JosephC

Couldn't agree more. This gets more and more ridiculous by the day. It started at 290 million. Then it became 360 million for a 13 year extension. Now the latest I see is 411 million from the state, 67.5 million from the county, 67.5 million from the city = 546 million for a 20 year extension. Of course, don't forget that originally Miller Park was sold to the public as a 300 million dollar project that would be a 50/50 private/public split. The original 150 million price-tag sold to us turned into 600+ million by the time the local sales tax ended. Looks like that 150 million will soon turn into 1.15+ billion. Regardless of any lease, it's a guarantee that Attanasio or whoever owns the Brewers in 2040 are going to come to us and say the stadium is now a 40 year old junk heap and it's time to forget about the last 10 years on the lease, bulldoze the stadium and build me a new one which will likely carry a 3 billion dollar price-tag by that time. But, but, but...these projects bring in so much revenue they pay for themselves. Anybody in this state that pays attention would have to be a complete fool to believe that. Just look at the Bucks and their arena. Shortly after that deal was done, MPS had their first referendum in 26 years because they needed more money. The Bucks arena has been such a financial windfall for the area that the city and county both had to raise taxes to be able to pay for what they are terming essential services. If the Bucks arena was such a great deal for the area, you could never tell by what has happened since then. It is just so unnecessary for the taxpayer to be continuously soaked by these professional sports franchises. Forbes estimates the current Brewer revenue at 294 million. There are 27 years between now and 2050. 27 years * 294 million = just short of 8 BILLION dollars. We really need to give this guy 546 million dollars? I say let that guy move the team after 2030, public is much better off IMO rather than handing over 546 million now and potentially having him and politicians gouge the public for another 3+ billion dollars in 2045 when he claims he "needs" a new stadium. This money pit is endless. Just cut the cord now!

This would have been much more interesting if pea-brained Manfred hadn't killed the August waiver trades.

If a player retires, a team does not have to pay the remainder of the salary. Fielder could no longer play, but the Rangers had an insurance policy on his contract. So when it was determined he could not play, the team went to the insurance company and made the claim, allowing Fielder to not play and still get paid...resulting in his retirement. There was some provision in the insurance contract that Fielder had to remain on the 40-man roster, and Fielder was on the 40 man roster for a couple years after he retired until the Rangers and the insurance company worked out another financial deal that allowed them to remove Fielder from the 40 man roster. As far as Strasburg, if he retires the Nationals do not legally owe him the remainder of his contract unless that changed in the latest CBA, which I don't think it did. Even if he cannot pitch, he would still earn his salary by not retiring, showing up and rehabbing his injury. It's safe to say at this point that the team doctors (and probably other doctors to provide more opinions) have concluded that he will never pitch again. Following is just speculation on my part, Strasburg demanded the rest of the contract be paid, so he could show up and go through the motions of rehabbing and eat up resources (trainers, equipment, other staff time) for nothing since he could no longer pitch and still get paid, or he would just retire if the Nationals were still willing to pay him. Either way, he's still getting paid. So the Nationals likely just decided to pay him instead of going through the false facade that he is rehabbing and may pitch again one day, and having him eat up resources that could be directed at players who can still play. Considering he spent his whole career with the Nationals, it wouldn't surprise me if there is a "personal services contract" aspect to this deal where he continues to work with the Nationals doing various, minor PR stuff for the team.

Beats Chris Davis for the worst contract in MLB history IMO, providing the early reports are correct and the Nationals will pay him the remainder of his contract. 7 years, 245 million End result = 8 games pitched, 31 1/3 innings, 32 hits allowed, 17 walks, 28 strikeouts, 1.56 WHIP, 5.69 FIP, -0.5 bWAR Not a wise contract considering the history of elbow problems and shoulder inflammation issues that he had for years before signing the deal. This guy was prime candidate #1 to have him arm fall off and it's no surprise that this was the end result.

