Ennder

Facepalm... One bullpen and one starting seems like a safe bet for what will happen with those 2. If one of these guys blows out an arm and needs TJ when shifting from pen to rotation later in the season...you may as well just ban me because I will not stop being upset about it on here. There is no reason to believe that moving from the pen to the rotation is bad for a pitchers arm, if anything this is the preferred way to break a starter in if you have the luxury to do it. I wouldn't want them to keep jerking them back and forth but if one is in the rotation half the season and them moves to the pen and the other is in the pen half the season and moves to the rotation that is called being smart.

Cancel early games sure, whack the season, no way in heck.

There is no way to know since it is a new virus. Everything I've read though suggests that warmer areas and areas with more humidity are not getting hit nearly as hard. This strain doesn't appear to like the heat. So I would guess that as we move into April the spread slows way down even without all of the precautions. But I certainly wouldn't want the people in charge to be acting on guesses. They have to act on more of the worst case scenario.

He doesn't need a big year at all. He just needs to show some sort of growth. He already had a big year in 2018 but it didn't really show the skill growth you wanted to see. I would gladly take a .750 OPS but with a 25% strike out rate from Ray, that would mean so much more to me than a .820+ OPS with a 31% K rate.

There are 2 off days still, plenty of time to set up their pitching whichever way they want it. Considering most of the rotation is going to have some sort of minor innings limit, starting with a bullpen day might not be a bad idea. Not sure how the fans react though, especially if they lose.

Even without the steroids Braun's career is so early heavy that it wasn't going to happen. In the big picture of basball Braun hasn't mattered since 2012.

Cutting Anderson would be an awful decision. It is still early in spring training and the team is going to need depth at SP.

Yep I completely agree. That is why I said instead of being worth 9 wins it is most likely 9.5 wins. The jump is very small because it is spread over a full team, doesn't mean the jump in value isn't there. It is also the kind of thing you can only really look at after the fact. If during Yelich's career with us we have a lot of really close playoff races and we win a few of them, it definitely makes the contract look better. If we don't it makes it look worse.

I agree there's a strong chance this is what it is...and I find it gross. I've found lindbloms stuff to be very underwhelming, and hitters seem to find it very hittable. And I've made my stance on Anderson extremely known. I hope those 2 find their way to the bullpen by mid may Are you basing the Lindblom take on the 10 innings he's thrown this spring? 10 innings that if you take away some bad defense have been really high quality. I have been very impressed with Lindblom so far, his control seems great, his stuff looks like it plays. He's had some really rotten defense in his few innings of work.

Well he stated that it was about being most meaningful not necessarily best. A big catch late in the game that saved the only no hitter in the franchise history is pretty meaningful.

It certainly spreads out to everyone but that is why my suggested value wasn't all that high. If we think of a win as worth 9M a year on a team that is on the fringe of the playoffs it might be worth 9.5M a year. If we were just applying all of the value to Yelich that number would be a lot higher. But yeah the math becomes a lot harder and a lot fuzzier when you are trying to spread something like that out over a full roster.

Yount's catch that saved Nieves no hitter comes to mind as one that would be in the running.

Wait, WHAT? Let me get this straight. You are making the case that if the COLLECTIVE of your team is on the fringe of the playoffs, its makes your best players WAR more expensive? What QB agent made that line of thinking up? That isn't what I said, I said it is more valuable, not more expensive, those are two very different things. The value of a win on a team who wins 70 games is very low. As the wins become more important the value of each WAR becomes higher. If it pushes you into a playoff rather than missing the playoffs the value shoots way up as the team earns a lot of revenue from the playoff games. If the Brewers are going to live in the world where they are always in the hunt for the playoffs but never a sure thing the value of WAR is going to be higher for them than a lot of other teams. That small amount of WAR can easily be the difference between making or missing the playoffs. That doesn't mean they should be looking to overpay for players. What they generally do is leave some flexibility in payroll and push it up if it looks likely they are going to make the playoffs and sit on it if it looks unlikely. But if the Brewers are going to constantly live in the playoff fringe it is going to make Yelich's contract look better when judging it after the fact.

It is also important to remember that the value of a win changes based on where you are in the win band. If the Brewers stay competitive and are always fighting for a playoff spot the value of a win goes up to more like 9.5M or 10M. It seems like they are always going to be that team that is in the fighting for the playoffs and not generally the sure thing playoff type.

I just think the fact that Lauer is stretched out to the point he can start a full season is going to come into play. Woodruff, Peralta, Burnes and even Houser probably all have some sort of innings limit on them. The limits are decently high but they are still there, especially if things are going well and you have to consider the playoff usage.

