BillScottCanRake

Wouldn't the Brewers be better off if they were picking 1st than 5th? In a vacuum, yes. That said, given how the roster is construction, having some players breakout at the expense of draft position isn't a bad thing. Lets say, for example, that Ryan Braun hit his 25th home run on July 20. Maybe because of his hot start the Brewers win enough games to pick fifth instead of first, but Stearns is also able to flip Braun for some advanced, top flight prospects plus the extra salary flexibility that would come from getting out from under Braun's contract. Or lets say Santana has a breakout year and between that and a few lucky breaks the Brewers end up winning enough games they pick sixth and finding a solid RFer for the next four or five years. Yeah, having the first pick is nice, And if it happens, great. But I'd be more than happy with them finding they have more assets than people thought and it costing them a few draft positions.

People object to tanking because they are able to see a difference between rebuilding to turn over a roster and doing things that are designed to result in losses. Baseball has always called what the Brewers and Phillies are doing and what the Astros did "rebuilding". Rebuilding pre-dates the MLB amateur draft, so in ye oldin' days losing was a nasty side affect to the rebuilding process that had to be endured. While losing is no longer quite so horrible now that there is a draft, draft position doesn't mean you are getting a future ML contributor, much less a star. In that regard, I feel losing is still something that has to be endured and are perhaps is made just a bit less horrible because the team may potentially be able to draft a player who is better than they otherwise would have drafted if they strove for mediocrity. Besides, I feel that what Milwaukee does with their picks is far more important than where the picks fall. And I'd rather have Maverick Phillips and the 30th than just a top-five pick any day. Most people see a difference between roster management resulting in losses and on-field/court actions that are intended to result in losses for the purpose of improving of draft position. When people watch the 76ers, they don't talk about them "tanking" because of their roster management, they do so because coaching decisions that have allowed people to conclude that attempting to win tonight's game isn't a priority. How come player x only played 20 minutes? Why on earth did player y get 35 minutes? Down five with a minute to go and you don't foul to extend the game? Yes, rebuilding results in teams having an inferior roster and losses, but "tanking" goes beyond having a low talent roster and starts undermine the on-field/court competition. People tend to not like that. We obviously haven't seen the Brewers play yet this year, but until they show lackluster effort and/or coaching decisions that are intended to result in a loss, I am perfectly OK using the term rebuilding and rejecting tanking. I'll be highly disappointed if I see anything close to tanking.

April 5, 2002, Rusch pitched a complete game 3-hitter, allowing two runs on solo home runs while hitting one of his own in a 6-2 Brewer's win. Box Score via Baseball-Reference.com Milwaukee was 2-2 after that game. Unfortunately, things didn't go so well after that, with the Brewers losing 7 in a row and winning only 54 more times the whole year.

Just because the goal isn't to win in Milwaukee in 2016 doesn't mean the goal is to lose. And it doesn't mean winning isn't a goal, it just isn't a goal this year. The immediate, short-term goal is to improve the level of talent in the entire system, from Arizona to Colorado Springs, by any means necessary, including at the expense of the talent in Milwaukee. One of the best ways to fill the cupboard is to trade proven guys for multiple prospects, and Lucroy and Davis are the dictionary definition of proven guys. And since the team only won 68 games last year anyways, it's not like trading Davis and Lucroy are going to cost them an 85-win season or something. With that said, I do expect the 2016 Brewers to try to win the games on their schedule. It might not happen as much as we'd like given the relative talent on the roster, but I do think that every reasonable effort will be made to win as many games as possible. There will be a lot of young guys who are playing for their careers this year, so I expect this team will play hard. I also expect that Counsell, within reason, is going to manage to win, too. They are going to lose a lot of games, but it won't be on purpose.

I'm not sure where this belongs (Major Leagues, Off Topic, Lambeau Leap?) but the Cleveland Browns have hired Paul DePodesta from the Mets. Linkage I will be interested to see how this works out. I think MLB is pretty far ahead of the NFL in the use of analytic, and it will be interesting to see how that might translate to football. Of course, this is the Browns, so we might not really know how it works out until someone else tries it.

