Ennder

This thread has quickly turned into a lot of hindsight is 20/20 comments. Since we didn't happen to make the playoffs in year X any move we made in year X must be a bad one. It just isn't productive in any way. Then we go into but we could have done this or that when not one of us knows if we actually could do something else. People love to make up trades we could have done but there is no way to know if said trade was really possible. This is not going to be productive unless people keep this looking at the future only.

I think your methodology for judging Melvin in the first half of your post is just terrible. It is like saying a player is great because he hit a lot of HR and ignoring the fact he never walks and hits .220 and can't field. To use another sport it is as silly as judging QB's by super bowl wins. You can have a great GM who doesn't get lucky enough to make it to the playoffs consistently and there are many teams that win championships that weren't even one of the 6 or 7 best teams in the league. Way too much goes into it to try to make it that easy. I think Melvin used to be a slightly above GM but more and more young blood that understands the game on a deeper level have come along and now he is average to below average. I'm absolutely fine with overhauling the team but I also understand why they don't want to do it. It isn't an easy decision. There was a competitive window that appears to be closing, it certainly wasn't helped any by Braun's suspension and injuries. This is the third year straight that one just awful stretch by the team is going to derail a season too so I am fine with letting RR go, he doesn't seem to have answers for how to get out of a funk when the team isn't playing well. At the minimum they need to trade the temporary parts that they can sooner rather than later to get actual value. Personally I'd trade scooter too, I don't feel he'll ever hit lefties. They also definitely need to take a long look at what they are doing at the minor league level because a lot of your complaints about sloppy play, plate discipline, pitch counts etc are things that start in the minors and are largely developed by the time you reach the majors.

not sure I agree but glad you understand me. Seriously this team was so insanely hard to project that anyone who thinks they could is a fool whether they were positive or negative. This isn't homerism, it is just really easy logic. A team like the Cardinals have a lot of players who have done the same thing for multiple years in a row so you have some expectations, the Brewers are loaded with players who have had wildly different seasons the past 3 years so there is no easy way to know what they are going to do. Doesn't take a genius to come to my conclusion.

People are results oriented to point of absolute stupidity, everyone who had a negative attitude about this team is patting their-selves on the back and saying I told you so I'm so smart because they are too short sighted to understand reality. This team is a very high variable team because their results over the past 2 years on a per player basis have just been so wildly different, they were really hard to predict and still are really hard to predict. Whether you predicted they would win 70 games or 90 games the reality is there is no way that you could know if you are right or wrong, it is just really unpredictable with this bunch.

Every team you play looks great by comparison when you aren't scoring, aren't hitting HR and are getting mediocre starting pitching and inconsistent bullpen work. Sure but that is likely a temporary thing. A lot of it is just that the division is really tough this year with no easy wins anymore. Getting the Tigers and Royals in inter-league doesn't help much either.

Baseball is like that though, you overpay to keep a player and you lose money by going after FA. Football is a bit of the opposite, players tend to take a paycut to be on a super bowl capable team because of the salary cap. FA is an awful way to build a team in either sport though but it is even worse with baseball.

Favre carried a ton of really piss poor teams to the playoffs even with all his flaws, if your talent is high enough you can get away with the flaws too.

They have a simply brutal schedule. The teams they play out of division seem to almost always be playoff caliber teams. It won't be a surprise to me if at the end of the year they are near the top in SOS played.

Managers should be judged by process, players should be judged by results. If you think this was a smart move it doesn't matter if it fails, sometimes the 75% right choice is the wrong result, like 25% of the time. The worst thing you can be is results oriented with a manager. Gomez has a low baseball IQ, it stinks but it is what it is. 3 different organizations have tried to fix this and all failed. It isn't the managers fault, it is just how the guy is.

Dave Cameron is always really negative on the Brewers so this isn't a surprise to me. I don't have a good handle on this team because there are very few players on the team that I'm confident in projecting. They are all either coming off of injuries, haven't played 3 full seasons yet or are coming off of sub par years. It is a really hard team to project. I will say that the Pirates pitching isn't certainly way better than the Brewers though. That Pirates staff could easily just be awful (so could the Brewers mind you). Liriano seems fluky and he still hasn't pitched a full season in forever, Burnett was bad last year and he is old enough that a bounce back isn't certain, Locke strikes me as a Dave Bush type who just has so little wiggle room to be good, Cole is the only sure thing for me in the rotation. The 5+ starters all have their own issues as well. As for Aramis, you can make small samples say anything you want them to. His first half of 2014 was more or less a carbon copy of his good year with the Brewers. His second half was a bad July and a bad Sept but he was really good in August. Is that just 2 bad stretches in the 2nd half or is it a sign he is done? There is no way you or I or the team knows that. He is the type of guy that makes this team so hard to project. I could see anywhere from a .725 to a .850 OPS from him.

Segura is good enough defensively to stick at SS. Scooter is a career platoon player IMO so he needs a backup. I don't see a full time 1B or 3B on the 40 man to be honest so those will probably continue to be stop gap guys for a couple more years.

Nothing would change for me and I'd be hoping that the owners changed their minds.

