bill hAll Star

Texas may punt but they aren't going to just give Hamels away. Look to the Verlander situation. They would've sat on him for the entirety of his contract if he hadn't built value back up. Teams just don't "shed salary" unless they are in financial crisis or did something insane like Boston 5 years ago. Even the Reds will sit on Homer Bailey's money the next few years. You're better off just sitting on that through a rebuild and not making many external signings to save money than giving a guy of value away. I know you suggested giving up a prospect as to suggest that he isn't just being given away, but I would be wary of giving up much. I'd rather just overpay a younger, mid-tier rotation guy and pray he is a 2-3 WAR guy instead of giving up prospect(s) praying that Hamels has not regressed at or below a 2-3 WAR guy. Wouldn't hate the move, though. It may be same old, same old of paying mid-tier pitching, but I'd rather just spend the cash and keep our prospects to keep the pipeline of good, cheap, younger players flowing.

Ever heard of money? It's this crazy thing that is #1 on every players list. You think he cares about playing SS that much? Don't think so. I don't think it is even possible, but it would make a ton of sense for Milwaukee. Condescending remarks don't help your stance. All MLB teams have money. And pretty much all of them have more than Milwaukee to burn if they want to buy in on a guy that had a career year at age 32. And when he comes in and puts up a line close to what Perez gives us, how great is that going to be for Milwaukee? He has a career .254 BA/.305 OBP/.716 OPS line. Last year he had a monster season posting a .930 OPS but the previous two seasons his OPS was .769 and .732. Hard pass. Especially for the money. Hard, hard pass. I'm not saying that I am in favor of Cozart at 2/$40 or 2/$30...but if the only position you're upgrading is 2B and then some help in the bullpen, the dollar amount doesn't bother me. It's 2 years. You're taking a bit of a 2019 risk but it's not causing you to lose anyone that you value.

Yes, many positions on the field can be upgraded. They may shuffle things around a bit, but I personally do not want to spend any prospect capital to obtain anything better than what we have. I could see a situation where we trade 2 pieces for 1 better piece. All of that said, my strategy going forward is to not trade any of our controllable assets (for the most part). I would pony up for upgrades over the next few years. When Shaw, Anderson, Nelson, etc. are due to be free agents, there is a high probability that almost none of those guys would be good 2nd contract guys. Keep the flow of young talent coming in and fill it in with vets.

It's a bit weird that you don't include Brinson. While Brinson isn't a surefire bet to hit 300, he can be productive with the bat while providing excellent defense. Hiura might end up at 1b or LF where the bat won't play. I know I hear all the time how his bat will play anywhere, but unless you are hitting 30+ bombs...your bat doesn't belong in LF or 1b. Hiura doesn't profile to do that. Brinson is Mike Cameron IMO with a tiny chance of being elite if he figures some stuff out at the plate. Brinson strikes out a ton just like Cameron so might be in the .250 range and obviously he isn't a consistent 40+ HR candidate. Brinson being Mike Cameron even is an ideal situation. If he's that, I'd love it. But Cameron was just a very good player for 15 years. He never had the highs of a Trout or McCutchen in terms of being an MVP candidate. I guess to be fair, Brinson does probably strike out less than Cameron did, but I think he'll fall a bit short of being an elite player. Definitely a chance.

Yes, and I think that is a reasonable blueprint. I think the Brewers need to shore up more good (non-elite) players. The Royals had Cueto, Zobrist, Morales, Volquez, Guthrie, Young, Infante, Vargas, Madson, Rios all on the roster. Now, many of those guys were acquired via trade, but the Brewers have the opportunity to go add their Cueto or Zobrist prior to the season in 2018 or 2019. I just think that going into 2019 or even 2018 with "what we have" will put us in a situation of saying, "they're a starting pitcher away from getting in" and then we'll trade future assets away for a pitcher.

Matt Moore since he stopped throwing his slider after Tommy John (going on 3 years now) has been way worse than Matt Garza.

