Cool Hand Lucroy

Soccer does it all the time, and it's great. Take Brighton, who's going to pretty much for sure be mid-table in the Premier League. They won't get relegated. They won't win the league (or make the Champions League), so being in the Europa League (2nd level all-Europe competition) adds interest and drama. There's no reason MLB couldn't devote 25 games or more to an in-season tournament. I'd say the simplest approach is to go interleague style. You balance the schedule and count IL games double: once for regular season standings, once as part of the IL cup or whatever. End of schedule, 4 teams in each league with the best records play three best-of-3, knockout series, with the final being a "mini-World Series" for a trophy (I'd also just count them as regular season games too). Scheduling is a the challenge. You'd have to a) front load IL games for everyone, hoping to finish the competition by late-August, I'd think and b) hold space for extra games. I think it's doable given all the modeling software out there. Competitively, I suppose counting theoretically difficult, IL Cup games double might be difficult, but there you're talking 9 games. Always going to be trade-offs. You could also do something smaller. You could reduce the regular season to 150 games and budget 12 for some sort of mid-season cup in a single location. Maybe during the LLWS, and you could call it the "Little Big Leagues WS." You could even play it in Williamsport if you wanted. Two weeks in August where everyone starts from zero would be fun. I fully support this in principle, and there will be a way to make it work. It will involve complications and trade-offs, but giving fans another competition to engage with is something a marathon sport like baseball desperately needs. The more I think about it, the more I'm a fan of the single-location tournament with full revenue sharing and a separate media rights deal. You'd think that would entice some owners to forego the 6 home games of lost revenue.

I love this deal. It's pretty low-risk for the team (Chourio's always going to have trade value based on the skillset, even if he struggles early, especially at this price), and it shows a lot of faith in a player. These are always fascinating economic situations. Chourio might be giving up $100 mil in hypothetical value, but it's clear what he's trading it for, and he'll still have a shot at another big contract if he can stick in the bigs. Good day to be a Brewer fan.

I'm done after this. We disagree, fine. But the idea that volume of money means someone is being treated well is...not a good argument. Service time manipulation, low-ball arby figures, etc., all those are bad ways to treat people. That applies no matter how much you're paying someone. Players take on WAY MORE risk than franchises in contract negotiations the VAST MAJORITY of the time. Teams are backed by billions of dollars. Even Mike Trout can't come close to that. The Brewers and Rays etc. have to play a different game economically, and I'm not silly enough to argue that point. All I'm saying is that pure financial value should NEVER be the ONLY factor involved in a contract negotiation. Everyone who argues that teams shouldn't sign Aroldis Chapman or whoever because of personal history makes the same argument all the time. Maybe the Brewers were super ethical and responsible in this case. Great! Maybe Woody would rather be an FA no matter what the terms of the contract. Great! I just didn't think it would be controversial to suggest my hope that the Brewers didn't simply just automatically non-tender the guy. An automatic non-tender would be bad. That's my entire argument. If I have to defend it this vociferously, then baseball's in worse shape than I thought.

Dude, the principle applies no matter what. If you're only goal is to get the most production for the least financial input, you're treating the guy like a widget. I contend that no good organization should treat people like widgets, whether they're paying them minimum wage or 2.5 mil/yr. If that makes me a Marxist, fine. I just didn't think it would be that controversial to say Woody deserves some human consideration given he's been underpaid relative to the value he's provided until now. I mean, disagree if you want, but wouldn't you want your boss recognizing past value and compensating you for it? Wouldn't you want your boss taking on a reasonable level of risk even if it seemed unlikely you'd achieve the same level of production in the future? This isn't that freakin' hard. If it's crazy to think Woody earned a little extra consideration, this game's in worse shape than I thought. Edit: under the scenario I outlined, you'd also be paying him like 2 mil to rehab and like 10 mil to pitch the next year, betting he'd be a 1-win player. Again, fine if you think that's a bad bet, but the idea that it's some insane level of commitment is just silly.

