True Blue Brew Crew

I would expect someone who has never managed in MLB before and will sign for a bottom tier salary to be the next manager. In other words, someone who can easily be fired without huge future $$$ liability.

New owners love to bring in their own people. The Brewers are about to have a sweet stadium lease, a top 5 farm system, only one average to below average long term player contract, a low overall payroll, next to zero long term contracts, and a manager making peanuts. If Attanasio wasn't doing this by design, he just might wake up one morning and realize how attractive all of this is to rich peers looking to buy a team. Why do any of the things Attanasio has done these past couple years? Let highly competent people leave. No long term deals offered even to current players, much less free agents. Payroll declining. These past 2-3 years have been a complete 180 from the way Attanasio operated the Brewers since he bought them up until around 2020-2021. Most of you probably aren't convinced Attanasio is positioning them to sell, but it's impossible not to see how attractive they are to others who are looking to buy right now. Complete blank slate with young cheap talent stocked and loaded.

Between the departures in back to back years of Stearns and Counsell, if the hire is someone really cheap, it just makes the team that much easier to sell, I'll say that. Clear them books

Putting everything into stats in such a contrarian manner (boosting afterthought prospects but not crediting highly regarded ones) leads to hitting on about 1 in 100. Basically Suter so far. You could do better throwing darts at the wall

Would be interesting if that is what he believes. I fail to see what player of any significant value the Brewers would miss out on if they bumped CC up another $3.5 million. I also wonder if some intentionally don't explicitly say that because deep down they know that hiring a cheaper manager isn't going to change a damn thing with payroll.

Personally, if bringing back the most successful manager the Brewers have ever had, one universally respected as one of the best currently in the game, comes down simply to Mark Attanasio writing a check - he dang well better write the check. Otherwise sell the team to someone who will. Because far more often than not, the Brewers have had below average people in that spot.

So that's it, it all boils down to this for you - the price isn't worth it? Why the heck would you care? You're not writing the check.

Oh shoot, I missed the part where every analytical hire is a home run who outperforms projections every year and is a statistical outlier to the extreme positive in 1 run games. Just fire up the computer and crank out the next manager who is far more valuable than a middling reliever but makes less. I'll say it again, the people who think Counsell is easy to replace deserve someone who pans out like Ken Macha. But the people who realize how likely it is that the Brewers will suffer a significant downgrade, don't deserve to relive that.

This kind of thinking deserves another Ken Macha. Problem is, then the rest of us suffer too

I'm 100% sure you read it. And the reason I'm sure you read it, is because of the fact it so thoroughly and irrefutably destroys your argument. So much so that you have nothing to argue back with. So instead you pretend you didn't read it. It really doesn't matter though. Because other people will read it. And they will see that yes it is indeed true that Counsell has either had a makeshift rotation or a makeshift lineup every year he's been the Brewers manager. Nothing ever aligned where the team had the pitching he has had recently or the bats he had prior to the arms arriving. The point was made and proven. And finally, cue one last throwaway BS response from you because you must have the last word. Even more so when you're on the wrong end of a debate

Exactly. There's no sense even belaboring the bullpen because the assumption by so many is that CC has just had such a strong pen that an usher out of the stands could have deployed them to great success. No mind paid to other teams' castoffs that CC wound up getting high leverage innings out of. He's had people like Knebel, Hader and recently Williams so a dummy could manage that according to them.

And apparently coaxing that kind of season out of Chase Anderson had nothing to do with Craig Counsell. Year after year, in-spite of either a weak cast of pitchers or a weak cast of hitters, but never both sides of the ball strong at the same time, the man somehow got 5 playoff appearances out of them. But no, Counsell is nothing special. Brewers magic got those results out of those players.

Lol. So in other words I completely refuted your point but because the most damning point was bolded and capitalized you didn't read it and everything is entirely dismissed. As always is the case with you, when you're proven wrong, there's some other reason to dismiss the other person's point. Exactly as expected.

Except when he finally had the young talented pitching, Yelich had already broken his kneecap and has never been the same since. The pitching arrived in 2020. Yelich's injury came at the end of 2019. When Counsell had the bats, Yelich, good Cain, good Hiura, good Aguilar, Braun, good Shaw, good Domingo Santana, etc, he was working with a misfit rotation. I thought people knew this. It never overlapped.

From 2016-2019 Chase friggin Anderson was the #2 starter twice and the #3 starter twice. And Junior Guerra was in the rotation 3 straight years! Zach Davies was the #1 starter twice in that span. And that was right in the midst of when the team came the closest to only its second World Series. How do people forget so easily. A lesser manager easily might only get those squads to the playoffs once in these past 9 years.