The Brewers are such a financial windfall to the city of Milwaukee that- https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2023/06/22/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-proposed-sales-tax-in-milwaukee/70341845007/ So we constantly get beat over the head that the last stimulus package put Wisconsin 7 billion in the black. But the UW system gets 130 million less than they requested in funding that may grow after the political side-shows are done, the city of Milwaukee acts like they are in dire straits with their finances...and sure as anything, the only thing to debate now is how much north of 360 million the free handout will be to billionaire Attanasio and MLB. Don't extend this current lease. Let it expire....and let the chips fall where they may. Completely done with these bloodsucking pro sports leagues claiming "partnerships" are needed when all they are interested in are free public handouts to line their pockets with even more money.

I'd be pretty disappointed if I was a Vegas resident. So we'd be getting a notoriously penny-pinching owner who is building the smallest stadium in the league in what is the smallest market in the league. The Brewers billed Miller Park as a 300 million, 50/50 public/private split giving the impression that it would be a 150 million dollar investment. Bill so far (not even counting all the tax breaks) is 605 million and what will be another 290 million very soon (I predict that number will end up being quite a bit higher than that), so we are up to 895 million which is just a shade under 6 times what was originally sold to the public. So if the A's are looking at 360 million of free money right off the bat, it's probably a reasonable bet that that will mean 2+ billion when freeloading billionaires and dishonest politicians have their way with the public dollars. No way MLB allows this franchise to flounder all the way through the first five years as that would look bad and not help their expert pilfering of public money for future projects. But when I am looking at a cheap owner in the smallest stadium in the smallest market in the league and the long-term projections of that comes with that...at what I reasonably expect to be a 2+ billion dollar price-tag over time...I'd be more than happy to throw them back to Oakland and let them deal with the constant headache of having to shell out free money to a crybaby billionaire.

Woah, woah, woah now. The Brewers hardly gave Erceg away. Attanasio probably got about 10,000 in cash as a result of that deal. Absolutely critical to get that money to keep the franchise afloat until Attanasio can get his 360 million dollar handout from the state.

I don't see it lasting for Teheran. May have the 1.56 ERA, but the 4.85 xFIP and 4.80 SIERA indicate that the ERA will rise, and possibly in dramatic fashion. I always suspect that K rate might have too much of an impact on xFIP and SIERA when it comes to heavy ground-ball pitchers, but Teheran GB% is only at 37.7, and while he throws a sinker, the numbers throughout his career show that he has never been a ground ball pitcher. The BABIP is .235 and the HR/FB% is 7.7, both low numbers that indicate he's been pretty fortunate so far.

McGinn's coverage has historically tended to be very good, as he is very well connected with NFL front office people and generally doesn't inject very much of his own opinion when it comes to evaluating prospects. According to him, OL and WR seem like the really weak groups this year, with TE and CB being the strongest.

And yet, billionaire owners can partner up with gambling organizations and make a few more million on top of their billions. Please enlighten me as to what the penalty would be for an owner if he was caught filling out a NCAA bracket on the team's property?

At those rates, would anyone even notice unless it was pointed out to them? 2021 = 492 SB + 188 CS = 680 attempts in 417 games = 1.63 attempts per game 2023 = 767 SB + 203 CS = 970 attempts in 438 games = 2.21 attempts per game 2021 = 492 SB / 417 games = 1.18 steals per game 2023 = 767 SB / 438 games = 1.75 steals per game Increase in attempts = 0.58 per game Increase in stolen bases = 0.57 per game Can't really see that 1 extra stolen base (and attempt) per every 2 games making MLB that much more of an exciting watch. Manfred and MLB will probably claim that this is some sort of big win, but those numbers make me think that people who weren't watching baseball before aren't going to start tuning in now.

Rodgers can flap his gums all he wants. I don't see him retiring until the door is hitting his rear end on the way out. Farve was going to retire the last 3-5 years when he was with the Packers, then was going to retire after his one year with the Jets, then was going to retire after his first year with the Vikings....and then did retire when his completion percentage slipped to 60%, his TD/INT ratio dropped to 11/19, his record as a starter went to 5-8 and nobody in the league wanted him anymore. If Rodgers was Andrew Luck then we wouldn't have seen him in the last 10 years. I'd put chances at 90+% that he falls in the Favre/Brady/Manning group and will continue to play as long as he is able.