Absolutely. I'm not angry or angsty about it. We'll never know. I just think it's worth pointing out it's a pretty bad way to treat someone IF it was a straight nontender. And I hope anyone asking Woody (or the Brewers) about it as a journalist is asking that question because it seems an important one, even if you get a PR-speak response.

Okay. I mean, I agree. I also think analytics accelerate the trend and mean everyone is essentially operating on cold economic logic. I think that's bad in the same way unregulated capitalism is bad. Some things are worth protecting, even if they aren't the most profitable. Remember that we needed the pitch clock and the shift rules and the Manfred runner because efficiency was grinding the joy out of the game. I happen to like joy, even when it makes organizations less economically efficient.

I mean...12 mil? A guarantee that he'll have some leash to try and get back to health? I get the point. Maybe the market is more robust than that. Then, yeah, he should go try and get what he can get. Again, I just think you have to make an offer to the guy. And it's gotta be reasonable. I think 2/12 is, but I have no qualms about him saying no. If he does, the offer itself is the team doing right by him. I think part of the point is that the Brewers really just had to clear the bare minimum here. I'll never know probably, but I hope they did. Edit: if some team gives Woody like 3/30, I'll take it back under the argument the humane thing was letting the guy go get paid.

Agreed. I hope the discussion was had. I thought Woody could accept a multi-year contract offer anytime, regardless of arb status. Maybe I'm wrong. And, yeah, maybe Woody says no, but you have to make the offer. I would contend that every organization treats players like pieces of meat. And that's bad. The end of analytics is that players are assets and nothing more. Long-term that does bad things to the game. At some point, pure economic logic sinks baseball, not to mention that it's just wrong to forget these are humans. Look, maybe the team was nice to Woody. That's good. All I'm sayings is: IF they didn't even try to avoid a nontender, that would be awful.

I just disagree completely. Treating Woody like a human costs Mark A 10 mil. And he might end up seeing that 10 mil translate into value down the road. The idea that a pro sports owner cannot afford to take care of a guy in Woody's situation is not something I will ever believe. Business is business, but it doesn't have to mean treating Woody like a piece of meat.

I think I have an ethical rubric here and just think non-tendering a guy who got hurt is bad personnel relations. Now, if there was an offer I don't know about, maybe that changes things. But I'd have offered Woody 2yrs/12, with 10 backlogged to year 2. He'd only need to be worth 1 win to equal that. And he's earned it. Others can exercise a pure business mindset if they want. I understand it. I just think there are non-financial factors that belong in the cost-benefit analysis.

The whole problem is that sports teams are public utilities owned by private parties who are primarily interested in profit. How are sports public utilities? I'd argue that sports provide an essential emotional service in a lot of communities, and it isn't easy to replace that. We can talk about whether sports should be put in that position (I'm here for the argument that the US in particular cares way too much about organized athletics), but they're in it. I know people might be upset by this, but they serve an essentially religious function. They provide community and ritual and a whole lot of mystical wholeness that's hard to describe. I don't think that's a fiction. I think it's real and genuine and important. The problem is, other than (MAYBE) the Green Bay Packers (the closest thing pro sports has to an actual public utility), everything in American pro sports has been commodified within an inch of its life. None of the actors with power are at all beholden the public utility goals of sport. Under those rules, communities have to decide between losing the closest thing to a collective, ecstatic experience that modern America can provide or participating in a rigged game. You're either a martyr or a co-conspirator. There's no way out. I guess, as a fan, all I've got is this: I have no faith in any body of legislators to do very much right. At least them being wrong in this case has some positive side effects.

