Thurston Fluff

I saw a guy in a balloon store standing next to a dancing gorilla being interviewed on TV here in GB and thought out loud to myself, "That must be BUC's place!" I wasn't going to bring it up here since I'm sure nobody really cares about tv spots for us but since it was brought up I should at least thank channel five for such a sweet promo. We a got a full 3 spot remote over the hour long show right before Valentines day. Thank you thank you channel 5. Turns out it's sweeps right now so hopefully we were visual enough to help their ratings out. Principessa21 if anyone wants a lesson in marketing they really should talk to my wife. As much as I'd like to take credit she's a true marketing guru. She started this business as a 18 year old out of a UWO dorm room. I came along as she was leaving the dorm room and moving into an actual store. We got together and, I am proud to say, I slept my way to the top. BTW what else is there to know about a person other than if they are a Brewer fan or not?

Wasn't that a Superbowl commercial?

We do deliveries dressed up as different characters and do mini roasts to suspecting victims for their birthdays and such. The gorilla is sort of our mascot. The hardest thing to do is find people who can be funny and actually want to work. So far she's good on both counts. Monty Python sucks. Thems fightin words. i'd nerdily assumed everyone could do that. If you ever need a job...

A while back we found out one of the best teenagers ever to work for us was moving on. I was happy for her but it sucked to lose her. Now we hired a new 19 year old girl who loves being a gorilla and can sing the entire Monty Python Lumber Jack song. Sometimes life hands you nice little surprises.

Mr. Levine we'll all be impressed when the Yankees win a pennant without having the highest payroll. I might also want to inform you that no teams would be on welfare if they were allowed to relocate to NY. Yet I think you might be against that. In fact I believe your team has preemptively blocked such a move. The Queens Rangers, Brooklyn Brewers or the Manhattan Twins should be an option for teams you insist on telling to make more money to. Seems a bit rich to tell someone else to get their finances in order when you won't share the largest market with them.

Despite his poor overall ability Looper is an inning eater who takes the ball every fifth day. As an injury replacement on a team who has four good starters Looper could be plugged in and help prevent one injury from blowing up the pen. His biggest problem here was that we needed more than that from him.

I wore out two pairs of leather bomber gloves this winter throwing a disk to a dog. If there was a competition for how many hours one man can throw disks off a ramp, through hoop, for a dog to catch I am the world champion.

http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv208/ThurstonFluff/gladys2.jpg Didn't know if this belonged in the winter weather thread or pet thread but thought it was a pretty cool shot. Little blurry but still thought it showed Gladys at her best.

Given his statements about who signed Soriano along with how candid he is now looks like he's distancing himself from the team doesn't it? Gotta wonder if maybe he's getting sick of meddling owners making moves he thinks will backfire.

Does anyone have a link related to the decline of defense age thing? Kind of piqued my interest.

Scioscia gets a lot of love from a lot of people, but I can tell you right now that I wouldn't want him managing the Brewers. It's what makes me a bit concerned about Roenicke. He could very easily be Scioscia 2.0. Madden could have as well I guess. They had a terrible offense last season. Poor OBP and Slugging which is why Wells may help. Even if it isn't enough to justify his salary of what they paid to get him. I think some people have looked into this lately, and found that it's actually even younger (like 26-28). I can't give a link, but perhaps somebody else can. That's interesting. I have no reason to doubt you but that make little sense to me. Why would people with more experience and no physical decline suddenly decline in an area whose two prime requisites are experience and physical ability? That does change things a bit though.

He would have been 29 when the decline in defense started. I really don't believe 29 is where age related decline in defense starts. Going forward he has to keep his legs which may be harder to do age 33 vs age 29 but age was never the problem with his defense. Injury and inconsistency were.

I don't know if it's likely. Napoli has produced more wins than Wells over the last three years, per fangraphs.com Looking at wins above replacement is not my favorite measurement but it is even less useful when comparing two separate positions on a team. It isn't as easy as to say player A has two wins above replacement and player B three so the team will win one more game with player B. Who would replace each player if they weren't there is a large part of that. Filling team needs plays a larger role to wins than simply getting highest WAR guys regardless of how many catcher/1st basemen types that might mean. The comparison shouldn't be between Napoli and Wells. It should be the comparison between Napoli and another outfielder vs Conger and Wells. Conger is knocking on the door and seems to have the on base skills to help there. Admittedly I have limited knowledge of Angel minor league players but if he is even close to average as a catcher he'll improve the defense as well. I am not trying to defend the trade as I agree it isn't a good one. I am trying to understand it. I simply do not believe teams who have shown they are competent enough to put a decent run together are just plain stupid. Looking at it from the perspective that it will help them win more games short term it makes some amount of sense. However, all the fielding data suggests he's been, at best, below average for three consecutive seasons. And before that 4 consecutive good seasons. Either he somehow forgot how to play defense or something else is going on. I would guess the Angels think they know why and believe he can revert back to form.

It isn't hard to see it's lopsided but if a team who has been pretty good the last decade did it there has to be some sort of logic behind it. I simply don't buy the idea they are totally idiots. Thus there has to be some reason for doing this. Getting past the money spent isn't Wells likely to help them win more games this season? I get the money is totally out of whack for what he brings but the Angels are not mid market. They have resources. They are not going to be out of the running for future FA's because of it are they? Terrible trade value wise but not necessarily production wise in the short term.

Last three years he's been -12.9, -16.6 and -6.4 according to UZR. He was good the previous four years but was bad his first two. He's -37.7 in his career. He's not a very good defender, maybe going to grass will help a little, but it's not going to make a huge difference. Considering he was good four consecutive years then suddenly fell off seems to indicate something other than suddenly forgetting how to play defense over the winter one year. I think his leg troubles had something to do with it. Grass and a year removed from those leg issues should do more than a little for him. But get your point. His UZR is bad for his career which should be a warning sign. How does he rate on other defensive metrics?