I think Lauer wins the #5 job and they unfortunately put Peralta in the bullpen even though he should be in the minors as a starter. My big question is what they do with Burnes. I don't see any way Houser isn't a starter unless he fails in season and I don't think he will fail in season.

The Pujols deal has never been a good comp, the ages are completely different. The best comps I've seen for recent players are Andrew McCutchen and Paul Goldschmidt. Both had very similar production as Yelich in their 26-28 aged seasons. McCutchen's value tanked largely because he suddenly sucked defensively. I don't know that Yelich is going to follow that same path since defense isn't a huge part of his game right now. Goldschmidt mostly held his value until last year which included a team change which makes things a bit more confusing. It looks like Goldschmidt had a lot of bad luck with BABIP last year compared to his norm but maybe that is just moving to a pitchers park from a hitters park. I highly doubt this is a good deal for the Brewers from a pure wins to contract value standpoint. The safer play was to let him play out his contract and leave. But every once in a while one of these guys stays amazing into his mid 30's, if that happens it is a huge win. We are kind of hoping he is Josh Donaldson who has managed to stay great until 34 outside of that one season. Even if it doesn't happen having that clear face of the franchise that the fanbase can rally behind has a lot of sneaky value that I think really matters. I like the deal but I can't say that it is a sure win for the Brewers.

The farm system rankings are always misleading. The Brewers don't have a ton of players ready to reach the majors but they have a lot of talent in the lower levels that tends to get overlooked unless it is can't miss talent. Even if they were to not draft another player they would move up in the rankings over the next few seasons as that young talent moved up. We just have a hole right now because we graduated or traded almost all of the older end of the prospects in the past 2 seasons.

My issue was not so much that he was cheap but that he seemed to be crying poor through his mouthpieces like Haudricourt when there was plenty of evidence to the contrary. This extension actually proves the point that there was money available to keep last years team essentially together. Nobody knew Yelich would take a deal without testing the market. When they refused to pay a guy like Thames a couple million more than his worth or hold on to a very useful bullpen arm like Guerra neither of whom would break the bank, it certainly seemed they were being cheap. They must have been pretty confident that extending Yelich was doable. He never said anything like this, you and many others projected this onto him. There was NOTHING in what he said that suggest this is true, nothing at all. The same people that listed to the Stearns interview yesterday and said it meant Yelich was never going to be signed to an extension. The same people that are convinced that the team is going to ask for a new publicly funded stadium soon for some odd reason. Fans have a nasty habit of doing this. They hear something, decide it means something with no real proof behind it and just go with it. We got an upgrade over Thames and Guerra's peripherals never matched his results so he is a tricky guy. I think he is probably a 4.00-4.50 ERA reliever. Mouse and Grandal both got overpaid, maybe they could have signed one of them but Grandal signed so early I'm not shocked they didn't match him. Mouse is not very attractive at that contract imo. What Stearns did this offseason was not take on contracts that probably weren't good deals.

Fair enough, I thought Houser was like 25 not 27. There is just no way that Woodruff signs this type of deal coming off such a good season imo.

This is unfortunate. Neither Peralta or Lauer should be in the bullpen to start the season, big mistake. Keep one of them fresh and stretched out in AAA and working on their secondary pitches. It hurts the team long term to stick them in the bullpen.

I think woodruff did enough last year that he probably isn't giving a discount this year no matter what. He is betting on himself at this point. Burnes or Houser are better targets for extensions for pitching. Kind of like Hiura is a bad target because he was just too good last year, but if the team believed in Ray which I don't think they do, he would be the guy to extend at this point.

Well keep in mind a career BABIP of .288 is quite low. His xAVG in 2017 was only .253. In 2019 it was .232. The xwOBA's are closer than that even. 2017 is an unrealistic expectation because he got better results than his skills. The biggest flaw in his game though is he can't hit a breaking ball to save his life. Early spring training most pitchers are getting their fastballs under control more than throwing the other stuff, probably why he has done so well so far. I hope he breaks out this year but that breakout is going to be something like a .715 OPS if it happens. Not really hoping for much.

The difference between 2017 Arcia and 2019 Arcia was really just BABIP. All of the peripherals were about the same with 2017 having a very slight edge in xOPS. The big difference is Arcia had a career high BABIP in 2017 and a career low in 2019.

Without accounting for platoons and assuming guys are generally healthy the best lineup we can probably put out there is going to be Cain, Yelich, Hiura, Smoak, Narvaez, Braun rest of the guys. Yelich and Hiura are clearly the best hitters on the team so are the core at 2/3. Cain profiles as an ideal leadoff hitter with the high OBP and not so great slugging. Narvaez and Smoak are probably the next best hitters on the team with Braun or Garcia being neck and neck for the next best. Then you get into the platoon muck from that point on.