igor67

Gammons new article highlighting the dearth of power bats out there in general makes Hart look a fair bit more attractive. Sure the health is an issue, but he does have a pretty solid track record wen it comes to knocking it out of the park.

Pulling in homeruns maybe too rare of an event to find reliable trends, but 5 really is an incredible number for a season. Crediting him with 8 runs saved on those plays alone almost seems conservative.

I do look the wildcard format a lot now. Despite the playoff teams being pretty well known for a while no one took it easy in September. This format gives more teams a chance without going crazy and clearly rewards excellence in the regular season. A wildcard winning the World Series should be a once a decade occurrence.

Roster decisions of this sort are more involved then mentioned so far. One has to factor in the likelihood of losing the player, which presumably is lower at this point in the season. The crunch caused in the near future by other players who would be added in the offseason. The quirky fact that we actually played nearly all of our 40- man this year, and with only a couple of exceptions all of them out played Gamel. The money difference is pretty small, it is not 1 million dollars at best it is the difference between his salary and the league minimum which would be half that, still it is something. Similarly the risk of losing Gamel is offset by the probability of finding a similar guy floating around who needs a chance. I was rooting for the guy, but he know profiles as a waiver wire guy. Fransisco is merely one example. I wouldn't bet on either one being terribly useful next year at this point, but that kind of is the idea. I can't bemoan this as a loss of talent, when we have a lot of other guys who are at least producing something and/or have a better chance of producing something soon. Let's take what tiny sliver of roster flexibility this provides work through the offseason, and then grab the best lottery tickets that might plausibly fill out the roster at the end instead of holding spots for lottery tickets.

I would think that given the clear consequences proving bad intent would be pretty straightforward. There is a clearly established negative consequence for using that Clark knew.

The fact that this was mentioned publicly at all is a testament to how awesome Scooter played this year. And the defensive improvement is a big part of that. You have to figure that the Brewers were seeing that and figuring even if both players regressed toward career norms Scooter's D looked like a potent tie breaker. Not saying it was all world or anything, but clearly its an upgrade on Weeks.

I'd be inclined to option Schaffer back down and see if he can apply some of those major league lessons with some regular playing time. Aoki and Gindl is a pretty nice pair of hitters coming off the bench. Definitely some versatility as well to do defensive subbing if you want. Davis and Braun in the line-up full time would go a long way towards restoring the power outage.

I fully expect the Nats to have a few more good seasons, they will probably even make it look better than the Brewers did in their window because of more resources. I picked on the Nats to highlight the fact that regardless of how awesome you look on paper bad luck can still strike and has to be accounted for when trying to realistically assess how well these various strategies will work. The list of teams 'going young' is very long. Plenty long enough that there is always a new darling every year to point to if people want to justify their belief in the strategy, but the history is pretty clear that building for a window does not guarantee any kind of sustained success. If one takes a look at Oakland again they very much seem to be built around the method I'm talking about, build a solidish roster with individually good moves and catch the high point every now and again. Team sustainability strikes me as more important than player sustainability. Given Melvin's documented success in trading for players, I don't see why the Brewers can't have generally competitive teams for another 5 years and grab another couple of playoff births.

I'd quibble Barney an say that the strategy is more of Sustainable intermittent success. I understand the preference some have to attempt to stink long enough to to accumulate a mass of talent and have the best shot at winning the World Series. Even though history is not kind to the success of this philosophy (one must accept the success of Tampa along with the failure of the Nats at this strategy), it is not a terrible plan on the face of it. I can also appreciate that there is room for divergent opinions on draft and development strategy. The rhetoric about failure and the intolerability of philosophical differences is over the top far too often. If one has a large amount of resources it is possible to build a talent pile big enough to ride out most down years with only the ultrarare anomalies (Last year's Red sox). Mid or lower resource teams using that strategy have to hope their peak talent windows coincide with average or better luck or the entire development cycle can be wasted (This years Nats, though they may have enough resources to keep things going). Even with better info and such luck factors can easily alter a teams win total by 10 in any given year. In that vein and the very random nature of the playoffs shooting for above average talent (85-88 wins) every year and grabbing playoff spots in good years, being competitive into September most years, and having the down year every once in awhile seems reasonable enough to not be worthy of venom. I categorize that as sustainable, particularly in the current environment because the over valuing of prospects makes it possible to patch holes as they emerge (aka acting on the most recent information) in a cost effective way.

