Ennder

If they have their season derailed by a losing streak that they just can't get out of for the 3rd year straight I'd imagine he is gone. Once is a fluke, twice is a pattern, three times and you are out.

Oh he definitely isn't a bad GM. I just think it is being overblown a bit. MLB network listed him as the #1 GM in baseball and it is almost purely based on the world series wins. While that is the goal the point is that the team that is built the best isn't going to win the whole thing even close to half of the time. It takes a skilled GM to get to the playoffs, it takes some good fortune to win it. I'd rather define success by playoff appearances than by world series wins.

I consider the Giants the Eli Manning of baseball. They got hot at the right time and had some better teams play poorly to help them out. Those Giants teams (in both sports) were not one of the 5 best teams in their sport when they won their championships. I think it is idiotic to judge a QB by his Super Bowl wins but it is just as bad to judge a GM by World Series wins. It is rare in today's game that the best team wins it all.

That logic is awful though. They had 2 bad months and 1 good month, impossible to derive how good they actually are from that. It is just as easy to point to a healthy Brewers team being way over .500 and when injuries hit them hard in the 2nd half they fell apart. Who knows what is the truth. I mean over half the team had some nagging little injury in the 2nd half. I think the Brewers are in the hunt for the wild card but I think all of the teams in the hunt for the wild card are somewhere between 70 and 90 wins, you just can't really predict baseball.

Joel Sherman is generally a putz imo so that doesn't bother me. One of the baseball guys I respect a lot less than most. Brewers did not have a great offseason but they weren't one of the worst either. No reason to project them to lose ground over last year though and they are certainly in the Wild Card discussion at this point.

The Mets could actually have an elite rotation with DeGrom, Wheeler, Niese, Harvey and Colon. I can see why it puts them in that .500ish range. Those NL projections seem about right to me. Each division has someone who stands out and then a bunch of .500ish teams. The AL seems completely up for grabs to me. I don't see any clear division winner even.

This team is impossible to project in my mind. I could see 70 wins very easily, I could see 90 wins very easily. I just feel this team had 3 major weaknesses that wouldn't have been relatively easy to fill. 1) Lack of starter depth 2) Lack of MI depth 3) Lack of CI depth If a pitcher, MI or CI goes down or if we have an injury stack at those positions I think it will derail the entire season.

That is a fair opinion JohnBriggs12 but I was talking more about what they will actually do than what they should do. Ramirez is in that stage where you can't be sure he isn't still a viable 4th hitter and they almost certainly will give him the benefit of the doubt.

For one guy this is even fine. But we have Fiers and Nelson who we really have no idea what we will get out of them. Garza has injury issues and Lohse is hitting that scary age range. Behind those guys we have no established starters at all. The depth is just way too thin as we are setup now. Most years you start 8+ guys and I'd much rather see Nelson as the 6 than the 5!

The thing is most of these contracts were called bad by at least the stat guys when they happened. Verlander was questionable but not totally unreasonable, Shoo is just incomplete at this point. The other 8 were instantly viewed as bad deals. Why do the GMs not realize this?

Because they play an unbalanced schedule and the difference between the 2 wild cards teams is so small that which one plays on is simply not a big deal. They could either add more rounds of playoffs and dilute the playing field like the really bad playoff systems do or they can go to this system where the day after the regular system we get these amazingly important and awesome games. The system also gives division winners a leg up on wild card teams which is nothing but a good thing, considering the wild card teams have to blow their best pitcher before the real playoffs. This system is brilliant.

If I was forced to either bet on which NFL teams made the playoffs or which MLB teams were going to make it I would go with the NFL side every day of the week. Just feels like there is a lot more continuity in football at the very top end. NFL's parity is driven almost completely by the small sample of games they play. Here is an article that came up with that same conclusion basically. You can ride a hot first 5 or 6 games to a playoff in the NFL and you simply cannot do that in other sports. http://www.sloansportsconference.com/?p=12728 Truth of the matter in baseball is that the more money you spend, the less efficient that money is. A team that wants to spend a ton of cash is almost always going to get inefficient returns on it. When you add in revenue sharing etc we are about as close to parity in the league as we are going to get. The one final step is probably better sharing of money from media deals, but a salary cap would just be a complete disaster in baseball. People would say finally things are fair but it would just make things worse.

In 2008 we had an elite offense, we no longer have that. Thornburg and Smith are in RP roles. Jungmann is a complete unknown. Willis was the joke, the fact he really could be the backup plan spells disaster. On top of that Fiers is still a complete unknown given his history. It is just a bad setup for a rotation. We are just praying everything goes our way with no solid backup plan.

Nelson being our #5 is a complete and utter disaster and will stop the team from being competitive this year. It has nothing at all to do with Nelson and everything to do with the fact that if a single SP gets hurt we have nobody who can step in. Nelson as the insurance policy for the top 5 is awesome, Nelson as a full time starter with Dontrelle Willis as the backup policy is nothing short of foolish. This team is in dire need of depth and SP was a relatively easy spot to add it.