Contreras has two pre-arbitration years left, which makes a huge difference. I don't think the experts project him to do what his brother has done, but let's assign him the same arbitration figures that Willson received (using the logic that lower figures from a slightly lesser performance is offset by baseball inflation). William is currently at 1 year + 109 days...the 109 days being key because it means there is pretty much no chance that he will be Super 2 eligible. So assuming the above, his salaries over the next 5 years would be- 2023 = ~0.80 million 2024 = ~0.90 million 2025 = 4.5 million 2026 = 6.65 million 2027 = 9.625 million Total - 22.475 million So a 6 year, 40 million dollar deal would likely buy out 1 year of free agency at 17.525 million. His brother's deal with St. Louis is basically an 18 million dollar/year deal. So the Brewers get no discount while guaranteeing him 6 years of salaries. I don't think taking 80% of "reasonable market value" is a bad deal for the player. In this case, it potentially costs William 8 million dollars, but the trade-off is he would get 32 million guaranteed, that protects him against injury or poor performance and is about 26 times more money than he's made so far in his MLB career. Something like this seems reasonable for both sides, if one expects him to perform at a level "just under" what Willson has done. 2023 = 1.5 million 2024 = 2.5 million 2025 = 5 million 2026 = 6.5 million 2027 = 7.5 million 2028 = 9 million 6 years, 32 million

Doing a search over at Fangraphs, there are 114 pitchers who have thrown at least 200 innings in 2021 + 2022. In terms of xFIP, Houser's 4.45 places him #94 on the list. In terms of SIERA, Houser's 4.87 places him #111 on that list. MLB front offices look at these types of advanced metrics these days instead of looking at the more traditional stats when making deals for established players. Houser's advanced metrics aren't just below average, they are pretty bad when compared to the rest of the league. I'd bet pretty much every front office sees him as a potential inning-eater and nothing really beyond that. My guess on a return would be one lottery ticket prospect and one organizational filler prospect. I'd be surprised if they could get a top 15 player off of any team's prospect list during the off-season. Now if they got into the regular season and a couple team's rotations got wiped out by injury, maybe the Brewers could get more for Houser at that time. Think of it this way. Let's say the Brewers needed a starting pitcher. What would you give up for Brad Keller? In the 2021 + 2022 timeframe, Keller has a 4.46 xFIP (95th) and a 4.70 SIERA (107th). So what would you give up for Keller? Robert Gasser? Jeferson Quero? Robert Moore? Carlos Rodriguez (the pitcher)? Zavier Warren? Adam Seminaris? Those are Brewer prospects #5, #10, #15, #20, #25, #30 on Fangraph's most recent top Brewer prospects list. What you would give up for Keller is probably not so different from what other teams would give up for Houser. And yes, there is a difference in service time, but we aren't talking about annual 3 WAR players here. Houser's average bWAR/fWAR over the last two season is 0.9 WAR, so when you look at his arbitration salary, it's not like an extra year adds a whole lot of extra value.

Doing a search over at Fangraphs, there are 114 pitchers who have thrown at least 200 innings in 2021 + 2022. In terms of xFIP, Houser's 4.45 places him #94 on the list. In terms of SIERA, Houser's 4.87 places him #111 on that list. MLB front offices look at these types of advanced metrics these days instead of looking at the more traditional stats when making deals for established players. Houser's advanced metrics aren't just below average, they are pretty bad when compared to the rest of the league. I'd bet pretty much every front office sees him as a potential inning-eater and nothing really beyond that. My guess on a return would be one lottery ticket prospect and one organizational filler prospect. I'd be surprised if they could get a top 15 player off of any team's prospect list during the off-season. Now if they got into the regular season and a couple team's rotations got wiped out by injury, maybe the Brewers could get more for Houser at that time. Think of it this way. Let's say the Brewers needed a starting pitcher. What would you give up for Brad Keller? In the 2021 + 2022 timeframe, Keller has a 4.46 xFIP (95th) and a 4.70 SIERA (107th). So what would you give up for Keller? Robert Gasser? Jeferson Quero? Robert Moore? Carlos Rodriguez (the pitcher)? Zavier Warren? Adam Seminaris? Those are Brewer prospects #5, #10, #15, #20, #25, #30 on Fangraph's most recent top Brewer prospects list. What you would give up for Keller is probably not so different from what other teams would give up for Houser. And yes, there is a difference in service time, but we aren't talking about annual 3 WAR players here. Houser's average bWAR/fWAR over the last two season is 0.9 WAR, so when you look at his arbitration salary, it's not like an extra year adds a whole lot of extra value.

