danzig6767

Detroit and Texas just made a blockbuster deal. I understand that those deals are rare but they do happen (I think of the R.A. Dickey deal last season as well). Those trades were all about money. Detroit wanted to unload Fielders contract and the Mets didn't want to roll the dice on paying Dickey a lot money given his age and being a knuckle ball pitcher. The one winning team i can think of off the top of my head who shows fairly often that they will trade very productive guys at any time is Tampa. That said, Friedman just might be the best GM in the league and he's had the luxury to trade productive pitchers because his amateur scouting department has drafted pitching great, while the Brewers have been miserable for ages at drafting pitching. One team I've always thought would be a good match for Gomez would be Seattle. They have a lot of young pitching prospects but are struggling big time on offense. We generally have a pretty strong offense but our pitching ranks are nearly bare. Flipping Gomez for Walker or Hultzen + makes all the sense in the world for both teams. Maybe Seattle would make a trade like that and maybe not. If i was the Brewers GM, nobody on the roster would be untouchable, that obviously includes Gomez. If he doesn't get traded though which is most likely, i'm not going to bash Melvin unless someone comes up with concrete details of players Doug was really offered and then turned down. I simply can't join in the camp of some on message boards who get mad if certain players aren't traded even if those people have no clear details of who was offered for that player or if reported rumors ending up proving to be factually accurate. How am I acting like that? All I am doing is stating the facts. Melvin rarely trades significant contributors that are not in the final years of their contracts Why are you so focused on the last year of a contract aspect? I did not forget about Mark Attanasio. And I know he has veto power over everything. But Doug is the baseball guy, not Mark. It's Doug's job to win and if that means convincing the owner that they need pitching at any cost then that's what he should be doing. Tell that to Bucks GM's over roughly the last 20 years with Kohl meddling and the Packers GM's before Wolf was given total authority. When an owner/boss is in place who both wants to win now and have say in moves made, it's much easier on a forum to just say, well convince him that X or Y needs to be done if that owner is dead set on what he believes helps a team win right now. He's not winning in the present. That's the problem. He's not winning because he has no pitching. History has shown when he has pitching he wins (I think in his time with Milwaukee there was only one season where the team ERA was in the top half of the league and they did not make the playoffs). But instead of using the pieces that he has to go get that pitching he sits on his hands and marvels about how wonderful of a player he's got. I know you don't like Melvin, but do you honestly think he doesn't understand the importance of pitching? This is a GM who traded for elite arms like Sabathia and Greinke. I'm assuming though that you mainly mean trading for high quality young pitching, yet what is arguably the most valuable commodity in the game? That would be cheap high quality young pitching, especially cheap high quality young starters. It sure seems to me that you think it's easier to trade for high quality young arms than it really is given those super valuable commodities aren't exactly being traded a lot. Well clearly whatever he's doing in the draft isn't working. This is where we clearly get to the main crux of the problem for the Brewers pitching woes to me. For decades now, the organization has been dreadful when it comes to drafting pitching. It's been that way before Melvin arrived and has remained that way during his tenure as GM. When he arrived as GM, Jack Zduriencik was running the drafts and after he left for Seattle, Doug hired Seid to run the drafts. Given the poor results so far, to me, the hiring of Seid may end up being the biggest overall mistake Melvin has made. Let's face it, MLB general managers simply don't have anywhere near enough time to go traveling around the country scouting vast quantities of high school and college prospects. That is up to the amateur scouting director and the many scouts under the scouting director. Well, since both Zduriencik and Seid have been so terrible at drafting pitching, Melvin in pretty much each season has had to put together pitching staffs with arms acquired mostly via trades, free agency, minor league free agents, pitchers off the scrap heap, etc because the amateur scouting department has been so abysmal at their jobs with pitching. Look at say the Cardinals, most of their big stable of young to youngish great arms in the rotation, pen, and minor league system came via the draft. Same with greatly run Tampa Bay. I'm quite sure Doug would much rather just called up a Garcia, Miller, Wacha, Rosenthal, etc etc from the minors instead of having to trade for a Greinke because the amateur scouting department keeps drafting pitching busts, injured guys, or more mediocre talents. It's not like the Cardinals got all those great young arms by trading productive guys on the MLB roster. They drafted them. Tampa drafted them. Like i said, Doug did hire Seid, so he bears a decent amount of responsibility for the results of Seid's drafting. That said, Doug isn't the guy picking the players after traveling the country to watch hundreds and hundreds of prospects. If the drafting of pitching wasn't so poor, we wouldn't be in this spot as often where fans then expect Melvin to pretty easily go out and extract super valuable high quality young pitchers from teams who actually are able to draft pitching and are loathe to give it up. In fact, if someone did the research, i wouldn't doubt that the Brewers over the last 10-15-20 years were either the worst or at least top 5 worst team in baseball at drafting pitching. That's extremely hard for any non-rich organization to overcome.