In terms of being a chance to pick up value trading Aoki makes sense, but Aoki would be a better 5th OF than Schaffer at this point so I agree we shouldn't be so determined to trade him that we just take a random guy.

I like Gindl more as the 4th OF. The track record is very consistent, but that also works against him at this point when you put that together with the scouting and tools. There is little reason to think that at his peak he would post anything much over about an .820 OPS. Given reasonable playing time he is unlikely to do worse than a .750 OPS either. Combined with good defense that's a pretty valuable 4th OF, and in this lower offense era wouldn't even be horrible as a starter. With Davis though he has shown enough you really have to see where he can settle in as a player. With the defensive difference I could see some scenarios where Gindl ends up as the better player overall, but Davis could be a .900 OPS guys and you have to give that a shot.

That does suggest (indirectly) that the Brewers preferred the idea of working closely with D'vo on some parts of his game rather than sending him off against high level competition. I can see why they would prefer that environment.

The ghost of LaRussa lives, I guess the Cards really did need an Ax man.

Monty is pretty much dead-on. We can count on 1 surprise move probably, Melvin seems to be pretty good at pulling one of those that no one sees coming. He'll grab a few low priced FAs and one of those will stick as well. Aramis, Weeks, and Gallardo all seem like candidates for the surprise move its the trading partner and return that people will miss-on.

My upside prediction for Davis would be Matt Stairs. The nice part is we could potentially have him for the really good part of his career

I'm really very curious as to the logic for Haniger over D'Vo. Mitch is on track development wise, depending on how one reads his Brevard performance. Especially since he just completed a full minor league season for the first time. I could see some possible reasons for not giving D'Vo the chance to get more ABs against top level competition I'd just love to know what they are instead of guessing.

Even if both were having down years snagging a couple of teams 5th best prospects for relief pitchers is pretty good value.

Random thought, though it could be a bit too cute maybe they didn't send Richardson to the Fall League thinking that if he kept hitting they would have to protect him this winter.

Random thought, though it could be a bit too cute maybe they didn't send Richardson to the Fall League thinking that if he kept hitting they would have to protect him this winter.

Really surprised at no D'vo

Schaffer should be the most concerned at this point. Other than handedness, which he doesn't help with an OF of Davis, Gomez, and Braun (its unlikely that they would all pull it off, but an all .900 OPS performance is possible with that group) with Aoki the 4th OF and Gindl 5th looks pretty good. And the other Davis is doing enough that Logan might not even be the first call-up.

Regardless of how they turn out I like the idea of calling them Seid's Folly

I think your over simplifying how scouts have felt about Gennet in the past Rickey. A number including Sickels were fairly high on him because of the hit tool, the excitement declined over the last couple of years because he hadn't seemed to improve beyond what he did back then and stat wise then his number kept dropping.

There is some validity to the Fiers comp, but hitting lines tend to track into the majors more reliably. AAA repeaters (which doesn't apply to Davis) can sometimes pick-up tricks to inflate their batting lines beyond what they can do in the majors. I fully expect Davis to cool off, but cooling off looks more like an above average bat right now with a chance he could be a .900 OPS guy. Scooter is a bit of a different case for a couple of reasons. 1) He is quite a bit younger than Davis and showing unexpected performance in the latest developing tool, power. In that sense there is some plausibility to the development. On the other hand if you combine his MLB and AAA stat lines for the year the overall totals are consistent with his A ball lines. For me I'd put it in the category of him having shown enough power to answer the question of whether or not he will have enough pop to keep pitchers honest. Overall I'm still think he's probably about a league average bat at 2nd, but I could see him becoming a bit more than that now.

I'll follow up RoCo and add onto your post by saying that most people are so mad at him that any action he took was largely irrelevant at this point. The wordsmithing analysis of the text demonstrates this very clearly. If your mad at him that's fine I get it, but at least recognize that and acknowledge the silliness of expecting any kind of verbal or written statement from a guy your mad at for lying to you will make it better. Perhaps if we put him in stocks at third base and Mark gave out another $10 food voucher for people to throw at him?