Thurston Fluff

Yes, other than his internship with the Pirates, his time with the New York Mets, his time in the MLB Central Office, and the Cleveland Indians his only resume was the Astros model. I think you are reading way too much into his time with the Astros. I am sure he learned much during his time there. I tend to think his overall time in baseball, especially with working on rebuilding teams probably taught him something at each stop. It might even mean he realizes there is no single model to follow. That each team is different and each path is it's own. The whole tanking thing is getting old. Teams do not tank just to get the first round pick. I also don't think the Astros or Cubs intentionally tanked to get the first pick. If they did one team obviously failed. Those two teams like every rebuilding team ever got the first pick because the nature of rebuilding, like trading major league assets for minor league ones, tends to make the major league team suck. To tank on purpose hoping that you can get one player who might help five or more years down the road stretch credibility. Even if it does help to have higher picks it doesn't make it the reason teams rebuild the way they do. AS far as Cappy goes other than he was a cool dude when he was here signing him isn't worth noting. I hope he doesn't make the team because that would mean we have room for him on the 40 man roster. I'm kind of hoping we have too many quality players on it not worth losing for him.

The advantage of being a die hard fan is the interest level remains the same. It's just what part I'm interested that changes. Overall there is little I am not looking forward to other than a lot of losses. In years where the team is competitive story lines about reclamation projects, finding diamonds in the rough or how certain player's production will effect their trade value aren't very interesting to me. This season those are the things I am most interested in. In a weird way I enjoy this part of the cycle as much as the winning part. Less stress over the team losing yet something to follow all season long. That said I'd like to have the winning part of the cycle be longer than it was last time around.

The only team that would trade for either of them would be looking for short term help. So age doesn't really figure onto it. Ramirez got us something because he always starts slow and has a record of finishing well. Carter has a reputation of not being very good period. Knowing a player usually starts slow and has monster second halves is bound to get you more than someone who usually blows but had a hot half season. If he produces this season and into next things change. I just don't think flipping him for anything of value will happen this July. That's not a bad thing. We need someone there for at least one season anyway and he can build much more value by being good for a couple seasons than he ever could in half of one season

How he is doing at the break will affect his trade value. If he's on a hot streak and somehow managing a 900 OPS, teams are not going to make offers like he's a career 900 OPS guy, but the will likely offer more than if he is at last year's 734. Even if he is just at his career averages, there's likely to be some contender willing to offer a legit prospect. A-Ram brought one back last year, so Carter can too. You aren't seriously comparing Ramirez to Carter are you? I am not saying he cannot get hot for a couple months and get us something at the trade deadline. I just think he is the type that gets you a bag of balls than a legit prospect. I think if he had a couple good months his return would be that of a salary dump. Which is probably more than his value is now but not something that can actually help us down the road. I guess since the term lottery ticket is in vogue he could get us that. But the odds of getting anyone who could sniff the majors is literally about the same as a lottery ticket. I think he could gain trade value in a year or two but not in half a season. i just wouldn't look at him bringing anything back next July even if he has a good first half. Nothing wrong with that. We get our stop gap to get us to someone good and maybe he builds some value to get us something extra a couple years from now.

I'm fine with the signing but I think hoping he hits well enough to flip at the trade deadline is wishful thinking. Teams in playoff contention don't get there by making decisions based on half season of stats over the long term track record. The best hope is a team gets desperate and undervalues one of their own prospects. While that is possible i don't think that is what the Brewers are banking on. I think they are hoping to use him as a stop gap until the team is ready to be competitive again.

If Arcia and Maverick are two core players how is that different than having Fielder and Braun as the only two core players? When we had those two and surrounded them with complimentary players we won. It isn't like those teams had all above average players beyond those two either. When you can put Yuni at short and the bad version of Casey Megehee at third and still win 96 games it's pretty obvious you can win with only a couple super stars surrounded by a few above average players. What are you gonna get better than those two? You can just as easily get Rickie Weeks as you can Kris Bryant. There is far more risk in teh draft than there is projecting Arcia and Maverick. Is tanking and sucking for 3/4's of their time time in Milwaukee really a better plan than just building around them? To give up on the potential of being a contender when those guys get here in the hope to get even better players further down the road seems like a fools errand to me. There just aren't that many superior propects than they are. At some point you end up chasing unicorns and never actually get around to winning.

