Thurston Fluff
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Everything posted by Thurston Fluff
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Last evening a group of teenagers I've played ultimate frisbee with on occasion knocked on my door and asked my wife if grandpa could come out and play.
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Brewer’s All Time Failed Expectations Team
Thurston Fluff replied to TexasCheesehead's topic in Milwaukee Brewers Talk
He was drafted in the first round so he must have been viewed as a fairly significant prospect. He was overshadowed by Sheffield to some extent. He was never the same after that broken leg. Speaking of Sheffield he has to be considered one of the biggest disappointments of all time. He ended up having a great, though PED assisted, career but he was anything but HOF worthy with the Brewers. One the bright side we did get an all star season out of Ricky Bones. -
Brewer’s All Time Failed Expectations Team
Thurston Fluff replied to TexasCheesehead's topic in Milwaukee Brewers Talk
John Jaha and Ron Belliard have to be on the list. Jimmy Haynes would be on my list if only because of timing. He could dominate twice through the lineup then totally suck on the third round. A classic five inning pitcher. Today he'd be a perfect fit. Back then, not so much. -
I know a lot of people have been comparing the Reds this season to the Reds last season and attributing a lot of the improvement to DJ. I think he is part of it but I'm not so sure it's as big a part of it as it seems. The Reds made it a priority to improve the staff in the offseason. They did so by adding three starters. (though one hasn't pitched yet due to injury.) Beyond that one injury all their starters have made at least 18 starts. So, one injury to speak of for the entire starting rotation. They also has some young guys pitching before they were ready last season and are starting to figure it out now. I'm sure DJ has helped with that but to say they wouldn't have improved without him is a stretch. See Brandon Woodruff for example. Their bullpen overall has been like so many are. A couple guys having a better year this year and a couple having a worse year. That is the same across all of baseball year in and year out. So I don't knowif DJ should get any credit or blame for a single year when it comes to relievers. I'm not trying to belittle how good DJ is. I would love it if he was still here. I just don't think he's the major reason for the Reds turnaround. It was an organizational goal to improve the pitching and the players they picked to get there seem to be the right ones.
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Wouldn't the "professional" answer be to contact a balloon/party business in Cali and have them deliver? That was my first suggestion. She really wanted it shipped to him so he could see it was from Wisconsin. Hell I even gave her the name of a reliable company that I know there. She had it stuck in her head and it wasn't coming out. On the bright side I have nothing but pleasant people come in since then. BTW, I got a kick out of the quotes around professional. I never really thought of myself as being some sort of expert. I stated here in college and the owner (my now wife) said she'd give me a regular paycheck to tell jokes when I graduated. She was the balloon artist and I was the entertainer. It worked out well. Now I'm a "professional." I knew my degree in philosophy would pay off.
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A lady comes in the shop today and wants me to fill her balloons so she can ship them to a friend in CA. When he opens it she wants the balloons to fly out. I tell her that isn't possible because it won't survive the shipping. Helium balloons pop in planes due to the air pressure change. They also pop when they get hot so trucking it across half a nation in July isn't likely to work. There is no way a balloon is going to survive being shipped ground or air. So she says you're the professional here how can I make this work. I tell her as the professional here I am saying it won't work. She then asked if I can just fill them up half way. I tell her they won't float that way. How about air filling them? Ummm no. (why do so many people not understand that?) How about using something else? Anything else that floats will have the same problem as helium and is also flammable. She then gets mad at me and says that I can figure it out if I wanted to. Like knowing about balloons can somehow help me change physics. Anyway she had me fill them with helium and she's just gonna take her chances. I just don't get why some people just refuse to accept something isn't going to work like they imagined it would. What are the odds when it doesn't work she blames me for sabotaging them so I can say I told you so?
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There are a few possibilities. That Contreras injury is worse than we think, or that Caratini is trade bait. But with Contreras having played some outfield, and the Cubs outfield not being very good, there's a chance this move is made to both improve the outfield and get a much better defender behind the plate. It could also mean the Cubs cannot, or will not, trade their minor league talent to get what they want. They may be stuck with this sort of swap by force or by choice. If I'm the Cubs I have to look at the next few seasons as well. If they trade every last major league prospect what will they do when their core starts to hit free agency? While they have more money to spend than we do there is still a luxury tax and it gets worse every season a team is over it. Even the big money teams needs some of their own cheap players to offset costs as some point.
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That's where I'm at. Burnes just isn't as advanced as Woodruff is right now.
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Ben Sheets seemed ok. There were others who where pretty much developed but got derailed. Cal Eldred and Jimmy Nelson come to mind. Even if there were none what does the sins of the past have to do with the present? It isn't like it's the same people running everything. As far as spending big on TOR starters; the Cubs did that and they suck just about as bad as we do. It just cost them about 50 million every year forever to get those two extra wins in mid July.
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Why do we have to buy or sell? Isn't there a better argument to be made to just be wall flowers? We are not in position prospect wise to do what we did last season. We are not going to get much in return for our rental veterans. So why not just stand pat and hope the division stays within reach and our players start to play up to their potential?
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That is going to be a problem many years. Bullpens are always hit and miss. You can even have the same pitchers in the pen from one year to the next and get vastly different results. The problem is there just aren't many relievers who are consistently reliable for a whole career. Warning, bit of an unrelated tangent coming. If you rely on the four or five inning starter philosophy you are by definition going to rely on your pen more. That means the philosophy itself is given to more volatility from year to year. The good news, long term anyway, is that volatility usually swings the other way as often as not. So if the Brewers use the same strategy of finding cheap 4-5 inning type starters year in and year out, they can always stay in their payroll range and be competitive half the time. The alternative seems to be overpay for average at best starters or trade your farm for a year or two of a great pitcher and suck for five years after he leaves. For myself I'll take my chances this way.