I suspect the attendance will be somewhere between 2,222,222 and 2,222,226, depending upon whether that couple of Greenfield that usually attends two games per year will still support the team. I think they will, so my official guess is 2,222,226.

1. Orlando Arcia 2. Brett Phillips 3. Jorge Lopez 4. Trent Clark 5. Gilbert Lara 6. Tyrone Taylor 7. Josh Hader 8. Zach Davies 9. Clint Coulter 10. Kodi Medeiros 11. Monte Harrison 12. Devin Williams 13. Demi Orimoloye 14. Jake Gatewood 15. Cody Ponce 16. Michael Reed 17. Marcos Diplan 18. Jorge Ortega 19. Adrian Houser 20. Victor Roache 21. Wei-Chung Wang 22. Taylor Williams 23. Yadiel Rivera 24. Yhonathan Barrios 25. Nathan Kirby ------------------------- 26. Dennis Sarfate I've probably got Lopez at three and Lara at five more because of my heart than head. I'd love for Lopez to develop into a legitimate top of the rotation starter, and Lara's tools have made me weak in the knees for sometime. I'm also pretty pleased that I can have Michael Reed all the way down at 16, because I like him as a player and having 15 guys ahead of him is nice to see. And, yes, that's Dennis Sarfate coming in at number 26. Thanks for all the hard work organizing this, Rielly.

I am really struggling to explain my philosophy in a way that makes sense, so please bare with me while I attempt to explain why I disagree with winning the World Series should be the primary goal instead of making the playoffs every year. Over the course of a 162-game season, a teams performance is an indication as to how good that team really is. A team that wins, say, 95 games, probably is a pretty good team and worthy of making the playoffs. It would be difficult for a team with 70-win talent to luck into winning 95 games. As such, a team that is very good over a several year stretch is going to make the playoffs often. Over short stretches even bad teams can win a series against good teams. Often the reason for those short term successes are instances where luck played a bigger part in the outcome than skill. To me, that means teams have more control over their season long success than they do in a short series. That's why the best regular season team is sometimes beaten by lesser teams in the playoffs and World Series. A series can turn on a single inning or a pulled muscle stretching a double into a triple, something that doesn't have the same effect on a full season. As such, I think teams should build their roster to make the playoffs instead of to win the World Series. Once you are in the playoffs, let the chips fall where they may and if you make it often enough you are bound to win it all eventually. And if you are fortunate enough, maybe even multiple times. That means not doing anything that harms the teams long term viability, even if it seems to increases the odds of winning the WS in a given year. That's my preference. I'd rather the team not try to "speed up" the natural rebuilding process, and I don't want the team to shorten their window by a couple of years in an effort to increase their odds of winning a World Series in any one particular year. I don't want a year or two with the best odds, I just want lots of years with a chance.

In general, Greg's post mirrors what I'd like to see Milwaukee do. There are two items which I'd tweak ever so slightly. I'd be inclined to be more aggressive trying to move Lucroy due to his age and injury history. I think his value will only go down from this point forward, and I think he may only be one more errant foul-tip from being an ex-catcher, which would cause his value to dip further. I wouldn't give him away to be sure, but I don't think I'd need to be bowled over to move him. The other thing I'd consider is including Smith in the mix for the 2016 rotation. As a hard-throwing lefty with good stuff, I think his ceiling as a starter may be higher than Thornberg et al. Plus, if he fails, he's a known quantity as a reliever who can still be moved for prospects.

This times a million. I'd like to know that, should an injury derail a long post season run the odds are good that there will be another chance next year, instead of there maybe being another chance in five or six or 10 years. Milwaukee has had two chances to win a WS since 2008, while those 1990s Braves had 8 (or 14 if you include through 2005). I'd much rather have 8 (or 14) chances because most of the time that's going to result in two, three or four titles instead of just one. I think the Braves only winning it all once during that stretch was almost as improbable as making the playoffs 14 of 15 years.

Strange... we never got that information. At least not before I went to bed around 11:30 or so. Maybe different parts of the state got different messages? It's good to know that someone was getting something. If that had been someone in our part of the state, we'd have been helpless to provide any assistance.

