Thurston Fluff

Meh, what was he going to say? All he really said was the usual "our fans are the greatest ever," and "I am committed to getting this right." Which is what everyone says in this situation. I just don't see what is so open and honest about it considering the state the team is in now.

Sure all else being equal I would take the guy who strikes out less, but strikeouts are far down the list of what I would look at. Probably the last thing. Off the top of my head the order of things I would look at.(RBIs do not make the list) wOBA wrc+ OPS OBP, SLG, BA how they compare or where a player gets their offensive value. The combination will give a good idea of walk rates, whether they rely on balls in play, how much power they have. defense Baserunning (mostly SB vs CS) HR Strikeouts So it does matter, just not much. That is not the same as it doesn't matter at all. It is a weakness. Which leads me to another point. If a team completely ignores strikeouts they can end up with a lot of players who strikeout a lot. A few free swingers may not hurt but does that mean a team full of them doesn't? Is it possible that small weakness in one or two players gets amplified when all the players share that weakness? Has that been accounted for in the studies? I do not know but I am not sure anyone else does either. I ask because it seems relevant when rebuilding. Not to mention I think some of that was going on with the team the past couple seasons.

If compare two players with the same power and on base skills, but one has far worse strikeout numbers than the other are they equal? Isn't it likely the player who strikes out the least will be marginally more productive than the player who has strikes out the most?

I get the math but I wonder if players/GM's knowing the math means the math will change. Or already has.

I know I started this comparison but I was conflating two very different things to stimulate conversation. It's slow right now so why not? What I was comparing is how strikeouts effects one player (the pitcher) vs what they do to an entire offence. Strikeouts, as they correlate to pitchers, is in how they effect that specific pitcher. In other words I was using K rates to judge the specific pitcher. The effect of strikeouts on offence is judged by the effects it has based on the total of all hitters. In this instance it is judging the strikeout itself, not as a tool to judge the player. So what I was really comparing is how strikeouts effects one player vs what they do to an entire offence. That is not valid at all. The mistake I think a lot of people make about strikeout hitters is assuming because strikeouts do not necessarily matter to the overall offence then we can make no real judgement about the player who creates them. If we really wanted to make the case that strikeouts don't matter for a particular hitter then we would have to study the effects on each hitter to see if they, in particular, are effected by how much they strike out. Not in what happens to the entire offense when someone strikes out. Personally I think there are two types of strikeout hitters. One that doesn't mind striking out in an effort to get the right pitch or take a walk, the other because he just can't make contract very well. The former may be able to cut down his rate when the situation calls for it while the latter probably cannot. So I think the whole judgement of whether strikeouts matter to an offence is off base (no pun intended.) I would love to see a study done on hitters K rates in specific situations and see if certain hitters make bad strikeouts more often than others with similar K rates. Maybe then we could put to bed the debate of whether certain hitters can be judged by K rates like pitchers are. It would also go a long way towards judging how strikouts effect the team as a whole.

I think you hit on something here. How much strikeouts matter this year may not be the same as they will be in five years. Not so much the specifics of shifts but about how teams are adjusting their strategy overall. What works today may not work tomorrow. As far as the strikeout goes if it didn't matter why are power relievers who can strikeout hitters suddenly becoming in vogue? I think the trend is starting to shift somewhat. Can't really look back at what was important in the past when we are seeing a fairly significant change in how relievers are viewed/used in the present.

Houston just traded five prospects for one reliever and a minor league shortstop so it appears they are not afraid to trade prospects to win now. Frankly I hope we don't copy anyone. I would love to be the team others copy at some point. If we keep copying others we are always going to be a step behind.

Yes. He isn't my or quite a few peoples ideal SS because of his whack away type approach but he does have value and we'll see a return on him. Peńa is another guy that can become a big contributor this season. Hellweg, meh... I think when you rank players you need to put that into perspective. If the difference between the tenth highest ranked player has on OBP of .290 and the 20th is .287 does the fact he ranks higher create any more value? I think the real question is: Is a player good enough to have value? For as much as I rag on WAR I am happy they attempted to answer that.

You don't have to click on the thread. It is that easy...no really...that easy. He may not have said it eloquently but he does have the right to comment on the misuse of a stat as much as people have the right to misuse it. I don't tell people to not click on the page if they want to misuse WAR so it would be nice if people who point out the misuse of it would get the same consideration. There isn't any such thing as an accurate single number that captures a player's value. I have serious reservations about it's ability to even give a reasonably accurate portrait of a single player's value, let alone lump several players WAR together and measure it against another player. To me WAR is akin to measuring the value of water by computing the value of the components it's made up of. To make matters worse it weighs each component as equal even though everyone knows it takes a two:one ratio to make it. I applaud the attempt to make a single number all encompassing. It's just that it hasn't done that to any degree of accuracy IMHO. To make matter worse it's practical application seems to have morphed into the defining metric for a player's value.