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Uh, the Brewers are amongst the worst and possibly the worst at developing starting pitching, with but a handful over a span of decades: Eldred, Sheets, Gallardo, Woodruff and depending how liberally you construe the term ‘impact’ Fiers. The best pitching prospects they have are Peralta and Burnes both of whom are major reasons the team is where they are currently. Anyone else either profiles as a back of the rotation starter or is multiple seasons away. Waiting for prospects to arrive (and hope they hit the ground running) to make a championship caliber club, while they have dynamic talent on the major league roster is silly. The franchise already wasted 2009 and 2010 with Braun and Fielder together in their prime. You’d think they wouldn’t do the same thing again. I don’t think trading off players with expiring contracts this year results in the major league team improving substantially in 2020 and 2021. I don't think you can compare the past to the present because all those teams had a different front office and player development system. As far as pitchers profiling as back end of the rotation types what did Woodruff profile as in the minors? Speaking of Woodruff, while Peralta and Burnes might be part of the problem now I'd say that is more because of the position the Brewers out them in than what they will ultimately be. They are more like what Woodruff was in 2017-18 only the Brewers asked them to be more like Woodruff circa 2019. Yet Woodruff's development curve is a year or so ahead of them.
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Luckily we're about to start to playing against good teams again. They seem to play better against good teams.
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It isn't the players who don't want more revenue sharing. It's the owners of the large market teams that don't. If the players had their way all revenue would be shared evenly between all the teams. That ay more teams could compete for higher end players. As it is if about five teams don't need and elite player at a specific position that player essentially has no way of getting paid what many teams would be willing to pay if they could. I think Grandal fell to us for that very reason.
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Also, yes, we hope to make some moves to change our direction, but don't think the Cubs aren't thinking the same exact thing. They won't stand pat, no way, no how. They are going to make a move or two as well. The Cubs have an even worse farm system than we do. I don't think any team in the division is going to do much in the way of trades. The teams in the division are pretty close to what they are going to be IMHO. Which is why I think we are in.
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It's also a first for me.
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I think WAR has to be taken with a grain of salt when it comes to defense first players. Defense is very hard to accurately assess on it's own and even harder to determine how valuable it is compared to offensive production. I also think defensive value fluctuates with what type of pitching staff any particular team has. It's just too fluid to measure in a fixed formula IMHO.
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Is 2020 Braun’s last year in Milwaukee?
Thurston Fluff replied to TexasCheesehead's topic in Milwaukee Brewers Talk
You can't just look at one's entire season and say that's exactly how that player has performed. It's like looking at a pen arm with a 4.21 ERA and saying that's exactly the type of pitcher he is but when you look at the game logs you see they have a 2.52 ERA through 25 innings of work so far this season but had 2 brutal outings spanning .2ip, 5ER - which is why the ERA is 4.21 and significantly higher. Disregarding 97% of this player's performance this year and chalking them up to the quality of a 4.21 ERA pen arm is utter nonsense. It's baseball. There's ups and downs for everyone. It's about consistency. And Braun had a worthless 10 game stretch in mid-April otherwise he's been around a 120 WRC+ performer this year. Isn't that how most people assess how well someone did in any given season? Sure all players have bad stretches but the good players have an equally good stretch to even it out. My worry is Braun might not be capable of that anymore. If he's average on a good day and still has bad days I'm not sure that is good enough for a team that wants to go to the playoffs. -
I did a plumbing project yesterday and only had to go to the hardware store once.
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We have a nice trail here along the lake for bikers and walkers. However, I would say about 50% of bikers ride on the busy 4 lane road next to the trail. A couple years ago a biker on the road was hit by a car and injured. There was uproar on the local Facebook groups, etc. about the biker being on the road when there is a separate and protected trail specifically for bikers 20 feet away. The biker crowd said they preferred the road to avoid the walkers on the trail. Point is, you can't win. As someone who cycles on a road bike, regularly at 15-20 MPH who's feet are clipped into pedals, I will always prefer a road to a busy "multi-use" path. Between people walking 4-wide, uncontrolled kids, and leashed dogs running from side to side across the path smelling everything, it's almost impossible to bike down a multi-use path at any reasonable pace without risk of injuring myself or others. When I was in Amsterdam bikes, peds and dogs all used much smaller sidewalks and it all seemed to flow pretty well. But bikes also all had bells on them and peds would move to one side when they heard them. Even tourists picked up on this pretty quickly. I often felt bikes should be mandated to have bells on them if they want to use sidewalks because you just can't hear them coming up on you. It's hard to get out of the way for someone when you don't know they're there.
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Keston Hiura called up, Shaw optioned
Thurston Fluff replied to jjgott's topic in Milwaukee Brewers Talk
Shaw hit a monster home run in a game that could have easily been the difference in a single game as well. It was the right move but that sort of could have beens can be played every game with ever player. -
To show how little half a season of advanced stats predict actual ability going forward, Domingo Santana's defensive stats from 2018 suggested he made decent progress on defense last season. Arcia is having a down season on defense but he's probably still going to be viewed as well above average to elite by most teams.
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What I hate is when bicycles use the sidewalks, as they are allowed to in Appleton, but go so fast that anyone coming out of a building is in danger of getting hit. It's like they don't even think about pedestrians while simultaneously being afraid of cars not thinking about bikes.
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While I think Acria's time here may be limited I don't think the Brewers would trade him during the season. Most teams that are selling would want minor league players with a full six years of service time and buying teams aren't going to give up major league talent that could help them win now. The Giants might be one of the few teams that would but why trade a guy during the season when there is one buyer instead of wait for the off season and have a lot more teams interested in him?
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The Brewers were tied for the best record in the division in June.