That's not exactly a risky prediction given that fairly major trades for players like Gomez aren't really all that commonplace for teams each year. For example, as this offseason plays out and the season is about to begin, how many teams will end up trading one of their better players who isn't either really old or owed huge money like in the Fielder deal? Two or three at most? Maybe less? You act like teams regularly trade productive guys like Gomez, Gallardo, or Hart when they aren't old and/or don't have an ugly contract. As if Melvin is the only GM sitting around not shopping his non-old productive players for prospects because he wants to win in the present. You also seem to forget that Melvin has a clearly involved owner who has shown and stated multiple times that he wants to win in the present as much or more than than Doug does. You are assuming big time that Attanasio would just sign off on trading away all of the productive players you wanted traded who didn't have ugly contracts, for mostly prospects. What exactly about Attanasio's behavior makes you believe this? Keep in mind this is an owner who took the lead in signing all three of Suppan, Ramirez, and Lohse. He also took the lead in signing Lohse even after Melvin in multiple interviews said he didn't want to lose a draft pick. Attanasio gave Melvin an extension. So what's there to think he'd say been fine with Melvin trading Ramirez for prospects after his big first season with the team, a player Attanasio personally got signed to a contract? Trade Greinke before the 2012 season started? Why would they have traded Greinke then anyways after winning 96 games? Attanasio would have been cool with trading Axford for prospects even though he was dirt cheap, was coming off a fabulous 46 save season, and the team was only two games from reach the World Series? Take out Attanasio, how many teams in the exact same situation would have traded Axford for prospects? FWIW, i also have issues with Melvin sometimes and wouldn't be upset if he was replaced. That said, i just think you are being delusional about what Attanasio would allow in all of these pretend trades you wish Melvin would have made and not realistic in how easy you seem to think it is for GM's to pull off the kind of trades like you wish would happen. There is a reason that vastly vastly fewer trades happen in real baseball than on message boards, blog sites, and rumor mills. Even when actual GM's want to make trades, they don't end up happening often for a myriad of reasons. Hell, just look at last year's trade deadline. Tons of rumors and almost no trades.

Yep Baseball teams in markets which can draw these huge cable TV deals are just swimming in money, so what may seem like expensive payouts are instead more a reflection of the kind of overall revenues some of these bigger market teams have. San Fran is trying to compete for a title and is in a division with the ultra rich Dodgers, that's why even if Hudson can't given them 200 plus innings in each of those two years, 11.5 million per over only two seasons won't put a sizable dent in their budget.

I was going to say that i was surprised Johnson didn't get more money than that, but it said in the article that he turned down more money to play in San Diego. Given the huge amounts of money in baseball right now, that's a nice pretty low risk/potential high reward signing for the Padres.

No question that the odds of Segura getting traded are microscopic, but for good reason. If he was on pretty much any other MLB teams lacking shortstop quality in their system, Segura wouldn't be traded by those teams either. Trades like that are extremely uncommon except in trades for veteran pitchers like say Greinke or Shields. Gomez likely won't be traded either, but i don't buy that he's nearly untouchable as Segura is. Of course Melvin should expect a really nice return of pitching talent to trade Carlos given the extremely team friendly deal Doug got him to sign, but i don't think a call about Gomez would receive an immediate hang up. Any hypothetical trade is all about the exact details. At least this thread had that with clear details in hypothetically asking would you trade Segura for Miller if offered? A very valid argument could be made both ways. With Gomez though, to vaguely just say he should be traded for pitching doesn't really say much of anything. What matters is for what pitcher/pitchers and then obviously it matters just as much whether the other team would actually say yes. It's way easy to make up pretend trades online than real GM's pulling of important trades given they happen so few times in real life compared to online. Plus, i don't buy at all that there is a "strategy of all offense no pitching" as you put it. When an amateur scouting department for non-revenue rich teams consistently whiffs when drafting pitchers, then pitching will nearly always become a problem compared to teams who instead draft pitching much better. If our scouting department had drafted high quality pitchers like Jaime Garcia, Shelby Miller, Michael Wacha, Joe Kelly, Trevor Rosenthal, etc along with arms in their system instead of so many busts, injury flameouts, and/or lower ceiling pitchers, the Brewers wouldn't be in this pitching predicament. Until Seid starts producing better results, the organization will very likely remain in a pitching bind.

