Ennder

Lucroy rates as one of the best C in the game at framing pitches and is probably responsible for a good part of the Brewers huge K% last year.

Finally got to watch this and it wasn't too bad. Pretty fair opinions about the team all around.

You probably didn't miss much considering what morons some of these guys are. Harold Reynolds just said Cliff Lee isn't an ace because he only won 6 games last year. He didn't do his job which is to win... even though he pitched deep into games and had a 3.16 ERA. Just so dumb. Now Reynolds just talked about how Braun slipped when he lost the protection of Fielder... oh yeah, nice job there Harold. And he just said he doesn't like Votto's .430 OBP since he doesn't want his #4 guy walking. Get this guy off the program~.

That could very reasonably happen. Usually young SP have the advantage the first few times a team faces them, I think we have to hope that they come out strong and carry us early.

Suppan posted a 3.30 ERA and .324 wOBA the 2nd half of that year. He wasn't done he just had a terrible stretch. He pretty much got better every month of the season that year. I mean it stunk that we were still relying on Suppan at that point since he should have never got that long of a deal but Melvin didn't do anything wrong with how he handled it that year.

http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?topic_id=41345972 It isn't its own show anymore, it is part of MLB tonight. They interviewed RR on Hot Stove today and Melvin on Clubhouse Confidential so it was sort of Brewer day.

I don't really care for the Braves rotation. Hudson is always an injury risk and he is showing signs of age. Medlen's year seems completely unsustainable. Minor is erratic at best. Maholm has had back to back decent years but the peripherals don't support it. Teheran is a completely untested rookie. Their bullpen is definitely better than the Brewers though. Like their worst RP is probably better than our best~. I don't think the Giants have a good lineup and the Diamondbacks have a better team this year than they did last year by at least 3 wins.

That seems very reasonable Monty. Get Peralta some more confidence in AAA and I'm sure someone will get hurt or be ineffective early and need to be replaced.

Cairo has us at 78 wins too. Keep in mind that is under the assumption that we have the 3rd worst pitching in the NL and 8th most allowed runs including the AL. The projection system is already projecting the pitching to be awful. Projections hate young guys in general and I'm sure it is fleshing out innings with minor league guys at 5+ ERA each. Also these are heavily regressed so there will always be teams that beat the projections. I'm not sure I'd feel safe projecting the Braves or Giants for 90 wins. The Giants had a historic hot streak late in the season to reach it last year and the Braves are a weaker team than they were last year. I looked into Cairo since it is free. 138 IP of Rogers at a 5.58 ERA and 80 IP of Stinsen at a 5.18, 140 innings of Peralta at a 4.64 look to be the main culprits for the bad pitching. Henderson and Narveson adding another 155 IP of 4.35ish ERA. It actually liked Fiers and Estrada to be sub 4 ERA. Best ERA it projected was Axford and that was a 3.41. SO yeah if we have multiple guys over a 5 ERA, a huge chunk of our innings from mid 4 ERA guys and nobody else takes a step up we will only win 78.

I don't really think Rogers has more talent than Narveson but I would be trying to get what I can out of him before his arm falls off to be honest. Why doesn't anyone talk about how iffy the Cardinals rotation is btw? I mean Garcia has a shoulder injury that may make him miss a big chunk of the year. Lynn is a lot like Fiers where he kind of came out of nowhere had a great stretch and an awful one. Westbrook and Kelly are nothing special. Miller is having some shoulder problems now. I think their rotation is very comparable to ours. The Reds are clearly a step ahead of the Brewers but we match up with the Cardinals and I think the Pirates are still a year or two away.

The WBC is probably the most compelling sporting event I've ever seen since the miracle on ice. The only world level sports we compete in are so darn boring that there is no reason to have any interest in them. Competitive baseball before opening day is nothing but a good thing considering how awful March sports are in general. Having said that the actual implementation of the WBC is just awful and ruins any chance of it being a major event for me. The US team is at such a huge disadvantage that it just isn't fun to me at all. The timing of it is complete broken and favors Asian and Caribbean teams to such an extreme that it is just asinine to put any value into the results. The fact the US team puts out maybe 50% of its best players says everything about the integrity of the event and I'm being generous in that 50%.

I do find your projection pessimistic but I completely agree with this post. They have a close to .500 team even with awful starting pitching but the actual outcome of the SP is so high variance that it is really hard to peg how many wins they will actually have. I can see high 70s and I can easily see low 80s and there is an outside shot for close to 90.

Yeah most pitchers can reach 4 or 5 MPH above their norm and guns can be off 1 or 2 MPH too.

Gallardo throws low 90s(91-92), Peralta mid 90's(95ish), estrada low 90's but more like 90-91.