Money aside Wells is a very good defender whose leg issues may be helped playing more on grass. Given the team got an base at a measly 311 clip and slugged .390 last season I think his bat will be welcome as well. Yes it is a bad deal value wise but sometimes even bad deals can lead to more wins. That said I'm glad it isn't the Brewers who did it. Even if money wasn't an issue.

TracyThom I took your advice and tried the Chicken bacon artichoke pizza. Normally I am not a fan of Papa Murphy but you were right. It was the best I've had from them by a long shot and pretty good overall.

I think it could be argued that we don't have good people on the defensive coaching side since most of our players that had defensive deficiencies didn't improve until they got to the majors. Fair point. I would have said pitching a couple season's ago as well. I think the approach Melvin has taken since then should help on the injury front. Really the guys that have contributed from our MiLB system have mostly been top of the draft picks. Guys that you would almost actively try to derail their careers. Escobar wasn't drafted and Cain was a 17th round pick. Hart was already mentioned. Hardy was a 2nd rounder as was YoGa. Second round picks are hardly guys who you have to work at to screw up. They are guys who have talent and potential but in reality the ones who are usually can't miss types are the top of the 1st round. Heck guys like Arnett and Heckathorn are higher picks and nobody is calling them can't miss, you'd have to work hard to screw them up, types. I think who you have developing them matter enough to think it should be part of the evaluation of how good the system is.

I disagree. Good talent doesn't help much if you have guys who can't teach them to harness that talent or burn them out.

Sure, but you're omitting the fact that our players have to go out & compete against those other players eventually. Who the other players in the league are is 100% relevant, I'm surprised you'd suggest they wouldn't be. Some farms need to be better stocked than ours because they don't have the players on the major league roster to play with us. That doesn't' make ours bad even if theirs does have more players of higher caliber. Their players won't be playing against our minor league players in two years. They will be playing against our major league ones. When that time comes our farm will then be good again by comparison. Not because we got so much better but because theirs got worse. Doesn't make our players any more capable of hitting a curve ball or throwing strikes. Looking at how our players can hit, field or pitch is to me a better way of determining if the guy is good or not than comparing him to someone he may never play against. One thing I haven't' touched yet is the idea that a farm can be good even if it is low on talent at any given time. Players are only as good as the people helping them develop. Having 50 good prospects with poor coaching leads to more busts. Poor conditioning leads to more injury. If we have a good developmental infrastructure in place, which I believe we do, we can compensate for the lack of players somewhat by doing more with less. Combine that with the infusion of talent by good scouting and a system can go from depleted to stocked in a much shorter period of time. SO even if we do have less numbers it still doesn't make this a bad MiLB system.

There is some encouraging depth in the Brewers system, but more impact talent, albeit a long ways off. I guess my whole point can be summed up by saying if that statement is true how can the only discussion be how bad the farm is? Regardless of how other systems are doing the job of the farm is to provide impact talent and depth. There are players of both types in the system though it is a ways away. Since there are legitimate players how can it be bad in an absolute sense. As far as comparatively speaking if somehow all other farms went downhill for a couple season's does that make our players better? Of course not. They don't hit or pitcher better. They still have the same talent level. They just look better because they are standing next to the uglier ones. Thus my belief it doesn't really matter if others are better or worse? Judge the system on it's ability to provide depth and impact players no thwo has better ones.

here are really zero impact bats in the system right now bats no arms yes. However, when you compare the Brewers' system to the other MLB systems, which is obv. how they're ranked 1st to 30th, you see that it's a bad system right now. Maybe I'm just wrong in how I view farm systems in general. In my own way of seeing the system, going back to before the Bando days has always been what the system will add in major league players over a set period of time regardless of how many other teams are rated as better or worse. I judged Bando's farm to be horrid because I couldn't legitimatly see any prospects to speak of at any level. There were years where you could look at the entire farm system and see maybe one or two who were legitimate major league prospects not just the best of the bad types. I don't see our farm in that light today. I just see a decent number of guys who have a ways to go but have a shot at legitimate big league careers. Whether that number is comparable to other systems in any given year is irrelevant to me. I am not trying to defend our system, or the management. Even if it does truly suck today it is perfectly understandable why it is where it is. It's just that I have always looked at a system as it relates to numbers of prospects instead of comparatively to other systems. I guess it's just a different way of looking at the same thing. Not saying my way is right just saying that is the way I've always looked at it.

I guess it just depends on what criteria one uses. I think we have a good number of high ceiling guys, specially pitchers, who have a long way to go. I don't see that as bad as much as simply not ready. I know many people like to rate the systems based on how advanced it is along with ceiling level but in this case I'm not sure that really tells us much about the system as a whole. I base that partially on how good it was before we traded all the higher level talent along with the fact that the same people who developed that talent is largely still here. To me a bad system takes 5 years to rebuild because there is no talent. The current Brewer system has talent just not very advanced. In two years some of the A talent will be in AAA knocking on the door. Maybe I'm wrong on that level of talent but I do not think I am wrong that there is at least room for debate on the subject.

Just checked last nights lottery results. The winning numbers for powerball were 19,21,22,23,40,48 powerball 27 My numbers were 20,22,23,24,41,49 powerball 29. Pity my powerball wasn't 28 that would have probably been worse odds than actually winning.

but I do not think it's a stretch at all right now to call the farm system's prospects "bad" as it relates to the expected major league talent it may produce. I agree it isn't a stretch. It also isn't a stretch to say it's not bad just young nor that it's average. What I disagreed with is that the only discussion is how bad it is vs what shape it's in.