OldSchoolSnapper

The Costner thing was so cringey until the players came out, then it was still the corniest thing ever but it worked.

Just as we all predicted Imagine someone actually predicting this and that they'd still be 70-46.

I generally also write off the 2020 season, but Yelich is the same guy he was during those 60 games.

The FOD game is fine, but I can't stand these in-game interviews.

Funny thing is that perspective is everything. If this happens, most people will be happy with it. But if he'd done this basically for the life of the contract without the last 2 really bad years, they'd probably be angrier than they'd end up being in your scenario.

Yea, that was the point. You know who he is and what team he is on. A player of comparable stature in MLB, even the majority of people who follow their home team won't know where that kind of player is even playing. You could go down the line NBA fans can tell you the best player on a bunch of different teams. You won't be able to do that in MLB. I can tell you the starting QB, RB and WR on nearly every team, but ask me who plays third base for Seattle or catcher for Houston in a random year and I have no idea.

It's impossible to know the results if you open that can of worms. If Yelich and Hiura open the season with 30 combined homers in April and May do we bother finding Adames? I mean maybe, but do we know for sure?

We paid the guy $200 million and he's hitting .226. If you think this is bad, just be happy we aren't 10 games under .500 or that's all every single Brewers fan site would be.

Don't think he'll be quite as useless as Davis but I'm just hoping he stops being Marquis Grissom in a Brewers uniform. Grisson hit 20 HRs for us once though...

I guess without elaborating I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but the NBA seems to be waaaay more hyper-local than the MLB. The NBA has millions of fans who live in other countries and everyone knows who their biggest stars are. Everyone who follows basketball knows who somebody like Paul George is. The majority of MLB fans know very little outside of their own team. And they don't watch non-hometown baseball like NBA fans do. The NBA also has legions of fans who put player loyalty before a specific team. And the NBA sells players more than either the MLB or NFL. You can take some second tier guy like Russell Westbrook and he has almost double the online presence of Tom Brady...and I don't think his 17 million followers are all Wizards/Thunder/Lakers fans. Geographically speaking, I'd say MLB teams generally reach across their states better than NBA teams do, but fans of the Warriors or something take more a vested interested in Bucks vs. Nets playoff series than say, Brewers fans take in Cleveland vs. Minnesota.

https://mlb.nbcsports.com/2019/03/28/bryce-harper-has-best-selling-jersey-of-2019/ This has him 8th, which is still waaaaay higher than I thought. Pretty impressive looking at the cities/names on that list. But it makes some sense that a player new to a team would sell well.

Baseball is by far the most hyper-local sport of the major ones, so I would honestly be surprised if Yelich was even a top 20 jersey at the height of his popularity. I'm gonna guess there's no way he was in the top 10. The players just don't transcend the hometown team like they do in other sports.

It's hard for me to see any team being better than the Packers this year, but I can't shake this feeling they're just due to have an off-year.

Source? And again, you're stuck on this attendance thing that I called from the start, that nobody is arguing. What you're also not factoring here is that attendance is very expensive. There are huge operating costs with a game. It doesn't cost the Brewers anything for somebody else to take one of their players and pose for a couple photos or for AmFam to pay $60 million for naming rights. So it's not an apples to apples thing.

The Brewers would take a lead in the all-time series with a win today.

Actually they'll still be paying him. It does give more flexibility to spread the payments out and a free roster spot.

I'd definitely say Braun was better in front of a camera than Yelich and I have noticed the same sort of social awkwardness with him, though I don't know of a single WI athlete off hand who was better at that than Braun was. But he looked like a movie star and he sounded like one too.

The second-most recognizable face on the current roster is almost definitely Hader and I can't think of anyone that would even be close. Partially because he's very good, partially because he has a distinctive look.

You are comparing a guy who has been around for a few months to a guy who has been around for a few years. If you are going to make a hypothetical with no actual proof it would be that way, at least use a guy with similar time around the team...like Brandon Woodruff. We're talking about Adames so that's why I used Adames...though I don't think Woodruff would fare all that much better. Among casual type Brewers fans, yeah he would. I dunno what else say on the topic since it won't ever be put to the test. But I absolutely don't believe that if I stood on a street corner downtown with a headshot of Adames, that 20% of passersby could ID him. You guys are way overshooting the commercial power of a decent player in town for a couple of months. More than half won't have watched a baseball game this year and a bunch more not closely enough to recognize a random player's face without context. I'd be pretty impressed if 10 could. There's a not-insignificant chunk of attendees at the stadium on a given day who couldn't do it. This is exactly what I was talking about as far as this place vs. gen pop. Not the same thing because this is a hyper-local example, but like half the population can't place the name with a picture of the VP of our country. You're under-estimating the % of people who couldn't care less about sports, and over-estimating the % that follow the Brewers closely enough to ID a player on the team for one summer, because it's the world you and I live in. I think you'd be truly shocked if you think that 83% figure is way off the mark.

