Thurston Fluff

If you want people to find someone who has the exact scenario of 29 games and four innings pitched then why not just ask for a pink unicorn who pitches as well? Neither are likely to be found but the lack of it doesn't mean anything. There are a lot of pitchers who have roles that do not come up all that often in the first month. Some of them do not do well in the few times they do get called upon. The reason he hasn't been used is the situations he is supposed to contribute in haven't come up much. When it did last Wednesday he did contribute. Three innings worth that saved at least two maybe, three other relievers from having to pitch that day. And the 15 ERA thing isn't helping your argument at all. Given his role and number of innings you would be hard pressed to find a more useless number.

You think 4 innings in 29 games is "eating innings" and "saving the rest of the pen"?? Yes, I think the last time he pitched he saved the pen and ate some innings. What do you call pitching through the sixth when the starter leaves after the third? I don't see anything that shows he can do that or that the Brewers are willing to allow him to do that. Considering he just did it a couple days ago I think it pretty obvious that the Brewers are and he is. I challange anyone to find another team that has a guy in their bullpen that has been on the active roster since the beginning of the season (no games missed because of injury or DL stints) and has 4IP and a 15 ERA. How about John Axeford last season? He had an ERA of 18.20 after 4 1/3 innings. You simply do not make any decisions based on that sample size if you don't have to. Especially when you would lose the pitcher by doing so. You are not going to find one because it's unwise to keep a guy on your team that can only pitch in very specific situations and can't get guys out when he does pitch in those situations. It took me all of 2 seconds to find one. I know there are plenty more. It happens on a fairly regular basis. Most often when a team has to put them through waivers and don't want to lose them. Which just so happens to be the case here. There is nothing out of the ordinary about these sort of things this early in the season.

I'm not looking for a "lights out" last man in the bullpen. I'm looking for someone with an ERA below, say, 6.00. That's not a lot to ask. Not sure if ERA matters for a guy who projects to have 30ish innings of mop up duty. What matters for a mop up guy is if he can eat innings and save the rest of the pen. I think he showed he can do that. I get we could have someone more competent doing it but given the nature of the games he will be pitching in it is hardly worth wasting a potential starter under control for five more years of major league service time and options left to have that guy on the roster.

It has got to be a case of the GM trying to save face, right?.... How long can Melvin hold out hope that Weeks will get a little hot streak and another team loses a 2B and they can get more than min. wage back in savings? Why does it have to be the GM saving face? Why couldn't it be holding onto someone in case of injury to the current second baseman or holding onto him until someone better in the minors forces their way onto the roster? It would really suck to cut Weeks then have Gennett go down. Then we'd get the honor of paying for Weeks to sit on the bench of another team and his replacement here as well. I get we are in a tricky spot with all the small injuries but the team has been doing pretty well riding it out. I don't really think it we need to do anything that could potentially effect our long term success if it isn't hurting our short term success. So far it is not. So why do it?

In the end this boils down to 1 thing, how many prospects, regardless of how high their ceiling is, will actually reach it? I absolutely understand what you are saying. I am probaly not being clear on my point. Partially because I have been making two and sometimes converging them when I probably shouldn't. I just think many people who rate farms fail to understand how to rate mid-level prospects correctly. Given it is fairly routine to see players come up and perform at the exact same level as they did throughout the minors and outsiders who rate systems typically rate players minor league numbers to regress as the competitive level increases they fail to see a whole group of players whose skill set is more translatable to the majors. If you accept that a real possibility then my point that we might very well have a lot of that inaccurately evaluated type of player is at least possible. Given what we are seeing from guys like Thorburg, Gennett and Davis seems to point to that. I would much rather bring up Jimmy Nelson through the farm system than sign Kyle Lohse, there is absolutely value in developing a ton of 3s through the system. The problem isn't so much the regular season, the problem is the post season, when you need to match-up best on best. If we don't have enough top end talent to match-up, then it's just a matter of time before we get bounced and wait till next year. Except I can name plenty of times where the team with the top end talent didn't win in the playoffs. When Jeff Suppan can become a playoff hero while teams that had Mulder, Zitto and Hudson or Glavine and Maddux fail time and again I don't see this major need to have the top players to win in the playoffs. In fact I would say it is the least important time. The playoff push is more about a team getting hot at the right time than anything. Even the year the Brewers lost to St Louis the Brewers had the best top end talent. Hell they had better talent all the way around. The problem was the Brewers matched up with a team whose bullpen and a couple no name players, got hot at the right time. That happens more times than not.

