SRB

It will be interesting to see how the Cardinals evolve once the long reach of LaRussa if finally broken.

England is in a bad position, but Italy beating Uruguay and Costa Rica, and England beating Costa Rica by multiple goals is pretty much the most reasonable prediction of what one would expect to happen, isn't it? England just have lost any wriggle room. I will always hate him for his handball against Ghana, but Suarez was a beast today.

Hey, I know the title sounds like absurd homerism, but I'm just adding the numbers here. Nothing fancy about it. If Lucroy: (1) didn't play in Milwaukee, and/or (2) had been an elite prospect coming up, I feel like there would be a lot more discussion of how great he has been the last few years.

With renewed talk of Lucroy being a potential MVP candidate this season after another monster game tonight, I was pretty amazed looking at some of Lucroy's advanced metrics. We all know by now that both metrics and industry insiders alike praise Lucroy's pitch-framing abilities as a defensive catcher, but how does Lucroy's value stack up to the rest of MLB when you add everything together? This is not sophisticated analysis, but I started by looking at the Fangraphs fWAR leaderboard for the past two and a half seasons (2012-2014). Lucroy is the #26 position player in baseball over that span using fWAR. However, fWAR does not currently take into account pitch-framing, which most analysis agree is perhaps Lucroy's asset as a catcher. There aren't any clearly accepted metrics to measure pitch-framing (or to cleanly distinguish the impact of the catcher from the impact of the pitcher), but one existing leaderboard is Matthew Caruth's at StatCorner: see here and here. Over the past three seasons, Lucroy has been quite impressive according to this metric: If you buy the metric, that means Lucroy has saved an additional 67.2 runs on defense over the past three seasons just through his ability to get called strikes through pitch framing. Now, the two statistics may not be directly translatable, but if you add this value to Lucroy's existing 2012-2014 fWAR he shoots up the leaderboards: However, this is sort of like comparing apples to oranges, because catchers are almost always going to get less playing time due to the rigor and difficulty of the position compared to a position like centerfield. Over this same time frame, Lucroy has 309 G versus Trout's 361 G and McCutchen's 382 G. (Lucroy also hit lower than #3/#4 in the order for most of the last three seasons, so he was also missing out on PA that way.) If we simply average each player's fWAR to a standardized 350 G, then you get the following leaderboard: So on a per-game basis, Trout is still a little ways ahead. But there is always going to be a fairly large margin of error in this type of statistic, and I would argue that a guy who is the #2 player in baseball over an expanded timeframe should a least be in the discussion for "best player in baseball." You also have to take into account whether catcher is an inherently more difficult position to fill than centerfield (even beyond the weighing involved in fWAR), as well as the fact that Lucroy is trending up while Trout is trending down to a certain extent (not that Trout isn't still at an MVP-level). You also have to remember that this "analysis" is based on stats prior to Lucroy's huge, 2-HR game tonight, which will surely bump his 2014 fWAR up a few runs. I'm not claiming that these statistics are especially precise or definitive, but I think it is interesting to see. I'm not cherry-picking stats or going out of my way to make Lucroy look good: I'm just adding pitch-framing to his existing fWAR totals, and the numbers suggest that he is at least in the same tier as Mike Trout. Really quite incredible.

If you add certain pitch framing metrics to Lucroy's fWAR (since Fangraphs WAR does not take into account pitch-framing yet in catcher defense, so far as I'm aware), Lucroy might actually be ahead of Tulowitzki at this point. StatCorner pitch-framing leaderboard has Lucroy leading the majors with +14.6 RAA in 2014, and entering tonight he was -1.5 fWAR behind Tulowitzki. (Not sure if those two stats are directly translatable though) Crazy season.

Wow! I guess the bright side of that is that it means the Brewers have $1M burning a hole in their pocket. Maybe can make sure nobody swoops in and steals Gilbert Lara.

Depends on the egregiousness of the errors, but one could argue that's actually an encouraging stat because it means Mallen is getting to a lot of balls (although, given his age, is also a little unpolished). He only turned 17 a couple weeks ago. Not sure about his DSL stats, but in his first season at Helena, Alcides Escobar had 21 E in 66 G.

Getting rid of Wang this late in the season would be silly. At this point they just have to stash him for a few more weeks before rosters expand.

I know Rickie is up there in HBP (8th on the active list 118 coming into today's game), but my memory tells me that he has had several RBI hbp's. However, I can't seem to find that interesting statistic anywhere. Assuming that you can only have an HBP RBI with the bases loaded (right?), tonight was Rickie's second career HBP RBI per Baseball-Reference career splits.