Is anyone else incredibly frustrated with the lack of information in the EAS Abducted Child Alerts? We received alerts on our TV over the course of three hours that night, and all of them were exactly the same: A child abduction alert was issued for: NW WI, Northern WI, NE WI, Eastern WI, Central WI, Western WI, SW WI, Southern WI and SE WI. This alert is until 2030 CDT. About an hour or so after the first EAS alert, I got a message on my phone that gave vehicle information and a possible destination, which gives us something to keep an eye out for. Yet that information was never made available on the EAS on my TV. They continued to broadcast, in essence, "Someone is WI was abducted." You'd think the information on my phone was available to the people who did the EAS message, too. Thank goodness someone provided us with good information, even if EAS never did.

All I can think of when I see Oppo Bombs is some sort of sugary, delicious breakfast cereal. And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Just to clarify, Stearns worked with Houston for 35 months and, other than his time as Asst Director, Baseball Operations Arizona Fall League, he worked at least 14 months at each job along the way. If you are curious about his complete work history, you can view his LinkedInaccount or his Houston Astro's bio. The question I would ask is this: Why should someone who is qualified to move to a new (and presumably better) job stay at his current one just so he can "pay his dues"?

Depending upon your provider, you might be able to configure each phone/line so that data is turned off at a user-specified threshold. We have four phones and a tablet on our plan that share 10GB per month. Via our provider, we have set monthly data allotments for each device/number, with the total of the allocations being 10GB. When those allotments are met, the ability of the device to use data is terminated until the next month begins. While my wife and I never come all that close to reaching our data allotment because we are almost always hooked up to WiFi, our son's poor data management and inability to connect his phone to the myriad of open WiFi connections that dot the city means he ran out of data consistently in the first 10-15 days of the billing period. It might have been a problem for him, but we were never charged an overage because we made it impossible to use more data than our plan allows.

I think it is well worth spending some time playing with both an iPhone and an Android phone if you can, as the biggest decision you will have to make is what OS do you want on your phone. Ultimately, which OS you like best is a personal choice, and if you are dissatisfied with this choice, no matter what phone you get you will be unhappy. Both systems offer most of the same features, but how they offer them is different, so what you end up liking is going to be as personal a choice as blondes or brunettes. Other than my first smartphone (which was an HTC running Windows Mobile) I have used Android's OS on Samsung phones. To me, the Android OS more closely resembles the Windows OS that I have used each and every day, which meant I was up and running right away. An added benefit to me is that I store all my contacts, calendars, etc, in Gmail. While I know iOS has functionality to pull contacts from gmail and attach to a calendar, I like that when I get a new phone I simply log into my Gmail account and it does all the work for me. It is important to note that I've had minimal exposure to Apple products, so I find the iPhone, iPad, etc, cumbersome to use. Anytime my mom wants me to try to do something on her phone, I typically have to google how to do it first and then do it. That's not an slam against Apple or iOS, just that my background and experience makes Android the best phone for me. My wife has a MacBook, so while she has an Android phone for personal use and likes it, she has no problem using the iPhone she has to use for work. I'l' be interested to see if she continues to use an Android phone for personal use or just drops it and sticks with the iPhone. That's why I recommend if possible spending some time with each OS before you pick out a phone. Once you decide on iOS or Android, then you can pick out a phone that fits within your budget and has the hardware features you want in a phone.

There were many great comments, but I particularly enjoyed this one. Well done.

I'm not sure if there is a better way to link to a tweet, but per this Ken Rosenthal tweet: Ken Rosenthal ‏@Ken_Rosenthal 27 minutes ago Rival exec: “I don’t think MIL is really looking to trade Gomez. Price is VERY high -- think they’re hoping to get blown away.”

Zuo Zongtang is the man after whom General Tso's Chicken was named. We had a student from China stay with us for a couple of weeks this past February and she laughed when we told her about General Tso's Chicken. Zuo is very well known in China, but apparently the dish named after him isn't.