I understand the reasoning here. And an incentive-laden deal is probably better than guaranteed money at the end of the day. I guess I just don't fully buy the notion that $10 mil is an amount of money that should matter to the Brewers in this instance. Right now, what does 10 mil get you? A year of Mark Canha? You're also not paying that money out until 2025, meaning you're actually saving it for 2024 since Woody would have gotten at least that much in arb. Bottom line (for me): for 10 mil guaranteed, under this hypothetical scenario, I get to avoid the players-are-assets-and-nothing-more philosophy that has made baseball so brutally efficient and had some important human consequences over the last two decades. I'll pay that price. It's not going to sink our roster, and I'd rather save my cold financial moves capital for situations where where what I'm being cold about involves performance or fit instead of injury.

I mean, in order for anyone to offer Woody a contract, the Brewers have to non-tender him first. That seems...cruel. I get it, it's a business, etc., but it takes some pretty cold thinking to look at the situation and just say, "Bye." There's going to be a 2-3 year offer from the Brewers. I don't know what that offer will be. But I'd guess something like 2/10 or 2/12. Woody gets 1-2 for 2024. He gets 1 WAR money for 2025. Perhaps there's an option for 2026. I think that's in the interest of both parties, if I'm being honest. But if Woody thinks he can get more, he should definitely push for a non-tender and see what the market is like. That's how I'd handle it. Open communication, we want you here, we'll give you what you would've gotten in arb this year for 2025 and a million for the lost year. If people think 10-12 million for a guy coming off shoulder surgery is too much in 2025, I get it. But you'd basically be betting on Woody as a 1 WAR player. I think that's reasonable. Maybe he's bad and you lose. Whatever. Teams take 10 mil flyers all the time. It's one year. Maybe he's great, and you can get a trade return midseason. Maybe he's great and you QO. Maybe he's just alright, and that's fine too.

Yeah, I'm not obsessed about the randomness of the baseball playoffs, or the favorites being down early. Every sport is like this to some extent. I don't know that baseball is any more random than hockey, for example. The NFL often features WC teams making deep runs. Basketball is probably the sport with the most predictable postseason, but that's at least partially a function of how much power NBA players have in free agency and how easy it is, structurally, to create true "superteams." The broader postseason issue for me is the drastic, drastic difference between MLB in the regular season and MLB in the playoffs. Even hockey, where the playoffs are a totally different beast, is less different than baseball. Baseball has the largest sample regular season and the smallest sample postseason, and it's probably the sport with the highest overall degree of variance. It also has the most unequal economic structure, which makes for....a big old mix of weirdness. I try to adjust for this by caring about things like division titles. My mentality as a fan gets adjusted because the gap between October and April-September is so wide. The other route is for baseball to make some adjustments to better reward regular season success. I agree that the simplest way to do that seems to be to extend the DS to the full seven. Would anyone complain if that were to be achieved by shortening the regular season to 156 games? I guess owners would, but at some point you can't have it both ways. It always comes back to the outsized role of market size and TV contracts in MLB for me, but I'm a Brewers fan, so what do you expect?

I mean, the team that beats the Brewers almost always wins the World Series, right? It's literally happened in every postseason appearance save for one (2018). I'd grab those 6 or 7 to 1 odds on the DBacks now if it were any fun rooting for them.

Yup, I agree with this completely. "See where you are at the deadline," but mostly make peace with the QO. I also think Willy's a guy who might be open to a security-type extension. It'd be worth making those offers now while the open market might not be as excited about a guy who just dipped below league-average OPS+ for only the second time in his career. I think I'm more bullish on Turang than most. He put together good ABs with regularity during the second half. Drew some walks in the Wild Card series too, even if he also looked overwhelmed by the moment. Point is, the dude needs to OBP what? .310 to be valuable? .320? Fangraphs WAR had him at .2 this year, bRef 1.6. I saw enough offensive flashes this year to think he could be a 2-win player. It's always going to be carried by the glove, but all the guy's got to do is draw walks and hit strikes, and that's if he basically stays physically the same guy. Plus, his bat doesn't matter as much if we can put a couple more actually good hitters in the lineup. Weimer is a bigger concern. Agree with LouisEly that he probably needs that year in AAA just to see if he can make consistent contact. Save for crucial playoff ABs against a lefty, I have more confidence in Turang to get on base than I do Weimer.