Agreed. I mean, the chance of him reaching that is one thing, but how can one possibly argue that the best athlete in the draft class (with a modicum of talent for baseball) does not have a huge ceiling? Nobody knows what Harrison is actually going to do down the line, but what we do know is that coming out of high school his physical tools are ridiculous. Here's some more Keith Law hypocrisy from a couple years ago. Reminded of this because I believe it was John Manuel in a BA podcast who suggested that one of the reasons Harrison might have fallen is that his athleticism-over-polish profile reminded teams of Bubba Starling (who burned the Royals in 2011): I guess a raw high school kid with amazing athleticism has best-in-the-league ceiling if he's on the Royals, but a slightly-above-average ceiling if he's on the Brewers... (And yeah, maybe Starling was a more highly regarded athlete at the time, but still)

HBP RBI? There's the Rickie we know and love!

Gomez hat trick: (1) steal a home run, (2) hit a home run, (3) get in a fistfight with Derek Jeter.

Can we rename the team the Milwaukee Lucroys, like in the early twentieth century when the used to name teams after players?

Between Medeiros's unique delivery and the fact that he does long-toss warmups/workouts (a strangely controversial issue in MLB, it seems), I hope they don't try to mess with him too much. Based on no evidence in particular, I've long worried that the Brewers think they are being clever by tinkering with pitchers to avoid injuries or whatever (which, granted, it seems they have been quite successful at) while missing the bigger picture and decreasing pitchers' upside.

I'm interested in seeing what Elvis Rubio does at Helena this season. Signed out of the Dominican Republic a few years ago and at the time was considered a corner OF with a power bat (presumably quite raw). Last season in Arizona he put up some nice numbers (only 154 PA), with a .386 OBP and .482 SLG. Haven't seen much if any buzz surrounding him, but if he has another strong season we could start to see his name more.

ESPN should not have such an opinionated (arguably biased) pundit discussing prospects. Yes, everyone is entitled to an opinion, but given the media reach of the Evil Empire you will now have legions of Brewers fans who don't know any better and are convinced that the Brewers had a mediocre draft or that the front office doesn't know what they're doing. Same issue with pundits like Buster Olney working people up into a fervor over Braun. Just do your job, report on the player's tools and what actual scouts have told you, and stop trying to make it about yourself with digs at players/organizations with every response you give. I've said it before but other prospect talking heads like Jim Callis or John Manuel (not to mention more in-depth prospect coverage sites like PG) are much better at this and much more professional, like actual journalists. There are inherent limitations to scouting. There are substantially larger inherent limitations when you aren't actually scouting but are just consolidating what you've heard from others or seen in brief snippets. You are not smarter than the MLB front office(s).

If the $2M figure is accurate for Medeiros, they still need to clear $237,900 in slot money across whatever bonuses Sneed, DeMuth, Meyer, Kole, McCall, and Salas got/will get. Considering that list includes four seniors, even if Sneed got slot money then the Brewers should have zero problem coming in below their bonus limit. Indeed, I'm guessing they will be a couple hundred thousand below their bonus pool. Maybe they can allocate some of that savings to sign one of the high school fliers from the later rounds.

Didn't see those plays, but I think I read that Norris (A's catcher) got hit yet again tonight, against a totally different team. Maybe it's something the catcher is doing and not the opposing batter.

You have to balance the recklessness of what he did with the degree to which he was purposefully trying to hit somebody. It looked to me like, at worst, he got angry and let the bat fly. If it clearly looked like he had deliberately tried to throw it at Abad or another A's player, then yeah we're talking a longer suspension. But 5 games seems more than fair for this.

Pelham looks pretty intriguing. Any guesses as to what it would take to sign him?

Some video of the top 3 picks from last year's PG All American Game (August 2013). Jacob Gatewood starting around 0:21:00. Monte Harrison starting around 0:31:20. Medeiros pitches starting around 0:53:00. I especially recommend watching his breaking ball just after 0:55:00. Somebody remind me how this kid was not considered a "consensus" top 15 pick again?

Just my guess, but it seems like no single senior draftee would ever have that much leverage. First, because the Brewers probably have enough wriggle room with other players that they don't 100% need the $50-100k in extra pool space from a given senior to stay below their pool ceiling. Second, because the Brewers can go over their pool ceiling quite a bit and only pay a fine. If the senior asks for too much the Brewers would be more than happy to just tell him to walk, and then he has basically thrown away his career (because he can't go back to school and get drafted again next year) while only causing the Brewers some minor difficulties. From the standpoint of the impact on the negotiating party, the team has all the leverage.

Some more info on why Monte Harrison perhaps fell so far, and why the Brewers nabbed him. According to Doug Melvin on WTMJ, Brewers scout Drew Anderson (Brewers and U. Nebraska almunus) has a decent relationship with Harrison and had a sense that he really wanted to play baseball instead of going to college (whereas some other teams may have thought he was a hard sign). Kudos to Drew Anderson if he helped land Harrison at #50!

I'd be quite thrilled with anybody we selected turning into a top-25 prospect in all of baseball. Actually turning that into MLB success is the second step of a difficult process.

Brewers-related questions