Let's say when Rose was manager he bet a significant amount of money on the Reds to win a game on some Monday in June. Because he's got a good chunk of money on the game he burns thru his bullpen in way he wouldn't normally. The Reds win Monday but with the pen shot the blow late leads on Tuesday and Wednesday. In such a case, betting on his own team caused Rose to harm his teams chances of winning on Tuesday and Wednesday because it was in his own personal best interest for the Reds to win on Monday. So, instead of playing to win as many games as possible, Rose is playing to selectively win games that he's bet upon. Another scenario would be that Rose bets on the Reds in each and every game without exception. That seems like it would be OK, because he's going to have to manage to win as many games as possible, just like he would have to if he were managing to get the Reds into the postseason. But what if, during an extended losing streak, Rose becomes indebted to the gamblers? They say, "Pete, if you can't pay us the money you owe us, we are going to need you to throw a few games to pay off your debt. Otherwise you'll be taking a swim with the fishes." What happens then? He's already breaking the rules against betting on baseball, so what are the odds he throws five games to pay off his debt? And what if the throws a few games to a team that ends up winning their division by 1 game? Or what if his own team just misses the playoffs? The idea of betting on ones own team seems harmless enough, but it can have all sorts of unintended consequences.

Wow... 10 years ago already? Where has the time gone? Those early to mid-2000s FanFest games turned out to be some of the more memorable games of the period.

I can't imagine he is real happy, because ultimately he's the one person who is responsible for how his team is performing. He's at the top of the organization's command structure, so it's up to him to make sure all of his minions are performing to a reasonable expectation. It's also up to him to know his limits and make sure he's just the right amount of hands-on and hands-off. Right now, the failure of the on-field product is a reflection of how Attanasio is running the team. He isn't solely responsible, but he's ultimately responsible and the only one who has the power to change everything. My biggest fear isn't that Attanasio keep or replace Melvin. My fear is Attanasio likes dabbling in the personnel side of things to the point that he neuter's whomever is GM and renders them ineffective. Or he hires someone who's less qualified because he's looking for someone who he can work closely with instead of someone to run the front office. Or how he runs the Brewers isn't conducive to winning consistently. Because if Attanasio's leadership is the root of the problem, that's a lot for the franchise to have to overcome. Hopefully I'm wrong. I am hopeful that Attanasio can make whatever changes are necessary to move the franchise forward, whether that's hiring a new GM, keeping Melvin, whatever. I've already lived thru the alternatives, and they aren't pretty (I'm looking at you Wendy Selig-Prieb)

I remember those HOF Trials... that was very good stuff. There has been so much good stuff that has come from here that sometimes it is easy to take for granted the work people have and still are putting into it.

I'd love to see madbad2000 posting here again. I saw a lot of minor league baseball with him at a time when the minors were a Brewer fan's only hope. To have a system produce guys like Fielder, Weeks, Hardy, Braun, Hart and Gallardo over such a short period is remarkable. Other guys in the system that had various levels of success include Bill Hall, Carlos Villaneuava, and Manny Parra, and even Tom Wilhemsen. I thought for sure that guys like Brad Nelson and Dennis Sarfate would be staples in Milwaukee but things didn't quite work out for them. Those were some pretty great days... Speaking of madbad2000, we'll be taking in a Brewers-Nationals game in DC in August. I think that will be our first non-Milwaukee Brewer game since their epic come-from-behind victory on July 4, 2002 (link for those with a strong stomach).

I am a bit surprised to see a "worst contract in history" thread and not one Marquis Grissom reference. BF.net was just coming into its own at the tail end of the Grissom Era, so I thought he might get a mention or two. Yes, technically, Cleveland who signed him to the 5-year, 25 million dollar contact, but who made the bigger mistake- Cleveland for signing him or Milwaukee for trading for him? Anyways, Milwaukee paid him 15 million for OPS+ of 79, 86 and 63 in 1998, 1999 and 2000, including a stellar 288 OBP in 640 PA in his last year in Milwaukee. The Brewers won 74, 74 and 73 games with the Gripper roaming CF, and while he was hardly the only problem, he was their best paid problem. Nothing like reminiscing about the good ol' days to take ones mind of the current Brewers.