JosephC

I'm still firmly in the hold position when it comes to Hader. Would rather wait until mid-season, see how the Brewers are doing, and if they are in the midst of a mediocre season then see what kind of return other teams are willing to offer. My best guess on if a trade with a rumored club were to happen now- Rays get- LHP - Josh Hader Brewers get- 3B - Mike Brosseau (a complete "non-prospect" who OPS'ed .855 in the minors and so far has OPS'ed .843 in the majors) RHP - Shane Baz (#86 on MLB.com's top 100 prospect list) SS - Taylor Walls (#19 on MLB.com's Ray's top 30 prospect list) ----------------------------------------------------- Padres get- LHP - Josh Hader Brewers get- LHP - Tim Hill (very funky lefty reliever with a 4.18 ERA/3.81 FIP/3.62 xFIP in 103 1/3 MLB innings) LHP - Ryan Weathers (#5 on MLB.com's Padre's top 30 prospect list...likely just barely outside of top 100) RHP - Brayan Medina (#15 on MLB.com's Padres's top 30 prospect list) RHP - Efrain Contreras (#27 on MLB.com's Padre's top 30 prospect list)

If Woodruff and Burnes keep pitching at a high level, they will be very expensive when they get to their final year of arbitration. I'm not going to compare their arbitration situation to someone like deGrom, because one could argue that he was the best pitcher in baseball. But if they keep pitching at a high level, then a comparison to Trevor Bauer is probably a pretty decent one. Now Bauer did win the Cy Young last year, but that was after the contracts/arbitration settlements. Prior to that he had one 6th place finish in Cy Young voting (just like Burnes last year). Bauer was a Super 2 player, Woodruff is but Burnes is not. Bauer earned 13 million in year #5 and 17.5 million in year #6. IF Woodruff and Burnes keep pitching as well as they have recently, it wouldn't be a bit surprising to see their COMBINED salaries hit 30 million in year #5 and 40 million in year #6.

I exported Baseball References Brewer franchise page to an Excel spreadsheet and, if I haven't botched the edit/delete and got the formulas right, from 1993-2020 the Brewer's regular season record is 2087-2280 (.478).

COVID-19 will get the writers off Attanasio's back, and in complete fairness the whole situation probably does impact the Brewers more than any other MLB club since their television revenue is bottom-of-the-barrel. But I know what your are saying. If Attanasio is running a 100 million dollar payroll in 2023, and a writer asks him why the payroll is the same as it was 10 years ago, I would fully expect Attanasio to drop the "well look at Christian, we spend money when the opportunity is there." At least we are guaranteed to outspend the Pirates as long as they have their current ownership. I really feel sorry for their fans. Where they are at right now looks like the Brewers during the last years of the Selig ownership.

I was looking the the Rays values at baseballtradevalues...and what can I say? Austin Meadows with a surplus value of 19 million dollars? Really? That is valuing him like a 1 WAR player per year over the next four seasons. I realize that, just looking at the math, that Meadows has been a 4 WAR player and has 2.5 years of service time, which would make him a 1.6 WAR per season player so far. And even that number is skewed because that counts 2020 as a full season but 2020 was really only 37% of a season. But wouldn't pretty much everyone expect him to outperform that over the next four years? I know I would. I have moved solidly into the "hold" category when it comes to Josh Hader. I also wouldn't put any sort of priority on picking up a 4th outfielder. But if the Rays called and offered a straight up Hader for Austin Meadows deal, I'd have a real hard time turning that one down (not to imply that Meadows would be picked up to be a fourth outfielder, sorry Avisail).

