baseball. Thats where the problem starts. It will appeal to analytical types, except theyre taking the strategy out of the game. Having more to do, see, eat, drink at the ballpark will draw the millennials too, big reason why Miller Park is popular, even before last season. Nascar and other sports tried to appeal to the masses and failed miserably by driving away their core fans. NFL is getting close to that, if not for the off the charts interest in fantasy football. So lets try this. Keep baseball.....baseball. Then promote it, promote fantasy leagues, educate fans on the game, continue to innovate the game day experience. Work on bringing baseball back to the youth level. What wont work? Stupid rule changes and cutting commercial breaks by 5 seconds. Now get off my lawn! This here is an excellent point. When you look at the chart posted on MLB.com and see that on average, most teams did around 30 mid-inning pitching changes last year on pitchers that faced less than three batters (eg, about one per team per week), you can kind of then leap to the conclusion that pitchers facing less than three batters isn't the driving force behind long game times. It's the guys stepping out of the box and unstrapping their batting gloves three times when they haven't even swung (Braun, I'm looking at you). Pitchers taking 30 seconds between pitches. THESE are the drivers of long game times. Yes, Joe Maddon doing 6 pitching changes in an inning is annoying, but how many times does that happen? THATS NOT the driver of long game times. Watch a Ryan Braun at bat. Watch a Brandon Belt at bat. Or a Hunter Pence at bat. Watching Hunter Pence hit nearly gives me anxiety attacks, waiting for something to actually happen. This rule change is doing something to make people happy. "YAY, shorter game times!" This will probably shave about 90 seconds off of the average game time, if even that. What it's going to do is force managers into uncomfortable strategic decisions, and possibly burn relievers out. I don't care if MLB wants shorter games, but this isn't going to achieve that. THis isn't even going to come close to achieving that. And as previous poster said, in the event that they change a ton of rules, and make players play a fundamentally different game, and start playing in 2 1/2 hours instead of 3 hours, are a bunch of people going to suddenly say "YES! Baseball, I never realized how cool and interesting and exciting baseball is!" Baseball is STILL going to be a sport that is comprised over 90% of the time of down time and waiting and watching mostly nothing happening. THat's the core of it. That will never change, and if THAT changes, then it's not baseball anymore. Who are we trying to appeal to at that point?

While I hate this rule change, this isn't "the Brewers were successful so let's make a rule to stop them from being successful" rule change. That's silly and in no way a reality. The Brewers had a great bullpen, and yes, it will change the way Counsell will manage, and it sucks, but they certainly aren't the only team to do this. The Brewers still averaged over 5 IP per start last year, even factoring in the way he managed in September, and Hader, Jeffress, and Knebel aren't one batter guys. I still think this is stupid. If you want to speed up the game, speed it up, don't make fundamental changes to the way it is played.

Ranking yelich 7th is fine. He's been elite for half of one season in his career. Is that who he is? I think we will all still be pretty happy going forward if all we actually have is the 7th best player in mlb.

The NBA reality, as many other posters have already pointed out, is either spend the money on your FA-to-be (Middleton) or don't spend it all. The Bucks owners aren't going to go bankrupt if they spend the money on Middleton, so the question that needs to be asked and answered is this. In the next 2 to 5-ish years, do the Bucks have a reasonable in-house replacement for Middleton, AND the bench? Is one of Sterling Brown/DJ Wilson/Divincenzo, or someone else ready or ready in the next few years to play Middleton's role, as good as Middleton does? Wilson has shown flashes of potential, but he's not at that level yet. Divincenzo doesn't have Mid's length and size, and I just don't think he's ever going to be a "do everything" 17-20 ppg guy who can be the 2nd scoring option to G. Sterling Brown could be that guy, but I don't want to bet on it. And part two to this question becomes, when you (potentially) move DJ Wilson or Sterling Brown into Middleton's spot, you exponentially reduce the strength of the bench. As has already been pointed out repeatedly, if the Bucks don't extend Middleton, they can't go out and just sign "someone else". The NBA just doesn't work that way. I'm not advocating Middleton as a max contract guy, but he's at worst, the third best player on the team. I've been pretty critical of his play of late, but he's just not replaceable by Snell or Wilson. That's a big dropoff in play. Mids creates his own shot, he creates shots for others, is still capable of playing above average D (though he doesn't always do it), rebounds and is still just 27.

