danzig6767

With Escobar developing into a very good prospect, buying out any of the free agent years of Hardy seems less likely to me. If we can get any of these guys to stay past their years of free agency, the Brewers are going to need to pick which of the young guys to keep and which to let go. Positions where a new young prospect looks ready to fill in will have to be factored in the equation. Escobar likely won't hit as well as Hardy, but if he is at least decent with the bat and is as great with the glove as we hear, paying Hardy big money at the possible expense of losing one of our other young players doesn't make much sense to me.

I've lived in Wisconsin most of my life after moving here as a kid from California. In my teens and 20's i didn't mind the weather here, i even worked outside for two years and the cold didn't faze me much back then. Once i got into my 30's though i started disliking Wisconsin weather more and more, i'd get jealous when i'd visit my mom in Arizona during winter, 60-70 degrees there and 8 degrees here. Now i've gone from not like winter to hating it with a passion, it somewhat depresses me because i love summer so much and hate the cold. Many people here hate really hot weather, but it's never to hot for me in summer. I absolutely love the hot sun hitting my body like a laser beam, so much so i even hate clouds because they block the sun when i'm outside in summer. I'll be say tailgaiting before a Brewers game and if a cloud blocks the sun, i'll start swearing at the cloud. It should be easy to see then that three months of summer is not near enough for my liking and 4-5 months of winter is pure hell for me. So i've been thinking about moving somewhere warm the last few years, i haven't settled on where, but San Diego is appealing to me. One reason i haven't moved yet is my teenage daughter lives here in Greenfield with her mom, but i live 5 minutes away and she spends as much time with me as her mom. I won't even consider moving until she's out of high school. The other reason i haven't moved is i don't know anybody out of WI except my brother who is in the military and Oklahoma is not a destination i want. I'm also not married and have little desire to ever do so. My question is, has anyone here moved somewhere where you knew nobody at all? My mom moved back to WI a few years ago, all my friends and family are here. I'm leery of moving somewhere and not knowing anyone, i have no clue how i'd handle that or how long it would take to make friends in a new state. Would holidays be semi depressing with no family around? Sometimes family gatherings here bore me silly, but i think i might miss them if i was alone. I know a place with 6-7 months of summer and no winter would make me much happier, but maybe not knowing anyone isn't worth that. So to anyone here who has moved out of state to a place where they knew nobody, any advice or stories of how things went would be appreciated.

I'm with you, managers usually look like idiots charging out on the field to argue a call that won't get reversed anyways.

If getting most games on HD meant Stuart Scott and Chris Berman had to call games, i wouldn't care. The analog feed on FSN is terrible, it's such a pleasure when they are in HD instead.

The Mets didn't just give up those four prospects, they also are going to have to pay Santana a massive amount of money, that has to be factored in. The Mets in effect gave up those four kids for the right to negotiate a contract with Santana because he wasn't going to waive his no trade clause without getting a new contract.

1. Cameron 2. Torres next if all those innings as a Pirate and age haven't caught up with him.

Ramirez and it's not really close, that kid has silly talent Great job by the Marlins in scouting him. He struggled badly in AA, but they obviously saw his raw skills. Ramirez had the kind of season last year that i hoped we'd see from Weeks one day, just with less stolen bases.

It is amazing when you consider all the young talent we drafted vs what the Pirates got. If i was a Pirates fan and watched the Brewers come into town with all this great young talent, i'd want to throw up. That really the only main difference between the two franchises. One drafted very well and the other didn't.

I will say that they started to turn it all around prior to selling the team when Taylor hired Jack Z. Everyone seems to universally accept that we didn't start to turn things around until Melvin came on board, but it was my opinion that Dean Taylor is someone who really does deserve a great deal of credit for the Brewers recent resurgence. He's the one who brought in the man who got it all turned around for us. Taylor was just a terrible GM on the big league level from who he hired as managers to teams he put together. He for sure does deserve huge credit though for that one single move he made in bringing in Jack Zduriencik. In fact, outside of building Miller Park and getting a new owner, it could easily be argued that hiring Zduriencik was single most important baseball move this franchise has made in over 20 years.