I didn't say it was. I was simply pointing out I didn't think you were correct is saying Stearns goal was to tank so we got a better draft pick. There is a difference between purposely tanking and the major league roster not being the main concern for next season. If you purposely tank you are not worrying about the next five or so years. I do not believe that is the way Stearns in thinking for the reasons I outlined. Our farm system is already one of the better ones in baseball. We need to find enough decent role players to supplement the next wave of core players. That wave is a year or two away not five of six. This is not the Cubs or Astos of 2010. We are well ahead of where they were. Thus we should not copy the 2010 Cubs or Astros approach. A single year of defensive metrics is worth about a1/3 of a year of offensive metrics. What would you have learned about Lucroy by the first third of this season? WAR is a useless stat to begin with because it fails to take that into account. If I remember correctly Braun was up for a gold glove around that same period of time. He lost out to Parra. Now I know gold gloves are not very telling either but I think it has as much, probably more, credibility as WAR does when it comes to defense.

I don't think that is the goal at all. Granted the primary goal isn't the major league roster next season but i seriously doubt the goal is to be the worst team in the league just to get the top pick. I think what many people here are missing is this isn't the Atros or Cubs of five or six years ago. We are way ahead of those teams. They had horrible farm systems and nobody of value at the major league level. Our farm system is far form one of the worst. In fact there are some people who are starting to look at them as one of the top farms in baseball. Jim Callis tweeted he thinks it might be top five this year. Christopher Crawford tweeted the Brewers might be his favorite system right now. Here is Jonathan Mayo's take on it. http://m.mlb.com/news/article/160576804/atlanta-braves-top-most-improved-farm-systems?topicid=151437456 I just don't see a team like that tanking just for the top draft pick. With guys like Arcia, Santana, Philips an Lopez coming along it seems wrong to tank just for a draft pick that wouldn't be ready until those guys are about to hit free agency. Seems more prudent to me to find players to compliment the next wave of stars already in the system. Basically I just don't believe the parallels to the Astros and Cubs are strong enough to be the model for how we should go about it. Just because Stearns came from the Astros doesn't mean he's going to copy what the Astros did Verbatim. My guess is the Astros wouldn't have done what they did if they inherited what Stearns has here. The two teams aren't in nearly the same situation when the respective GM's took over. That doesn't even touch the fact that what worked in the past does not mean it will work as well in the future. In a copy cat league everyone wants to copy the flavor of the week. That in turn increases the odds each team that does the same thing will be less effective. Is it really wise, for instance, to race the Philly's, Braves and Reds to the bottom? After all three of the four teams are not going to succeed in being the worst. Notice four teams could copy the Astros and Cubs now instead of just those two doing it. That means instead of competing with one other team for the coveted first draft pick four are. Perhaps by next season six will be. After all conventional thinking says if it worked for the Cubs and Astos it should work for every team. At some point half the teams will be competing for the bottom. How's that gonna work out for most of them? Why not carve out our own way and be ahead of the curve for once? Personally I think Stearns knows he is not in the same situation as the Cubs or Astors and is working accordingly. Why take five of six years when two or three will do? We aren't going to be good next year but we are not as far away as the Cubs or Astros were. So why follow their path of pain and torture for half a decade when we don't have to?

I don't think Braun is below average in left. If for no other reason than the level of the average defensive player in left is not very good. I also think Davis defensive deficiencies are way over blown. He certainly has a noodle for an arm but he does seem to get decent jumps and takes good routes to the ball. I wouldn't exactly call him good but how bad he is seems overdone. I am all for putting offense first players in left. It seems stupid to value defense in a position where it is least valuable. As far as Young goes I wonder if they aren't looking at him just for the base stealing ability. I think one of the roster spots most underutilized is that last bench spot. It hardly ever goes to someone who can actually hit and is usually more of an emergency type player than anything. Why not use that spot for a dedicated base stealer for late game situations? At least it provides something that can be used on a regular basis.

Might also explain why the Brewers trade action is so low recently. If the trade value is that low on those guys one has to wonder if the same thing is going on with the likes of Lucroy or Davis.

No kidding. Football games today consist of 10 seconds of actual play, the refs standing around talking for 2 minutes, a challenge, a review, the refs standing and discussing things with coaches, then a huddle, then the players get set for the next play only to call a timeout because they play clock is about to hit 0 then after another minute or two another 10 second play. Lather, rinse, repeat. Glass houses. There's not too much difference between the two. Per a 2013 WSJ study, baseball games feature 18 minutes of actual action with the ball in play (which would include each pitch, not just a batted ball in play). In a similar WSJ study from 2010, NFL games feature 11 minutes. Which means for both sports, you are spending the vast majority of the game (3 hours or more) watching people standing around or in a commercial break. Either way, I don't think there's a correlation between game pace/action and the enjoyment of the sport. Otherwise we'd all be huge basketball & soccer fans. I think people have other issues with blame pacing, without understanding that both are pretty similar in terms of when something meaningful happens on the field. I can't speak for Point Beer Is Best but I wasn't saying baseball is more action packed. Merely that football isn't any more so than baseball. I do think football has got to the point where there really isn't any flow to the game. Baseball on the other hand does IMHO. It shouldn't come as a surprise considering MLB has been actively working to create a better flow.

