Jopal78

With a one game, winner take all event, conventional baseball wisdom of having a starting pitcher throw multiple innings to start the game doesn't make sense. The team should just open up with their best pitchers and then go through all the killers in the bullpen and bridge the gap to Hader by throwing Chacin and/or Miley if needed. If the game goes to extra innings, Chase Anderson, Zach Davies, Junior Guerra and Gio Gonzalez would all be available to throw. They should really make the Wild Card round a three game series, with the top wild card team hosting the entire series. That way the Division Series could still start on the first Friday of October maybe even the first Thursday. The current system favors seems to favor the division winners which isn't unfair. However, a team like the Brewers has spent a significant amount of capital in terms of minor league talent to get where they are and to have it all be over in a one game playoff seems a disincentive to smaller market clubs that must rely on their minor league pipeline to stay competitive.

If the Brewers can go 12-9 (.571) over their last 21 games that would put them at 91 wins. The Cardinals would have to go 13-9 (.590) to catch up to the Brewers for the top wild card spot. The Rockies would have to go 14-9 (.608) to catch up to the Brewers. The Dodgers would have to go 15-7 (.682) to catch up to the Brewers The Diamondbacks would have to go 16-7 (.695) to catch up to the Brewers. Can the Brewers go 12-9 the rest of the way? The Giants are a terrible team on the road and have played under .500 baseball since June. As hot as the Pirates were in July (17-9) they were just as cold in August (10-17) and hover around .500 albeit with good pitching. Only three games left against the Reds. The Tigers will be mentally checked out by the end of the year. The Cardinals will give the Brewers all they can handle, and I'm sure the Cubs will have Quintana, Hendricks and Hamels line up against the Brewers (they tend to move Lester around to avoid pitching against the Brewers only 5 starts against in four years)

It all depends if the analytics departments around baseball think Miley can sustain his hits allowed rate and homers allowed rate. Both are career bests this year 7.5H/9 and 0.4HR/9 with career averages of 9.4H/9 and 1.0HR/9. I am leery about pitchers who suddenly "find it" and have a standout year after seasons of poor play. I'd offer a one year deal for 9 or 10 million dollars with a club option for 2020, and let him shop around for something better.

Hamels comments are no different than Ken Griffey Jr.’s from years back, that there is nothing to do in Milwaukee. Hamels is only familiar with Milwaukee from pitching once a year on the visiting team a half decade ago or more. Odds are pretty good if it wasn’t a weekend game the stadium was probably less than half full. lol and behold he pitches in front of a full house where 50% of the fans are Cub fans and you can see his perspective when making those comments

I would exercise the team’s half of the option on both Soria and Moustakas.;Make the player walk away from significant guaranteed money...they likely won’t. If both sides exercise the mutual option nothing says the team couldn’t trade them. Or get creative in packaging Shaw for controllable pitching or something like that

Don’t discount the facts that Hamels is owed a lot of money in salary; even though Texas picked up the option buy out. Hamels has a partial no trade clause, and was ticked for 21 earned runs in 17 innings (both home and away starts) in July leading up to the trade. More probably true than not, Texas had zero leverage given the dollars and no trade clause. Epstein took a huge risk but now gets to reap the huge rewards. It’s not a situation where he’s got things figured out ahead of time and outmaneuvered all other teams to get his guy.

Regardless what happens in 2018, I expect the Brewers to exercise their half of the options for Soria and Moustakas and tender Schoop a contract. Give the players something to think about. If Moustakas exercises his half of his 2019 option, the team could always trade him or even try to trade Shaw for starting pitching. Ditto for Soria. He probably could get a multi year deal but likely won’t top an AAV of 10 million. If he accepts the Brewers could Walt’s ship him as well. Finally I think they’ll roll with Schoop at 2nd next year, but they could always trade him off after the season, although they’d be selliing when his value is lowest

The errors,walks, misplays aren’t Counsel’s fault. A manager is a genius when winning and an idiot when losing, but it’s the players who dictate the outcome of the game with their throwing, hitting, catching and pitching.

Ball game. Now instead of having Miley suck it up and eat innings for the team. They’ll pull him after the 4th. Brutal, to be 18 over .500 and blow it

This is what I can’t stand about the Packers, the fascination with flawed talent. The entire league passed on Kumerow in the draft. Understandable coming from Whitewater. But then the Bengals cut him in September of 2015, 2016 and 2017. The Packers passed on him four times in three years before picking him up this past December. Its unlikely he has developed some skill set at 26 years old that was lacking the last three years. The team singing the praises of a fringe NFL journeyman is more an indictment of the WR talent on their roster than a testament to Kumerow’s ability.