Agree with this in terms of being stuck with the larger playoff field. A couple of ways to improve, from my perspective: 1) Love what the NBA is doing with the in-season tournament this year. I'd love to see MLB take a page from soccer's book and have in-season competitions that matter. You could even do what the NBA is doing and have the games count double (as both part of the in-season competition and as regular season games). MLB could divide teams into 5 groups of 6 teams, top two teams in each group advance, and you play knockout-style three-game series. There are some scheduling quirks you'd need to figure out, but, at the end of the day, you're taking about maybe 30 games of the schedule counting as a separate competition with a trophy. Short of doing promotion/relegation (never happen), I think this is a cool way to add some juice to the regular season. You could even offer big incentives like the winner gets an automatic ticket to the postseason or something. There's just a lot of fun you could do. 2) I'd love to see division winners always get byes. To do this, you just shift to two divisions per league. You could do a radical realignment and even base divisions on market-size or TV contract instead of just geography. Or you could go geographic and do away with "leagues." Four division winners, best six other teams, and there's a random draw for matchups. I'd go with East, Midwest, South, and West as divisions, so the Brewers would be with both Chicago teams, Twins, Cardinals, Royals, and two of Reds/Guardians/Tigers. Probably have to expansion to 32 at some point to make for even, 8-team divisions, but keeping leagues and doing 7-8 in each league could work too. South would probably have 7: Rays, Marlins, Astros, Rangers, Orioles, Nats, Braves. West: Arizona, Seattle, San Diego, Giants, Vegas, two LA teams, Colorado. East: Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Pirates, one of Tigers/Reds/Guardians, Phillies, Mets. Just ideas, but I'd really love to see #1 happen. It's a great way to keep fan interest up in some markets where maybe the Tigers get hot in a competition despite being out of it overall. And it gives smaller markets another way to measure success. The best part about following the Premier League is that, even though only about 4 teams have any real shot to win it, a lot of teams can find joy and success simply by staying up and avoiding relegation. Some of that spirit can apply in baseball.

I can see this too. I have more faith in Willy than some, maybe, but I'm inclined to think he's going to get better offensively next year.

I am all on board to bring Santana back. Not sure what it'll cost, but between the good defensive (even adjusting for age-related decline) and good ABs and clubhouse presence, he'd be much preferred to Canha, at least for me.

Plus, Adames has a pretty deep track record of being a better offensive player than he was this year. He seems like a classic, "hang on and see where you are at the deadline" guy just because his value is more likely to go up than go down. I also think you just make peace with the fact that you may have to go the QO route. It's not as big of a deal to develop (or acquire or even piecemeal replace offensively) a SS like Willy as it is a pitcher like Burnes. Burnes, you really need to capitalize on him because, as a franchise, it's really tough to get SP like that, and, even in this era, a TOR starter is the most valuable thing in the sport.

Nothing wrong with long. I loved reading this. I echo your thoughts on Woody. I hope we get some encouraging news on his injury. Hopefully they shut it down quickly enough that he can avoid missing a ton of next season and can maintain his usual level of excellence. That seems pretty pie-in-the-sky, but if anyone can do it, it's him. The bad HBP luck (Taylor's in 2019 not being conclusive, Turang's being conclusive) really hurt me too. Frustrating for the season to come down to that, but yeah, just the nature of October baseball. I'll be following along all offseason. Lots of big decisions to be made. I think Milwaukee is going to be a great sports follow for the next couple years, with two small-market teams trying to win in almost diametrically opposed ways. Wouldn't it be cool if Ohtani just thought Giannis was the coolest guy ever or something :) ?

I would LOVE to have Stephen Vogt back in the dugout. So many "I Believe" chants. And I do. I believe in Stephen Vogt.