Trying to figure out Arenado's worth adjusted when not having Coors as a home park. Lifetime he is a .322 OBP, .793 OPS hitter on the road. Let's throw out 2020. In 2019 the primary 3B that was closest to these numbers was Jose Ramirez. .327 OBP/.806 OPS. Good at 3B but not as good as Arenado, Ramirez posted a +4 DRS and +4.5 UZR/150 in 1088 innings. Ramirez only played in 129 games. He finished the season with a 3.4 fWAR and a 3.4 bWAR. Adjust this to a 150 game season and give some more credit for superior defense, and it probably ends up at about a 4.5 WAR season. 2018 doesn't have real good comparison. Mike Moustakas is probably the closest in terms of OBP/OPS, he finished the year at .315/.774. 152 games so a full season that doesn't require any adjustment for time missed. Not close to Arenado's level of defense as Moustakas finished with 3B numbers of +2 DRS and +1.0 UZR/150 (1096 innings at 3B, only 35 innings at 1B). All that was good for a 2.4 fWAR and 2.4 bWAR. The offensive numbers are clearly behind Arenado's road numbers but Ramirez's 2019 numbers were a bit better, so let's not make any adjustment for that. Bump Arenado up for the superior defense and I'd adjust Moustakas' 2.4 WAR up to a 3.0 WAR estimate for Arenado. Kyle Seager is probably the best comparison from 2017. .323 OBP/.773 OPS. 154 games played. +6 DRS, +7.3 UZR/150. +3.5 fWAR/+3.5 bWAR. Using the figures above, I'd estimate Arenado as being a 3.7 to 3.9 WAR player after removing him from Coors Field. After all the money being shipping from Colorado, it still sounds like the Cardinals will pay him roughly 25 million per season and then they tacked another 15 million dollar season on the end of that. So if I have that right, the Cardinals obligation is now 7 years, ~165 million. They talk about 9 million per WAR but that is based on top free agent dollars so you are talking Yankee and Red Sox dollars but here we are talking about Cardinal dollars. Probably safe to say they will be looking at about 150 million dollar payrolls in the short term future so they it seems like 6.75 million per WAR is more reasonable when looking at their payroll level. They probably need to get 24-25 WAR out of Arenado over the next 7 years to make the investment worth it. So we are looking at about 3.5 WAR per season. As always, it will come down to how fast and how hard the decline happens for Arenado. You can bet the Cardinals are extremely confident that Arenado will outperform the .322 OBP/.793 OPS level early on in this deal, and that's probably a pretty good bet. All comes down to when the offensive falloff happens.

That will come two years from now, when the Brewers find themselves in the same spot as the Rockies and trade Yelich.

Unfortunately I think this will all go away in a week, but the media and public really needs to continue to turn the screws on some of these brokerage firms. My goodness, how crooked do you have to be to get Ted Cruz, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, CNN and Fox News all on the same page!?!??! https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2021/01/29/robinhood-ceo-vlad-tenev-gamestop-stock-cpt-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/business-markets-investing/

Lots of speculation that Yamamoto's arm is in bad shape. Significant drop in velocity last season and he did not fare well.

Compared to Jets, it certainly looks closer to a "real" Detroit style as the sauce has just been dropped in "gobs" on the top. It does look like Pizza Hut got the bottom "crispy" part of the crust right. My gut feeling is Jets would probably be the better tasting pizza, but who knows? Truth be told I was a bit disappointed with the Jets I ordered the other night. Taste was good, but the pizza only filled about 3/4 of the box which made me feel cheated...and it was a big deal as I wanted to make 3 meals out of it (still got three meals out of it, but they were pretty light).

If the Brewers are really hot on adding a fourth outfielder, then maybe the Gregory Polanco would be an option considering the package that you could get for picking up the rest of his contract. Polanco was bad in 2019 and horrible in 2020, I'm guessing he's done. But maybe you'd get lucky and he'd has one good season left in him and you'd get it because he'd be revitalized moving out of Pittsburgh. If the Brewers have 15 million left (doubtful)...Polanco gets 11 million this year...a 3 million dollar buyout next year and then you have to cover Frazier's 4+ million dollar salary this year, so it would be a 15 million dollar commitment for 2021. But who really believes that Pittsburgh's main motivation is accumulating prospect over dumping salaries? I think they'd probably give up a pretty decent prospect to get Polanco's salary off the books. Fun to think about but I don't think Attanasio would approve the salary aspect. But it would be a good way to get pieces while only really having to give up money to do so. Milwaukee gets: OF-Gregory Polanco IF-Adam Frazier OF-Sammy Siani Pittsburgh gets: IF-Mark Mathias IF-Yeison Coca

While I'm sure we'll end up with an NL DH a couple years down the road, it sure doesn't look like we are going to have one in 2021. So it doesn't seem like Frazier is a roster fit at all. Yelich is probably being viewed as a left fielder exclusively, and while I think Hiura is eventually moved off second base, I'd guess the Brewers are fully committed to Hiura getting another full season at second base. So if you pick up Frazier, to me it seems to come down to how much do you want to give up for a 3B that has slashed .268/.330/.418/.748 over the last three season (can't really see him playing anywhere other than 3B if he's in a Brewer uniform).