Record 85-77 Division: 2nd behind Reds All Stars: Braun, Lucroy Disappointments: Rogers, Segura, new RPs Surprises: Gomez, Fiers mostly repeat last year World Series: Nationals and Blue Jays will be the best 2 teams but some goofy team will sneak in and win it even though they are the 5th or 6th best team.

I'm not on board with the legit #2 but I expect Fiers and Estrada to be viable ML starters, Gallardo is obviously at least a soft ace. Rogers or Narveson should be an acceptable #5 so Peralta really is the guy who things depend on. If we happen to sigh a Lohse or trade for a Capuano he isn't nearly as important as others imo.

You don't have to pay for today's game, just have an account. I'm listening to the game and didn't buy the package. I went through the link on www.brewers.com.

He would have to see his prime numbers improve on the foundation he already has established. He's only 24th in WAR over the past 4 years as an example. Hard to make a case for him being even a top 15 pitcher over his current stretch of games so he would have to take a significant step up and keep those gains for a good period of time. some sort of component ERA probably likes him more than FIP given his situation but I doubt it is enough to push him into the top 15.

No. It was soft because a whole slew of young 1B just entered the league. The same reason LaRoche didn't get offers from anyone but Was. Davis, Freeman, Goldschmidt, Hosmer etc are why the 1B market was soft when Fielder was in his last season, just way too much young talent was heading up for teams. The one team that would have made sense was the Dodgers but they had money issues at the time and were sort of freezing their assets in general. I guess the Giants made some sense at the time but they still haven't gone with an established 1B yet so I assume they either think Belt is going to hit eventually or that Posey or Panda will have to move to 1B. The team that actually did sign him moved an all star 1B off the position just to make room and only signed him because their DH got hurt. There just was no market for a 1B the past couple of years.

Hart has had an injury every year of his career, usually at the end of the season, it has really killed any trade value he has had. Weeks has been about the same, we know his talent level is above his production. There was no reason to trade him in 2011 and he had such an awful start to 2012 you couldn't trade him. These are exactly the type of issues I have. The we should have traded him concepts without looking at the context of the player and the reality of the situation. Gomez also has very little value after just one good year and Schafer isn't likely a major league starting player so we don't really have depth there. This was also the year where CF's were a dime a dozen with Bourn taking a below value contract since there were so many on the market, awful year to try to trade Gomez compared to most.

I didn't think LaPorta had a future in the majors when he was a top prospect. I didn't think he had a future after we traded him. I don't think he has a future now. I'll pass.

I don't disagree with the Hardy to Escobar part but the others are pretty meh. Gamel hasn't proven a thing and was hurt, hard to say you could rely on him the next season. Schafer probably doesn't profile as a starting major league player and once Hart moved to 1B there was no Gomez to Aoki. Last year we had no clue what we had in Aoki and Gomez had no value. The one time we had some sort of real positional depth in the past few years was with Hardy and we traded him (a trade I didn't like btw). The entire reason the Brewers have pushed players into the majors so fast is because there has been no depth, we have been playing do or die every season. I'm confident that the reason they pushed them up so fast is to get the fanbase back because this was the worst franchise in baseball when Melvin took over, it wasn't really close. I'm very happy we are where we are now compared to say the Pirates who actually had a better franchise back then.

I understand the point of view. I just think it is being obtuse. You cannot build a franchise the way you suggest without depth in the talent pool and we have not had the depth you need. It started with rushing our talent up to the majors too quickly to put butts in the seats and then they decided to go for it during a window where they actually had world series talent but the team tanked both years in the playoffs. I understand that you want us to build the way the A's did and the way the Ray's do etc but you have to understand that these teams have always traded from areas of strength. They are two of the better franchises in the game at drafting and developing SP. The A's burn theirs up quickly and sell them before they get hurt and the Rays sell them right before they get expensive but in both cases they sell them when they really don't need them to compete the next year. We have not been in a situation of depth yet at any point in Melvin's tenure. I don't think Melvin is a top end GM, I don't think he is a bad GM. I don't think the way he has run the team is bad in any way, it isn't perfect either. But this notion that we should have traded young guys every year is a poorly thought out one. This is our window of competitiveness and we simply have never had the depth in the minors to support trading away the major league talent to get more minor league talent. Jack Z was too awful at drafting pitching and ignored defense too much and the fact we had to blow prospects to fix the issue gave us a big hole in the minor league system that we haven't dug out of. We either could have some playoff runs or we could have a mediocre team with a good farm system, there was no real option to have both. There just wasn't enough real talent in the system.

I'm sure monty wishes we had traded guys during the 96 win year too. Trading away starting players before mid season last year would have been an awful move. It isn't like we had a depth to trade from which is what you usually see when you see these big trades made by teams who are expected to win.

You technically can be suspended without a drug test but it isn't going to happen without some sort of concrete case and there really is nothing that suggests they have one on any of these players. I'd be shocked if anything came out of this for any player.