KeithStone53151

Bellinger would without question be an improvement on our .571 OPS in RF, with the added benefit of moving Wiemer to his natural position in RF and creating a crazy good defensive outfield. Pending cost, he's a better target than continuing to roll Tapia/Perkins out there.

Hiura in 600+ mlb innings at 1b between 2021 and 2022 is an average defensive 1b when you consider UZR, DRS, range, etc. I'll take an average defensive 1b that can hit over a borderline GG defender at 1b that can't hit. Owen Miller had the month of his life in May driven by a near 400 BABIP and has since regressed to the AAAA talent he is. The fact Miller is hitting cleanup today is absolutely laughable and a testament to the incompetence of CC. How does he not realize that Miller can't hit? I get that our lineup is not good, but I believe literally ever hitter in the lineup today is better than Miller. He should be batting 9th today, really he should go back to his utility role and get glued to the bench barring injury.

For all our discussion regarding Hiura, the fact that he'd play Miller over Hiura at 1b right now is laughable and shows one of CC's glaring and massive weaknesses as a manager...his obsession with middling utility players that can't hit.

Ya know, I've wondered if CC is subtly sending messages to Matt Arnold in this manner. After Rowdy went down, CC said something like "we're going to see a lot of Miller at 1b". I wondered if that was his way of saying "I need a 1b that hits better than Miller". This I would consider very similar.

I don't think it makes sense to bring up a guy that isn't getting it done currently. You want to put Frelick in a position to succeed. There are a fair amount of corner OF types we could bring in that are better than what we have and Frelick right now. My realistic hope is bringing in Tyler O'Neill or Tommy Pham and CJ Cron. It's simple checkers but it should accomplish exactly what we hope to.

Can anyone see any positions that could use an offensive upgrade? Hint - bringing in a new 1b moves Miller/Turang into somewhat of a platoon/timeshare at 2b.

He has a point to a degree in my opinion. Think about the players we have in AAA. Toro, Naquin, Brosseau, etc. At this point, those guys are AAAA types. In AA you are going to run into guys like Jackson Holliday or Chourio or whatever phenom is flying through. There are more younger, and raw/talented high end prospects in AA than AAA generally. That said, I think there's a ton of value to facing and clearing the AAAA types hurdle.

I would guess 1-2 innings for ashby. I would also expect his rehab assignment to be lengthy as there's no reason for him to come up until he's effective. Imagining a world where B Wilson and Milner are our mop up guys, because Payamps, Peguero, J Wilson, Ashby, Williams are handling 7-9th inning duties with one of Rea/Miley/Houser/Teheran in long relief...all while Uribe embarrasses AAA pitching and is first up in the event of injury.

This is a greater possibility in a couple years when Woodruff/Burnes are off the roster, but that will also probably be during a rebuild where it's not the best use of $. To sum up your post, it sounds like you're more frustrated with the execution of the philosophy than the philosophy itself. That is certainly fair. Winker is in the top 18 in PA at DH this season. With a wRC+ of 64, that is 24 lower than the next lowest which is Miguel Cabrera at 88. Guys like McCutchen, Pederson, Blackmon, Vogelbach, Bell, Ozuna, Cabrera are all getting 180+ PA in the DH spot and all are outperforming Winker by a fairly wide margin. Mind you none of these guys are jumping off the page, only Pederson has an OPS over 800 and he's strict platooned. So at the end of the day, the philosophy seems fine and widely used across the league. You can either chalk it up to the Brewers chose poorly, or we chose fine and simply got exceptionally unlucky to pick Winker over the similar options available.

Miley is eligible to come off July 29 and I've seen nothing to indicate it would be a longer stint than that. Woodruff is expected to go out on rehab assignment soon and has a fairly realistic timetable of mid August return to the mlb rotation. I would qualify both those situations as pretty soon.

The Brewers philosophy has been to rotate a few different bat first players into the DH role. Saying we do anything else is incorrect. Last year, we had a bit of an outfield log jam so Renfroe and McCutchen got a lot of DH at bats. We went into this year with Voit/Tellez/Winker figuring 3 players to start in 2 spots most of the time with Winker getting occasional outfield reps. The goal is to platoon effectively and maximize production on low cost players...which is unfortunately something the Brewers need to do due to budgetary constraints. This is also something most teams do. If you look around a bit, most teams don't have a designated player at DH. In 2023, 4 players have more than 300 PA as the DH. Ohtani, Meneses, JD Martinez, Byron Buxton. 8 other teams have a player getting at least 200 PA at DH. That means 26 teams are getting at least 100 PA and 18 teams are getting at least 200 PA this season so far from someone other than a designated DH. As I scrolled teams, approx 2/3 of teams have at least 5 guys getting 20 PA this season at DH. Point being, what the Brewers are doing isn't unusual...it would be unusual if we were the team paying JD Martinez $10M to DH for us full time.