Obviously starting pitching is hugely important to simply getting into the playoffs and then can have a big impact in those playoffs, but like you said, it doesn't always decide who wins rings. Hell, besides what you wrote, the Cardinals won it all a few years ago with a starting rotation which struggled to go just 5 innings in many of their playoff games. They won that title mostly on the backs of their offense and stellar bullpen performance. Carpenter did come up huge a few times though that year. MLB playoffs of late are often so unpredictable and everything is important to winning from starting pitching, bullpens, hitting, defense, and some luck sprinkled in. A player or two coming up huge that isn't among the team's best players. You get in these only 5 or 7 game series, a poorly performing bullpen can sabotage a team as much as starting pitching, just ask Rangers fans. On the flip side, a really good bullpen can be huge in advancing, the Boston pen this year being a prime example. This is why simply just getting into the playoffs is so important. We see teams advance all of the time who just barely made it into the playoffs over teams who were better in the regular season, unlike say the NBA playoffs where it's more surprising when upsets happen. In fact, in MLB playoffs, i don't know if any team ever winning or losing a series should be considered a really big upset anymore.

I agree with you that trading within the division with young talents should be secondary to making your team better, even if it may also end up making a division rival better. That said, you have no idea if Melvin and Attanasio would say no for sure if this hypothetical trade was offered or if Cardinals management would be interested either. Look around baseball over say the last decade, trades like the one being discussed rarely happen with any teams, not just the Brewers. Trading a really highly thought of young player with just a year of service time for a similar guy at a different position straight up involves significant risk for both sides, which is likely why trades like that are so uncommon. In fact, trades like that are pretty rare in any professional sport. That's why even if the Cardinals are potentially exploring the possibility of trading a guy like say Miller for a high end young shortstop, i put the odds against a deal in that realm actually happening. The one team though i could see a possible good fit would be Texas. They have Andrus locked up long term, so maybe they'd consider a deal involving Profar for a top young and cheap starter.

Not to get political here but looking at the way Cobb County plans to pay for this stadium is just ridiculous: http://deadspin.com/heres-how-cobb-county-will-pay-for-the-braves-ballpar-1464404976 What services are going to be cut when the $8 million is diverted annually to pay off the debt? I liked the one comment questioning why they used a 30 year projection when the Braves have shown they're going to look to upgrade in 15-20. Plus, i read somewhere that of the 250-275 million the Braves are supposed to be contributing, most of that money will come naming rights for the new park, in effect allowing the Braves to get the stadium mostly for free. Didn't the Brewers do the same thing? That the naming rights deal with Miller didn't go towards lessening the cost of the stadium for taxpayers, but instead the Selig's were able to use that naming rights money as their "contribution" towards the park being built?

There is something about the 1b deals though...I mean Hunter Morris went in to this season as the "3rd Best" 1b prospect The 1b position has dried up and when you look at those 3 players and what they've done historically vs. what is coming up the pipeline, I completely see the view as to why an owner would take the long term high paid road. Now, meanwhile Texas signed Andrus to an 8yr extension with what looks like a soon to be flooded MLB SS talents. That contract to me is worse than any of the 3 1b contracts....okay Pujols may be an exception but only because you still wonder his true age. The issue isn't the present, it's the back end of these contracts. We already see Pujols in serious decline, but even still productive guys like Prince and Votto have a lot of years left on their contracts. When Votto is 35 is still owed 5yrs/125 million dollars, what are the odds of him still being highly productive vs in noticeable decline which only gets worse as each season goes by? Sure, there is a chance that he can beat the odds and still remain highly productive, but i'd definitely lay my money on him being in decline mode and the Reds desperately trying to find anyone to just assume his contract. Fielder at least has the DH option to where he might end up being able to carve out a David Ortiz like career going forward, but i'd still bet on at least the last three years of his contract not looking pretty for Detroit. Votto's contract i see becoming a bigger albatross in the future.

All of these 7-8-9-10 year deals at huge money are such massive risks of blowing up in the faces of the teams who handed them out. Same with 6-7 year deals for starting pitchers. Just look at the massive long term deals handed out to firstbaseman like Pujols, Prince, and Votto. Pujols already looks washed up and they still owe him roughly 8yrs/200. That Votto contract is insane, they will be paying him 25 million per through ages 35-40. When will these teams learn that the odds of contracts like these are far more likely to become albatrosses than working out well?