One of the few teams Mikolas has struggled against this year is the Brewers. He’s allowed 10 earned runs against the Brewers in 18+ innings

To be fair, Hammonds was signed after a monster season in Colorado to create buzz for the team as Miller Park opened. Marquis Grissom was acquired in a salary dump/change of scenery trade. The only reason Melvin gave Suppan, Randy Wolf and Matt Garza extra years is because they weren’t coming to Milwaukee otherwise. Just like Lorenzo Cain getting a five year deal. If four years was the best he could do he would be playing for somebody else in 2018. In nearly all instances players go where the money is. The Brewers sign middle for free agents because they are never going to shell out 20+ million a year to sign a free agent. It’s not a Melvin or a Stearns thing. Thei Breweees market pushed to the limit will support right around a 100 million dollar payroll which any frontline starter would command I Excess of twenty million per annum.

There’s two points here; a winning team usually doesn’t draft in the top 15. After that the elite talents in the draft are long gone and it’s more a less a crap shoot. So Melvin pretty much stopped drafting well after about 2007 which coincided with him not having top 10 picks. So replenishing the farm” is a lot easier said then done. Secondly as for all the players Melvin traded away: Brantley, Lawrie, Joe Thatcher, Odorizzi, Cain, Jeffress, Haniger, Nelson Cruz (although in a different kind of deal) etc. did have an impact on the team. It resulted in Yuni B soaking up at bats, Braden Looper pitching in the rotation, countless bums in the bullpen, Logan Schafer, Ishikawa, Felipe Lopez. None of those players where any good and more likely than not cost the team games, but they played because there was no better option because everyone else capable had been traded. And third, that Brantley has made it ten years in the major leagues is in and off itself evidence that he’s a fantastic player. Super star, of course not. But a solid starter for a decade, there isn’t much more you could ask of a player

The Royals playoff success in 2014 and 2015 has to be viewed in context. The Red Sox has losing records in both those years and the Yankees missed the playoffs in 2014 and were a wild card in 2015. So the path through the playoffs was without the traditional big dogs As applied to the Brewers, the Cubs aren’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future. Ben Zobrist is the only player of note they don’t control until 2021. In fact, they could trade Happ, Russell and Bote for a controlled SP this offseason and not miss a beat. That’s just in the NL Central. The Braves and Phillies are young and both look for real, and the Dodgers (like the Yankees and Red Sox) are usually in the hunt. What’s fun to muse about is in retrospect they absolutely should have signed Arrieta when they had the chance because they’d more likely than not be giving the Cubs and the rest of the NL all they can handle. Instead they’ve got their hot rod in the show but upon closer inspection there’s a lot of bondo and OEM parts

This is the stuff that’s interesting to me? When in your opinion long suffering fan is the time to strike? The same arguments were made on this board ten+ years ago when the Braun-Fielder-Weeks-Hart group was coming up, and that core of players ultimately won less than 20 more games than they lost before the core broke up. If this isn’t the “contending” Brewers team, where are the pieces coming from to put them over the top? All the pitching that is less than two years off is already here. To project players like Lutz and Turang as contributors is so speculative. In fact take a look at the archived Power 50s on this very site and look the top prospects featured there that didn’t amount to a thing: Mat Gamel, Taylor Green, Logan Schafer, Caleb Gindl, Brad Nelson etc. What you see now is what they got. Is it good enough to make the wild card, we’ll see. It is so hard to win in baseball compared to the other pro sports leagues, as a fan it is annoying when your team has a golden opportunity and screws it up 3 out of the last 5 years.

