monty57

There has to be some reason why K-Rod is still out there with no offers every year, forcing Boras to call Attanasio, who he knows has no qualms about signing wife-beaters. K-Rod should be tradeable, but really what has changed since this offseason, when any team could have signed him to a contract, and all it would have cost was money? We'll probably get something from trading him to a playoff-hopeful team that has issues with their closer, but I wouldn't expect a high return. The rumored talks with the Mets would have Ramirez traded for Dillon Gee, so we'd save some money, but would have another veteran #5 starter we're paying millions for. I'd probably rather just give him to the Mets in return for them paying the full salary. Really, the only way we're trading Ramirez will be if we take an unwanted contract back. I still wonder how serious the Brewers will be about this "rebuild." Their seeming refusal to deal either Segura or Lucroy (especially Segura, for whom we have an in-house replacement ready and our top prospect about a year out) leads me to believe they'll probably look to deal the guys who are going to be free agents (Parra, Lohse and Ramirez) and we won't get anything but salary relief back. They'll try their hardest to divest themselves of Garza, but that is more because they realize it's a bad contract and want to get out of the financial obligation. They won't be good next year, so they will end up trading Gomez next deadline, when his value is significantly worse than it is today (.5 years vs 1.5 and no chance to make QO), and they'll try to extend Lucroy, which won't end up being a good deal, as we'll pay big money for decline years.

Melvin's contract was up and he had said he was going to retire after 2012. Coincidentally, he went "all in" in the offseason prior to 2011, trading the farm for two guys whose contracts were up after the 2012 season. He wanted to go out on top. Of course, he accepted an extension, and he recently stated that (paraphrasing from memory) the team had a window in 2011-2012 and has needed a rebuild, and the longer you wait, the longer the rebuild will need to be. Just my opinion, but I think Melvin has realized for a long time that we needed to change direction, and it's been a bit of a tug of war between him and Attanasio as to what needs to be done. Year after year, Melvin hints that we aren't going to make any big moves, only to be followed up by Attanasio signing a 30-something free agent. I agree with you that Melvin has seemed to be doing some things to try to help "the future." I disagree that Garza was a good signing. I put a chart up in another thread that we've all seen before. Once a player gets into his 30's, production is likely to fall, falling significantly after they're around 31-33. From the get-go, this contract (like Ramirez, Lohse, Wolf and all the other 30-something free agents) was very likely to have a lot of "dead money" in it, and the team is already trying to get someone to take the contract off their hands. They need to stop this trend of signing 30-something free agents to multi-year deals for eight figures a year. Free agency for the Brewers needs to be for complementary players, not for "name" guys who are supposed to play big roles but are signed to contracts that take them well past their prime. We've signed a number of these deals under Attanasio, and none of them has ended well. Most have ended with the fanbase wishing the guy was cut, and yet for some reason those same fans get excited when the next guy is signed.

Well said. Attanasio was pissed at the end of last season, but even if the front office believed at the time that the team needed to be torn apart, it would have been a hard sell to start a rebuild after the oft-mentioned "152 days in first place." Now, with both the terrible end to last season and the terrible start to this season fresh on everyone's mind, a large part of the fanbase understands that something big needs to be done, and they will be much more accepting of a rebuild.

Here's a chart from BP. 31 is right at the end of the prime years, and as the text says "drops for a few years and then spikes at 31... interesting." The big dropoff after age 31 shows why I dislike the contracts that take players into their 30's and especially their late 30's, and why I am not at all surprised when players like Ramirez, Lohse, Wolf, Suppan, etc hit a cliff before the contract is over. This is also why I would rather trade Lucroy this year or next year rather than extending him (he will be in his early 30's when his current contract expires). Back to Braun, this is why I think he will still be productive for a few seasons (he's diminishing from a high peak), but if we get a chance to trade him, we should jump at it. The years he will be productive will be our down years, and when we should start our upward swing, Braun will be taking up a large chunk of our payroll and will likely not be performing very well.