I am one former big NFL customer that has completely moved away from that league. I watched about 10 snaps of the first Packer/Bear game this year and that was it. I will no longer be buying any NFL merchandise. My reason for this has nothing to do with COVID or social justice messages or anything like that, I just think their product completely sucks. I like blocking and tackling and really don't see much of this in the NFL anymore. So what does that have to do with MLB? Well it just goes to show that big professional sports leagues can lose once very loyal customers. Yes, there was an era where these guys could do almost anything and their customers would eventually come crawling back because they had nothing better to do. In an age with On Demand TV viewing, and more and more people given a real option to just dump sports programming by picking steaming services, I think these professional sports leagues have to look at the realistic possibility that a good chunk of their current audience just might not care 10-15 years down the road. What is really interesting is that with so many people ordered to stay at home, that the common sense assumption would be that sports viewership on TV would go through the roof. But the numbers I've seen for the NFL indicate that viewership was down 10%. Some excuses have already popped up, like it was an election year. But think about it....one would think that with all those people stuck in the house that there would be no way that viewership would drop?! I didn't watch any MLB games this year but that was entirely due to COVID and I just didn't have any interest in a 60-game season. But I intend on watching in 2021 and am really looking forward to a full season that I am hoping will happen (and it looks like it will). But in all honesty, I really didn't miss watching games that much at all. And frankly, if Manfred comes up with some more dumb ideas or the league starts doing a bunch of dumb stuff that I don't like, I really think it would be easy to get me to turn off MLB just like I have already turned off the NFL. A work stoppage that would be 100% about greed as both sides are making billions of dollars, while so many Americans are struggling financially, could very well end my relationship with MLB. And while I'm sure MLB would have the attitude of "don't let the door hit you on the way out," I kind of get the feeling that there are millions of others just like me. I think the professional sports world really needs to be careful. This environment just isn't the same environment that existed just 10 years ago.

Matz really hasn't been very good for awhile now. He has a 4.83 ERA and 4.92 FIP since the beginning of 2017 and really had hit a level of mediocrity before he completely crashed last year. I was actually kind of surprised that the Mets offered him arbitration considering how bad he's been recently and they already were looking pretty good in the rotation. But it turned out to be a pretty good move for them as they pick up three prospects. Toronto probably likes him because he had his highest fastball velocity in 2020 and had a career high in K%, but his location must have been as bad as Burnes in 2019 because he allowed 14 home runs in 30 2/3 innings. But even if you look at that as a total fluke, which could be reasonable, it's hard to overlook the really average performance from 2017-2019. I would have no interest in him at a 5+ million price-tag, much less giving up three prospects for him, but time will tell if this works for the Blue Jays or not.

Aren’t the Mets looking for an OF? They missed out on both Springer and Hand. I think Yelich would look great in a Met's uniform. He'll have a big year in 2021 too. Mets should strike while the iron is still hot!

Thing that jumps right out is that Rosario is being projected at an .800-.810 OPS type hitter but only being worth 1.5 WAR. Normally there are some bad defensive numbers associated with that but not in Rosario's case. It looks like he is pretty good in left field and can hold his own in right, although he hasn't played that many innings in right. I also thought it was interesting that his BABIP really dropped the last couple of years. From .316 in 2018 to .273 in 2019 to .248 in 2020. Sometimes that's bad luck. Other times it due to a drop in speed. Went to Baseball Savant and Rosario's sprint speed has dropped from 28.0 (ft/s) in 2018 to 27.1 in 2019 to 26.8 in 2020. To me it looks like the big concern is that with a drop in athletic skills that he might be limited to LF and if the bat falls off at all...nobody is going to be all that interested in a left fielder that OPS's .760, especially with Christian Yelich on the same roster. Considering Braun saw 127 innings in right field last year and Yelich saw 0, pretty strong indication that the Brewers see Yelich as a left fielder exclusively at this point. Rosario has played some right field for the Twins, but not very many innings the last few years (217 innings over the last 4 years). There is always the possibility of just throwing him at 1B but I'm a bit skeptical on that since it's been so long since the guy played in the infield. Probably doesn't help that for three years there was all this talk about Braun at 1B, Braun at 1B, Braun at 1B...and in the end the Brewers only played him there for 109 innings in 2018 and he was so bad in that limited run (-19.0 UZR/150) that he wasn't credited with another inning at 1B after that. Rosario could be an excellent fourth outfielder so I'm on board if the price is right, and this is the time of the year for bargain shopping. But there is enough negative stuff mixed in here where I don't think something like a 2 year, 15 million dollar deal is warranted.

Account credit, account credit, account credit. Hey Mark, if you move someone from $40 seats to $30 seats how about just doing the honest thing and give them back their $10 dollars per seat per game RIGHT NOW instead of sitting on THEIR money?