Oh really, not even once, huh. Here are the rotations he's had and their ERAs... 2016: Nelson (4.62) Davies (3.97) Chase Anderson (4.39) Wily Peralta (4.86) Junior Guerra (2.81) Matt Garza (4.51) 2017: Davies (3.90) Nelson (3.49) Anderson (2.74) Garza (4.94) Suter (3.42) Guerra (5.12) 2018: Chacin (3.50) Anderson (3.93) Guerra (4.09) Suter (4.44) Miley (2.57) F Peralta (4.25) Counsell took that 2018 collection of aces to 96 wins and 1 game shy of the WS 2019: Davies (3.55) Anderson (4.21) Woodruff (3.62) Houser (3.72) Chacin (5.79) Gio Gonzalez (3.50) 2020: Woodruff (3.05) Burnes (2.11) Houser (5.30) Anderson (4.21) Lindblom (5.16) - 50 game season where the team batted .223 The past 3 years (2021-2023) Counsell has had some very fine rotations to work WITH but that's also exactly when the lineups went south batting .233 in '21, .235 in '22 and .240 in 2023 When the arms in the rotation arrived (2020), the lineup had everyday players like the following dragging the team down... 2020: Navarez .176 Smoak .186 Hiura .212 Sogard .209 Yelich .205 Ben Gamel .237 2021: Vogelbach .219 Yelich .248 Bradley Jr .163 Urias .249 2022: Caratini .199 Tellez .219 Adames .238 Jace Peterson .236 Taylor .233 McCutchen .237 2023: Turang .218 Adames .217 Anderson .226 Wiemer .204 Winker .199 So like I said, HE'S ALWAYS EITHER HAD A COBBLED TOGETHER ROTATION OR A PIECED TOGETHER LINEUP. Not one single year where he had a good to great lineup paired with a good to great rotation or vice versa. Yet he's taken those squads to 5 PLAYOFFS. But you could simply have a memory and I shouldn't have had to plot all of this out. Again, goldfish-like memories.

It's like people think Counsell has had some juggernaut roster every year. Go look at some of the rosters he's had in his time here. It's always been a pieced together rotation or a cobbled together lineup - one or the other. The Brewers have had 5 managers who took the team to the postseason. Counsell has more playoff seasons that the other 4 managers combined. Not only that but you all literally have the other teams who want to interview him as input as to what other MLB people think of him. Hopefully this is just about setting the market, which he indeed will. Counsell is worth more than some middle reliever, getting more out of his rosters than even the Brewers own modeling expects. But what's really hilarious are the people that think he's just a analytic robot who can replaced by another stats guy who will get the same result. Goldfish-like memories around here

People are literally colliding while running wrong routes as well as TEs blocking the wrong defender but you do you

Some pretty strong and definitive conclusions being drawn about a young and inexperienced team that is performing exactly like most young and inexperienced teams tend to perform. Especially regarding this offense. Do yourself a favor and look up the 2021 Detroit Lions and see how that young team fared with veteran QB Jared Goff at the helm.

Surely none of these people downplaying Marquette's relevance will be on the bandwagon if they make a deep run in the NCAA tournament

The team that won the NBA title just over 2 years ago? Those Bucks?

What's wild about that is apparently said poster doesn't think Counsell played any role in those bullpens being so good. I guess bringing along pitchers people never heard of, who did nothing elsewhere, and turning them into high leverage late inning relievers was Brewers magic! And the fact that it was in response to the notion that Stearns might see an edge in hiring a manager who excels at winning tight games but said poster believed New York doesn't have a Milwaukee level bullpen so therefore Stearns probably isn't interested in paying Counsell, is the highest of comedy. As though the Mets can't go out and put together a strong bullpen the same way he built them here but with more money. Somehow that post was liked by 3 people. My presumption is that downplaying the effectiveness of Counsell is some sort of defense mechanism at that prospect of losing him. Either that or people have forgotten how bad some previous Brewers managers were.

Possibly. I guess the point is that it goes against logic to assume an analytics person would completely take an unanalytic approach to choosing a manager. What's Stearns approach going to be if not analytic? Who gives the best pregame speeches? Counsell is already well known to be very analytic and statistics driven, so he's already got a leg up there in matched approach. The next logical step for a decision maker like Stearns is running analysis at who does it best. And by one measure (1 run games) Counsell is the best ever at it.

OR maybe Stears sees that Counsell owns the best record of any manager in MLB history in 1 run games and decides he vastly underpaid no matter what the penny equivalent a record breaking salary amounts to for Cohen. Why would Stearns even calculate the dollar aspect of it? Manager salary doesn't even factor into team payroll and tax. Finding an edge at manager would be free. Counsell is 212-161 as a manager in 1 run games (+51) which over 9 seasons means about 5.67 wins over .500 per season. An analytics person might equate that into a similar calculation to WAR (wins above replacement) figuring that Counsell is worth 5.5 wins above a typical manager. If an analytics person chooses to look at Counsell in that light, he'd be vastly underpaid even if he becomes the highest paid manager in the game. Of course not everyone will agree to weigh things that way, but when it's just the owner's money and doesn't affect the team payroll or tax, why not look for that statistical edge at manager? Almost seems silly to suggest that an analytics person wouldn't apply the same approach to everything, including and even especially manager.

What an ugly and unfortunate situation. Of course a 2 year deal immediately springs to mind but it should just as quickly be dismissed. No matter how little you pay Woody to rehab in 2024, the amount you're paying him in 2025 will still be too high. He's not going to just spring back to pitching 200 innings and making 30 starts. And that's before even contemplating if he's going to be as effective as he has been before. If Woodruff is ever going to be a top of rotation starter again, it will be 2026 at the earliest, after a season of building up his arm and pushing an innings limit. If you then explore a 3 year deal, now you're committing 3 years of real dollars to a guy who may never return to top form. And what's to say Woodruff even wants to do a 3 year deal at a figure well below what he was projected for before the injury? So when you accept that 2024 is completely lost, 2025 is at best a build back year, and 2026 is probably something neither side even wants to discuss, what's the point? It's all risk with next to zero upside.