Ennder

Hall has good UZR, if people are saying he is bad defensively it is because of word of mouth not stats.

Looper and Gallardo pitched pretty close to their projections. Bush and Suppan were pitching to their projections before getting hurt which is something that happens to pitchers. Parra's is the only one that really did differently than expected. I don't think you are giving nearly enough credit to injuries for how this season went. Suppan and Bush don't get hurt and this season goes very different. Melvin is to blame for not having enough depth to live through the injuries but the actual starting 5 has mostly been derailed by injury, not by Melvin being 'wrong' somehow. Another part of the issue may be that you are trying to judge pitchers by ERA which is just a terrible way to go about it. The projections can't account for luck/variance and ERA has a ton of it over a single season, if you compare projections to something like xFIP you'll see they weren't too far off until the injuries at least.

Health isn't a binary function. He doesn't have to be healthy or injured, there is a pretty large gray area in the middle where he can be healthy enough to pitch but injured enough to not be as effective as he should be.

WAR is a result based stat, not a predictive one, that is the biggest flaw with it if you are trying to use it to actually compare the 'true' talent of players. UZR does require more than one full season to really represent talent levels though. Of course so does AVG, I find it very strange that someone would point to AVG as a meaningful stat over one season considering it fluctuates wildly year to year for most players and is as much a function as BABIP as anything else over a single season worth of AB.

I dunno, his ERA was bad the last year we had him and his peripherals were always bad. He might be one of those examples of LOB% being a skill for some pitchers or it might just be he has been a bit lucky in his career but I still don't think much of Davis. He was gone after the season anyway so hard to point to that as a long term issue.

Edwin Jackson has a 4.58 xFIP including a much improved BB/9 that he may not be able to sustain. I wouldn't go throwing around I told you so's based on an ERA that is mostly driven by stranding a higher number of hitters than is sustainable. This is a pitcher that is more likely to see an ERA over 4.5 next year than one under 3.00 like he has this year.

If anybody got a screw job, it was Mark A, for having to pay Hardy 4.65 million dollars for the lack of production this year. JJ was given the chance to rebound(much longer than he should have been IMO), he never did. He has no one to blame about this than himself.Using simple WAR Hardy was worth 6.5M so far this season because of his defense. He was worth 22.2M last year. This line of reasoning is incredibly weak in general.

I don't think it is an issue but there have been bigger September runs than the Brewers would need in the past and by teams that weren't really talented enough to expect it from. The odds are still non-zero that they make it at this point. Of course if they do make some miracle run it probably means Escobar is hitting well and deserves to play in the playoffs anyway~.

Of course the reason they brought them up and played them before their stats might have warranted it is most likely to put fans in the seats. Seems to me they rushed them to show the fanbase that the future was coming and to start getting fans to come to the games.

Sure, I agree with that as well. I just don't think we trade for Sabathia if Gallardo doesn't get hurt and if we don't trade LaPorta during the season to get Sabathia it means we have the prospects to trade for a Vazquez or something like that during the off season or for a pitcher to fill in this year when Parra starts so poorly and Bush/Suppan get hurt. I was more just trying to point out that the depth has been more of an issue in general than the actual rotation we have put out there considering how terrible the rotation was when he took over.

I'd rather throw Suppan out there than Burns or CV, at least when he's healthy. As much as I dislike Suppan he isn't anywhere near as bad as people make him out to be. Most teams in baseball would throw him out there as their #5 over who they currently have. The joke is how much we pay him to do it and how many other guys we have that aren't much better than him.

2002 - Sheets, Rusch, Quevedo, Wright, Neugebauer 2003 - Sheets, Franklin, Kinney, Rusch, Overmueller I don't think you can really blame our pitching those years on Melvin, we had nothing to work with at that point. 2004 - Sheets, Davis, Santos, Obermueller, Capuano This is an upgrade over 2003, we still have no depth or anything at this point. 2005 - Davis, Capuano, Sheets, Santos, Ohka Again a slight upgrade, building a staff that is actually not a complete joke for the first time in years. 2006 - Capuano, Bush, Davis, Sheets, Ohka Another upgrade, we now have 5 real pitchers without a joke in the rotation. At this point we also have Parra and Gallardo coming to help soon. So from 2002-2006 I find it hard to criticize Melvin for the pitching considering what we started with and the fact we rebuilt the offense first through the draft. 2007 - Suppan, Bush, Capuano(injured), Sheets, Vargas, Gallardo. This is where it started to go wrong, the bad contract for Suppan, Capuano and Sheets getting hurt pretty much killed the pitching this season though we had Gallardo stepping in to help out. 2008 - Sheets, Bush, Suppan, Parra, Gallardo(injured), Sabathia Again we have a decent rotation here with pretty much no depth. The Gallardo injury makes us trade a prospect to get a rental which hurt. Gallardo doesnt go down and maybe we have the chips to trade for say Halladay or Lee this year. 2009 - Suppan, Bush, Parra, Looper, Gallardo Suppan contract is still killing us, Parra regresses and Bush gets hurt. Very little looks wrong with how Melvin handled this situation to me other than the fact the organization hasn't had enough success with young pitching. That is partially Melvin's fault but there has to be more to it than that since so many people are involved in the drafting and teaching of these players. I don't think magically replacing Melvin fixes the issue by itself. The Suppan contract is obviously the real killer in all of this, if we had say signed Lilly or Meche instead this entire picture looks so much better.