I don't mind a "wait and see" year, but I do think that at some point if we want to win prior to 2021, the Brewers are probably going to have to spend a bit of coin. I love what Stearns (and the ghost of Melvin) has done with Shaw, Santana, Knebel, Hader, Brinson, et al but I don't think this is a championship core. The Astros, Cubs, Indians, and Dodgers have several superstar young players and most of them have spent money to address other needs. The Brewers have probably 8 or 9 guys that are probably 1-3 time All-Stars, not 10x All Star/Cy Young/MVP candidates like Altuve/Correa/Lindor/Seager/Kershaw/Rizzo/Bryant/Kluber/etc. and those teams have 4 or 5 of those guys, each. On top of it all, our guys like Chase Anderson and Shaw are already nearing the age of 30. Of course there is always the chance that Stearns works more magic and brings in some semi-controllable elite players that do not affect the future very much in packages that we return.

2017 had a 5 WAR season from Nelson, and I think most would agree that we'd be happy to get a 1 WAR season in 2018 and there is no guarantee in 2019. I agree that there are only certain places to fill via free agency and that the crop isn't great, but adding another starting pitcher (Cobb, Lynn) and several relievers is where I'd go. I'd also consider Walker or some sort of stopgap at 2B. I'm fine with "stay the course" with the young guys but I'm not betting on over 85 wins with this core for the next year or 2. There will be money (a bit less) to spend in 2020 or 2021, but now the longer contracts you sign in those years may actually get in the way of the very young prospects we have like Phillips or Arcia further on down the road. Why not spend it now? We can handle one or two Cobb-type 4ish year deals and plenty of 1-2 year reliever deals like Swarzak. I think people are failing to see the nuance that we could even handle a failed contract or two. though obviously we'd rather have those contracts not fail. Some want to see what we have with Jungmann, Guerra, and others penned into the #5 starting spot. I think a lot of guys like that are destined to fail. We aren't even sure if Woodruff is for real. Get Cobb or Lynn and you still have plenty of room to take whichever of the list of decent prospects that we have pans out.

I'm a fan of making some splashes this offseason, but Martinez may be way too expensive. It's a reasonable idea if it somehow can work out financially.

So are you saying 2017 was a fluke? The team finished one game out of the playoffs but we should make zero moves to improve the lineup? The lineup is just fine as it is? Asking sincerely as I want to understand you. To add, we only have a handful of guys that we can reasonably expect to become All Star or elite (unlikely) players. Canceling that out is no Nelson, Anderson/Shaw/Knebel maybe regressing. Next year's team could do nothing and would be very likely to win 80 games and we'd still have a bunch of guys that we are not expecting to develop into a team of elite players. We have an 80-85 win crop of core players and unfortunately, I do not see Hader/Brinson/Phillips/Arcia/Santana development doing much to change that. Everyone else is a regression candidate and half of the list in the previous sentence is a regression candidate.

So what's the end-game? Do nothing in 2018 and the team with a bunch of non-elite younger/prime players becomes a contender in 2020 or 2021? How? The plan is to sit back and pray that Brinson, Phillips, Hader, Woodruff, Santana, Shaw, etc. hopefully develop enough to win in 2020 or 2021? I like our prospects but we don't have a Kluber, Lindor, Carrasco, in our system to sit back and let most of the prospects do the talking 2-3 years from now (and the Indians got aggressive, but a bit later in the process). By 2020 or 2021 it's just as likely for Arcia to turn into an elite player as it is for Shaw or Anderson to regress to pre-2017 form.