No kidding. Football games today consist of 10 seconds of actual play, the refs standing around talking for 2 minutes, a challenge, a review, the refs standing and discussing things with coaches, then a huddle, then the players get set for the next play only to call a timeout because they play clock is about to hit 0 then after another minute or two another 10 second play. Lather, rinse, repeat. As far as the story goes I have little doubt many players used HGH or other PEDs. But the story itself seems pretty weak. A guy who wasn't there at the time of the alleged incidents now says nothing he said was true is the basis for the story. Hard to say it has any credibility at all.

Good luck to him. He was a decent bench player for us. It wasn't his fault he was asked to be more. I like guys like him who fight and scrap their way to the majors. They spend most of their career toiling in the minors, always worried about getting cut, but persevere. Got to respect guys like that. I hope he carves out a nice little career for himself playing in the role he was meant for.

I think Kris Bryant might disagree with you.

Saw it last night. Decent movie but certainly not up to all the hype. Can't say I'm all that surprised. Any time you hear more about a movie before it's released than after something is wrong. Tired to hard at nostalgia and forgot to make something new or original IMHO. Meet the new Death Star. Same as the old Death Star.

I'll take a passionate guy who cares even if he erupts on occasion over a guy who accepts losing and not performing. He's a modern day Jimmy Piersall. The game could use guys like that. He's not a bad dude, just wired tighter than most guys. Suggest some of you guys read up on Milwaukee icon Johnny Logan or even Eddie Mathews. Johnson is in that same image. Logan was hated by opposing teams and Mathews instigated a few epic brawls in his day also. Or he could be Jeff Juden or Scott Karl in the clubhouse. I don't think getting into fights in any way relates to how much you want to win.

Not picking on you personally for this but I honestly don't get this line of thinking for a couple reasons. The first is I don't think the division is going to remain as great as it was last season over the next few seasons. Just because those three teams were good last season doesn't make them a lock to be good for the next three or so. The Pirates are about to hit the same situation the 2011 Brewers did. Their core of players are going to get expensive, Burnett is gone and Liriano isn't exactly young nor durable. The Cards have lost a few players and their core is getting old. Even the Cubs, who look to be the class of the division going forward may not get much, if any, better than they were last season. They stayed remarkably healthy and all of their young players played up to their potential. That rarely lasts over a three year period. They will have their Rickie Weeks and Cory Hart's as well. Odds are each team will have their version of Ryan Braun's thumb, Cory Hart's and Mat Gamel's knees. They will all also have some guys who just never put together consistent, year to year, high level production. They too will have their versions of JJ Hardy and Rickie Weeks. The Cubs already did with Starlin Castro. Going deeper into that a couple season's ago they had an embarrassment of riches at shortstop in the minors. The farm was so full of them nobody was sure what they would do with them all. This winter they had to go out and buy an older free agent to play shortstop. Things change far too quickly to predicate building your team on how other teams look today. The second problem with building your team based on when the division might get weaker is it's the wrong thing to focus on. Given the predictability problems I stated above it seems silly to target players to be ready at some time when the division might not be as good. If we are going to do that why not just strive to put out 85 win teams and hope for that to be enough in five years? If we are building a team that is good enough to win championships then there is no need to worry about how good other teams in the division are. There will always be a great team that we need to beat if we are to win it all. It doesn't matter one hill of beans if that team is in our division or not. You don't win championships by trying to avoid teams when they are good because there will always be good teams. The key is being good yourself.

Don't forget c) but low on veteran players in the hope they up their stock enough to land a prospect. I'm all for adding players like Nieuwenhuis but part of me wonders what makes him a better bet than Schafer was. Seems like six of one half dozen of the other to me. That said Stearns knows more than I do about it so I'll trust him until further notice.

Or he could the the Cardinals next Kip Wells. They do not succeed in making every move work like so many here insinuate.

My bad I didn't notice Topper was talking strictly about two strike counts. I think the point remains that not thinking strikeouts matter can lead to not learning how to cut down on them at the wrong time. Jose Hernandez' best season being the one with the most K's notwithstanding. He was always a strikeout hitter. The fact he had more one season than another most likely random chance. He accidentally hit a few more than he missed one season over another. I think it would have served him better over his career had he learned situational hitting better. Maybe we are talking past each other a bit as well. I think cutting down on strikeouts makes a specific player better than they would have been. If a skill is not learned because of the concept that strikeouts don't matter then I think strikeouts matter. If only in the sense that the specific player is not as good as he could have been. If the conversation is about whether strikeout hitters as a whole hurts an offense then it's probably less of an issue.