Once he got Looper there really was no reason to get another major league starter and what he said was pretty accurate. The weakness of the team was not having any depth behind the 5 guys so when Parra struggled there was no one to replace him and when Bush and Suppan both got hurt the rotation crumbled. I'm sure Melvin would have liked to add someone better than Looper but it just didn't work out, once we got Looper I'm not sure what you expected, I guess Parra to the minors would have been the only solution but before the season there was no reason to expect to need to do that.

We haven't had much in the way of prospects to trade until about 2 seasons ago so it really is more of a short term issue not getting a good trade. Two years ago it didn't even look like we needed a trade since we had Gallardo and Parra coming and a decent rotation before injuries. I don't think Melvin is amazing or anything but I think he is getting a lot of flack for the results of this season more than anything. Arguments that he should have done more or drafted better over the past 4 years or whatever make a lot of sense but just saying he should have done more last off season is not being very realistic.

If the discussion is going to boil down to Fukudome is better because I say he is then there really isn't anything to discuss. If you can't use the plethora of stats available to argue the merits of one player or another then I'm not really sure what the point of discussing it is. This is why I have no interest in discussing football players as an example, the stats are so subjective as to be almost useless so the discussions never get anywhere.

The Suppan deal is certainly bad, Riske getting hurt really clouds that comment. Melvin was most certainly dealt a bad hand when he started though, we had one of the worst franchises in baseball when we started and while people are quick to applaud Jack Z and not give Melvin credit for 'rebuilding' the offense through the draft they seem to blame Melvin and ignore the fact that Jack Z's history at drafting pitching is beyond horrible. The fault and applause for these things belongs somewhere in the middle.

You are making a big and most likely wrong assumption that Suppan's injuries are 'made up'. It just isn't very likely that it is true.

It is cutting it for the rockies, it was cutting it for the Phillies(before the Lee trade). The most important thing to admit is his hands were pretty much tied. It is fun to be an arm chair GM and say that he should of would of could of but he knew the pitching was shaky and he knew there was absolutely nothing to do about it for last season. It isn't that I'm happy that we aren't likely to have a competitive rotation next year, I just think you are being an eternal optimist if you think it something we can fix. The team has no young pitching outside of Parra/Gallardo and isn't a large market team that can overpay for established aces. This isn't something fixable for next season, we either trade for AA/AAA depth, we wait for our A/AA pitchers to come along or we do nothing. None of that is gonig to give us a good rotation for 2010. The best we can do is pick up a few really high risk/reward types and hope we get the reward(like say Pavano this year). This is a systemic problem caused by our poor drafting/developing of young pitching over the past 10 years. I'm not sure I can just pin that on Melvin though I guess he is the top of the food chain and is ultimately responsible.

The Rockies comparison is pretty much completely spot on. We put together a rag tag rotation and they underperformed/got hurt. I expect the same type of thing next year and then when Suppan/Hall are completely off teh books maybe we can work something out. If we are going to trade Hart/Hardy for pitching it is going to be AA/AAA pitching most likely, not major league quality.

I think a lot of fans will be upset when Melvin does a good job next off season and we don't end up with a playoff calibre rotation. It just isn't very realistic.

The problem with that is ERA+ is just a terrible stat for actually judging how good a pitcher is. He could have that same ERA+ trend but be getting better every single season. That isn't the case though, he is getting slightly worse, just not as fast as that suggests. He was never as good as those first two seasons suggest and he isn't as bad as that last one suggest either. The 87-97 is probably around where his talent lies and it hasn't really changed very much. He was a bad pitcher for the Cardinals too, he just happened to have ok ERAs probably because of how strong those teams were defensively.

I don't know the league average but I'm guessing it is right around the league average for ERA. Yes having a bunch of guys who talent sits in the 4.50-5.00 range isn't good for a staff, especially when you add a complete lack of depth behind them. I don't see the Brewers competing next year and by 2011 we'll lose Fielder and the picture gets cloudier.

Suppan and Bush were pitching about as expected before the injuries so I'd really take any numbers you throw out right now with a grain of salt. But ERA is such a cruddy stat over a single season that it can jump between 4.50 and 5.50 without a pitcher actually changing in skill in any way. I'd use something like xFIP or some other composite stat to really judge a player(FIP isn't a very good one imo since it doesn't do anything to correct for HR/FB which is highly random year to year~). Bush xFIP over the past 6 years has been 4.88, 4.64, 4.02, 4.43, 4.91, 4.88. He is what he is and this year is about the same as always just with an ERA jump. Looper xFIP as a starter has been 4.93, 4.59, 4.84. Again he is pitching just about the same as always Suppan xFIP over the past 6 years has been 4.73, 4.55, 4.86, 4.85, 4.91, 5.35. I don't know how to isolate for pre injury but I'm going to guess he was sitting around 4.90-5.00 most likely, right around what should have been expected out of him. My big problem with Suppan is we ignored the stats that mattered and payed him according to ERA/Clutch which is a recipe for disaster.

The entire system is terrible, so it doesn't surprise me. They use the wrong stats completely to judge these things. It is just another example of how antiquated baseball stats lead to people complete misinterpreting player value. Same thing as judging hitters by AVG or pitchers by ERA.

That was an incredibly lucky 4.30 ERA. Seriously. 10 HR's in less than 40 innings and he still had a 4.30 ERA. If I'm calculating it right, that's a 5.93 FIP. You can't expect a guy to pitch like Bush did in May and maintain a 4.30 ERA.HR/FB is more of a luck based stat than anything in the first place so I really wouldn't put much stock into this.