If the pro-Lutz crowd wants to bet money that Lutz will amass 150+ plate appearances in the major leagues, I would bet against that and it would take me about 1 nanosecond to make that decision.

Just a few years ago, Zack Brown was listed on the MLB pipeline as the Brewers #1 prospect, and the Brewers left him unprotected in the Rule 5 and the entire league passed on him. Granted, at the time the Brewers minor league system was considered terrible and the worst in baseball.

Payamps has just over 2 years of MLB service time and has posted 2.0 bWAR (which primarily comes from run prevention) and 0.5 fWAR (which primarily comes from the peripherals). A 1.0 WAR/year reliever is a pretty solid guy as the 4th/5th guy in the bullpen. A 0.25 WAR/year reliever is just above replacement level and will always be either the 7th or 8th guy in the pen and will always be in danger of being let go. He has a career ERA of 3.35, but his career xFIP is 4.50. What is interesting is that his ERA has been significantly lower than the xFIP in each of the four seasons he's appeared in MLB (the first two years only totaled 7 innings, so it would be reasonable to just throw those out). So if the ERA gravitates towards the xFIP over time, then Payamps run prevention will start rising which is why he's been passed around from team to team over the last couple of years. So at Fangraphs I just picked 2022 > Relievers > minimum 40 innings pitched. There were 203 players that made it through the filter. Here is where Payamps ranked on the list of 203 players in the following categories- K/9 = 6.63 = ranked 188 K% minus BB% = 10.4 = ranked 169 BABIP = .303 = ranked 60 HR/FB% = 12.7 = ranked 48 GB% = 52.8 = ranked 33 Hard hit % = 26.4 = ranked 76 SIERA = 3.86 = ranked 149 xFIP = 4.07 = ranked 136 Two of the three best numbers are the BABIP and HR/FB% ratio, which a lot of experts consider to be "luck" numbers. The K rate is awful, and is a major factor in dragging down the SIERA and xFIP. But overall, when looking at the peripherals, he looks like a marginal reliever who probably needs plus infield defense behind him in order to stick. One thing that really concerned me is this- https://www.mlb.com/player/joel-payamps-606303 Scroll down to charts and look at the Batting Average Against chart. Normally when you see this listing of peripherals, the first thing that comes to mind is that the guy is a sinker baller and owns the bottom of the zone and needs his pitches to stay there in order to survive. But he gets hammered at the bottom of the zone. I don't know if the cold zones (primarily up and away to righties, or up and in to lefties) has a luck factor at all, but overall the chart really makes it look like Payamps really needs to get hitters to chase pitches out of the zone to be successful. To me, Payamps just looks like another guy to throw in the Peguero/Junk/Varland/etc/etc pile and see which guys win the #6/#7/#8 reliever spots in spring training.

Sorry, I forgot to adjust plate appearances, so only qualifiers showed up on the list I was looking at. Rutschman only had 470 plate appearances, but did have a higher fWAR than Murphy.