I think this is very similar to the errors vs range debates in fielding. Errors are really easy to spot and it is really easy to overreact to how much they hurt your team. Lack of range is much harder to spot but causes more issues in the long run. The Brewers are an above average base running team, they just make a lot of errors. The Cardinals as mentioned above are a team with poor range on the base paths but they don't make a lot of errors. Obviously having the best of both worlds would be great but I don't know that this is an organizational issue and not just the fact we have some players who are just too aggressive.

530 runs is really hard to do unless you are in a killer pitchers park.

I guess I just don't think the mental part is as easy to fix as you think it is. Gomez has played this way for 20+ years of life now. Baserunning is very instinctual because if you hesitate at all you are probably going to get out. I don't think this is an easy thing to fix for him. Also I think you are completely wrong if you don't think Gomez is trying to improve every year. Now turning off his steals of 3rd with less than 2 outs would be fine with me and that is something they can definitely control. Telling him to be less aggressive is probably going to just hurt him in most other areas though.

Of course players learn over time but that comes from so many other sources than just the manager. Gomez has gotten better over time in almost every department. I don't really credit Roenicke for that and I'm certainly not going to blame him when Gomez isn't perfect either. From 2011-2014 Gomez is the 20th highest rated BsR in MLB so it isn't like his baserunning is a negative. I just think you are looking for someone to blame when there isn't one thing to point at. Gomez is not a smart baseball player and probably never will be. The Brewers organization really has nothing to do with it. He has improved since he got here and we had nothing to do with his minor league development. If you look at most players weaknesses when they first came up,they don't usually lose that as a weakness. Weeks improved defensively but it was never a strength, Gomez has a low baseball IQ and probably always will, Segura will probably always swing at too many pitches, Scooter is probably never going to be a good hitter against lefties. You can work on hiding them and make them less of a weakness but in the big picture they usually stay a weakness.

RR cannot micro control Gomez the way you guys seem to think he can. RR can yell at him until he is blue in the face but the reality is he can either green light him or hold him back by shutting off his aggression completely. We don't know what discussions go on off the field, I'm sure RR talks to him about it all the time. Gomez the player has been like this his entire career, he has 20 years or so of experience and this is just built in at this point. If you think the boneheaded play is somehow RR's fault I think you are just fooling yourself. Your one really good shot at teaching this stuff is when you have the player in the minors and they aren't established yet. Once they get a full season or two into them at the pros it is really hard to change what you see. It has to come from the player. If Carlos Gomez was traded to the Cardinals tomorrow I highly doubt any of this would change. Where the Cardinals excel is at player development before they hit the majors, it doesn't happen at the majors.

Nobody is saying the Brewers don't make a lot of bonehead mistakes but that is on the players or even on player development in the minors more than on the major league manager.

The truly bad management was the Twins who tried to turn Gomez into something that was never going to work. Also nobody ever 'fixed' Hunter Pence and he does just about everything wrong. If it works for him then they let him keep doing it. They let Panda overeat and get away with it, they let Zito party all he wanted. Lincecum continually smoked pot etc. It isn't like the Giants have some huge control over their players. They just got hot late in the season a few times.

Do you mean 2012? He played 61 games in 2013. No, I meant a full season with stats like he had in 2013 only pro rated to a full season. He won't return to the .950 OPS monster he was but I can totally see an all star quality .850 OPS return. .290, 23 HR, good doubles, 90-100 RBI type numbers playing like 145 games. Watching Scooter try to hit lefties physically pains me so that is my one prediction I'm most sure of. He is completely overmatched against them. Since he seems to be a hot point I'll say Segura splits the difference. He isn't the guy we saw his rookie year but he is better than last year. .700ish OPS and solid defense makes him an average player at SS.

Braun puts up a full season like 2013 but not like an MVP. Brewers win mid 80s and miss playoffs. Nelson has to be sent back to the minors at one point. Scooter is back to being a platoon player by mid season. Khris Davis puts up all star quality stats in the 2nd half and takes full time job away from Parra.

Darvish was shut down for the final 2 months of the season last year with inflammation in that elbow. His final start was august 9th.

It most certainly did not. Very rare for a pen to cost a team 4 to 6 wins in a full season and that is if it is one of the worst in the game. RP just don't have this type of impact. Enderr do you really believe that? What happened in 2013? Pretty sure that RP staff cost the team far more than 6games by the start of June. much less for the full season. I don't just believe it, I know it is complete malarkey. The Brewers bullpen has almost nothing to do with why they missed the playoffs last year, it was a complete collapse by the offense that caused it. The overall best WAR in the NL for a bullpen was 5.2 last year, the Brewers were 1.9 which was average, the worst was -1.6 which was the Mets. for the Brewers bullpen to cost the team even 4 wins in just half a season would require it to be a historically bad bullpen and it simply was not. The difference in WAR between the 1st and 2nd half of the season for the Brewers was under 1 WAR. Even figuring for situational pitching it is completely ridiculous to think ti cost us 4 wins much less 6.

It most certainly did not. Very rare for a pen to cost a team 4 to 6 wins in a full season and that is if it is one of the worst in the game. RP just don't have this type of impact.

Every year they talk about having salary flexibility so it wouldn't surprise me. Years where we look to be in the playoff hunt they have always been willing to add payroll mid season.