2016 will likely be a worse season than this one. We're on pace to be something like 52-110. I don't think it's possible to be much worse. I do agree with the premise of the rest of your post though :-)

He's a nice stop gap player who can provide value for cheap but he's never going to be a guy we should look to build around. That pretty much applies to the Brewer roster right now. We have Braun forever, but other than him, the only player on the current roster who might merit an extension is Peralta, who hits arby next year and will be a free agent at age 29. Everyone else is either short-term (Lohse, Ramirez, Gomez, Lind, and Lucroy), not good enough to merit an extension (Davis, Segura, Perez, Rogers, Sardinas, Gennett), are under "team control" until they're past their prime (Fiers, Nelson), or are bench/bullpen players who I don't consider in discussions about "players we're going to build around." I love the concept of offering extensions to players in their pre-arby years. The Brewers just need more players worthy of that offer. The way it looks right now, even if we don't "rebuild/retool," this team will probably look vastly different two or three years from now than it does today.

And these young guys they have drafted with "nice upside"...I am hopeful, like you, Logan82, that they pan out. But let's see them against some real competition before we start getting excited, and pointing to them as a change for the better. I like that they are going for upside, but I agree that the enthusiasm has to be tempered. Medeiros was essentially a late-1st rounder/early 2nd rounder, who they picked in the middle of the 1st round so they could pay him under slot value to be able to afford their later signings. In other words, they traded the ability to sign the "best player available" in order to be able to sign three "late 1st/early 2nd round talent" guys. I'm happy they went for high-upside guys, and am happy they were able to sign them, when the pundits didn't think they would, but they are all "late 1st round/early 2nd round" guys who are just out of high school, so there is a high flameout rate there. That they were all immediately planted near the top of our "top prospect lists" really just shows that our "top prospect" list is still relatively weak. Hopefully they live up to their potential and help to change that. I do like that they traded away a veteran (Gallardo) for prospects in order to open a spot for another prospect (Nelson). That they traded for a guy (Sardinas) who would allow them to trade another veteran (Segura) could be telling. If they hold on to Segura and they essentially traded their #1 starter for an MLB ready utility IF and middle reliever to help them "compete" this year, then I'm not as happy with the trade.

Personally, I think too many stars have to align for the team to be a contender next year. It's not impossible, just improbable, in my opinion. I agree, and think the small chance of success next year is far outweighed by the diminished return we'd receive from our "trade chips." If we trade Gomez this season (with 1.5 years left on the contract and the option to offer a QO), I'd look at a top 25 guy and another top 100 guy coming back in trade. If we wait until next year's trade deadline, we probably get something like the Greinke return (a top 100 guy and two guys with potential but some big warts). Is raising the playoff odds from "none" to "highly unlikely" worth giving up that top 25 prospect? That's the big thing for me. We have some guys we could trade to make the "rebuild/retool" go a lot quicker. If we hold them, we may not have guys in a couple years who will have that trade value. If that's the case, then we'll need to wait until we get 4-5 years of top 10 draft slots to get the talent into the system, and that's not a fun 4-5 years to watch at the MLB level. Furthermore, if we continue to add just enough to sell tickets, but keep us out of the top 10 draft positions, we'll never get a good farm, and therefore never have loads of cheap talent arriving at the MLB level to make us a legitimate playoff team. We'll be the Cubs of the 70's, turning a profit off of a few "name" players, with the "June swoon" knocking us out of playoff contention.

The last 1/4 season, he's had a .923 OPS. Not a "little run". I have/had concerns about his thumb, but I've been a believer that if the thumb is healthy, he's still a good hitter. I've felt all along that it was the thumb that was his problem, not PED use (or lack thereof). My belief has been that because of he's past the normal "prime" years, he'll probably settle in around the mid-to-high .800 OPS range. That said, 1/4 of a season is a small sample. I personally believe that he will be good as long as he can stay healthy, but most MLB players can be really good over 1/4 season. It will take longer than that to "prove" the naysayers wrong. Relatively speaking, Cryoablation is an extremely minor procedure I admittedly know little about this, and I hope it's something that will work with no diminishing results and no adverse effects. Then, we'll only have a few annual missed days for the thumb procedure to add to the annual missed time to oblique strains, so he should be good for 130-140 games/year.