Interesting article, even if i question the race angle given teams like the Braves and Cardinals under LaRussa have for years been playing the "Guardians of the Game" deal regardless of the race of players involved. It was one reason i was so glad to see LaRussa finally retire. One paragraph of the article though i agreed with 100 percent. "Fernandez apologized after the game for his behavior, although I'm not quite certain why he had to do so. He hadn't hurt anyone. His only crime was to exhibit a passionate reaction, which itself hardly seems like much of a crime." I wish Fernandez hadn't apologized after the game because he did absolutely nothing wrong. The kid hit his first home run in the majors, got caught up in the emotion doing so and thus watched the ball for a second or two. Wow, what a crime against humanity and the game of baseball, so he needed to be preached to by that moron McCann. Screw him and anyone who agrees with/defends the action of McCann. He's instantly topping my list of hated players in baseball. I'm totally against the practice of pitchers throwing at hitters for breaking these silly unwritten rules, but i would have laughed if Fernandez or one of his fellow Miami pitchers had turned the tables on these unwritten rules and threw at McCann for his high-minded attitude thinking he gets to decide just how exactly another player has to react after hitting a home run.

The bolded part is why I specified the past 3-4 seasons (or so). Basically, when Neal Huntington took the reins at GM, imo they started building intelligently for the future. I don't know that Huntington did anything all that special about supposedly building for the future besides trading for Locke which in turn lead to their 94 win season. Look at their roster this year which finally got the Pirates into the postseason. To me, it was mainly Huntington hitting big on three veteran starters Burnett/Liriano/Rodriguez, signing 30 year old Martin, trading for 28 year old Melancon, 33 year old Grilli having a career year at closer, and high draft picks like McCutchen, Alvarez, Cole, etc finally panning out after years of them mostly drafting busts with top 10 picks.

So was it a joke what the Pirates were doing 2 or 3 or 4 years ago? What about the Athletics 2-6 years ago? Sometimes a team has to recognize that the best plan is to build a foundation, & not simply try to paper over the cracks from one year to the next & hope everything breaks in their favor. It doesn't impress me or make me feel grateful that a club will "put the best product on the field", if that product is a .500-ish club like the Brewers were, objectively, heading into 2013. I get what you are saying, but i don't think the Pirates are a good example. In their run of futility, they often made puzzling moves acquiring veterans in hopes of winning just 80 games, but failed miserably at even doing that. Then they also would draft poorly more often than not given how high they consistently were picking. It's only been recently that they've finally started hitting with all of their high draft picks. It took them finally hitting on some high picks and acquiring three veteran starters in Burnett, Liriano, and Wandy Rodriguez. I'd say Oakland is a much better example of what you're trying to point out than Pittsburgh. Beane has consistently followed a certain strategy of trying to mostly keep an influx of cheap young talent given his financial constraints and sprinkle in veterans when he feels he has a team that can compete for the playoffs in any given year.

I'm not surprised about either, but of the two i'd have kept Gamel over Green, even with back to back ACL tears. It's true that Green only got 140 big league at bats, but he looked terribly overmatched in all of them.

Two trades: K-Rod to BAL for Nicky Delmonico (top-10 prospect) Axford to StL for Michael Blazek (wasn't he also a top-10 prospect?) Not shabby, all things considered. Other than Michael Gonzalez, who stunk his way out of every trade conversation, most any other "substantial" trade "hopeful" in BF.net-land (thinking primarily of Ramirez, Weeks, Hart) was eventually injured enough to be untradeable. It wasn't just the Brewers. This year seemed like the most uneventful trade deadline in the league overall that i can remember, both in the small number of trades made and names involved in the few trades which actually did go down. I'd assume that we'll see this being more common going forward now that teams can't get a draft pick back for a rental they traded for. That and it seems like more teams have wised up over trading prospects of any serious value for two months of a relief pitcher.

What the hell is such a big deal about any hitter admiring a long home run? To me, when a batter just crushes a ball for a long and high home run, it's one of the prettiest things in all of sports. Why shouldn't a hitter get to admire his work there for a few seconds? While DVR's are a great invention for many reasons, one benefit for me is being able to rewind and watch multiple times when a batter just crushes a ball. It should be something to enjoy and admire without a pitcher or the other team being so thin skinned to demand retaliation like kids on a playground. Sure, if a guy not only watches his homer for 2-3 seconds, he also points right at the pitcher and say follows that by doing a back flip on the way to first base, then yea there is reason to get really annoyed. Just watching it though for a few seconds should be nothing to get all bent out of shape about. One of my favorite players ever was Ricky Henderson. Often when he'd really crush a ball, he would first flip his bat, then admire the ball flying for a second or two, and finally do his own little Ricky like trot around the bases. It was funny/entertaining and the same with Manny Ramirez. Someone explain to me why this is supposed to be such a major offense to other players/teams? Or the Prince and Brewers bowling ball pins deal after a walk off homer vs the Giants? If i was baseball commissioner, i honestly would suspend any pitcher at least 20 games if i felt he hit a batter on purpose. We are talking about throwing basically a rock at a person at very high velocity, and on purpose. That could potentially cause a serious injury. If a pitcher purposely threw at a guy and it ended up near a batters head, i'd suspend the guy at least 50 games.