If you had to rank the Brewers compared to other teams in developing pitching, top 5 without question. You could easily argue higher, but it's not necessary for this exercise. If you do the same ranking developing hitting, bottom 5 without question. It's too early to tell if we're getting better, or if high picks/high dollar intl FA like Mitchell/Black/Chourio/Quero are succeeding due to Brewers development or despite Brewers development. It's tough to look at Atlanta and see Arcia hit his way to the all-star game after we couldn't unlock him at all. My point, the Brewers are clearly much better at identifying and developing pitching and rightfully so have a lot of confidence in it. They probably can very quickly judge based on stuff/command/success/etc and fly the best guys through the system. They don't have the same success/confidence with hitters so move them more slowly. That's my guess anyway.

I think you made a great point but by accident to a degree. Maybe part of keeping Black in AA is so his numbers stayed up for a potential trade target. Imagine if we sent him to AAA a month ago and he posted a 600 OPS for the month? I'm honestly just not that concerned about replacing Winker. I don't see a scenario that he we don't bring in at least another option for DH. If we add say Tommy Pham and CJ Cron for example, we didn't specifically address DH but now the guys playing RF and 1B would become bench/DH options. Also when Tellez comes back, he could roll into the DH over winker if he still isn't getting it done. Winker has about 2 weeks left of everyday playing time that he either needs to hit, or he's going to become a bench option or possibly a DFA option. I appreciate the amount of leash he was given, but at this point it's been half a season and it doesn't seem to be happening.

Disappointing, but it's what it is. Fortunately, we're in a position that one arm going down short term doesn't significantly impact run prevention. We had 6 starters, now we drop one and bring up a number of solid relief options. Miley will be back soon along with Woodruff and Wilson pretty soon.

I struggle with reasons like this for not giving a call to AAA. Black is a higher priority by far than any of these guys except Urias. We can punt one of these guys or move to AA if they think Black is best suited for AAA. What's next, Chourio beats down AA next year but shouldn't get called up to AAA only because we have too many versions of Tyler Naquin on the roster?

The scenarios that involve Misiorowski coming up in late August would involve probably 4 or 5 relievers/starters either getting hurt or completely losing it and getting creamed...in between the trade deadline and August 31. That scenario would also include Misiorowski being healthy/effective/improving over the next 2 months. It's tough to imagine all those things lining up. Also worth noting, Misiorowski is probably going to have a fairly low innings limit and having a young guy potentially pitching into late October and starting ramp up again in early March is not great for a young electric arm.

The Brewers situation this year is entirely different to prior years when we've targeted relievers. In the next few weeks, we'll be wanting to add 2-3 mlb arms and not have 2-3 guys that deserve to be sent down. Ashby, Lauer, Strezlecki, etc could come back once healthy or once they re-figure it out later in August as well. We're in a much different spot than last year, where sometimes we had trouble getting the ball to Williams/Hader...and also specifically considering we traded Hader for value. It's certainly possible we add one arm, but I doubt it and think it's more likely we utilize all outgoing resources to improve run production. Canha could effectively be a rental if nobody wants him for $11.5M. It's very possible that's the case as he enters his age 35 season. Also the season is more than half over, any acquiring team would owe closer to 1/3 of his salary if traded at the deadline. You're completely missing the point on Hernandez in that you're mischaracterizing the Brewers hitters. Hernandez has had a successful career with a lowish OBP and near 30% k rate. That profile works when you can hit for average and power. The Brewers don't have a "litany" of players that fit that profile. Of the guys you mentioned, Tapia/Perkins is lazy and you know it. They are below replacement level players due to injuries and will be replaced before the deadline. Turang is not a low OBP high k hitters, he hasn't been in the minors and once established won't have that type of profile. Tellez and Adames both have higher career OBP and lower career k rate than Hernandez. Wiemer could have a fairly similar profile to Hernandez with the primary difference being a GG defender while Hernandez is meh on defense. Bottom line, we don't have a "litany" of hitters that profile similar to Hernandez. We have a few guys with lower OBP's due to underperforming or being below replacement level players is a much more accurate characterization. Jimenez, so you pick one stat(which as a stand alone stat doesn't say much) to justify him as this super valuable commodity. I'll add another, because I'm a helper. Jimenez has 251 rbi in 378 games. That would be 108 over a full season. What a player! You completely and conveniently ignore the fact that his controlled seasons are all going to be expensive. The option aspect has value, but if he hits to career norms and you exercise the options you're paying a DH $50M over 3 years to post a low 800s OPS. That's maybe market value? Maybe? What's a 1.5 WAR DH worth anyway? I bet the Brewers could entice the White Sox for far less than you think, if we were inclined.