The issue isn't whether this new procedure "works." It does, it freezes the nerve. It's not like one day it can't freeze the nerve. Nerves are receptors whose sole purpose is to tell us something else is wrong. The nerve isn't usually the problem, it's a warning. For instance, you touch a hot stove and the nerves say "pull your hand back." You could numb your hand, and then touching the stove wouldn't hurt. However, your hand would get fried because the nerves weren't telling you to pull your hand back. Does freezing the nerve in Braun's hand solve anything, or simply cause the nerve to stop telling Braun "ouch," so that he can perform the action which probably caused the problem in the first place (swinging a bat). If so, then performing said action could lead the actual problem to worsen. I don't know the details, but Braun originally said he didn't want the surgery. Why? If there were no chance it would cause any further damage, there is no reason he wouldn't have it done. It's not like he's averse to doing things to his body to help him stay on the field.

I see Braun's thumb closer to that comparison than a pitcher getting cortisone shots in his shoulder. I hope you are correct, but unless it is known (like it is known that glasses correct vision) that this is a permanent solution, I think GM's could be hesitant. Of course, their doctors may tell them it's nothing to worry about, in which case it shouldn't have a negative effect on trade value. If the doctors don't know if it's a permanent solution, I'd steer clear. From cursory reading (what they said when he was about to go under the knife), it sounds like this is a somewhat new procedure, so the ongoing results may not be clear. I'll stop here, because I'm arguing an unknown. Just saying it may be something to watch.

It appears from here that this will be an issue for him the rest of his career. Some team who needs a big bat out in the outfield might show some interest but will they make us an offer that will be worth it for us? I agree that he could still be traded, but this is another negative to his value. With his recent resurgence, there has been a glimmer of hope that he could be a good trade chip, with a team sending good talent as well as taking on his entire contract. I don't know if this was ever going to happen, but this news just reduces the chances of that happening.

I get it, and I throw as many barbs as anyone, but from Melvin's standpoint, these are his guys. He either hired them or hired the guys who hired them. He either has to trust them, or he has to fire them. Every day, they are out there watching these kids, and I would assume they have their "nerds" analyzing them as well. They aren't looking to sell content like the guys who make the "Top 100" lists, so they do not need to add some arbitrary criteria as to who makes the list. They just need to find good ballplayers who look like they have a shot at growing into major leaguers. Not an easy task, but if you can get three guys as opposed to one "blue chip" guy. It'd be nice to think they could hit on one out of three. Of course I'd love Syndergaard... everyone would. But, that's the reason why no one can have him, or if he were made available, it would be for a king's ransom. What could be available more cheaply is "the next Syndergaard." You just need to find him, and I'm sure they have some idea where to look.

Are those of you saying it's no big deal absolutely certain that this treatment will continue to work with no diminishing results and no side effects? I don't know either, but if I'm a GM, I'd certainly have concern over trading for a guy who I would be paying for 15 more seasons who requires an experimental surgery to temporarily regain his ability to hit. To me, this is akin to a pitcher who needs a cortisone shot in his shoulder every 4-5 starts. There is a serious problem there that is being masked - not cured - and that will be your problem if you trade for him. Without this surgery, Braun is a mediocre player, and this surgery is hiding that, not fixing it.

Well that diminishes all the recent hopes of Braun regaining his values as a great trade chip. The potential that the surgery has diminishing effects over time, and the 2014 Braun becomes the norm would be too much for me to trade for him.

Dean Taylor signed Jose Hernandez and gave up a 2nd round pick to do it. As a Brewer, Hernandez had lines of: 2000 .315 OBP / .372 SLG / .687 OPS 2001 .300 OBP / .443 SLG / .743 OPS 2002 .356 OBP / .478 SLG / . 834 OPS Not bad for a Shortstop (played 3B in 2000, SS in '01 & '02), but he struck out a lot, and is probably best remembered for being benched at the end of the season just so he didn't break the strikeout record. But I agree with the premise of your post Boomer, Taylor didn't seem great at acquiring MLB talent. His legacy to the Brewers was beginning the transformation of the minor league system, which brought us the talent that took us to the playoffs. Without his brief tenure as GM, I believe that we would still be looking for our first playoff appearance since 1982.