I'm a big fan of Gammons also. He not only strikes me as very knowledgeable about the game, he's a likable person. The only thing i've always wondered about is why nobody tells him about the pieces of spittle that often are sitting on his mouth when he talks for awhile. Who knows though, maybe i only notice this.

Yea, at this point I think I have to remove myself form that discussion, less I earn myself a strike. My only real beef with what the Selig's did from a money standpoint was their last season as owners and their money grab. Ask the taxpayers to build a park and after the city paid to build it and fans filled it, that last year they cut the payroll to 20-25 million and did a quick cash grab on the way out knowing they were going to sell the team. Call me naive,but I do not believe that Bud was doing anything at all with the team after he relinquished control in the mid 90's. I want to say it was 94, but I'm not quite certain. So, to Danzig, again, I was speaking more about the 1970-1994 stretch. We certainly were not a 100 win a season juggernaut, but we were a respectable team and pretty well run in my opinion. I also don't believe that Angelos spent more money, relative to the Brewers payroll during those years. Bud let the team go out and do what it needed to do. I still believe that letting Molitor go was a giant mistake, but be that as it is, I still think overall, the team did a very good job under his leadership. You are correct. The team was under the control of Wendy, not Bud, when that cash grab was done on the way out of town. Whether Bud was consulted on it by Wendy before doing so and how much of the money from the sale of the team Bud got i have absolutely no idea.There were also other investors in the team that very well could have played a role in wanting to grab money on the way out. The Brewers were no doubt competitive for quite awhile under Bud. Once the revenue gaps began to really widen later in his ownership and under Wendy, they both just made some real mistakes in the hiring of GM's, particularly Sal Bando. Mix in they refused to accept the need to fully rebuild via the farm system, it lead to poor judgement in skimping on the draft while at the same time lighting money on fire by adding mediocre talent to big league rosters that had zero chance to win anyways. Angelos is following a similar path in Baltimore. He spends cash poorly every offseason on free agents nowhere near good enough to help the team gets past the two cash cows above them in the AL East. So instead of accepting the reality that they need to fully rebuild and that they currently have no chance to catch the Yanks/Sox, they instead keep plugging along under a strategy that's done nothing except fail.

I was flipping the channels and that Huckabee guy had a good line He said something like to pay for this rebate, we'll borrow 150 billion from China so we can go to stores and spend it on products we import from China.

Has anyone here said the Brewers will win the division with ease, much less everyone saying this? I think the vast majority of Brewers fans think the Brewers and Cubs are pretty even and clearly the best two teams in the division. That it should be a close race and likely the division should be decides by a few games either way. That's awfully far from everyone thinking the division will be a walk in the park for the Brewers and the Cubs are crap.

My only real beef with what the Selig's did from a money standpoint was their last season as owners and their money grab. Ask the taxpayers to build a park and after the city paid to build it and fans filled it, that last year they cut the payroll to 20-25 million and did a quick cash grab on the way out knowing they were going to sell the team. Other than that, the only complaint for me was them hiring incompetent people to run the team after Dalton was gone. Not only was Bando in over his head and kept in charge way to long, the team would go on the cheap in the draft and at the same time waste cash on band-aids for a big league roster that wasn't going anywhere. No plan, no direction. The Orioles in fact are a not perfect, but fairly decent comparison to the dark days after the mid-80's with the Brewers. Bud and Wendy didn't meddle like Angelos does, but the poor direction from ownership left the franchise unable to get out from a very prolonged period of losing. Neither owner was necessarily cheap, the Brewers had lower revenue then and Angelos will spend, but both were clueless as how to get out of the morass their franchises were stuck in. Thankfully, we are now out of that morass and Attanasio looks to be a good owner and a bright man. Baltimore is still stuck though with not only Angelos, but being in the AL East with baseball's two cash printing teams. Glad i'm not a Baltimore fan.