Make sure you mention the new muffler to the insurance company. They take that into consideration when offering compensation. For example when someone t-boned me in my car I told the insurance company that I just put a new clutch in it and they offered added some of that cost to the settlement. Of course that was not my fault and I was working with a company that my have been worried I wouldn't just settle. But I imagine your insurance company has some interest in maintaining you as a customer so they should be receptive as well. Certainly doesn't hurt to mention it.

Sure, that is what happens with inflation in most cases. On top of that, Braun signed a "bargain" deal for financial security before he could hit the market. Heyward is 26 and according to Fangraphs was the #11 best position player in all of baseball last year because of his elite defense and solid offense. We'll see if that holds true. Braun is a below average defender, but not terrible. "Pretty good" bat, but he is probably only going to decline from here. Of course, for the next 2-3 years, it doesn't even matter what Braun makes to me. The Brewers' payroll is somewhat irrelevant at this point. I'd like to have an extra $20 million to take risks on vets or sprinkle over the organization, but the only point it will matter is probably the 2019/2020 part of things. Who knows if he's here at that point. I think defensive metrics for non critical defensive positions tend to get over rated. No one will convince me Braun is less valuable than Brett Gardner. Yet in WAR they are quite comparable depending on what site you view. As to the Brewers payroll, it hardly matters the next 2 + years. This is clearly going to be a very very bad MLB team that will be picking top 1-5 consistently. I brought up Brauns contract as partly a Mea Culpa on his contract and partly that he is now a very trade able asset and none of us could say that 6 months ago. The problem with WAR, well the major problem with WAR, well one of the major problems with WAR, is it treats offense and defense in equal measure. Yet the minors are filled with great defensive players who can't hit a lick. You don't see many great offensive players never make the majors because they can't play defense.

I have been as passionate as any over this because i think its a truly awful trade. I guess, for me, the argument thats driving me up a wall is that these guys somehow have a high ceiling. age and ceiling are NOT synonyms, especially when it comes to the baseball world. Peterson, for instance (and im not implying that he was actually available in this trade though it was reported by several media members), has a far higher ceiling than any of these three. There are very few players capable of hitting 30+ homers in a minor league season, and hes one of them. So he had a down season last year, that literally make him the definition of high risk high reward. there is nothing about these guys that implies any type of high reward so i am just not sure where that is coming from. Keith Law, whom i despise yet respect, said that sterns was good to get 3 players for lind, but that he sacrificed quality for quantity and that it appears he was just looking for organizational depth with a few reliever types. I apologize to you thurston, because this post isnt about you specifically, but the many that keep using words like "ceiling" "prospect" "upside" with these guys. if they had those things the scouting world would know it as best exampled by the top 100 being 20% teenagers. I caution you not to conflate team scouting to media scouts. Each team has it's own list of other team's prospects and I doubt any two are the same. Much less the same as public media outlets rankings. But the main difference is probably how each entity looked at the specific players in question. Team scouts are often asked to look at specific players and assess them. Especially when they may be part of a trade. Media outlets set their rankings by going through the entire minor league system of every team and rank them. The most they get of any player is a snapshot of him. That probably goes double for players with limited exposure to the public eye. I think it's pretty obvious one way gives a much more comprehensive picture of a specific player than the other. I doubt for example Baseball America would have spent nearly as much time vetting each of these prospects as a scout for the Brewers did the past week or so. That is why I do not put much stock into their rankings at this point. As far as their ceiling goes none of us know for sure what they are. If they had an easy to see high ceiling we wouldn't have been able to get them for Lind. But looking at their age, room to grow, strikeout and control abilities so far there is nothing that says they have low ceiling either. In other words you are correct that they don't necessarily have a high ceiling but that is not the same as saying they have low ones.

I look at getting these guys the same as I do when the Packers trades back in the draft to accumulate more picks instead of having one higher pick. At some point the level of prospect you are likely to get is outweighed by the odds that three others provide more. If we were talking about getting a can't miss, above average, major league player then sure go with that. But Lind was never going to get us that. He might get us someone closer the the majors but every step closer to the majors we got was likely also a step lower ceiling to go with it. Nobody was going to trade multiple years of a sure shot, above average player for one year of Adam Lind.

I think the problem with K-Rod has little to do with domestic violence issues. They are not recent and he was never convicted. I think it has to do with him being a soft tosser who rely on his change up to get people out. That type of pitcher does not seem to be in vogue right now. I should note I am diminishing the significance of his off field issues. I just don't think baseball people are that worried about it if they felt he was as good as his numbers indicate. If he still hit the upper 90's on his fastball and had the numbers he had the past couple seasons teams would have been all over him no matter what he did.

I read something about Boston trying to change his hitting mechanics last season. If they did that might go some way toward explaining his drop off last season. He was a good prospect at one time and the type of player we might as well take a shot on considering our situation and how little it cost.

If it's true that these players are 5th starter, bullpen types that would be the second time in a little over a year that he was traded for that. That is pretty telling of what his true value is.