Yeah, this is good. It really comes down to the role you want baseball to serve in your life. I really like the rhythm and routine of the regular season. I like having that nightly game to look forward to and track and mark time by. I like the background and the moments of surprise, and I care more about preserving that than having October success. I just like when the regular season matters. I also know that nothing delivers joy and pain like October, and lots of folks would be willing to let go of consistent, daily meaning for that big, World Series payoff. Good to have both approaches.

Every decision starts with 1A and 1B, Counsell and Burnes. I think everything you do depends on what happens with those two, and I do think they're largely independent of each other. I don't think Counsell staying means Burnes is necessarily more likely to, FWIW. I would definitely trade Burnes. I just can't see an argument for keeping him, given a) arb cost, b) contract expiring, c) no chance to re-sign, and d) massive need for immediate 2024 offensive production. I doubt Burnes is worth a huge haul, but he should net you something like a MLB-ready, league-average bat with a couple years of team control, maybe something more. Of course, this team got Contreras for basically Esteury Ruiz, so maybe there's some magic out there too. The starting pitching is going to be a massive question mark. How serious is Woody's injury? Is Ashby ready, or even healthy? Can Houser continue to be a consistent depth option toward the back of the rotation? Do we get first half Freddy or second half Freddy? Is 10 million worth it for Miley? Can we get anything at all from Misiorowski, Rodriquez, or Gasser? I have no idea on those questions. You're basically going into the offseason knowing 2 of your starting pitchers. That's....interesting. While I see the argument for trading Devin (and wouldn't be opposed to it on principle), it's going to have to be a huge haul. When baseball seasons go bad, a shaky bullpen is usually a big part of the cause. With all the question marks all over the other parts of the roster, I'd bet on Peguero, Payamps, and Williams being good enough to hold most late-inning leads. Williams is the safest bet of those three, with the longest track record. With a young team, I want no part of a bunch of deflating, late-lead losses. Offensively, Adames is a 3-win player who is probably more valuable to you than anyone else. Hope for a bounce back year, and accept your best case might be a QO and subsequent draft pick compensation. I'd bring Santana back if the price is right. Canha, no. Too expensive, not enough of a difference maker anyway. I'm not into the Donaldson show. Dude looks pretty washed to me, despite hitting a few dingers that stood out because nobody else was doing it. I'm all in on Black starting with the big club. Let's see what he's got. What do we do with all our outfielders? Yelich is going to get starts in left, but probably not as many. Mitchell, Frelick, Weimer, Taylor, even Perkins has some value. Chourio is coming. That's 7 guys for 4 or 5 roster spots. Probably can keep Weimer and Chuorio at AAA early, but for how long? You probably need a backup catcher unless you're ready to go with Quero. Basically, I think there are a lot of good ways to build on this roster, and I'm looking forward to the offseason. It'll be fun to see this take shape. The pieces are there.

It's funny. I spent about an hour postgame thinking we now had the longest active playoff losing streak in sports (at 5). Turns out, that's way wrong. The Pistons have lost 14 playoff games in a row. So, okay, I thought, longest in baseball? Nope, that's Rays at 7. Longest in the NL? Nope! Not even the longest in the division. The Reds have lost 6 in a row, and the Marlins and Cardinals (!) have also each lost 5. All of which is to say, we aren't exceptional at losing, even in our division! At least not lately. Plus, having actually won a playoff series in the last decade, we're in a better position than a lot of franchises. This series sucked. Baseball is cruel. We weren't good enough, didn't get some important breaks, and now we just hope the experience pays dividends for our young guys. I maintain that this organization (even anticipating a lot more uncertainty next year) is in the best shape of my life. We're a chronic contender, and as someone who actually celebrated after that 2005 Brewers won their 81st game, I cannot believe how much better the last 15 years of difficult postseason losses have been. In all honesty, sign me up for 5 more playoff appearances over the next 6 years, even if you also guarantee me they won't win a WS.