Come on, man. You can't say something like this and make much of the board discount the validity of your other points. Distortion works both ways- now you're expecting Peralta to be fodder from here? I'm somewhat convinced that there are people in this (and any, really) fanbase that would come away with criticisms of a season even if we won the World Series. But you cannot have it both ways! If you absolve the GM for dumping good players like Segura, Davis and Gennett for nothing because he had no idea the players he was trading would turn out to be all-stars. You can’t give him a pass on Lind. He had an OPS of .820 his only year in Milwaukee, and solid career numbers. Unless clairvoyant, Stearns would not have known Lind’s career would fall apart after being traded. In exchange for a quality hitter, he got three A ball pitchers for Lind. One of them, Missaki, hasn’t even suited up the organization or played since 2015 and after having Tommy John. Carlos Herrera is pitching out of the pen in A ball to the tune of a 5+ ERA. Which brings us to Peralta. He currently is 0 WAR (or -0.1), and has trouble consistently locating his pitches. Admittedly, he’s a young and could learn command. He could also very well be the next Taylor Jungmann. The fans of this team are so starved for quality young pitching we’re willing to anoint anyone as the answer after one or two good starts. To bring this back around to topic. Stearns has done the best he could to build his team. And clearly it is more a finished project than a team waiting for the prospects to arrive. Unfortunately, the 2018 version likely doesn’t have enough starting pitching to keep them around in the race.

It is not disingenuous. There was neither a monetary reason nor a production reason for trading Davis off. He was not even arbitration eligible when traded. He had hit 60 homeruns in 321 games with Milwaukee, coming off an an .828 OPS season with a career Slugging of .494 (Yelich's OPS is .813 btw). GM's have the ability to bring in their own type of players. It is fairly obvious that Stearns prefers the Cain, Broxton, Yelich type outfielders who are defensively versatile, over an outfielder with one elite tool. It's his prerogative as GM to make that trade, but it doesn't mean he didn't get absolutely hosed. Also with Gennett, when the Reds claimed him they would have been either #1 or #2 in waiver priority, so it's not as though he was floating around without a job before being picked up by Cincinnati.

This is the same distortion we've talked about earlier. If the Stearns approach is quickly turning a pile of garbage into a winning team, you'd also have to admit the Stearns approach includes trading away major league talent for little or no return. Stearns did jettison, Khris Davis, Will Smith, Scooter Gennett, Martin Maldonado for little or no return. He sold low on Jean Segura. Adam Lind could also be included if we've already seen the best of Freddy Peralta. He also spun off the prospects he acquired in the Lucroy trade for a handful of veteran rentals. The preceding shouldn't be construed as a slam on David Stearns in any way. I think he's done an ok job with the hand he was dealt and lwhatever edicts come from ownership. However, I don't think he's a personnel genius either. Nelson and Anderson having career seasons in 2017 is more likely than not the main reason the team jumped into being competitive, as opposed to any sort of master plan implemented by the GM.

Of course it's real. They should have started a rebuild when they collapsed down the stretch in 2014. Their rebuild started in 2015 when the players proved the 2014 collapse wasn't a fluke. In 2016 they had a top 5 draft pick and lost nearly 90 games. Last season, they got career years out of Jimmy Nelson and Chase Anderson and won 86 games. This past winter they jettisoned most of their bullpen from 2017 but for Hader, Jeffress and Knebel. They signed Boone Logan, Matt Albers, JJ Hoover, and Dan Jennings as free agent relievers. They signed free agents Jhoulys Chacin and Wade Miley in an attempt to cover the innings Nelson would have pitched had he not got hurt. They signed Lorenzo Cain (a fantastic player) to a long-term big dollar contract, and they traded for Yelich. The facts are after the 2017 season, they filled a quarter of their 25 man roster with free agent players several of whom are on multi-year deals. Conduct typically not consistent with teams that are rebuilding. So if this is the core of the team they intend to make the playoffs with and win in the playoffs with, it doesn't appear to be good enough. The Cubs are clearly the best team in the NL Central, the Brewers by contrast have a losing record in their division 20-26 which doesn't bode well for September when division games dominate (take out their 7-3 record against the Reds and their record against the non-patsies in their division is really ugly 13-23). Further the team has already called up their top pitching prospects, Burnes, Peralta, Taylor Williams, so there is no pitching help on the way from the farm system (Clearly, for whatever reason, Brandon Woodruff is not among their 7 most preferred starters). The most successful hitting prospects are all at AA or lower. I don't know enough about the Southern League to say it is a pitcher's league or hitter's league. However, Keston Hiura has a .764 OPS at Biloxi and Corey Ray is at .845. For comparison, Javy Baez had a .983 OPS while playing in the Southern League in 2013. Kris Bryant put up a 1.160 OPS in 2014, Wilson Contreras had an .891 and Schwarber had a 1.017 for the Smokies in 2015. Its possible that Hiura and Ray develop into more superior players than Baez, Bryant, Contreras or Schwarber but right now it doesn't look like they are going to be the pieces that push the Brewers past the Cubs into perennial contenders. Of course the Brewers wouldn't be in the Kenny Williams like situation (having committed to being a contender without having the horses to actually get it done) had they not failed to draft and develop their own starting pitching. The facts are over the last 25 years the Brewers have developed only 9 pitchers who have started 100 or more games in the major leagues (with extremely varying levels of success): Cal Eldred, Scott Karl, Steve Sparks, Jeff D'Amico, Ben Sheets, Yovanni Gallardo, Mike Fiers, Wily Peralta and Jimmy Nelson. Doug Melvin had his own Bryant and Rizzo with Fielder and Braun yet during their time as teammates they lost more games than they won because of no quality starting pitching. They emptied out the farm system trading for quality starting pitching, and were only able to ship one of their own starters off for prospects before losing him to free agency (Gallardo). Stearns has some pitchers that could work out, but they are all 2 or more years away when most of their key players now will be 30 or older. Maybe the owner, behind closed doors, demands his front office people put a winner on the field, so they can sell 2.8 million+ tickets. Who knows? But I get the feeling 2018 is another 2nd half collapse as the pitching isn't good enough to hang with the big boys, and the hot start to the year distorted that they were out manned in the rotation from the get go.