I'm with you on this. The idea of finding undervalued assets is to find them before anyone else realizes their true value. When everyone else finds out it will no longer will be undervalued. Those who follow the trend are behind the trendsetters by definition. A baseball team like ours cannot afford to be behind trendsetters.

That's peanuts for the Cubs. If he sucks, they just take the hit and release him without thinking twice. i have little doubt that is how they view it as well. That kind of thinking is what I was referring to when I said they will go the same route as all big market teams do. It doesn't seem to make sense value wise but if the team has the money and is in a competitive window they almost have to go that route. Otherwise the fans get angry, start calling the team cheap etc etc. Then a few years from now all that poorly spent money comes back to haunt them.

I understand they grew this group into a contender like small market teams do. But I'm not talking about how they built a competitive team. I am talking about how they maintain it. Small market teams get competitive by sucking large for a while just like the Cubs did. But they maintain their competitiveness, as much as it is possible to do so, by trading their assets before they hit free agency, drafting well and making astute second tier free agent signings. When this group starts to hit free agency the Cubs will have to sign them and fall into the big spenders trap of long contracts for huge money or they will let them go and let their competitive window close. So where exactly is their ability to be competitive over more than the next five years coming from? The same place as any other big market team. Huge payrolls and taking on a lot of risk. While I understand MrTPlush's belief that the cubs farm is so deep that it will be able to just replace the likes of Bryant and Rizzo and keep right on going, I do not agree. If it was why did they have to supplement their roster now with the likes of Lester and Lackey? Not a single regular starter was drafted by them. All of them were either free agents or traded for. That hardly seems like a farm deep enough to allow for trades and replacing outgoing free agents more than five years from now when they will no longer have top 10 draft picks. They will go big market and have to deal with the risk just like every other club who can afford it does. Their window as a big market team operating like a small market team certainly isn't more than five years.

Things rarely go that smooth. They had a great season with few injuries and everyone playing up to their standard. A few injuries, someone slumps, another moves on and any team can turn average pretty fast. The Brewers sure did.

I was listening to someone talking about the current rise in baseball salaries recently. He said since the new tv contracts started, sorry do not remember the exact year he stated, revenue went up by 120%. Over that same period of time player salaries went up 60%. That means players got half the new revenue and the owners got half. That seems about the way it should be to me. I think the problem, at least for teams like the Brewers, isn't the players salaries as much as it is the way the owners share their half of the revenue.

Did you? Because the White Sox weren't #10 nor was their payroll(or any other teams) the number you provided. Also I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with what you said just adding to it because it was related. I used two different sites to make sure the trend I thought was true indeed was. It was, as you can clearly see by looking at it. The site I used as the example was payroll to start the season the other cumulative throughout the year. While the numbers are not exactly the same the point i was making is. A few teams had huge payrolls and most did not. Thus lumping teams together by ranking was not a useful way to compare payroll effects. If you have a problem with my basic point please address that instead of nit picking small numerical inaccuracies from one source to another.

The problem is you can't just look at one years payroll rankings since they vary so much year to year. For instance there are a couple teams that could easily spend more on that list(Cardinals/Cubs/Mets) which would push that #10 number to something more like $140mil. Heck in 2012 the Brewers actually had a Top10 payroll. Difference is the Brewers were maxed out and some teams could have spent $60mil if there were the players to buy. I think when it comes to differentiating small market teams and large market teams it comes down to one thing. One group of teams can(and will) sign the David Price's of the world and the other group cannot. That is the big difference in this whole thing. If the small market teams want that elite player they have to pray they can develop one or they have to trade the farm for one. If we could have just signed a Zack Greinke we would still have Escobar, Odorizzi, Cain, and Brantley on this team or available for other trades. What a massive difference that would have made. I'm guessing you didn't actually look at the link I provided.

I think we have to be careful to differentiate between payroll rankings and high payrolls. Last year for example the 10th highest payroll to start last season was the White Sox at $122,630,477. If you compare that to the Dodgers $273,440,830 payroll and the Brewers $98,037,500 you can see it was far closer to the Brewers than the Dodgers. In fact to get a payroll closer to the top than to the Brewers you have to go to the Red Sox at number three and their $189,577,594 payroll. So I think it takes more than just being in the top 10 in payroll to be a big spender. Here is a list of team payrolls if anyone is interested in seeing who the truly big spenders have been over the past decade or so. http://www.stevetheump.com/Payrolls.htm

Smart move by the Brewers as he's not young and they have traded for utility players who they think they can develop. But as a fan I will really miss him. He's the kind of player I find easy to root for. Enthusiastic, very good defense, hustles, etc and I tend to root for the guys who had a struggle making it. I hope he lands with a team that is a good fit for him and has a great 2016 season. I am with you on rooting for him as well as the reasons why. I don't think this means his days here are over though. I think it is just a way to get some short term flexibility on the 40 man roster. If he gets a deal somewhere else all the more power to him. If he doesn't I'd bet he signs a minor league deal here with an invite to spring training. At least here he has a manager who likes him and his shot at making the team is as good as he can hope for anywhere.