It's less about Mark A making money and more about opportunity cost for those dollars and rotation spots. I don't want Matt Garza pitching again to a 5+ ERA in 2020 and 2021. We can't(or won't) simply cut a guy loose like him with 2 years left on his contract. We didn't do it with Garza, Suppan, Wolf, etc. Hader and Woodruff have a very real chance to be better than either Lynn or Cobb in 2018. Burnes/Ortiz/Peralta are on the way. There are other prospects at the lower levels that will hopefully develop and give us options. If I'm spending money on a free agent or making a trade, I would either want someone truly impactful or utilize internal options considering the options we have. Our bullpen options aren't as good, and FA signings there are much more short term, so it makes more sense to look to FA for bullpen help. I just noted above that Garza's contract had zero harm long-term on the franchise and it's only really arguable that in his final year, maybe Guerra or Wilkerson might have been better than him down the stretch and they held on too long because he was making more $, but that's debatable. By the time Garza got into the "bad" years, the team was rebuilding anyways or did not need the extra $ (this year). The Brewers are in a very unique situation. They have minimal current elite players, a base of "good" players that make up ~$50 million of base money for 10-15 guys the next 4 years...but I can't think of a single player on our team that will be a free agent now until 2022 that I am interested in signing long-term after that. Maybe Santana but that's it. If Alex Cobb is a #3 starter for 2-3 years and #5 for 1-2 years we will lose probably zero home-grown free agents that we care about overpaying him in his final 2 years. The only consideration is maybe having less to throw around at free agents in 2020 or 2021 if they make some splashes this offseason or next...but I think Mark might open up the pocket book for the extra player or two if they are truly close to a World Series.

Very much this. The stigma of worrying about overpaying guys and overvaluing what we have is the issue. "Why overpay Alex Cobb? We have Burnes/Woodruff/Suter/etc.?" Well, I'd rather overpay Cobb and still take what I can get out of realistically the 1-2 guys that make it out of the group mentioned. The Nats, Dodgers, Cubs, Yankees, etc. all have $50-100 million more to spend, give or take. So yes, they can afford either 3 more massive contracts or 5 bigger contracts than the Brewers. All of those teams are sitting on Zobrist, Lester is overpaid, Werth, Zimmerman seemed like dead $, etc...but we can definitely pay for 2 bigger contracts and then a few short-term relievers or Walker knowing there may be a dead year in there. All of that said, you can overpay guys and deal with the consequences later. I'm not saying there aren't consequences, but we should now have a steady stream of guys coming up at the league minimum and contributing for the next 5 years and I don't think we should be worrying about keeping much of our current core 4 years from now. Shaw will be old to give a long deal to, Anderson will be old to give a long deal to, etc. I don't want to sound like I'm in favor of recklessly signing every free agent, but I think buying a few in the upper tier of them is the best course of action if we want to remain competitive right now and stay competitive with the next wave of prospects 5 years from now. Going back to the Matt Garza example: That contract did not hinder us one bit. None. Maybe he had a bit longer of a rope than he should have in the rotation. By the back-end years when he stunk, we were rebuilding anyways.

Suppan was simply a bad contract the moment the ink dried. Garza, to be honest, at the time I thought was a pretty fair contract. We're at the point where I don't care what they are making even if we know that year 4 may not be great. I know that Lynn or Cobb will be very overpaid and may fizzle out in their last year. The Cubs (huge note: they have the money to sign 8-10 of these guys instead of 4-5 like we do) knew that Lackey, Lester, Zobrist, Heyward would all be majorly overpaid halfway through their deals. It doesn't matter. If Shaw, Santana, Nelson, Anderson, etc. underwhelm us over the next 2-3 years, we are going to be rebuilding regardless and I don't really care if we're sitting on 2 years of overpaid Alex Cobb while we're sucking up our pride and retooling (letting the next wave of young guys play) or just absolutely rebuilding again in 2020. If those guys all play well and we're legitimately good, now we've got a good mid-rotation guy for 2-3 years instead of praying that Hader/Guerra/Wilkerson can fill out the back end of the rotation (note: I'd give those guys all chances, but it just moves the risk back one rung). Deal with the implications of $ spent later which I don't think will be bad, as noted in my long post looking out 4 years.

I'd rather just overpay the heck out of Walker for 2-3 years or Phillips for 1 year plus give Villar a part-time shot than give up anything for Cesar Hernandez. Hiura should be ready in 2 years.