If this is something people want, lets open a discussion on the proper forum

+1 Seeing lot's of "+1's" and "this" quotes lately. Just a reminder in the fan forum etiquette section that we want to steer away from these kinds of posts. Thanks For example, messages that say nothing beyond "I agree," "Ditto," etc., add nothing to a discussion and are candidates to be hidden by moderators. Don't chime in on every thread just because you can; instead, pick your spots for posting, and add something back into the site. Less can be more.

Omg Snell with the crossover ANKLE BREAKER!!!!! Bucks put the end of that road trip behind them

I mean, Middleton has been playing some bad hoops of late but bad khris middleton is still worlds better than Tony Snell.

I think we need to scale back the tone here. Let's start playing nice guys or threads are going to get locked and people are going to get warnings and bans real quick. It's real easy to share opinions and thoughts, and even disagree with others without this condescension. I had Tommy John surgery once on a ruined elbow, that doesn't make me an expert. I'm not a surgeon, I'm an IT guy

Its weird to me that he was "only" 61 years old. Feels like he has been around forever. Rip.

Well, if Middleton just has a bad night, not a absolutely horrible night, they win easily. You can always look at other plays, but I WOULD put the losses the last two games on Middleton. Sorry but I can't agree with that. Mirotic was horrible last night too. And Giannis had 6 turnovers and he fouled out. The Bucks should easily be able to overcome a horrible shooting night by one guy but no one else picked up the slack. At the end of the day, they gave up 40+ points to Utah in the 4th and 38 points to the friggin Suns in the 4th. That doesn't have much to do with bad shooting on the other end. Earlier in the season Lopez went 0-12 from 3, and I said "stop shooting!". Apparently, even when guys are having off nights, Bud wants them to keep putting it up. My complaint then wouldn't be so much that someone has an off night (both Mirotic and Middleton shot horribly last night) it's that Middleton's shot selection and defense (just standing out on the perimeter) contributed a lot more to the loss than just "bad shooting". If Bud wants them to just shoot through bad nights, ok.. I get that. I might not completely agree with it, but I see his point. Eventually those shots are gonna fall. but Mids is just playing bad basketball right now. The rest of the team didn't play GREAT, but most of it was just a bad shooting night, and probably the team being tired playing 3 games in 4 nights on a west coast swing. It is what it is, but when Mids is the defacto "2nd best player" on your team, I just feel like we're expecting more out of him, and rightly so. If he wants to be a max contract guy, he should play like it, and right now (and a lot of this season) he really hasn't been a guy I would see having that value.

Saying that someone stole a candybar in broad daylight is not the same as saying "that guy has an extra 2 mm of fat and I don't understand why no one else can see it". When absolutely no one else is agreeing with this point, obviously no one else is seeing it.

Could just be that he had a couple of really bad games....

certainly not.. but Middleton's play of late has been pretty terrible. Midds was a -18 tonight. Generally I hate +/- because that just doesn't tell a whole story. I've seen games where the Bucks win by 15, and Giannis has a negative, and Tony Snell played 15 minutes and has a +23, and has 0's across his box score. Middleton is just taking poor, contested shots lately, rushing shots, and his defense has been atrocious. He's standing around the perimeter and just letting guys run past him. He's gotta get more involved on the other end of the court. Losing to the Suns is a team effort, but if we're giving out individual grades, I'm looking at Middleton first and giving him a solid F.

Middleton was playing some really crappy basketball in the 4th quarter of the Utah game. Say what you want about the guards being unavailable or everyone being gassed, but they were up 17 with 7 to go, and Middleton was just making some really bad basketball decisions, and he played like absolute crap again tonight. It's not just about missing shots, it's about poor shot selection, rushing shots, not making any effort at ball movement and finding an open shooter or a cutter... he's just going up the floor and launching.

The Packers are bad. They won 6 games with a hof qb and now have a new coach that we don't know a lot about yet. They could win the division... Or they could go 6 and 10. The Bucks realistically could be in the NBA finals a few months from now as slight underdogs but with home court advantage. I'm picking Bucks.