Here are some numbers to consider. Rodgers has already earned over 240 million. If he completes the current contract, he will have earned just under 320 million in his NFL career. His 2021 cap number projects to being 20.6% of the team's cap number. His 2021 cap number would be the third highest in league. Even though the current extension started several seasons ago, the average dollars/year is tied for fifth highest. This is the way the NFL and the player pay structure works. Each year the salary cap goes up. Granted, there can be a real oddity like COVID-19 that will impact this, but generally speaking it's pretty safe to say that the cap goes up every year. Therefore, the top players with expiring contracts end up being the top paid players at their position, largely because teams have more money to spend, and then the next year there are a couple new top paid guys at their position, etc. So Rodgers was the top paid guy at the position when he signed the extension, then he gets bumped down a couple spots the next year, then he gets bumped down a couple more spots the next year. Packer fans know this concept first hand from when Jordy Nelson got a big deal, then Randall Cobb was up for free agency and everyone was wringing their hands wondering if and how the Packers could pay Cobb more than Nelson. This is just how the system works. Rodgers signed the extension before 2018 so considering he's still top 5 in average dollars per year, seems to indicate that it was a pretty good deal for him. Also love the way ProFootballTalk says that Rodgers is paid the same as Goff; therefore, he is massively underpaid. Good concept. Let's just cherry-pick the worst contracts at QB, WR, LT, pass-rusher, CB and base all of our player pay on those bad contracts. Sounds like that would work real well with a salary cap. Do you guys realize that Trey Flowers has a near 20 million dollar cap number for 2021? Looks like we will need to give Za'Darius Smith a new contract worth 40 million per season.

Like the Marlins, the Pirates are really close to becoming a real embarrassment to the league. With the arbitration cases now settled, they have 11 players under contract and those 11 players total 29.405 million dollars. Note that Vasquez is suspended and not getting paid, so he doesn't factor into this. So 15 more players to fill out the bottom of the roster at 650k each (minimum is $570,500 in 2021) would bring the payroll total to 39.155 million. I know Cherington is saying they will add some players so it won't be surprising if they end up adding a couple 3 million dollar type free agents. But if they don't they could end up with a sub-40 million dollar payroll and IMO, that's just terrible. According to Cots, the Marlins didn't drop below 45 million during their last teardown. The Brewers last ran a payroll like this back in 2005, which was just after Attanasio bought the team.

I think everyone expects Taillion to pitch well if he is healthy. Don't really agree that he didn't reach his promise with the Pirates. 191 innnings with a 3.20 ERA, 3.46 FIP and 1.18 WHIP in 2018 is a pretty good showing. Just unfortunate that he had elbow problems after that and needed a second Tommy John surgery. Meadows only got 165 plate appearances with the Pirates and hit a pretty respectable .292/.327/.468/.795. Don't think he was viewed as disappointing at all, just think the Pirates blew it and massively over-valued Chris Archer when paying too much attention to his strikeout numbers and not quite enough attention to his run prevention numbers. Glasnow had some significant control issues and the Rays did do a great job with that in 2019 (BB% dropped to 6.1) but that ticked up again in 2020 (9.2). Still much better than when he was with the Pirates when the BB% was up around 13. As far as Cole's dramatic improvement, that is likely due to cheating- https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2776159-absolutely-im-all-for-it-mlbs-stars-debate-pitchers-using-pine-tarIf#:~:text=As%20Buster%20Olney%20notes%20via,)%20and%202%2C157%20(2015). Cole spin rates with Pittsburgh: 2015 = 2157, 2016 = 2178, 2017 = 2163...then goes to Houston and in 2018 the spin rate goes to 2332. Hmmm, the Astros...very interesting.

Return seems about right. Taillion is a huge question mark. Yankees going for the big upside, but they have a lot of uncertainty in their rotation and this move just adds to that. Kind of surprised that they haven't made a bigger push for rotation stability, but they are only a few million under the luxury tax threshold and they may be committed to staying under that number.

I can't find a link, but I think Hector Gomez has been the source of wild and false rumors regarding Ozuna in past off-seasons.

Richards might still have good stuff, but in the last five years he's started 41 games and thrown 198 2/3 innings. 10 million is a lot of money for 8 starts and 40 innings (if history is any indication).

When Chris Sale was traded, he had finished in the top 6 in Cy Young voting for 5 consecutive years and had 3 years of team control at a bargain price of 39.5 million. Just 2 years ago Burnes was getting bombed in AAA. They are not the same thing. Chris Sale at time of trade = 27 years old, 1110 major league innings, 3.00 ERA, 3.06 FIP, 1.07 WHIP, 4.8 K/BB, 30.1 bWAR, 27.1 fWAR Corbin Burnes as of today = 26 years old, 146 2/3 innings, 4.48 ERA, 3.85 FIP, 1.29 WHIP, 3.5 K/BB, 0.5 bWAR, 2.2 fWAR

That's why I wouldn't do this particular deal. I'm not convinced on Vaughn. But for people who like Vaughn, then I think the swap would be pretty fair and realistic. And Vaughn is #13 on MLB Pipeline's top 100, so it's obvious that there are a ton of baseball people who like him.