Just to back up my claim that you can build a viable team with less than star prospects if you have enough average guys. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/whats-the-best-way-to-build-a-major-league-baseball-team/ I know it is about building a major league team but I think it relevant to my argument that we don't need star prospects to have a productive farm system. As long as we make up for it in average prospects we should be fine. It is just going to be doing it through a lot of singles instead of a couple home runs. Also should note I do not think WAR is worth much but one area it can be useful is in a supporting role to an overall analysis when comparing groups vs individuals. That seems to be the way it is used here.

Remarkable how much Card fans act like Packer fans. Even when the team is in contention for the playoffs they are fretting because they are not as much a lock to win it all as they want. I guess that is what happens when a team is always in contention regardless of the sport.

No I mean there are a lot of guys who never were top prospects that contribute in the majors and make up a significant part of good teams. They don't get a lot of pub they may never be great players or become all stars but they are league average players. Not sexy. Not something people pay attention to coming up but they help fill out a team with decent production and are more valuable in numbers than superstars are alone. Lance Lynn is a perfect example. He seemingly came out of nowhere. He wasn't highly regraded nor did he have an exceptional minor league career. Not bad but not great. Ditto for guys like Gennett and Davis. Some players might not dominate the minors like others but compete at every level they go to. Then, when they get to the majors, they do the same thing and everybody views them as a pleasant surprise. Or it he Cards case another case of making chicken salad out of...well you know what. But it shouldn't be a surprise. They did the same thing all the way along. Our minor league has a decent number of players who simply compete and put up decent if not spectacular numbers where ever they go. Davis for example had an OPS's of 848, 897, 851, 1.055 and 822 in the minors. But he is capable pf putting up the same type of numbers in the majors as he did the minors. Ditto for Gennett. Our minors have a lot of that on the pitching side. That has a tremendous amount of value that I just feel is under rated in a lot of the farm system analysis I see.

I sometimes think some people spend too much time focusing on the special players when assessing the farm systems. Yet look around the league and most teams are made up primarily of the Scooter Gennett's and Kris Davis' of the world. It doesn't help to have Ryan Braun surrounded by the Chris Barnwell's of the world any more than it helps to have nothing but the Gennetts on the team. In fact I would take a team full of average players before a team of below average with two or three studs. I get the value of a stud or two. But we have to assess more than the major, can't miss talent, to assess a farm system. To look only at what ours lacks misses a lot of what ours has. On a side not I have seen Coulter a few times last season and now again this season. I get it is early but he looks totally different now than he was last time around in Appleton. He's actually taking pitches out of the zone more and hitting the ones in it pretty well so far. He's fun to watch.

You'll play in a lot of close games when you're always playing for 1 run. Bunting guys over is playing for one run. I don't really see that too much unless it's late or against a great pitcher where runs by going station to station waiting for the three run homer isn't likely to happen. Stealing bases and taking an extra base isn't necessarily playing for one run. It is putting pressure on the other team to make perfect throws and watch the running game more closely. It is also playing to the mentality of the team. Macha tried to make aggressive players play to the numbers and it backfired.

I can think of several times this season good defense at first helped this team. Gennett has had a couple throws that would have been errors if it wasn't for the first baseman being able to scoop it out of the dirt or keep the foot on the bag as they reached for it. I can't think of a single time I ever saw that out of Francisco. In fact I saw the opposite quite a bit. I could deal with that sort of defense with someone like Prince. I don't see Francisco ever approaching that level of offense. Especially considering he makes Prince look like Carlos Gomez in the field.

I think some of the perception of a weak farm system was based on what we lost in trades as opposed to what we still had. I think many outside the organization also underrated some player's up side. Peralta and Thornburg come to mind. Hell nobody ever mentioned Davis at all until he got a shot. BA had him rated the 16th best prospect in the system and the system as one of the worst in baseball. I'd hate to see the best farms if Davis was rated correctly in ours. Ditto for Gennett.

Doesn't this come up every year in the early going? Then, by years end, they all end up within the normal range of innings/games pitched. Starters usually don't go as deep into games early and reliever roles/abilities are getting sorted out so it isn't unusual to have a slightly heavier workload for some of them early.

Given the timing and when he he played last it makes sense to sit now. If he sits 5 games now Luc has to play 5 games in a row. If he sits four games a few days from now Luc would have to play six or more in a row. Granted you could use Maldanado in a game before the suspension kicked in but then you lose Luc for an extra game where you normally wouldn't

I know Gomez gave him a lot of credit for letting him be him. He was the guy who let Gomez swing away instead of trying to take pitches and slap singles around so he could get on base. I think the thing RRR does best is understand just because a certain player has a certain skill set he may not have the mental makeup to maximize that skill set. Theoretically Gomez might be better if he did take more pitches and try to raise his OBP at the cost of SLG but in reality that didn't work. Gomez just isn't mentally built that way. I think overall our team is full of aggressive players. So perhaps some of the stupid things have to be lived with to make sure they play they way they perform best. Even if the numbers tell you it is wrong the numbers don't tell you what effect following the numbers has on the individual player. I think RRR believes in managing personalities instead of numbers. I happen to agree.