Not sure if it's already been posted, but Eric Longenhagen of Fangraphs says "says the most likely outcome for him is as a reserve outfielder" when evaluating Ruiz. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/three-teams-nine-players-one-surprising-winner-examining-the-sean-murphy-blockbuster/ Worth noting that the A's GM took over in 2019, and they were a 102 loss team in 2022. Is it fair to point that out since the ownership has tanked payroll? You be the judge. I do know that all sorts of handicapped payroll teams have done better than 102 losses. So I tend to think that the experts are right on this and the A's have ridiculously overvalued what they are getting back in this deal. This package isn't just Ruiz, Kyle Muller - who MLB.com had as the Braves #1 prospect - also went to the A's in this deal, and it's possible they could see Royber Salinas as prime lottery ticket material (he had 175 strikeouts in 109 innings between A+ and A ball last year). But they are really going against what all the experts are saying. And I'll point out that these experts are not just watching 5 minutes of video and forming an opinion based on that, they get a bunch of information and opinions from various scouts and various "front office" folks. Nobody has a crystal ball and, really, if just one of the guys that the A's get back turned into a solid 2.5 WAR player, that guy should make up what they will lose from parting with 3 years of Murphy. But if this turns out to be a bad deal for the A's, they are in line for some heavy criticism because, at the time the deal was made, it doesn't appear they got nearly what they should have gotten back for dealing Murphy. Murphy was a 5.1 fWAR player last year, Realmuto was the only catcher that posted a better fWAR. But certainly nice for the Brewers to get what seems like a bargain. Especially since it wasn't looking like they wanted to throw any significant money into the position, to have a young, cheap player fall into their lap is welcome.

Only real concerning stat that I could find is that Contreras makes contact 68.4% of the time when he swings. At the MLB level, that is better than what he had done previously. But 68.4% is the 15th worst number of the 246 players that had 350+ MLB at-bats last year, so he's in the bottom 7%. Here are the 14 players that finished lower, just looking at batting average and on-base percentage- Joey Gallo = .160/.280 Chris Taylor = .221/.304 Christopher Morel = .235/.308 Luke Voit = .226/.308 J.D. Davis = .248/.340 Avisail Garcia = .224/.266 Kole Calhoun = .196/.257 Franmil Reyes = .221/.273 Giancarlo Stanton = .211/.297 Oneil Cruz = .233/.294 Patrick Wisdom = .207/.298 Javier Baez = .238/.278 Bobby Dalbec = .215/.283 Teoscar Hernandez = .267/.316 Lots of really low on-base percentages there. Maybe the Braves saw him as having a problem with getting on base in the future base on his current swing-and-miss rate.

The other thing to consider is that perhaps Contreras is overvalued. Maybe one of those guys with marginal minor league results that was a quick flash-in-the-pan in the major leagues but will end up being marginal in the majors, just like he was in the minors. But I don't see it. BA has him 6th in the Braves organization in the 2021 handbook (Braves system was rated 6th then, unlikely now where they have one of the worst systems in the minors). Seems like any concerns with him was with the defense early in his career, but he had improved and had the look of being an average to good defensive players (and still seems to be on track for that by the Baseball Prospectus numbers). He didn't hit all that much in AA, but was good before that and hit while at AAA. Obviously he has really hit in the majors. I just don't see anything that would merit saying Contreras is over-valued, sure looks to be solidly in the 35-40 million in surplus value in my book. So either Ruiz has been vastly under-valued, or the A's have just botched their evaluation of him.

Thanks for the list, some interesting out of the box thinking on that one.

If it is just Ruiz, then it's not only a major miss by the Baseball Trade Values site, but also every "prospect reporter" that puts together organizational lists. To make up what would figure to be nearly 40 million dollars in surplus value that the Brewers would receive in this deal, Ruiz would have to rank as a top 50 prospect on the top 100 lists. I haven't seen him valued like that anywhere, not even a bottom end top 100, much less a top 50 ranked.

In terms of surplus value from the Baseball Trade Values site, the A's are currently at -39.7 million, the Braves are at +6.5 million and the Brewers are at +33.2 million. Adames probably has greater value than that, and with the bulk of the return going to Oakland...they would likely be more interested in prospects. Ashby could be a possibility, but my guess would be Frelick plus two more prospects. Would be great to see the meltdown if one of those guys were Gasser to go along with Ruiz.