igor67

I think Joey and mothership are making essentially the same point. I can only think of maybe one time this year where an opponent has tried to bun against a shift on us. I think by and large baseball hitters particularly the big swing lefties are so regimented in their approach that they are deathly afraid of changing for 1 AB for fear of messing themselves up for weeks afterward. On the other hand I imagine that Gwynn the elder would salivate at the thought of hitting against a shift, but his approach was always much more reacting to the pitcher than looking for the right pitch.

It's a hard thing to get a handle on statistically because defensive stats are about 20 years behind our understanding of offensive stats. Still from what I've seen the Brewers have a mediocre defensive team, which statistically looks very bad on certain metrics that tend to measure "normal" plays, but also makes a high number of "not normal" plays. On balance it seems to have had some slight positive affect, but it's use has been so frequent that it is easy for people to point to the plays were it doesn't work and latch onto that image instead of trying to look at the broader statistical trend.

I think it's noteworthy just because it's been awhile since I can remember any teams making substantial waiver claims in August for years. I'll proceed to open up a can of worms and ask if some other team claimed Suppan to try and block would you let him go? Would you wait until later in August when Sheets was closer to waive him and hope?

The obvious problem here is that there were just as many strong opinions 6-8 weeks ago that things were pretty much wrapped up with our big lead. Even if the Cubs did start playing better. If you look at as much data as you can the race really looks a lot more like a coin flip. This goes back to some of those late April and early May columns were the JS was saying most Brewer fans were waiting expecting the team to nosedive. Well that secret fear appears to be realized. The difference still exists though that this is a much better team than the previous decade of collapsers ever was.

In many ways that is the essential question of this trade do Linebrink's stats reflect a good reliever having one of those rare bad streaks and causing people to write him off or is it really the sign that his day in the sun is coming to an end? I don't see why the drafts picks would be a worse bet than the group of players. Inman was a 3rd rounder and the rest all lower. None has really advanced so far through the minors that you can just point out that they have beat the odds. A 1st rounder in the second half of round 1 and a supplemental pick are some pretty good spots to pick up real talent.

I think most accurately Johan iggest complaint i not with resigning players. It has been that in the last 7 or so years of the Twins respectability they have only made one trade at the deadline of any consequence Shannon Stewart. I can't particularly think of any great offseason moves either. But at times when they have had excellent prospect depth they have stead fastly hung onto Designated Line-up Stooges like Luis Rivas and Christian Guzman. It's one thing to give a prospect sometime but these guys stunk it it up offensively with no great glove for the better part of their 6 pre-arby years. If i tried I could probably come up with some other examples, but by and large Ryan has worshiped at the altar of Pat Gillick and really missed some low hanging fruit type opportunities to field a better ball club.

Well things certainly make a lot more sense now. Reading between the lines I think it's clear that the primary reason Gwynn was acceptable to the Rangers was not long lasting love (my previous reading of the evidence), but rather that the Brewers had the best offer on the table that couldn't get vetoed. Further the speculation that Gagne might not grant picks (which makes sense with the injury lost year) means he is practically worthless to hold onto. Now Gagne's agent picks up on the rumors and takes a look and realizes that not closing in Boston is still probably a lot better payoff than not closing in Milwaukee and signals his client might be willing to do that if properly compensated.

Well I've been in general a fan of this strategy since years ago when we traded for Matt Kinney. Now Matt Kinney may have stunk, but he proved my point at the time. He was a pitching possible who had some stuff, but hadn't translated that into results. We traded him straight up for an A baller at the time who had some stuff, but nothing to knock your socks off. I can't seem to find him in the transactions file. Anyway my comment at the time was essentially that 3 years down the road our best hope was for our current pitching prospect to turn into Matt Kinney (who at that point had relatively few chances to pitch at the MLB level). Well the prospect never got above AAA. Long way of saying that if you can avoid trading aware your really rare talented pitchers, and stick to doing a quality major league pitcher for an A ball prospect with upside you'll make out like a bandit. Now giving those young pitchers away 3 at a time on the other hand is a good way to strip down the system pretty fast.

