Ennder

I think at this point the roster spots are probably a bigger deal than the money. They are at the point where they don't have that many guys they want to ditch for super small depth upgrades. There is probably room for 1 or 2 more of these guys and there is still time to sign 1 or 2.

So I'm just going to go by bWAR here and compare things to last season. SP - 2.9 bWAR. That seems doable but certainly not a given, this may be what costs the team. RP - -4.1 bWAR. While people thought it was a strength last year the bullpen was a disaster outside of Hader. I think they can probably improve on this. C- 0.5. I think they can match this but this value seems really low, I guess baseball reference isn't very pro framing. 1B - -0.8. I think they can easily beat this bar. 2b - 0.9. Again I think Hiura easily beats this. 3B - -0.6. Shaw was an anchor last year, Sogard and Gyorko easily pass this number. SS- -2.2. Worst SS set in the league. I think Arcia beats this even without Sogard and Urias but the set of them beat it for sure. Getting rid of Hernan Perez is a huge boost to value. OF - 5.6. This is really the part of the team that drove everything last year. I like their odds to repeat it with the addition of Garcia for depth. Hopefully Cain is more healthy next year though with his age it isn't a given. I think the team overall is 2 or 3 games better than last season right now. A lot of how we improved was getting rid of negative players and a couple injuries could put a bunch more PA into negative players, but I feel like this team has a lot of depth. We had a lot of things really go wrong and I would hope it wouldn't be so bad this year. I do think last years team probably overproduced in wins though so that 2-3 games probably translates into about the same as last year. Mid to high 80's in wins if we don't get an injury stack at SP and if Yelich is healthy most of the year.

This simply is not true at all. Sogard has put up about 1.2 WAR per full season in his career and last year was one of his best years so no reason to expect that number to be faulty. Gyorko has been a 1.7 WAR player on average during his career coming off of his worst season. There is no reason to think that these two guys combined can't put up something like 1-1.5 WAR. That is below average still but it certainly isn't backup at best. Hernan Perez is backup at best, these guys are much higher quality than that. Both of them have put up seasons that were above average within the past 3 years and that was without playing a full season. It is unlikely that 3B isn't an upgrade over the putrid results we got from it last year. 1B, 3B, RP and probably SS are all upgrades over last season. LF probably will be as well. The question is if it can make up for the downgrade at C and SP.

By far the hardest player on a team to give a value to is the RP. I don't know that anyone can answer this question because it depends so heavily on the leverage when the RP enters the games. If I had to guess I'd say Hader is equal to like a really good #2 starter in value. But it would heavily be a guess.

I expect that 3B is going to be an easy position to fill with a mid season acquisition if things aren't going well. I don't have any concerns at all about 1B.

It may not be top 1 or 2 in home runs but it is generally in the top half of the league. Every site does it a bit differently though and every year is a bit different. I think Miller used to be more HR friendly but at some point it moved more neutral. All it really takes is some addition to the stadium impacting a weather pattern to change things. I don't remember them changing the walls at all but it is the kind of thing I don't pay much attention to.

Miller Park really isn't an amazing hitters park. It heavily inflates homers so it a good HR park. It also inflates walks. But overall it is middle of the pack or so for runs.

I agree, I give Houser a shot at 5+ to start. He saw a HR spike after 50 pitches but the rest of his stats looked spot on. The sample was small enough that there is a decent shot the HR spike was just a random blip.

They neutralize these by using comparisons between road parks and home parks. The team really has very little to do with the park adjustments. I mean the team can strike out a lot just because they have a lot of strike out guys, but those Mariners team's in the late 2000's that barely struck out still rated #1 or #2 in these stats.

The batters eye has a huge impact on strike outs and walks. Weather and altitude can affect it. The mound itself can impact it as well. I would guess the size of the park matters as well as pitchers are more likely to go for strike outs in more homer friendly parks and the hitters are more likely to swing for the fences, but that is just a guess. Different people have tracked this in different ways and Miller always comes in the top 5. For some reason Seattle is generally #1, not really sure why that is.

I don't think Baker is a great on the field manager but he is a very good manager for the rest of it. With a team going through something like this with this much talent on it I think the rest of it is probably more important this year. This is a very good fit imo. Plus its a one year deal so they can really take their time figuring out who they really want. I also think next year they will get to have first pick on available managers where this year given the nature of how things went down they were stuck picking from the guys who didn't get picked by anyone else. Not a great position to find a long term manager.

Cashner would definitely fit well since he can be a fill in starter when Anderson gets hurt and we need to get his replacement on the proper schedule.

Probably not but it is quite possible that he isn't. That is probably why the deal is so small and has the incentives because the Reds aren't sure either and neither is Strop. There are still a lot of RP out on the free agent market, Stearns may be holding out for the cheapest ones, he may want to leave room for young guys in our bullpen. I can't know that information. This is hardly a slam dunk must do deal though in my mind. Which says a lot given the small value of it.

