JoeHova

But because of the Johan contract, it was obvious the sort of contract CC would be receiving, despite not having quite as good a track record as Johan. Santana received a 6 year, $137.5 million contract extension. CC's is basically the same contract with one more year added on. Thus, I think the car analogy holds. CC knew he was worth over $130 million, even if he didn't know exactly how much he was worth (same thing when you sell a car, the blue book gives you a guide, but not necessarily an exact price). The Brewers offered far, far less than that and knew they had no chance of re-signing him. They are likely to do the same thing with Prince, but hopefully they decide to make a competitive offer instead. The Mark Teixiera deal is an analogue for Prince's deal in the same way the Johan one was for CC. Teixiera was worth an average of 4.5 wins over the 3 years before he signed his deal and was going into his age 29 season. Prince is 3 years younger, possibly making a long-term deal to him a slightly safer proposition (although that may be canceled out by Prince's body type). Teixiera signed an 8 year, $180 million dollar contract. Prince is under contract for $10.5 million next year, for 2011 let's give him the $19 million Ryan Howard signed for to avoid his last year of arby. If we use those criteria, Prince is probably in line for an offer of 8 years and $165 million this offseason. Like I said before, knock a little off because Prince has 2 years of arby left and the team assumes some unneeded risk, but a deal is not going to be cheap. If the Brewers publicize some sort of 6 year, $90 million offer, they are not being serious in negotiations and are pulling another Sabathia.

If you were selling a $20,000 car and someone offered $12,000, would you consider that a fair offer?

This is mostly semantics but when you offer only 62% of the market rate, that's not really a fair offer in my mind.

The question is whether the team will make a relatively fair offer to Prince. They declined to do that with Sabathia but they have somewhat better bargaining position with Prince and the Yankees have a 1st baseman already so they might feel they have more of a realistic chance to sign Prince than they did CC. If we look at the average of Prince's last years, he's been worth 4.7 wins annually. If we use what teams paid for wins last off season ($4.5 million per win), that means Prince is worth $21.15 million per year. Knock a little off because he's already under team control for 2 years and because the team assumes all of the risk in a long-term deal but it's still clear that Prince is a legit $20 million per year player, even discounting the possibility that he will improve more because he's only 25. If the Brewers took the initiative and offered him a 7 year $135 million deal that kicked in after 2010, I think that he'd have to think about taking it. I'm not sure he would, but I'm sure he'd be tempted. That would save him from having to worry about getting hurt over the next two years before he reached free agency. As for whether it would be smart for the Brewers to offer that much cash to anybody, much less a perceived injury risk like Prince, I don't really know. However, a team has to spend some money at some point if it wants to be consistently competitive.

If the staff turns around, I couldn't care less who gets some undeserved credit. Regression is obviously likely for most of the guys, but not assured. If they all pitch better, Peterson can take all the credit he wants.

Washburn didn't really beat his FIP until this year. year/ERA/ FIP: 2006: 4.67, 4.78 2007: 4.32, 4.77 2008: 4.69, 4.72 2009: 3.78, 4.58 Washburn is not a guy with good numbers or a good pitcher. He's mediocre. The reason he had a great ERA this year is because Franklin Gutierrez had one of the greatest defensive seasons by a centerfielder in baseball history and was flanked the whole year by guys who can play CF competently (Ichiro, Endy Chavez, Ryan Langerhans, Bill Hall). The Brewers have a pretty good defense but it is nothing at all like the defense the Mariners ran out there this season. FIP is not everything, but when you are looking at a possible acquisition, it is important to take into account how much of a pitcher's success (or lack of success) was due to his defense. In Washburn's case this year, quite a bit of his success was due to the historically great defense behind him. A team which fails to take that into account will rue the decision to sign him, just as the Mariners did for the first 3 years of his deal with them.

Well, I can't find his 3 year (2007-2009) splits and I don't feel like doing them by hand, but his overall ERA over that period has been somewhat higher than 3.83, which is why listing that stat seems misleading. Since Washburn joined the Mariners, his FIPs have been: 2006: 4.78 2007: 4.77 2008: 4.72 2009: 4.58 He's a tremendously consistent pitcher who got a bit lucky this year (with great defense behind him in Seattle and a fluky lack of home runs, which quickly caught up to him in Detroit) and will likely get a significant contract from some foolish team. I don't see him as being a better investment than Suppan, and he would arguably be a worse one because he's 35 whereas Suppan was 32 and Suppan's previous 4 seasons were slightly better (by both ERA and FIP) than Washburn's previous 4.