I don't agree with Tbadder's post and i'm glad for selfish reasons that Miller Park was built or baseball wouldn't exist here. With that said, i really despise what pro football/baseball/basketball leagues did in pulling a Tony Soprano and pretty much extorting cities into building them leagues arenas, ballparks, and stadiums. Pretty much holding guns to the heads of cities and saying, give us 250-750 million dollars or we'll abandon your city regardless if your residents supported our league for decades. To bad all cities from the start didn't just call the leagues bluffs and say, shove it up your you now what, build your own parks or arenas. What were MLB/NBA/NFL leagues going to do, move half or more of their teams? As it is, all these leagues have pretty much filled up all the big cities or viable markets that can support a team. What were they going to do if the cities all whipped these leagues the bird? Move from cities like Minnesota/Cleveland/Milwaukee/Houston/Philadelphia/Detroit etc etc to tiny markets in Iowa or Nebraska? Once some cities caved and didn't call the bluff of the leagues, other cities started to cave in unison out of fear they would be the one abandoned. I would have loved though if most cities held firm, called their bluff, and said screw you, let's see you move all these teams you are threatening to.

I sure would hope the Brewers only thoughts when setting up the rotation to start the season is which five they believe gives them the best chance to win games.

I was a catcher for quite awhile and got run over a few times by guys bigger than me, it's no fun because you really can't brace yourself for the hit since you have to watch the throw coming to you. Kinda like if you let someone punch you in the gut after tightening your stomach muscles vs getting a surprise stomach punch. I can't fathom getting run over by Prince with a full head of steam

The problem i see signing Prince isn't so much the yearly amount as much as the number of years. Boras will likely try to get Prince as many years possible once he hits free agency. It's one thing if Prince would take say 17-18 million per year over three/four seasons, it gets super dicey though if he wants and could get five/six years elsewhere. With Prince being a big guy, it would be risky for any NL team to throw five/six year at him. On top of that, my assumption is the Brewers will try to avoid very long big money contracts whenever possible.

Why would you hope he killed himself vs an accidental OD? I'm sure it would be much easier on those that loved him knowing he died from an accident than having to spend a bunch of time wondering why he'd kill himself and maybe even blaming themselves for not noticing the signs or wondering if they were at fault at all in a depression that lead to suicide. You often hear stories of family/friends blaming themselves to a degree after a suicide because they sit around wondering if there was something they could have done to prevent it. If a person dies from an accident, it's still tragic for family/friends, but they don't have to sit around wondering if they played a role in some depression or missed signs that suicide was in that persons mind.

Yea i see Villanueva being one of the bigger wildcards for this years team, i could see a fairly wide degree of results from him this year. It wouldn't shock me at all if he was very good and put up an ERA in the 3.5 range or was in the 4.5 range.

I hope nobody takes offense to my question because i mean nothing snide by asking this, but what is the big fascination many have with getting autographs from athletes? Is it mainly to make a card, bat, or ball more valuable or it the love for autographs something else?

If Catalanotto isn't much of a defender in left, the goal here is to trade a starting pitcher for an .800 OPS guy that does nothing to improve the defense and likely only makes it worse when factoring the defensive drop off from Jenkins to Catalanotto? Catalanotto does seem like he'd be a nice two hole bat, but a lineup of Prince 1st Weeks 2nd Braun 3rd Hardy SS Catalanotto LF Hall CF Hart RF Kendall C That looks to me to likely be one of if not the worst defensive team in baseball. I'm sure the pitchers will like the good run support and at the same time dread the likely horrible defense that would be behind them. Get ready for lots of games swearing at the TV as bad defense keeps alive innings that should be over.

Roth was the best part of Van Halen during their prime IMO. Once he got booted and they put in Sammy Hagar, i couldn't listen to any of that crap they put out. It would have been like Aerosmith booting Steven Tyler and inserting something terrible like Steven Perry of Journey in Tyler's place and still calling themselves Aerosmith. I'd consider paying decent money to see Van Halen now if Roth is even half way decent, i wouldn't go to a Hagar lead Van Halen show even if i was given free front row tickets.

Haren is a bit like Carl Crawford in that both are young quality players that are also signed to team friendly contracts, thus making them even more valuable. It would take a hefty package to get him and we might not even have the pieces Beane would want. I'd guess maybe Villanueva and Parra would both need to be included, along with another highly thought of prospect.

Not that i think there is any chance we get Matsui, but i'd love to have him and i think Melvin would also. Hideki pretty much fits to a tee the professional hitter that Melvin said he wanted to add. The only downside besides what we'd have to give up for him would be that means another season of Braun at third and horrible infield defense overall.