Point 1 yes I would put him in LF Point 2 he's played 3rd and OF before in the major leagues Point 3 current defensive records indicate we are getting average at best LF defense so any down grade while he would have adjusted is not likely to be overwhelming. Point 4 I specifically stated that the valuation of Tony Gwynn was from Texas point of view. I find it ludicrous myself, but the evidence that he would be a centerpiece player for Gagne or Otisukura indicates they value him much higher than that.

Just wanted to throw this out there since people keep bring up the record since being 24-10. Essentially the statistical problem is known as selective end points. And if you instead choose to parse the Brewers record month by month. You find that they had a .500 or better record every month except July. Yes they were well above .500 in June 7 games over if I remember correctly. That doesn't change the overall record, but I think it highlights how dangerous this notion of thinking we've been sliding since a hot start truly is. It also pays to mention how many road games we played in July. You can't exactly go cause and effect with the home vs. road records but it kind of confounds your thinking about what you should expect for this home stand.

I hate to go clancy on a point, but this continued trade speculation that Gwynn is a centerpiece to this deal really really makes me think that Gwynn plus the package for Linebrink would have been competitive with the Braves offer for Texeiria at least in the minds of Texas. I'm incline to think that this would have helped the team more than adding Gagne and Linebrink personally.

I don't know about LaPorta I mean that infinite K to walk ratio in the Pioneer league pretty much screams free swinger. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif

Parra the beast!

I'm a big Hardy believer, but definitely agree that the extra days off are probably needed especially because he's still kind of sputtering along at the plate. Hitting second with the platoon advantage I really don't mind Counsell. He is uncanny at drawing walks out of otherwise good pitchers. I think if there's one spot in the order you can afford to just have a guy get on base it's in front of Braun and Prince. And of Course Braun is a stud.

Perhaps we should take a moment to reflect on the irony of conflating small ball and OBP. Some where Billy Beane has to be laughing at it all.

Yeah I have to agree with Joe the grounds for winning a lawsuit are pretty shaky and I can't imagine you'd be in line for any sort of significant damages. But I think you are ethically obligated for the sake of other patients to make a report to the state medical board.

My gut reaction is that 1) I probably should have precious little problem watching the weasel who ran taking the fall for the entire thing. 2) It doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense that he should. Further thinking makes the issue a lot cloudier in terms of cause and effect. If the driver had crashed into a news van clearly he should be culpable right? On the other hand let's say a person falls out a window a long the path of said chase it too seems fishy that that could be connected. Of course someone might argue that he was looking out the window at the noise and it caused him to fall. The law itself makes sense because it hammers home the central point that if you are doing something stupid people can easily get hurt and throwing all the blame on that person ups the stakes to hopefully remind people of this.

It sure looks like Jeffress got zero bullpen help. I would advocate for someone else for the top spot or two until he's made it a little farther along personally. LaPorta and Gamel have that huge offensive upside that could justify putting them ahead of Jeremy's awesome tools.

I'm not saying that small ball is a negative. On the contrary I think it is very useful to be able to get sac flies with runners on third. Which is one thing perhaps to be taken out of the stats. You would think with all the fly balls they hit they should have more sac flies, but they only rank tied for 19th-24th with 27. The research I know of supports that sac flies largely just happen without being a conscious thing. In which case I think that number should be a lot higher. I like stolen bases too. It's telling I think that we've been caught 23 times which is higher than the National league average yet our steal total is so low, and we have 3 very good base stealers in Braun, Hart, and Weeks. The story this tells me is 1) Weeks injury and drop in effectiveness hurt this aspect and 2) we have a lot of guys doing things they shouldn't be on the base paths and end up getting picked off or thrown out. Our big 3 base stealers account for less than 1/3 of the caught stealings, but almost 2/3 of our steals.

Any idea who the Brewers will use in the 9th? I was surprised Claudio went 8 I can't imagine they'll let him put up a 130 pitch count and watch him be worthless for a month. It does look like we'll have a big edge in the pen tomorrow essentially completely rested while they've burned two arms that would be hard pressed to see any action tomorrow.