Totally guessing at arbitration values (italics), but here is what is committed on guys that I think will very likely be on the roster the next few years (barring reshuffle trade) that have anything more than the league minimum (~$550k). It's possible that we'd cut ties with someone like Villar after 2018 if he still struggles, but I'm going to just keep them on through arbitration. Same with guys like Pina. He may get too old by the time he hits arbitration, but again, let's just keep him in there as an approximation. We'd probably replace him with someone similarly cheap or cheaper in the system. 2018: Braun ($20), Thames ($5), Anderson ($7), Villar ($2), Nelson ($4), Perez ($1.5), Knebel ($3) Total: $43 million plus 12 players at $500k = $50 million. Also have Jeffress, Vogt, Hughes, etc. all probably in the $4-5 million range in arbitration that we could choose to keep. Probably 5-6 open 25 man slots. 2019: Braun ($19), Thames ($6), Anderson ($10), Villar ($4), Nelson ($5), Perez ($3), Knebel ($5), Santana ($2.5), Shaw ($3), Davies ($3), Pina ($1.5) Total: 11 players for about $60 million. 10 more on minimum and let's round up to $75 million. That leaves probably about 4 slots. 2020: Braun ($17), Thames ($7.5), Anderson ($15), Villar ($7), Nelson ($6), Perez ($5), Knebel ($8), Santana ($5), Shaw ($6), Davies ($6), Pina ($3), Arcia ($2.5) That's about $90 million for 12 players. However, that includes Villar, Perez (can't imagine we'll keep a utility player for that), Nelson (who knows if his arm will ever be the same), and Thames. Throw in 8-10 more at league minimum so we'll round up for $100 million, but there are so many ways that could change and $ could be shed. 2021: Braun ($4 or $20), Nelson ($10), Knebel ($12), Santana ($10), Shaw ($11), Davies ($12), Pina ($3), Arcia ($5) and I'm not sure, but Hader/Phillips probably will be in their first year of arbitration then. I'm assuming Braun won't be retained at that point, so that's 7-10 players for $60 million, but a lot of that can change this far out. Long story short, given that we're going to keep cycling in the next generation to replace guys like Villar or Perez or in the pitching rotation, I think we should be major players for a Cobb or a Lynn, keeping Walker for 2-3 years, short-ish contracts for decent relievers and maybe one long relief contract. We should be able to afford it. I'm not sure if Shaw (age), Santana, Anderson (too much $ if he's really this good), Nelson (health) will be worth retaining 4-5 years from now. I'd rather do this than trade prospects for upper crust players routinely. That could also change.

I like Gordon, but I'd steer clear because while 30/31 isn't old for most players, I'm not buying 3 years of a 100% speed-based player at age 30 or 31.

My opinion used to be that 2018 and 2019 would be totally fine if we spent $30-40 million/year on free agents and Mark was willing to go up to the expected $110 or even $120 million but we'd face issues in 2020. We should have no issues keeping everyone that we want in 2018 and 2019 with a pretty fair amount of money spent. Given that Nelson is no longer a sure thing and that there are some other guys that I'm not sure will be worth their next contract or we could reshuffle, I'm starting to be totally fine with signings some larger contracts even into 2020 and beyond. The team is lacking elite players and prospects (probably) so I think if we want to win short-term, we need to keep adding very good players. If not, I'm not sure if we're going to be able to pass the Cubs. And given that we have a very deep farm system, as long as we aren't dealing the farm system away to fill gaps in the 25 man roster, I'm all for it. We should have a lot of cheap players still coming up over the next few years and even if let's say we "overpay" Neil Walker for 3 years, if he begins to turn to an old man 1.5 years in, bring in Hiura and let Walker play as an overpriced utility man.

If the Rangers are looking to still win, they need pitching so they're not going to give away the only decent pitcher they have remaining to "retool." If the Rangers are looking to rebuild, one year of Hamels money isn't going to kill their ownership while they're taking 2-3 years off to rebuild. They won't just give him away. It would cost too many prospects to acquire him. Very few teams are actively looking ever to shed salary in the majors and the Rangers definitely are not one of them.