I would say the Brewers really don’t have a long term plan and are sort of like the White Sox circa 2010-2016, they put a decent team together and hope to get hot and lucky. They’re not in a “rebuild” because they’re added payroll in the offseason and traded minor leaguers for established veterans. Outside Hiura and Ray there are no elite prospects in the system. (As an example the Cubs had Baez, Bryant, Schwarber, Contreras, all working their way towards the majors at about the same time). Meaning, the talent level you see on the field now is likely what you can expect going forward unless they add more talent via trade or free agency. Additionally, with an above average product at the major league level they’re going to be drafting somewhere around 20th a spot well after the elite talent in the draft has been chosen. They continue to fail because given their location they absolutely have to be able to develop front line starting pitching. Not only for their own success but like Oakland and Tampa, to trade off before free agency to restock the farm team. The Brewers have been the worst team in the major leagues at developing their own starting pitching for over a generation and across at least four different general managers. Until they get that right they’ll never have a plan and will continue to mirror the Kenny Williams White Sox model

The arms in the bullpen are regressing towards the mean after a lights out start to the season. The starters outside Chacín (and to a lesser extent Miley) have trouble getting more than 12 outs. They’ve lost 7 games this month already where their offense scored 4 or more runs. As is always the case, after the all star break the teams that are truly in the hunt start to separate from the pack. The Brewers have been treading water for months and have been passed by the Cubs and Braves, with Philadelphia, St. Louis and Colorado coming up fast. If the pitching doesn’t turn around quickly I assume they’ll fade from the race before September 1st

I think there will be a change in the video department after this season. The manager is told that video supports a challenge, then in clear instances where a challenge is warranted they don't get the information. It's almost like they don't have someone in an AV room and are just watching the game on TV.

Look at it from this perspective, prior to July 31st the worst hitters on the Brewers were: Brad Miller, Tyler Saladino, Jonathon Villar, Pina, Kratz and Arica. Since the trade, Miller has zero at bats (released) Saladino has 0 at bats (optioned), Villar has zero at bats (traded) Arcia has 20 at bats and Hernan Perez has 23 at bats. Moustakas has 53 and Schoop has 39 at bats. It’s addition by subtraction and they didn’t give up anyone who was pegged to be a contributor in the near future. With the way things have shaken out it probably was a mistake to add only one reliever and no starting pitcher or catcher, but both the other Trades for hitters were moves that strengthened the club

Then again Cordell has been ineffective for the White Sox and is 27. Jorg Lopez can’t even crack the 25 man roster of the Royals and is out of options, and there is no way knowing any pitching prospect below AAA will ever make the majors let alone contribute, and with the Brewers record of developing starting pitchers over the last 25+ years it’s very likel Kodi M and Ortiz wouldn’t have amounted to anything in Milwaukee anyhow

With the pitching staff giving up an average 8.2 runs per game in August; they’re certainly not going to stay in the race and it’s only a matter of time until they’re likely back around. .500