Sanders has started brawls with his gloating and cockiness, it is not just baseball. No professional sport takes these socalled unwritten rules so seriously and to then take it so far as to often throwing a rock hard ball 90mph at a player as retaliation is beyond ridiculous. That's legitimately very dangerous with the potential to cause a serious injury if the pitcher hits a player in the wrong spot. Even a brawl in baseball can cause an injury, but a few guys pushing and throwing punches in the NFL is meaningless given all the gear they have on. Plus, if a few guys on a football field fight over whatever reason, we don't ever see nonsense of both teams all running on the field to take part as happens in baseball. Watching all of the guys from both bullpens come charging on to the field just adds to the silly behavior from many of these brawls in baseball over "slights" which strike me as childish whining more suited for 5th graders on a playground than very well paid grown men. Let's start a big fight and maybe later even fire a baseball at some hitter because he looked at his home run for a second or two longer than i find acceptable. Really? Baseball players are that thin skinned over something this minor? FWIW, i'm not just talking about the Gomez incident because this crap has been going on for ages and for a variety of dumb slights.

Not me I'm sure many will disagree, but i have zero problem at all with any hitter admiring a home run which they've just hit and i think it's silly that in turn the opposing pitcher and/or his teammates get all bent out of shape over just a hitter admiring a home run. It's even more ridiculous when a pitcher decides to throw a hard baseball at a hitter for whatever that pitcher deems as breaking some unwritten conduct rule. It would be akin to not liking how someone is acting and choosing to throw a rock at that person as hard as you can throw it. This is professional baseball, not little league baseball. It's paid entertainment and thus to me, if a professional athlete chooses to showboat sometimes, i don't care one bit. Granted, if a player does it to often to where it starts making his team/teammates uncomfortable, then those people should tell that player to tone it down vs having other teams get to decide this, much less getting violent over the behavior. Only in baseball does this nonsense go on. If say Deion Sanders high stepped his way into the endzone after a great punt return, NFL players didn't start a brawl over it and dangerously fire a hard object at him the next time he took the field. In hockey, if a guy really celebrates after a great goal, an opposing player doesn't fire a hard puck 90mph at the guy the next time he's on the ice. In the NBA, if a guy celebrates a great play by drawing attention to himself, that doesn't lead to a brawl and a player on the other team picking up a hard object and firing it at the celebrating player. Just baseball does this crap.

That's my biggest concern. For a guy that's supposed to have this power arm, he sure struggles badly to miss bats anytime he actually throws a strike.

I agree. In fact, when they traded for Burnett i'm pretty sure a number of people ripped the move given the Pirates were still a bad team at the time. It is pretty crazy to think it took them this long to be a playoff team when you consider just how often they've been drafting top 5-7.

It would be nice to actually see Blazek used once in awhile.

Why would you even be surprised, much less shocked? Rogers is now a 27 year old pitcher with a really long history of arm/shoulder injuries and inability to throw strikes, leading to career minor league stats of a 4.62 ERA and ugly 1.555 WHIP. Mix in that he no longer throws in the high 90's either, what reason at all would there to be for another team to use a 40 man roster spot by claiming him? The only thing that would shock me is Rogers ever becoming a productive big league pitcher, be it as a starter or in the pen.

Even for the Brewers one day i was going back to look at Gorman Thomas's career stats and in doing so i saw the stats for pitcher Mike Caldwell. In 1978 he had an amazing 23 complete games and 16 more the following year. That's 39 complete games over only two years, yet the current Brewers went i believe almost two full seasons without a complete game. For whatever reason, some pitchers are just blessed to have a socalled rubber arm, while others breakdown much easier, even if they have good mechanics and were generally treated carefully on pitch counts.

I'd still give Segura an extension if the money was really team friendly.

He better be telling the truth about that because if there is evidence still out there about Braun also using PED's prior to 2011 and that evidence comes out, he'll get absolutely crushed by other players and the media for lying yet again.