I like this idea in theory, and I do thing we splurge on relievers, but other teams won't let us take the top 3 relievers. Other teams have more money than us, it won't happen. We should be aggressive on high end relievers in FA. Wade Davis is probably the only guy I don't think we should look at, though he's likely to get $12-15 million per on 3-4 years and we have a closer. Yeah, the "there are other teams" argument is generally one I also use. That said, if the Brewers wanted to, they absolutely could be the highest bidder on 3 of the top relievers on the market. It's not a great market, but they may have to overpay some guys to make things work over the next few years. You could probably walk off with Swarzak, Watson or McGee, and Wade Davis if you wanted to. I'm not saying that's a great idea, but those contracts would probably be 2, 3, and 4 years, respectively. Probably $7, $8, and $12 million or so annually. Maybe it would be a little bit more given that other teams may get desperate to win one of these battles and bid it up futher, but the Brewers have a lot of money to spend short-term and minimal holes to fill. There will probably be some shuffling of the team because the offense was subpar, but other than 2B, which position can you really argue won't have the incumbent in it again or be filled in-house by a prospect (Phillips/Brinson)?

If you could sell off Knebel for a king's ransom to keep the farm stocked for another 5 years, I'd do it. I'd also spend $20-30 million this offseason (in just 2018 salary) for 1-3 year contracts to basically take every top reliever on the market.

I think there is little doubt that we will spend to bolster the bullpen this offseason. I think we'll probably also land a starter in either trade or free agency. If the right deal is there, I'm sure Attanasio would like to add a "big name" starter to the rotation. I just hope Stearns is able to keep him from doing something stupid. I wouldn't mind a big (by Milwaukee standards) deal for a young starter we could have through his prime years. I'd be worried about signing someone in their 30's like we continually did in the Melvin era. The good thing about having good young talent and a strong farm is that we will have a lot of good, pre-arby talent on the MLB roster for the foreseeable future, allowing us to handle a few bigger contracts... as long as we don't do something dumb like trading away all of our good prospect talent in a couple "win now" moves. I think my acceptance or support of buying someone like Cobb or Lynn is that, while it is 100% clear they will not live up to the value of their contract, there is room to spend on these guys even 4-5 years down the road. If things get tight then because so many of our young players are All Stars, you deal with the problem then. The team is in a weird position where I'm not sure how they're going to win 90+ games just from the organization and small signings in the next year or two unless Hader/Brinson/Phillips vastly exceed expectations given their current, flawed state as MLB prospect that are lacking the ability to be elite players most likely. Some regression can be expected from some of our good players this year. Not many of them are expected to take it up another level. Maybe Arcia improves but Davies regresses, etc.

I have thought all along that we have some excess $ to "overpay" guys for the next 1-2 years, but I think Mark is going to spend some money this offseason and next on short deals AND some longer ones. I think there is room to add some bigger ticket items over the next few years at positions where help is needed and I don't think it will have a major effect on 2021-2022 as I had thought. Be prepared. I'm OK with it as long as we don't block major pieces in the organization and don't trade prospects in our system away to get said big $ players. Just free agents or salary dumps.

Ideally, the Crew has both. If Villar returns to 2016 form, and Walker stays - awesome. If Walker stays, but Villar is closer to 2017 than 2016, hey, not bad. If Villar returns and Walker gets big buck, not bad, either. But if Walker stays and Villar returns to 2016... heck, if Arcia can't get his OPS higher than .730, you can always move Villar to short, play Walker at second, and you gain 96 points of OPS at short and Walker will add 10 points over Villar's 2016 numbers at second while Arcia can work on getting the OPS up. I'm not sure it matters what Arcia's OPS is. I'd probably rather have him there for the defense.

The Cardinals/Cubs games does not mean a ton to the WC chase from the Brewers' perspective unless we are rooting for the Cards to miss. The Rockies are going to have to go something like 1-4 or 0-5 for it to matter from the Brewers' perspective and we play the Cards in the final series. It's something to consider given that it's still in the realm of possibility that the Rockies completely flame out and the Brewers go 4-2 while the Cards go 5-1 (in which case, 1 game for last spot), but we likely need to worry about the Rockies and only the Rockies.