Eye Black

Brewers sent 9 to the plate that inning, do you consider that batting around or nah?

Tyrone got all of that one.

Come on Yeli, huge opportunity to make a statement early in this series.

Half of the Brewers position players in the lineup are lefties which seems fine. At this point I’ll take giving Taylor a shot at facing Giolito over JBJ.

A little long, how about just going with Bronzies?

The difference is, in the NBA half the teams make the playoffs. It is much harder to win in baseball and make the playoffs. As the 2019 Washington Nationals and other teams can attest to, once you get in the playoffs anything can happen. Moreover, an NBA or NFL team revenue is not driven by ticket sales as much as it is by television and merchandising. Outside of NY, LA, and Chicago baseball teams are more dependent on ticket sales than broadcast revenue, the demand of which is driven by the quality of the product on the field. I think the difference between an NBA comparison is the true talent best team is much, much more likely to win in the NBA playoffs as opposed to the MLB playoffs. For the MLB playoffs to have the same “best team advances” equivalency as the NBA, individual playoff series would have to be something like 21+ games. Also, adding one impact player is going to have a greater influence on the outcome of any given NBA game than adding one impact player to an MLB roster can be expected to have. That’s why the “most possible bites at the apple” theory works better in baseball than it does in any other sport. Now the flip side of this, and the reason I would support the Brewers taking a big swing this season, is the postseason appears to be lining up in such a way where the NL West teams are going to end up playing a survivor series of sorts (NL Wild Card game, then #1 seed vs WC winner). This seems like a year where things could be lined up nicely for the Brewers to have a legitimate shot at finding their way into the World Series. Anything that can even incrementally help their chances this year might be worth sacrificing some future wins for.

The relevance of Guardians to Cleveland appears to be their “Guardians of Traffic” statues on the Hope Memorial Bridge. I wonder what the baseball team will become known as guardians of? Maybe Guardians of the Diamond, or Guardians of the Cuyahoga?

Yeah, don’t really care for the logo. I guess it matters most what Cleveland fans think, but as an outsider I thought the Spiders thing had legs.

I think Hiura or Turang are the pieces most likely to be involved in a trade for a true impact player that has control beyond this year. Obviously trading Hiura at his low point isn’t ideal. I hope they’ll place a high value on Turang, his Double-A stat line looks a lot more impressive when you sort by other 21 year olds playing at that level. The only 21 (or younger) player outhitting him in the Double-A South Division is the Rays’ Xavier Edwards. If Turang had gone to college this would’ve been his junior year, so it’s worth considering he still has a wide range of possible outcomes with his development.

There was an Effectively Wild episode on this recently with a professor that did a study on players traded to a different league mid-season. They found that on the whole players traded across leagues actually outperform their previous stat lines once playing in the new league. I don’t believe they provided specific stats, but indicated it was a statistically significant increase.

Freddy Peralta: Batter (White Sox) vs Pitching Stats Lucas Giolito: Batter (Brewers) vs Pitching Stats Statcast Game Preview for White Sox-Brewers Statcast Game Feed for White Sox-Brewers

Black signed for exactly slot, Binelas signed for $300 over slot, Frelick was $114,200 over slot. That $114,500 dollars represents about 1.1% of the Brewers $10,063,400 total bonus pool. Shouldn't hinder their ability to sign anyone else later, especially since all these figures are more or less ball parked & agreed upon before the picks are made. One other thing of note is the Brewers can exceed their bonus pool by 4.999999% without incurring a draft pick penalty. That means their $10,063,400 bonus pool can actually be stretched to $10,566,500 without any lost draft pick repercussions. In that case they would have to pay a 75% tax penalty on any overage spending, but they’ve shown a willingness to do it before.

Per Jim Callis: 2nd-rder Russell Smith signs w/@Brewers for $1 million (pick 51 value = $1,436,900). Texas Christian 4th-yr LHP, 89-95 mph fastball plays up b/c of command & angle, flashes plus changeup, mixes in slider, lots of strikes.

Per Jeff Passan… BREAKING: The Tampa Bay Rays are finalizing a deal to acquire slugger Nelson Cruz from the Minnesota Twins, sources tell ESPN.

Eric Lauer: Batter (Royals) vs Pitching Stats Brad Keller: Batter (Brewers) vs Pitching Stats Statcast Game Preview for Royals-Brewers Statcast Game Feed for Royals-Brewers

That might legitimately be in the running for worst strike call of the year. Top 5 at least.

Went back and listened, the audio starts around the 2:50:00 mark for anyone with the MLB app. Uecker tried to get him to say he was retired [in a joking manner], and Braun made an audible hesitation (i.e. “ahhhh”), but then quickly corrected him by saying he’s not ready to declare retirement yet. It sounded like one of those “I know something I can’t say” moments to me, but that’s purely my own interpretation. If I had to guess I would say there’s a real chance Braun plays again in MLB at some point.

We’re to the point that replay is primarily used to overturn split second moments when a player loses contact with a base after clearly being safe initially, but they often can’t get the calls correct that the system was actually intended to assist with.

Brett Anderson: Batter (Royals) vs Pitching Stats Mike Minor: Batter (Brewers) vs Pitching Stats Statcast Game Preview for Royals-Brewers Statcast Game Feed for Royals-Brewers

I agree, I would bet against a precipitous decline continuing throughout the next several years. I don’t think he’s likely to win another MVP, but I think he has some valuable seasons ahead of him. He still has the capability to hit the ball too hard for me to buy into a sub-.400 slugging percentage continuing over the long haul. It may not be a perfect comparison, but Robin Yount’s production backed up a bit during his late 20s and he obviously bounced back to have some good seasons throughout his early 30s (including an MVP season at age-33).

His median trade value was listed at 26.0 the day the trade was made and is listed at 26.8 currently. So a very modest rise so far.

One of my favorite series of articles each year. They released #41-50, FanGraphs Trade Value: #41 to #50 They have Freddy Peralta at #43 and mentioned that he’d be much a higher with a little longer track record of what he’s doing right now. I know bringing up the Baseball Trade Values website is apparently upsetting for some folks, but as a comparison they currently have Woodruff and Burnes as having the 8th and 10th highest trade values in all of baseball, respectively, while they have Peralta as the 19th highest trade value in MLB. Adames and Hader are both outside the top 100 for BTV. One thing that’s sort of incredible about the BTV top twelve trade values is that 8 of those 12 players are on just four teams, the Braves (Acuna at #2 and Albies at #4), Blue Jays (Vlad at #5 and Bichette at #7), Brewers (Woodruff at #8 and Burnes at #10), and Dodgers (Buehler at #11, Smith at #12). The Brewers and Braves are the only teams with three players in the top 20.