You've taken a very pessimistic to the Brewers perspective view on every item you've mentioned here. You might try to say you're attempting to take an unbiased viewpoint, but it seems very skewed intentionally away from us. Canha, he's 34, he's on an $11.5M deal this year and has the noted option for next year. As primarily a below average defensively corner outfielder, he's cracked 800 OPS once in his career, 5 years ago. I'm not so sure there's going to be a line of people wanting to pay him $11.5M next year. I don't really want the Brewers to get him because I'd prefer we aim higher, the argument that a deal can't happen because he's a controllable talented player is a weird argument. Hernandez, I agreed with this until you're snarky comment about the Brewers litany of low OBP high K hitters. We don't actually have a lot of players that fit that mold, a few guys have underperformed this season and have low OBP for that reason...but we don't have many that, when things are going right, are in the 28-30% k rate with OBP under 320. Jimenez, are there really going to be teams lining up for an 822 OPS(5.6 WAR over 5 years) that's having a down year, has struggled to stay healthy his entire career, and will be quite expensive next year and even moreso if the options are exercised(16.5 and 18.5). His cost would likely not be nearly as high as you think, but for that reason he also probably doesn't move because I don't think the White Sox are inclined to sell low. How would you say low strike out numbers is a trait the Brewers look for when you previously commented on our litany of high strikeout hitters? Sounds like you contradicted yourself in your own post. I also don't really see the Brewers targeting pitchers, we have quite a few reinforcements coming and pitching has been a strength.

I see the point you are making and generally agree, but lumping in Turang hurts your argument as his OPS+ is 55. His WAR backs that up a 0.3 which is on pace for maybe 0.6. Wiemer on the other hand has an OPS+ of 86(right in your range) and is trending towards ending the season around 2 WAR. That cumulative run prevention effect when you have good to elite defenders everywhere with good pitching is clearly what the Brewers are going for. But back to your general point, having 80ish OPS+ hitters like Turang and Wiemer providing elite defense and hitting 8-9 is fine if you have a 1b and DH hitting 3 and 4 in the order with an OPS+ in the 120-140 range. It should be cheaper/easier to add run production at those positions than at 2B and CF.

The primary reason this won't work is we have big problems with quality outfielders right now, especially in CF. The only way this makes sense, and only if another team values him highly, would be if he was packaged with other players of value for a significant improvement in CF right now. And to be fair...that might make sense. If the White Sox really like Wiemer and we can add other quality pieces to an offer for Robert, maybe that's a fit. It's not likely we could trade Wiemer for even one really strong prospect at this point. Wiemer is really tough to value right now, the bat can really go either way. If he takes a big step forward and is hitting close to 260 with everything else he adds, he could be a 5+ WAR player pretty easily. Or he could stay at his current 210 avg and replace Taylor as a quality 4th outfielder that starts against lefties.

This could possibly be the most impactful deadline move of all time, even surpassing CC sabathia and Aroldis Chapman as the top 2 most impactful i can remember.

In my experience, it is very normal for the lessor(City of Milwaukee) to pay for upkeep costs and large capital repairs of the building. That's how most lease agreements work in the business world. People don't rent space and pay extra to upkeep the building for you. This assumes the Brewers are paying market rent in their lease payments, which is highly unlikely because if the Brewers were making large lease payments to the City we wouldn't need nearly as much funding from the City/taxpayers(otherwise it makes you wonder where those rent checks are going). Worth noting, this building is specialized in nature and can't easily be repurposed to many other businesses like an office building or grocery store could be...so the Brewers have significant leverage from that perspective. All that said, this seems like a no brainer to shell out for the repairs if it comes with a significant extension of the lease agreement to keep the Brewers in Milwaukee long term.

To a degree yes. The manager has been quite the weenie this year, and it's not fun playing on a losing team...he should know that as well as anybody through his time in Colorado. Nobody expected the Cardinals to fall apart quite like they have to this point.

What an interesting problem we'll have when Woodruff comes back. Currently Burnes, Peralta, Miley, Teheran, Rea, and Houser all starting. The obvious answer is probably moving Rea/Houser to long relief and kicking back to a 5 man rotation. There aren't any bad stretches of games in a row that a 6 man rotation is really necessary, so I see that going away quickly. They will probably try to have one of Rea/Houser available on days Miley/Teheran pitch, but you can't get away with strict piggybacks at this level. Sending our worst 2 relievers to AAA in favor of 2 effective starters shifting to relief should solve to a degree our problem created by the worst relievers in the pen, while adding length to what the bullpen can cover. Relief decisions/rest is certainly simplified when the starter goes 5 innings, Houser goes 3, Williams nails down the save.

Considering the nature of projections, and the fact that FG had them at around 2% at the end of May, I'm concerned about the trajectory and find zero comfort in 54 vs 30% that FG is noting currently.