I don't know why people keep saying this. It's pretty obvious that is the case. It doesn't change the fact that it's a major consideration when those contracts are offered, which is the point. You can trade some drop-off in play for the branding, heck that was probably the expectation, but nobody, even those of you who hated the extension, saw him falling off a cliff immediately after signing.

No, I didn't mean it to be hyperbolic. 5/6 is 83%, and I'm saying that I don't think 20% of Greater Milwaukee could pick Willy Adames out of a lineup. I don't think people here have ever had a great understanding of the layman's attentiveness to baseball or the team. A while back there was a thread about a Miller Park hotel and the estimates people were tossing around about the % of folks driving from hours away to MP were comical. Just using my own extended family, I know that basically my dad and one sibling could spot Adames, and almost nobody else could. They could all spot Yelich though, even the ones who think baseball sucks. >At what point does having Christian yelich's All-American, well-spoken face on a billboard have value that overrides his poor play? I literally said he's not playing well enough for his off-field value to offset it.

There's a difference between bad signing and the contract being bad for the team. Some people didn't like signing Yelich but most people were excited. You can see why they did it. But that doesn't change the fact that right now it does not look good. Some things look very stupid right off the bat. Yeah you can not like extending Yelich but it's not like it was some crazy move out of nowhere.

I was pretty clear that attendance is just one component of this, which yes, tracks more closely with winning than any single player. For reasons that are borderline not really what this forum does, Christian Yelich is really valuable to the Brewers, more so than Willy Adames or Jesus Aguilar. This is sort of exactly what I was talking about. Being good at baseball is just where those partnerships start, but advertisers have all kinds of ways of quantifying this (please don't bring up Giannis; he is a transcendent once in a millennia darling) People who follow the Brewers closely know Willy Adames. My wife has no clue who he is. I could probably round up a lot of men who consider themselves Brewers fans who couldn't tell me anything other than "oh yeah, I hear he's doing pretty good" and couldn't tell you what position he plays. I'd guess more than 5/6 Milwaukee couldn't pick his face out of lineup. Some of that change with time but he is unlikely ever to reach the star power of Braun or Yeli. I work in this field every day so I feel close to it. I know you guys scoff at the idea that Yelich on a billboard for Associated Bank matters, but there is the reason these brands pay millions of dollars to do it, and it is not to get hardcore baseball fans who know Adames is better in their doors. Yelich is a well-spoken All-American guy that any brand would love to have. I'm not saying that Adames or any other guy on the roster isn't, but they just don't come close to his brand power. All that said, Yelich is not playing well enough now to off-set that. But Ryan Braun was, IMO. In my experience, this particular forum is just far too analytical and baseball-minded to have this conversation, it pretty much always has been, but the high-level baseball discussion is sort of this place's calling card.

Because the brand needs a face and this stuff matters far more than the folks here want to believe. Not just to sell tickets, which always seems to be where this conversation steers. You need a brand for corporate partnerships and the general engagement of the fans. Yelich, after 2 seasons of OPS-ing .750, is still by far the most recognizable likeness on the team, and it's not close. Signing him far away from FA is the only for MKE to sign him. I still don't really fault the Brewers too much for it. But it doesn't change the fact that as of today, it absolutely sucks how this is unfolding.

I'll still happily defend Braun's contract. It just wasn't that bad. He provided a lot of hard-to-quantify things and things that come up time and time again on BF that most of the brethren here just don't want to acknowledge or admit. There is a major off-field component of those monster contracts. I never thought Braun's play declined to such a level that is a bad deal with all of those things considered. Yelich is not doing enough on the field where those other things matter in my opinion. I had been saying for a long time that I think Yelich's best play is behind him, but that I think also think he will be better than this. I'm just not confident in the second part of that anymore.