How much does spring training matters when pitchers are not game planning. For the better part of spring plenty of pitchers don't even throw all their pitchers. It's one thing to get a player in there a few times to see if they can play there occasionally but quite another to get them up to speed to be the everyday guy. My main concern is not to make the transition to the majors harder than it needs to be. For myself there has to be some compelling reason to complicate a player's first season in the majors. Like winning now or if they are out of options or something. I just don't see that in this situation.

Situational hitting as described by Topper09er is a skill that needs to be learned. If you go by the mantra strikeouts don't matter then it seems unlikely you would bother to learn that. It's also noteworthy that Hernandez's best year was below average league wide. Looking at how many k's one has in a given year and determining they don't matter because that one person's best season came when he had the most strikeouts misses the fact that he was always a strikeout prone player who was always below average.

When we aren't going to win many games anyway what does it matter if he is one of the 8 best players? I don't really see how learning to adjusting to major league pitching is best achieved by having him learn a new position at the same time? It could hurt his long term development which would be the worst possible outcome. To take that sort of risk on a team that isn't going anywhere seems counterproductive to me. If this team was a possible contender and he was the best option it would be one thing. In the position the Brewers are in there is just no justification for it. If they want to convert him the first long term then send him to AAA to do so.

Braun is NOT a liability in the OF. he can play LF or RF (he's better in LF clearly). i don't care what nerdy analytics you can dig up to support what you're saying - use your eyes as well (my eyes are what tells me Davis has the worst corner OF arm i'll ever see in my life). and Khris Davis is NOT a legit bat. he has legit power and literally nothing else. while his BB rate rose this past season in fewer ABs his K rate rose. he's proved at this level not to be a high OBP guy, not to have an understanding of the strike zone, not to hit line to line, not to hit for a solid avg, not a contact hitter and has not showed any consistency whatsoever. he's had 3 months over the past 2 seasons that have resulted in the majority of his power numbers (best tool). and that doesn't even include his avg at best defense with brutal arm. yes, you're correct that now is the time to move him especially after his final 2 months last year. but not because it's when you can maximize the return rather he's the opposite of what this team is becoming and because room needs to be made for Santana in RF. Please, I beg people, stop relying on wOBA, WAR, etc. That's part of the evaluation process but too many people use it as the final say. There isn't 1 GM that would take Khris Davis over Alex Gordon. Davis also had a higher wOBA than Heyward too lol Please, enlighten us on your scouting ability while watching FSWI. Edit - everyone knows Khris Davis has a shoulder problem and can't throw. You are just becoming a broken record with your scorn for anyone using advance metrics. We all watch the Brewers, we see the same things you do, when evaluating trade pieces/proposals it doesn't hurt to use advance statistics. The fact that you point out your disdain for them in every.single.post. is tiresome. We get it. In his defense, one season of defensive stats is not enough to base any argument on. I think sometimes people are against analytics because they get used wrong. Using one season of defensive WAR as the basis for saying someone is a defensive liability isn't accurate analytically. It may not be right to deny the value of statistical analysis but it shouldn't be wrong to question if they are being used correctly.

I think at least Mark Attanasio comes off as a true fan of the club who is passionate about where the club is heading and understands fans may get frustrated by a non-contending team. That's a lot better than a lot of the generic corporate cheerleading that you get from many sports owners. Citing Baseball America, etc. shows that he is at least fairly in tune with the makeup of the franchise. Citing a public site dedicated to fans of baseball is supposed to make me feel he is in tune with the makeup of the franchise? Why wasn't he in tune with that last off season? Sorry but I just don't see that open letter as anything special. I like him and I do believe he wants to win but the same can be said of virtually any owner and the ones who don't sure as hell don't say so. Hell the ones who aren't probably pay more lip service to the fans and thier commitment to winning than the ones who do. It's cheaper to get fans to think you're a good guy dedicated to winning than to actually be a good guy dedicated to winning. I am not usually pessimistic but an open letter like that is what every owner who just had a disappointing season and is about to go on a massive rebuild does. Make some public appeals to patience and the desire to do what it takes to bring us a championship and telling us how great of fans we are. That isn't being open and honest as much as it is being a smart businessman. Seems more like pandering to bleed as much money out of a bad product than anything. I am for it though. He should be doing such things. Just don't try to portray it as something special that our owner does than none others do. Sure it is. So am I supposed to be happy he finally admitted what has been pretty evident for a while now? I might be more interested in what he said if he hasn't also been trying to sell us on being a team that will not have to go through this sort of rebuild every decade or so. Had he come out and said a team like ours has to go through these things once in a while I might give him more credit for being open and honest. But he isn't is he? He's selling it like this is the last time we'll have to deal with it because he's going to do something no other team in our situation has ever done before. That is far from open and honest. If it is it's delusional. I am not trying to bash him as much as I am saying this is hardly anything special that deserves praise. He should be saying what he is. But we don't have to act like he's a great owner for doing so.