I like the spirit of the rule, I don't know if I like the reality of it though. As for the 'integrity of the game', screw that. Baseball was not perfect the day it was made, it has gone through a hundred changes for the better and it will go through another 100 changes for the better. Sticking with something because that is how it is supposed to be is just asinine as proven by how dumb it is the AL still has the DH imbalancing the game so completely.

Quick, name the last huge NFL free agent signing. That is, huge star in the prime of his career who's own team, and everyone else, wanted to sign him and he bolted for more money elsewhere. I can't think of one either. Now try the same for baseball - off the top of my head - CC Sabathia, Prince Fielder, Zach Greinke (yes I know we traded him but of course because the writing was on the wall), Max Scherzer, Alex Rodriguez, Albert Pujols, Robinson Cano... It really hardly ever happens in football. That's why there are teams that can be consistently good for long periods of team, because you can build a team and keep it together, including keeping your star QB. But the playing field is even from the start, it's up to the teams to build success and maintain it. In baseball it's up and sell to the highest bidder year after year, and oh by the way not everyone can afford to bid the same amount. How is that fair? The only baseball player you named that remotely fits your description is Scherzer. Every other name you listed were players who the team knew were going to get overpaid and wanted nothing at all to do with them. FA signings in baseball are largely a suckers bet. As for football, the careers are so short, the injuries so high and the impact of a single non QB player is so low that FA just isn't a huge deal overall. The market responds to the game period. In the NFL players take less money to go to the teams that will get the endorsements or a good chance at a ring, it makes it really hard for teams that don't fit those two bills to sign any FA at all. In MLB FA are grossly overpaid and are almost never an efficient use of your money. You are almost always paying for the past and not the future. In the long run parity still exists with both systems.

Ned Yost got fired because he was a terrible in game manager and took a ton of heat this off season for being just that. I am usually very kind when it comes to second guessing managers because we don't know all the details of what is going on. Yost had a number of times when he didn't just go with what felt the 2nd best option but with what felt like the absolute worst option. I have no clue what to expect out of this team. Lucroy is the only offensive player we have that I'm comfortable projecting at all. Is Aramis just done or was the 2nd half a fluke, 1st half was just like 2013. Will Braun be healthy. Can Scooter hit lefties at all. Which Segura shows up. Can Davis build on his mid season growth from last year or was it just a hot streak etc etc. I can see a playoff team in there somewhere. I can see a really really good bullpen in there too. Unfortunately the team seems really thin on depth.

Football is far from an even playing field. Players will take less money to go to some teams than others. The structure just works differently. There is a reason the Packers rarely if ever get FA and it is because they have to pay more than the larger market/warm weather teams for the same players. The big difference is the shelf life of players more than anything. An NFL team rolls over almost its entire roster in 5 years. It takes a lot of the Brewers players 5 years just to get their first full season in the majors. You just can't really compare these two sports.

It is really hard to know what Ramirez we will get so my guess would be he starts off #4. 2013 Ramirez was perfectly acceptable batting 4th, first half of 2014 was right in line with that. 2nd half of 2014 was dreadful. There is no way to know which Braun is going to show up either. This whole roster is just so hard to judge everywhere. I could see them winning 70 or 90 just based on which of the past 2 seasons shows up for each player. Also I still don't get why people worry about strike outs in a leadoff hitter. That is the spot in the order it hurts you the least since there is almost never anyone on base. Obviously it is harder to be a high OBP guy with a ton of strike outs but this is a team lacking in OBP all around. Gonna guess we go with some fast guy leading off, a good average guy batting 2nd and some combo of Lucroy/Braun/Ramirez in the middle. Yeah it is vague but this lineup doesn't really lend itself to any easy flow.

We have faced really strong pitching overall in the 2nd half.

I don't really like the deal but just about anything you put on the field will be better than Schafer. He can't hit, his defense seems shaky for someone who is supposed to be a great defensive player and he can't even seem to bunt. 4th OF was definitely a need for this team because if anyone gets hurt and we have to start Schafer it is a complete nightmare. I think we overpaid for Parra though, probably because he has been a bit of a Brewer killer.

This was an upper 80 win roster on paper assuming they missed the injury bug which they have so far. Depth is the big flaw with the team and so far it hasn't been a huge deal. More than any team in the division health is the key for us because there just aren't many replacements coming. The team was right where I expected them before this last winning streak.

I think if he can develop his change people will think of him more as a starter and not a bullpen guy. As far as I can tell this is almost solely about him only really having 2 pitches. The arm slot is something a good number of starters get away with so that can't be too big a part of it.

Taveras is a nice player and all but he would be a 4th OF on the Brewers.

On paper we should dominate but on the other hand these are a lot of teams that just seem to dominate us year after year. I will go with 2 games over .500.