Ennder

I hope you realize how much of a gross exaggeration this is. There is no way that Yuni came close to giving us 10 extra runs just from not striking out very much. Gonzalez is about the same as Yuni offensively and putting the ball in play for an out has almost no added value over a strike out. In a few situations it is better but in other situations it is actually worse and it mostly evens out over a full season. But yeah I said I think the pitching could be a little better and I meant a little better, marginal improvements by a few guys and obviously if someone has a major injury it could be worse too. That more or less goes without saying. I think Greinke, Narveson and Gallardo could all improve this year and Wolf and Marcum will probably get slightly worse, net effect is a marginal improvement.

I'm probably in the minority but Braun not being suspended would be great but to me it is even more important that he clears his name. I have kids who look up to him and he is going to be the face of the franchise for years to come. I'd gladly take some rational excuse that makes it seem like he didn't use PEDs along with a suspension rather than all evidence pointing towards him using.

Fielder+Betancourt+McGehee combined for 6.3 WAR last year. We replaced that with Gonzalez+Ramirez+Gamel. Gonzalez is usually a 1-1.5 WAR guy, Ramirez is in the 2-4 WAR range (he is very erratic), Gamel is probably something like a 1 WAR player. The bullpen is arguably a wash with a full season of KRod, the rotation is probably a little better than they performed last year with a full season of Greinke and Gallardo maturing. So even without taking Braun into account I'd think at best this roster is a wash with last years and most likely it is weaker. It is a playoff capable roster but some things certainly need to go right.

Veras, Loe, KRod, Axford probably are set as the late inning guys and the 6th inning guy usually isn't that important to teams. I doubt we see a bullpen guy brought in to be honest.

A lot of managers prefer to give rookies extra days off, I tend to agree with them. I don't know if 130 is the 'magic' number but I think something like 135-145 is probably pretty appropriate. That is still more games than they are used to playing in a season and you want to keep them fresh and protect them against bad matchups when you can.

Ok league minimum is probably stretching it for any established player but guys like Ryan Ludwick is as good as Hart vs RHP and signing for 2.5M. It isn't a big deal trying to replace what he does vs RHP in the OF if you need to which was the original point. It only takes Craig Counsell money to do.

Yes you can find this when you add in the below average defense and you plan on platooning. Every year some LH poor fielder signs for very little money. You pay Hart for what he does vs LH pitching, he is just good enough to keep him on the field vs RH pitching but he isn't much of a plus against them.

Hart is a liability in RF vs RHP so I'm hoping that is where this going more than anything else, you can get Hart's production vs RHP for league minimum.

His career UZR/150 is 6.3 which is elite for a SS so the stats support the scouts here. Then again statistically the best defensive SS over the past 10 years has been JJ Hardy and people on this board still seem to think he was just average defensively which makes no sense to me since he always looked great to me.

I may be in the minority but assuming the same stats I'd gladly take the guy who works the count and strikes out too much over the guy who swings away and makes more contact. Yuni's approach is more or less the worst case scenario in baseball but he makes enough contact to make it work at least a little bit.

Pepsi is horrible, please go with coke! I say that realizing that from a sponsor standpoint I don't care all all since I would never pay the prices they charge for a soda at a baseball game.

NBA, NHL, NASCAR, Soccer, Golf and Bowling are just horrible. So once football is over sports might as well not exist until the NCAA basketball tourney and at that point Spring training is going strong and there are sports worth watching again.

Yuni's approach is just awful, but his contact skills definitely had some value to them.

NFL ratings are up because of Sunday night games and Tim Tebow. The rest of the games are down compared to last year. Monday night ratings were down 10% this year as an example. NFL is still extremely healthy but lets at least be realistic about it.

I'm the minority but I'd always take the hitter over the pitcher while rebuilding a team so I get this trade. Pineda probably has something like a 50% chance to get injured while he is still cheap and something like a 25% chance to have an injury so severe it derails his career while being cheap. You rebuild around offense and then find a way to get pitching in general, especially in the AL. It is better if you can build both equally but Seattle has kind of failed on the offense front so they can't really do both at once. In this case I think Pineda is the better player and I think they could have gotten more for him so I don't love the trade, but I at least understand it.