This is almost certainly just random variance. This wasn't a particularly bad team for average and while it was high for strike outs part of that is because Miller Park inflates K's heavily so that is something they can't really escape. They were also a team that walks a ton so filled the bases more than most. The Brewers actually had a below average OPS+ last year so the offense as a whole was slightly below average, that explains at least some of it.

Strop's 2018 was one of those really lucky type seasons, he was nowhere near a 2.26 ERA pitcher. There were definitely warning signs in 2017/2018 that the skills were slipping and then he was bad in 2019. That is why bullpen guys are so hard. It won't surprise me if he puts up like a 2.80 ERA on the year, but it also won't surprise me if he is a 4+ ERA guy and has just lost it. Take Sierra which is usually decent in small samples. 2012-2016 it was around 2.75 on average. 2017 it was 3.61, 2018 it was 3.69 and last year it was 3.94. It really seems like his skills are in heavy decline and have been for a few years.

So I just watched a bit on MLB network about this and Tom Verducci said that NL baseball is how the game was meant to be played. I hate dumb stuff like this. In original baseball the starting pitcher pretty much always pitched 9 innings. We no longer have original baseball. In original baseball the pitcher just lobbed the ball in and tried to get people to put it in play. In original baseball the fielders didn't have gloves. In original baseball there were no walls so a really hard hit double was a home run. Original baseball has nothing at all to do with the DH rule and whether it should exist or not.

Guys like this are just so hard to judge, hard to say if this is a good or bad deal.

The point of the DH in today's game is to protect the pitcher and give the fans a more entertaining at bat. I don't think it is really just about adding offense. Protecting the pitcher is the biggest part of it. I would think of any NL fanbase ours is the one that would want the DH most. We moved from the AL so a lot of people were already used to it. Two of the best young SP we have developed had their careers derailed by getting hurt during the process of running the bases, both in seasons where we could have really used them in the post season. For a franchise that hasn't been great at developing pitching that is a huge deal.

To be fair if you look at the underlying stats Arcia's 2019 was much closer to his 2017 than his 2018. The results weren't there but everything else mirrored 2017. Last year was a growth season for Arcia even if the results weren't there. More walks, fewer strikes out, barreled the ball more, elevated better.

I think that is a fair statement TJseven7 but at the same time I think Stearns has done a good job getting those veteran guys mid season so you have to give him a little bit of benefit of the doubt. My guess is we still bring in someone like Drew Smyly or Dan Straily. Some guy that you don't have to give big money to that can take a spot if they are pitching well but it isn't a requirement. I think they want to see what they have now and not block it with someone more established right now.

Very few teams use a dedicated DH these days. I really don't think this is going to hurt small market teams at all. When pitchers used to pitch complete games all the time the pitcher hitting made sense, it just makes no sense at all in todays game. Especially since many of the leagues leading up to the majors use the DH. A couple years ago I tracked this for almost every game of the first half and I think there were only 2 times in the entire half that an actual difficult decision came up for pinch hitting for the starter. It is a bit bigger of a deal for the RP.

Well bullpens are so random year to year that it is a super hard question to answer. There is a lot of upside the the bullpen but well there isn't a ton of certainty. I do think you are underselling it some though. Wahl seems to have real potential. Knebel is coming back. Williams and Black have potential etc, even Claudio wasn't really bad last year. It is really hard to know with bullpens. I think bullpens are really important in today's game but out of all of the positions on a team they are the hardest to predict as well.

There is no way Arcia doesn't start the year at SS if Urias isn't ready. Sure he has had issues and I personally don't think he will fix them, but he still is only 25 and has shown above average defense at a defensive spot. If you are a believer in peripherals he was unlucky last year and showed growth in power and plate discipline. If he had played to his career BABIP he would have hit roughly .250 with a .700 OPS. Not super amazing but with good defense still a completely viable stop gap. He showed a lot of growth in underlying stats in 2019 but the results weren't there, the underlying stats usually mean more.

Urias slugged .600 last year in AAA, not sure how that is no power. I was never sold on Arcia because he never showed any ability to drive the ball and didn't ever show he could take a walk. Urias has shown both of those skills even it was more doubles driven when was in his teens. I was sort of kidding, but I'm not expecting big power numbers out of him this year. If he plays good defense and is an upgrade over Arcia at the plate, I'm golden. This year that makes sense. But I fully expect that at some point while on the Brewers Urias will have a 35 doubles, 5 triples, 20 homer season.

Starting pitching's value hasn't been this low since the early 1900s when the glove was first put into common use. Starters hitting doesn't really matter much anymore, they don't go as many innings as they used to, shifts protect them from their weaker matchups, bullpens protect them when they get in trouble, strike outs protect them from BABIP and hard hit rates more than they used to. If one part of the team is uncertain the absolute best spot for it to be is in the rotation. I know some posters will balk at this but it simply the truth in today's game. The 2018 Red Sox won with really only one good starter since Sale was hurt. The 2015 Royals won with no good starters. Their bullpen won more games than the starters did in the playoffs. The 2014 Giants had one good starter, he dominated the series but he was really the only guy. I think you have to go all the way back to 2013 to find a time when the starters really dominated a series on both sides and decided who won it all.