Shouldn't we worry about that negative effect when there is a problem? Giving up on long term success for what amounts to a two day stretch where we need a starter to go a little deeper into a game isn't smart. If that doesn't happen we just brought up a backup plan to deal with any short term problems. The benefit of five capable starters is you can rely on them to give you innings when needed.

I wonder what Cole said to Tabita(I think it was him) when he did virtually the same thing on Thursday to Wang as Gomez did on Sunday. I'm sure when Tabita got back to the dugout Cole was right there saying "dude, that was a 21 year old rule five pick who never pitched above single A before. You should just put your head down, carefully drop your bat, better yet delicately put it down, and run to second. When you get to second maybe even yell a few words of encouragement to the kid. He's in a tough spot." If not I think we know how much they really care about what Gomez did vs how much they hate the Brewers for what we always do to them on the scoreboard.

This is not the same thing as last season. The incident with McCann was far more on Gomez than this one is. He was talking all the way around the bases deliberately showing up the pitcher. I should add there was a history there. That pitcher had hit Gomez a couple times prior to that which is why he was doing what he did. But in that moment he was specifically showing up the pitcher and McCann acted on that. Which is why he accepted the penalty without appealing it and apologized for his actions afterward. This time I don't think the pitcher even crossed his mind. He hit the ball flipped his bat as he watched it for a fraction of a second and was to busy running the bases to even think about showing up anyone. I didn't see the hit at the time but did afterward. I didn't really see the big deal Cole made out of it. Let alone Snider. Seems to me they just let 1-5 frustration get in their head a little. Unfortunately since he did what he did last season nobody is going to give him the benefit of a doubt this time.

I didn't see the game but I did hear both announcers mention he stayed at the plate a bit. But how long could he have stared if he still made it to third? Doubtful it was more than some of those same Pirates did at times in their careers. Personally I think the Pirates are getting a little mad at getting beat every way imaginable and are letting their frustrations out. AS far as Gomez goes he's wound pretty tightly. He plays with high energy and emotion. If he sometimes gets carried away so be it. I for one would rather deal with an occasional flare up like this than have him follow a bunch of unwritten rules and lose his mojo.

With Gomez now getting some bad boy pub we kind of have a bad boy image developing. I was never much of a fan of that but at least we are developing a national identity. I must admit it is kind of fun watching the frustration build in the haters as we keep on keeping on. Screw them all let them hate our players speak at the plate.

I missed the game as well. I ended up going to some chick flick with far more romance than comedy that night. I got out as the post game show was finishing. Obviously I wasn't dating anyone as cool as Hawing at the time. I did get to watch Odell Jones near no hitter though.

Thank you. When I saw that quote I remembered someone here had a picture of Kurt Russell here but couldn't remember who it was. One of my all time favorite actors. I even forgave him for Escape From LA.

Pitching WAR is useless. Statistical projections are even more useless. Take out the pitching part and you have my opinion on WAR.

Don't forget that Braun has always been viewed as a nice, great guy. His fall is similar to Tiger's fall as many people thrust their own emotional expectations on him. Where people are mistaken now is that he's still regarded as a great guy and they're vilifying him like he's Bonds or ARod. It appeared to me Braun was always viewed as arrogant by other teams. I know Pittsburgh hated him forever. And I am wholly unimpressed with the Pirates. Their offense is simply average at best and with the loss of Burnett I think their pitching is not nearly what it was last year either. If Liriano or Cole ever run into injury problems that team is in trouble. Volquez surely isn't going to keep pitching that well. I was thinking that over the series as well. Funny how people pointed to first base as a major issue for Milwaukee because they have Mark Reynolds and Lyle Overbay. Yet Pittsburgh trots out Travis Ishikawa and Gaby Sanchez at first and people view them as legitimate contenders.

If Milwaukee isn't going to use him then they have no trade leverage at all. Pittsburgh knows that the Brewers keeping him around is handicapping the roster and they also know that they can get him back for basically nothing. The Pirates can demand whatever they want in trade and it would likely be more than the Brewers would or should give up for a rule V pickup. Pitt is absolutely loaded with talent up and down their minor league chain, they don't need him anywhere near as much as the Brewers do who are short on impact pitching, the Pirates are holding all the cards here. One would think they would have more leverage if the Brewers didn't have a place to hide him. As it is we have five very good starters. There isn't a back end guy or two that will tax the pen like some staffs have. Top that off with a good pen complete with a good mix of righties and lefties, several of which a couple can go multiple innings. How does that give the Pirates all the cards?