RockCo, you & I often see things differently, but not this time! I think his offensive approach is going to drive people through the roof just as Yuni's did and to many, at that point, his defense will have to be Ozzie Smith-like to have even a slight chance of offsetting the justified frustration with his offense. In spite of his defensive reputation, if he starts blowing a few plays in the field, he'll "elevate" himself to Yuni B status 'round here in a hurry. His offense is as good as Yuni's so unless he is one of the worst fielders in baseball he will be an upgrade and he isn't one of the worst fielders in baseball. It is rare to find a player who incompetent on both sides of the game who still gets full time starts in baseball so it is rare to find a player like Yuni.

I think the point is you can't become the Kotsay or Betancourt. The reason people didn't like them is they could see before the season that they weren't good but were going to get to play. There will likely be someone who doesn't produce and everyone rides on but that is a different type of thing than those cases were. Aramis is a good bet to get peoples ire early since he is a slow starter and an ex Cub and Brewer killer.

I think you missed what I was trying to say or I said it poorly. I watch all kinds of NFL games that aren't the Packers just because they are on Sundays, it is convienent to watch, they have games on every weekend from out of my market and I can follow almost the entire league in 1 day. The season is also relatively short so I tend to do my best to watch every Packers game I can though i still miss some. I'm a much bigger Brewers fan than I am a Packers fan. I don't really watch other baseball games very much because the timing is almost always bad. I used to watch a ton but only because I had MLB.TV, which is really something I don't need at all to be able to watch football. I watch maybe 1/3 of the Brewers games because there are just so many games and I'm so busy I can't hope to watch much more than that. I still spend a good 5+ times as much of time per year paying attention to baseball than I do football even with all that and in the end baseball has lower ratings from my viewership than NFL does. While the NFL might not have developed the league specifically to suit TV ratings the end result is the sport is perfectly built for TV ratings. The low number of games mean people don't want to miss them, the bunched up games mean people will watch them and the fact the games are mostly during the dead part of the week means I have time to watch them. TV ratings is going to be a terrible way to compare sports in general and it certainly is a terrible way to judge a sports growth since more and more viewers are being pushed away from TV. This bleeds into the World Series and Super Bowl too. The World Series is so inconvienent to watch that even though I'm a huge baseball fan I tend to miss half of it. The Super Bowl has become such an event that unless the Packers are playing 90% of the people at the party I go to generally don't even watch the game, but everyone I know has it on, it is just another reason to have a party. NFL is just the perfect package for TV viewing. The NFL could be run by slackjawed yokels and put a terrible product on the field and still have better ratings than MLB, there isn't anything baseball can do about it.

Well you can blame baseball for going to TBS for this, that is a ratings killer. But football viewing isn't really up overall, the Sunday night game is a huge draw but the ratings of the rest of the games are down. A lot of people watch baseball on their computers these days as well and I'm not sure how you can track something like that. The sport is certainly healthy enough now. I don't think MLB will ever be able to match NFL because NFL is built for TV and MLB isn't. NFL bunches up its games and has a shorter season, much more fan friendly.

Zobrist also started his full time career as that type of player, he kind of forced his way into the lineup without having a set position. But yeah I'd think Hart would be fine playing 1B sometimes and RF sometimes as long as he gets on board with it.

If Kirby Puckett got in anyone who had a couple good years should probably be let in.

The fan scouting reports came out and while I don't put a ton of stock into them they are another data point to add for defense which can be a tough part of the game to judge. Betancourt came it at -29 which is the worst fielder at any position in baseball. Gonzalez came in at +13 good enough for 4th best SS in baseball. Escobar was +15 good for 2nd best SS. http://www.fangraphs.com/...&team=0&rost=0&players=0

Give it a couple months and he'll get his deal. It might only be 5 or 6 years but there is no way in heck he is coming back to the Brewers on a 1 year arbitration deal.

Sure, the guy who risked his health at least had some sort of consequence for his behavior, the guy who just doctored the ball was just pure cheating with no chance for it to matter, that is so much worse. I'll be honest, no matter what sport you like and no matter who your heroes are if you grew up in the 80s odds are your favorite players used steroids. Just because your hero wasn't linked to it doesn't mean he didn't do it and if your hero played something other than baseball the chances are even higher that he did it since football and NBA basically had no testing at all while baseball at least acknowledged it. If you want to hate a player because it was proven he did steroids that is fine but not putting someone in the hall because of some vague rumors about him doing them is just stupid.

1 year for a closer is almost never a bad deal, even if it is $10M.