the only conclusion I can come to is that Taylor should have been given more time; and left alone if he was being pressured from above to "win now." I probably have my timing off here, but there was also the desire to "put the most attractive package together for a prospective buyer" thing going on around that time. Taylor took over in 2000, when to no one's surprise the Brewers had some good offensive players (Sexson, Jenkins, Burnitz, Hernandez, Loretta), but absolutely no pitching. I think he was correct in the belief that they needed to build the farm, but was done in when he traded Burnitz for Glendon Rusch and signed Hammonds to replace Burnitz. Melvin seems to have endless rope when it comes to making moves, but these moves got Taylor fired. Melvin inherited a poor MLB team, but a much stronger farm, and he was given the "prize trading chip" of Sexson, and the blessing that he was allowed to have some bad seasons until the stars (acquired starting under Taylor) made it to the majors. Attanasio bought the team during this stage, when we were at the bottom and ready to rise. I don't know if holding on to Taylor was the answer or not. He seemed to at least have a direction, which I think has been lacking in the current regime, but he may not have been very good at judging MLB talent and has been successful with KC by helping them find minor league talent (just a possibility, I have no idea). I do think that had he not been a short chapter in the Brewers' history, they would not have had the success they have had over the past decade, and I think the dynamic duo we have making decisions at the top right now are not going to make the next decade very successful. I think that at this time either Melvin has to go, being replaced by someone Attanasio completely trusts to make all the decisions, or Attanasio has to go, which isn't very likely. Since the probable scenario seems to be Melvin remaining as some sort of "go between" for Attanasio and the next GM, the next GM will be nothing more than a puppet being led around by Attanasio/Melvin, and I don't think that will go well at all.

Just going through MLB's top 100 it doesn't look like there's even 4 SPs available to maybe have in trade that would qualify as not being a 4+BB/9 and having a 8.5k+/9. I think the theory in going to the low minors is to find guys who are likely to be studs, but who aren't "proven" enough to make the Top 100 lists. You need to trust your scouts in this and your risk is higher, but theoretically you should be able to get much more potential return in getting a number of 18-year-olds who you think will become "the next Syndergaard" than you will by actually trading for Syndergaard. Trading all 3 of those guys during the season for prospects will mean 100 losses for the next 3-4 seasons. I personally don't think we'd take much of a step back (if any) by trading Segura. He's a sub-.700 OPS guy with decent defense, who we would replace with Sardinas, a sub-.700 OPS guy with good defense, later to be replaced by our top prospect. Regarding Gomez and Lucroy, we are going to lose them soon anyway, so the "trade off" is whether we win a few extra games the next year (Gomez) or two (Lucroy) with these guys before losing them for nothing to free agency, or whether we sacrifice those few games over the next year or two in order to improve our sub-standard farm system so that we increase our odds of winning in future years. The chances of trading Garza are practically nil right now. From the get-go, Garza was a salary dump, and we may not even get that right now. The team was maxed on payroll, and probably would have needed the playoffs in order to make money this year. After the play in the first couple of weeks, Schleisinger (? sp) had to be bouncing off the walls worried about how much they would lose, so the Garza rumors started to fly, signifying not only that they were willing to cut bait on this season, but on next season as well. K-Rod is the guy that might bring something of value if you deal him this season. I hope so, but he never seems to draw the interest his numbers would suggest. Maybe other teams have concerns over having a wife-beating scumbag on their team. The Astros and Cubs success has made a 3-4 down time a lot more understandable. Agree. The marketing team needs to back off from the "buy tickets because we signed a name player" campaign, and start some "look at this great talent we have on the farm" and "look how well this worked for the Cubs" campaigns. Might not be as easy a sell, but without the bloated contracts to overage vets, we'll sport a smaller payroll, necessitating less tickets sold, so really they're keeping the interest up enough that they don't permanently lose fans.

The phrase "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" comes to mind.