What does Washburn's road ERA have to do with anything when his home park over most of the past 3 years is one of the best parks for a flyball pitcher in the majors? That seems misleading. ZIPS (Szym works fast) has Washburn projected to a 4.59 ERA for 2010. I'd rather stay away from yet another guy who projects to have an ERA near 5. Either spend some money or some prospects to get a relatively young guy that at least has a chance to be something better than league average. I can't believe I'm saying this, but if they are actually thinking of trying to get Washburn, I'd rather they just kept Looper because he'd only be on a 1 year deal. That said, the Washburn acquisition is probably a fait accompli because he's from Wisconsin and Melvin and Attanasio will think that fact will deflect attention away from how crappy he is.

I'm on-board with trying to implement a consistent philosophy throughout the organization, but if it's a real radical change, I hope the team does its due diligence. I don't know if I can get excited about hiring Peterson. The Kazmir/Zambrano thing is hard to get past, but hopefully he's learned his lesson about being able to fix guys in 10 minutes. On the bright side, I saw an article about Kazmir calling Peterson for advice this year after he got traded to the Angels, so even though Peterson wanted Kazmir shipped out, Kazmir apparently still respects him, which is a good sign. Overall, I would probably be happy with the hire. Peterson seems pretty smart and has experienced success in the past. How much of that success was due to him is impossible to know but he's probably worth a try. It's not like he could ruin Suppan, Parra, Bush, or Looper anyway. God that's a depressing 80% of the rotation. I really hope they decline Looper's option.

How much would Ryan Howard's 200th home run ball be worth? A couple thousand bucks maybe? It doesn't seem worth it to hire an attorney over something like that. However, if they were upset not so much about the monetary aspect but about their 12 year old being pressured into doing something she didn't want to do, I support them in their efforts at redress.

Mike Cameron blew a critical play against Philly in the playoffs last year and he was still brought back. Most teams wouldn't let one play, no matter how crucial, influence their decision making to a great extent.

Not really. It was 2006 when he lost his job as the starter, and Mike Rivera started the majority of September games that year. In 2007, Miller was the backup to Estrada and took over for the last week once Estrada went down.

I know. I was just pointing out that the Patterson situation is much, much worse than the Reyes situation was.

I think Brewerfan would have been Crash fans. People were fond of Chris Coste when he was with Indianapolis. Also Willie Mays Hayes would have been popular. People loved Scott Podsednik (at first) and I think Willie was clearly better than him, especially defensively.

That was different though, Reyes was a 22 year old hot prospect, not a washed up scrub. He's been in the .350's every year since. Patterson and Kendall have an approximately 0% chance of having a season with an OBP that high. Reyes could be justified as being groomed for the future. There's no justification for having Patterson or Kendall lead off. There really isn't a way to justify having either of them on the team at all.

Has any team ever used two players as bad as Kendall and Patterson in their leadoff spot during the same season? It's probably happened before, but it sure isn't a point in Macha's favor.

There is no excuse for Kendall to still be on the team, much less playing often. If they bring him back, I may think twice about getting Extra Innings again because I can't stand watching him. The fact that Melvin apparently sees no problem is perplexing in the extreme.

I thought all along that Macha would be gone after this season (because he was only signed to a 2 year deal). Nothing he's done so far this year has changed my opinion. I wonder who Doug has in mind as his replacement.

I was including the rest of this year.

Jeff Suppan has about $17.5 million left on his contract. Bradley has about $22 million left on his. Suppan is a sunk cost at this point, being replacement level at best. Bradley for 2 years and only $4.5 million would be a steal. For that same reason, I doubt the Cubs would got for it, but it would be worth a try. Bradley's having a down year, but he's still been about average overall. Even if he doesn't rebound to his 2007-2008 level he would be a great fit in Milwaukee and give them another big on-base guy to go with Prince.

Very few players would say that they have no interest in returning to their current team. It doesn't make a lot of sense to limit the market for your services. Even if you don't like your current team, there is no reason to remove them from the bidding.

Hardy is a professional athlete. He's always going to have to worry about some young kid coming up and taking his job. If he can't handle that, he's in the wrong profession. I don't think management did anything wrong in their handling of Hardy (until they sent him down, but I can see why they wanted to do that, even if I don't necessarily think it was especially fair to JJ). In fact, they went out of their way to accommodate JJ, they moved a shortstop who had hit 35 home runs as JJ's injury replacement to another position. Most teams wouldn't have done that, I don't believe.

I don't really understand this viewpoint. I can understand saying that, as the team stands right now, it would be nice to add pitching rather than hitting. However, in most scenarios that people propagate, the Brewers are subtracting one of their 3 best position players (either Prince or Cameron) in order to get pitching. It's hard to see how that will do anything other than change the balance of the team. I don't get why moving Cameron is considered likely to net a pitcher better than him. In fact, I would argue that it would be very unlikely for Doug to be able to find a pitcher who can provide the value that Cameron does for his salary.

Why would we think Bourgeois is better offensively (or defensively) than Hall? I find either idea implausible, although that's not necessarily saying much for Hall.

I wish Bill luck in Seattle.