I agree about Vargas not only did he only give up two runs, but he pitched 7 innings. It's amazing what those walks do

OK so I was maintaining my calm on this issue, but I cannot do so any longer after reading all the whining about the Brewers HRs in the chat. The reason the Brewers score such a high percentage of their runs via the HR is because they hit so many!! It is simple mathematical necessity it can be no other way. Since the HR is the best offensive outcome from any at bat you always want more. Every time you hit a HR the percentage of runs you score via the HR guess what think back. It goes up. Now you can try and parse some convoluted argument about stealing more and just getting more runs that way. Here's the problem there is no such thing as a Grand steal, or a three run steal, or even a two run steal (unless you pretend you are Harry Potter and cast a spell on the defense whereby they forget they are major league players and chuck the ball around like it's t-ball). On the other hand those nice HR things come in all those wonderful flavors as a result they are much more efficient at scoring runs. But wait you say you are erecting a straw man what I really want is not stolen base related runs but is base hits. Here's where the logic is really great. I grant your wish the Brewers have now hit no HRs this year only doubles. Would you score more runs this way? Of course not, how many more base hits would you need to score the same number of runs? I'd wager a reasonable guess is an equal number of singles to drive in that double. That would mean the Brewers would have to hit .302 as a team to match that production that's a full 0.13 points higher than the top hitting offense the Tigers who have the benefit of the DH(and a raise of 40 points in the team batting average). This is clearly ridiculous you can't expect a team to hit that well. Which leads into my last point for why the HR you hit will always drive the small ball percentage way down. Imagine the Brewers going through an inning everytime that ultra efficient HR clears the bases of base runners you need to have a replacement hit or walk to get that base runner back to then hit in via a single or a double. You force yourself into the above scenario of needing to have an unrealistically high batting average to make up the ground percentage wise that the HR takes in big chomps. Unless you want to talk about historic team season leading or nearly leading the league in HRs is always going to produce a very high percentage of runs scored via the HR. (unambigufied thread title --1992)

I'm pretty sure if you do an adjustment for offensive era Braun's season jumps ahead of Pujols outstanding season. I think the thing that will always standout about Pujols season is that he was drafted so relatively low dominated A-ball and then just owned the league the next year. You don't just jump 3 levels and treat MLB pitchers like batting practice partners.

I would think you would be hard pressed to find anyone to disagree that the Brewers are probably done making any trades. For largely the reason you stated any significant upgrade would cost serious prospects and we don't have that many with that big cache and then you take Salome out of the mix (regardless of how he tested positive he still tested positive) there's not in the way of centerpieces left that you would feel comfortable dealing. We've got some other players who could emerge into bigtime prospects, but right now they aren't that valuable by themselves. So as a practical matter it does become about the depth.

I think the best way to frame this is a series of key questions. 1) Is Linebrink drop in performance a sign of overuse and wearing out or the typical kinds of bad streaks even the best relievers have and Doug got him just like he got Coco last year? I've decided that I can't answer this reliably and will defer to the organizations long standing good track record with bullpen guys. In other words since statistically you can make arguments either way based on the data you need that scouting insight and the Brewers have been churning out excellent bullpen performances for years relative to the rest of the team's talent, so I think it's safe to say they think he's going to bounce back 2) How do you scout Inman? I submit that you can't really say anything from his AA performance it's too small and depending on your opinion before hand you can find evidence for any opinion. So it really comes down to what they saw before. I would feel differently if this scouting issue was just being brought up for the first time, but it has been brought up before and I think largely ignored by us fans and certainly down played by Doug. Which is fine and it's still OK to think Inman might be different and have more success. 3) What else was out there at a similar price? I went on record earlier wondering how much more it would have taken to get Texeria, and I still stand by that question. Texas was already apparently high on TGJ, there is a lot of other pieces the team could include as interesting prospects. Now maybe Texas wants nothing less than two Braun and Gallardo type prospects, but I doubt they can expect to get that much in reality. This is the only area I have doubts. Then again trying to read trade rumors is about as reliable as forecasting the weather with a graphing calculator.