Taylor inherited an utter mess. Melvin inherited a strong farm. I don't think there's really any denying that. Agree. Melvin and Attanasio inherited/bought into the Brewers at a point when an upswing in success at the MLB level was pretty much inevitable. They had a strong farm, a surge in ticket sales from the new stadium, and a rock bottom MLB payroll allowing them to add a lot of salary. Give about anybody the reigns and tell them "you have two guys who will put up Hall of Fame numbers, and several other multiple-time All Stars for the next six years, and you can add around $60,000,000 in annual payroll," and see if you can squeeze some wins out of it. It is extremely disappointing that we've pissed that away and now sit in an unenviable position, likely unwilling to take the steps necessary to break us out of the rut. Until they stop settling for at best mid rotation guys in their 30's as "big" signings and either start developing top of the rotation starters themselves, or play with the big boys in FA and pay the going rate for a true top of the rotation guy with something left in his tank, the best they can hope for is to once every 5 years or so accumulate enough in their system to swing a deal for a short term fix. The notion that they can get their by dealing off their assets for prospects is dubious at best. Well, they could get some of that desired pitching back in those "dubious" trades. They don't have anyone in the franchise that is likely to have the term "Ace" affixed next to their name, so they need to get some. They can tank the next five or six seasons and hope to get some aces in the draft, or they can trade for some. One way you mentioned is to trade multiple good prospects for 1-2 years of a "proven ace," or you can trade 1-2 years of our "proven stars" to get multiple good prospects. It would take trading talent to get this talent, so the only real way they can get "Ace-caliber" talent in their system for more then a short time is to trade guys like Gomez and Lucroy. As I said, NFL and MLB is an apples-to-oranges comparison. There are a lot of differences, but I think most long-term successful franchises (whether in sport, business or elsewhere) have similarities. The most important is that the person at the top has to set in place an organizational philosophy and a long-term plan for success. The Packers floundered until they brought in Harlen. The Badgers floundered until they brought in Alvarez. Apple floundered when Jobs was let go until he was brought back. So yes, there are a lot of "micro" things to bicker over, but on the "macro" level, the person at the top really matters, so until Attanasio either becomes much more knowledgeable about the ins-and-outs of baseball, or until he gets the heck out of the way, this team will be a rudderless ship. Also, the Brewers haven't "accepted" mediocrity either since MA bought the team. Agree. Attanasio doesn't like mediocrity, he just doesn't understand that he's the root cause for the mediocrity.

Parra can play center. Parra is a free agent after the season. He will almost certainly be traded. I have almost zero interest in the game-to-game action other than seeing guys boost their trade value up. C'mon! I'm getting impatient, Mark/Doug! That's where I was a couple of weeks ago, but I got tired of cheering for Broxton, Garza and Lohse to pitch well only to see them blown up, so I'm on to rarely watching the team and just following the news waiting to see who's traded. This is pretty sad, as I've watched nearly every game for a long time, including some really bad teams in the late 90's/early 2000's. It's not the losing so much as how dumbfounded management is wondering how they got here.

I think the only real thing the MLB club does for the minor league teams is provide the talent. The facilities, staff, promotions, etc are the responsibility of the local owner. Minor leagues need talent to draw fans and make money, so if a minor league team's board/ownership feels they are not getting enough talent and will not get enough talent in the future, they would be prudent to try to get a different team into their facilities. All of the above is really cheap compared to over spending on major league talent. I pick on Broxton a lot, but I would bet all of what you suggest would be funded just by never trading for him in the first place. Every year, there seems to be a lot of money thrown away on at least one really bad contract, most of which was kind of expected when the contract was signed. That happens when you constantly sign 30-somethings to multi-year deals, none of which has worked out well in the final year or two of the contract.

I get it but I'd still lean the other way And that is what has always made this site special. We're all die hard Brewer fans, we all want the best for the franchise, and when we view things differently we should always be able to understand the other side. I get why people like going for it, I'm just hard-wired into always looking at future consequences of present actions :-) but more importantly that when do you ever get good? When those prospects come up you would be trading them right away again and just become a farm system. Baseball's salary structure is goofy and it screws the young guys, but it plays very well for teams that want to take advantage of it. A player spends years of "seasoning" in the minors getting paid nothing. Theoretically, when they make it up, they should be pretty ready to play, but they still get paid relatively little compared to most pro athletes for six full seasons. That's crazy when you look at other sports. So, even without extensions, you generally get the player's six best years, with the small exception for guys so good they're up when they're really young. Those are the guys you try to extend when you have a ton of leverage over them... they are playing for $500,000, which means if they get injured they will have to find a "real job" somewhere. Transferring that risk to the team means the team gets a steal of a contract to buy out a couple of years of free agency, so they get the player for eight years instead of six. Eight years is a looooong time in the sporting world, but that's not all. The team has every right to uproot the player and trade him off whenever they want, which should be either when the player's "team control" is getting short or when a younger, cheaper guy allows them the luxury of trading the older, more expensive guy away. It's not easy (nothing is), but the system is in place, so I think teams so do what they can to take advantage of it.

My take is the state of the farm is on Melvin and should be held responsible but I really don't think the trades were the killers at all, it was the horrific drafting/development. That was certainly part of it, and as I have mentioned before, I think a lot of that was because the Brewers decided to put all of their available funds into the MLB payroll, while focusing on "signability" picks in the draft. Had they trimmed a couple of million off the MLB payroll, they probably could have drafted and signed the best player instead of simply looking for someone they could sign cheaply. Melvin was very vocal about his dislike for teams being able to sign players over "slot value," which is a big reason MLB changed the rules to the current "pool" of funds. Since that change, the Brewers seem to have done better in the drafts. Wait, they traded away guys that didn't have any real trade value for Sabathia and Grienke? Melvin must have Jedi mind powers. They traded Cruz for Nix and Brantley was the PTBNL for Sabathia. Either of them are worth far more than half a season of a pitcher nowadays. Greinke was traded for Odorizzi, Cain, and Escobar, who may not each be able to bring back two years of Greinke, but they're valuable. Yuni was negative trade value in that deal, so there's that too :-) I just feel like it wasn't necessarily for one season as we had a shot all years from 08 until the Braun suspension, which helps shift me into my side of the argument. Where I started to get concerned was the 2010 offseason. The Sabathia deal was completely understandable, due to the long string of sub-.500 and playoff-less baseball in Milwaukee. In 2010, they still had a good team, and everyone thought they were going to trade Fielder and Hart to get some good young talent. Melvin insisted on two pre-arby MLB pitchers for Fielder. The only team that would trade for one year of a guy is a playoff-hopeful team, and no playoff-hopeful team would trade two good, young pitchers from their rotation, so what he was asking was completely unreasonable. When he couldn't get the deal he wanted, he shifted course, traded the farm for Greinke and Marcum, extended Hart and decided to let Fielder play to free agency. At that point, I said "I hope we win it all, because we're going to pay for this later." I enjoyed 2011, but knew it wouldn't last, and when 2012 rolled around, I said they better have a quick trigger to start trading guys if things weren't going well. They got off to a bad start, but waited too long, so Marcum was untradeable, and they refused to trade Ramirez when the Dodgers really wanted him. Since then, it's been a whole lot of spinning the wheels trying to sell tickets as they became "top heavy" on contracts for aging vets, without the young talent to complement them. I loved where this team was, felt they could have kept it going if they had played their hand differently in 2010, cheered them on in their one real chance at a title, but knew from then that if they didn't change tack a big rebuild would eventually be necessary. Since then, I've just been hoping Brewer management would realize it before it became too painful. I actually hope to start getting optimistic again if they can make some good trades soon, but until they occur, I'm skeptical.

Man, I'd hate to be your broker I am my "broker" (although I'd never call myself a "broker") and that's why my clients didn't get "all in" on things like the dot com and real estate bubbles, and why they have more money today then they had back then. For the long haul (which is all that really matters), systems increase the odds for success, "all in" increases the odds for failure. Wait...isn't that what they did?...but you are still complaining about it. No, they traded away the young, cheap guys who would later become all-stars before they had any real trade value. So some have the stance that after all the painful years, we successfully built a team that in 2011 had a shot to go for it before losing Fielder should have traded him and other players and not went for the title? I have the stance that we threw away the potential to be good for a long time in order to be good for one season. I understand your opinion, but after all these years people still can't seem to grasp the basics of where I'm coming from. Patrick's stock market reference was a good one. I know lots of people who put everything into the dot com and real estate bubbles. As obvious as some things seem, there are always people who get genuinely mad at those who point out that the path they are on may feel good for a fleeting moment, but is destined for long-term failure. Then, after the "get rich quick" dust settles and the failure naturally occurs, they can't seem to understand what happened. I'm not trying to get emotions running hot. I'm just saying that where we are now was pretty much destined to happen due to the moves the team made a few years ago. It didn't have to be that way, things could have been done differently. I wish they had been done differently, as I never think throwing away the future for one year is a good idea. Obviously others feel differently.