monty57

And we traded him for Glendon freakin' Rusch

Except for one season in his career, Teheran averages almost exactly 6 IP per start. This season he's been averaging less than 6 IP per start, and he's been really bad. For his career CHris Archer averages 6.11 IP per start. This idea that there's a guy out there that will go 7+ IP every time out is just a Unicorn. There's Clayton Kershaw, and there's everyone else. 7 IP starters don't exist anymore. That isn't the way the game is played anymore. I think there's probably a handful of teams (if that) that have rotations that average 6 IP per start. The answer isn't finding something that doesn't exist (7 IP starters)... it's building a quality bullpen. Yeah, I think the best you can hope for is to get a solid group of starters, each of whom can occasionally go 7-8 innings. Getting a couple of those starts in a row, like we did with Anderson/Nelson last time around, can keep the pen rested. We have some good SP prospects that should hit the majors soon, and others who won't cut it in the rotation, but will hopefully give us a strong bullpen in future years. As for today, we need to figure out which of these guys have some promise, and which should be released. I'm leaning on the "release Peralta" train.

His 'one good year' was last year, and that was the only year he played full time. I'm not thrilled with his production, but this year we need to find out if he can really put things together and be a consistently productive player. He has too much talent to discard it to easily. Sogard looks great in limited action, but at 5 years older than Villar, he doesn't likely have a long future ahead of him. I guess that's the problem with our winning before we're "supposed to." We still want to give guys who could be part of our future a shot, but at the same time it would stink if we lost the division by a game while playing a .600 OPS, below-average defensive 2B everyday. Hopefully he'll turn things around soon. A lot of lefties platoon. Nothing wrong with that, especially when about 3/4 of SP are right handed. I get that he's not a world beater, and I understand why the Brewers gave Villar the starting nod. It's just looking like cutting him may have been a mistake. Those happen.

The next time I go into Miller Park to watch the Brewers, I think I'll lodge a complaint. Is the complaint booth in the Leinie Lodge or on one of the beer decks :-)

I agree. I'll never hold it against someone if they make the decision to go for the most money, as that is their right, but I think most players should take it if it's offered. Villar's closest "real world" example was Lucroy, who looked to have been hurt by accepting the extension. Hopefully, Villar can be an example for next guy(s) so they will decide to take the extension.

No one cares about what Scooter Gennett is doing as a bench player here except you. And saying "Just Saying" is annoying. Stop acting like you are something special because Scooter Gennett has proven he was a better choice to keep in your mind. It gets old. I think Gennett is worthwhile to talk about in a Villar thread, as they are directly related. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it looks like we would have been better off keeping Arcia in AAA last year, and starting this season with Villar at SS and Gennett at 2B. Gennett became the odd man out because for some reason we felt the need to rush Arcia to the majors when he wasn't ready. This really wasn't needed, and seems to go against the "controllable talent" thing Stearns likes to tout. After Arcia got brought up, and for some reason can't be sent back down no matter how bad he hits, the decision came down to Villar vs Gennett. After his season last year, it seemed like an easy decision to stick with Villar, but that doesn't mean that it will end up being the correct decision. Don't rush Arcia, keep Villar at SS, Gennett at 2B. We're probably better this year, and we have Arcia for another year or two in his prime years down the road. Now, because of decisions that were made, we've got two guys on our team who aren't hitting (Villar and Arcia), and the only alternatives are guys like Franklin, Sogard, de Jesus, or Y. Rivera. There is still plenty of time for Villar to turn things around and look like a guy we can stick with, but if he does turn into a pumpkin, what are our options? We'll probably either have to go out on the free agent market to find a 2B, or rush a prospect like Diaz to the majors before he's probably ready. Stearns has made lots of great decisions. The decision to cut Gennett in order to keep an extra pitcher might not be one of them.

Fangraphs also has our depth chart as the 4th worst roster in baseball. http://www.fangraphs.com/depthcharts.aspx?position=ALL&teamid=23 So if Mark A is seduced by the 25-22 record, the analytics team will tell him he is wasting his money to bring in veteran help for a year long WC push. Kind of odd projections. Broxton already had 0.6 WAR, and they have him getting 0.8 for the season. Shaw is at 0.8 WAR in 173 AB, and they have him getting to 1.2 WAR in 388 PAs - do they expect him to get hurt? Thames is at 1.7 WAR already, and they have him getting 1.7 WAR for the season (only getting 422 PA) Not sure how they came up with these.

One bit of good news: Kirk N is posting a .567 OPS in Colorado, so the Brewers won't be able to justify bringing him up over one of the prospects.

This is showing exactly why I (along with many others) wanted Braun traded this past offseason. When healthy he's still a great hitter, but he's always one step away from a visit to the disabled list, and he is on the wrong side of 30, so his skills are going to diminish over the course of his contract. We have two good young starters at the MLB level, three guys who are probably ready to be MLB starters sitting in AAA, and more talented OF throughout the lower levels of the minors. Having too much talent is usually a good problem to have, but something's going to have to give. I agree with the others who say that now is the time to bring up one of our good players from AAA and let him start for the duration of Braun's DL stint. It's not a long-term solution, but at least it will start the "getting your feet wet" stage before some more permanent moves are made in the future. Oh, I also hate having a short bench, so there's that too :-)

And by half a decade you mean 2 seasons. The Brewers haven't had half a decade of bad baseball since before Melvin. They were in playoff contention late into the season just 3 years ago. The team this year doesn't look like bad baseball either and I doubt next year will. "Bad" may have been too harsh. Relative to the low bar set by past Brewer teams, it wasn't so bad, but relative to what a normal fan would expect, it was subpar. My original description ("blah baseball") probably fits better than "bad," but how do you think Yankee or Cardinal fans would react with the following string of seasons? Heck, how would the same Brewer fans react if the Packers put together a string of seasons like this? 2012: 83-79 Not too bad, but they were expecting a World Series run this year 2013: 74-88 Very disappointing, late season surge to get this "good" 2014: 82-80 Ridiculously good start to season and bad baseball after that 2015: 68-94 One of the worst seasons in franchise history. Only good thing about this season is it made Attanasio realize he needed to change the way he was doing things 2016: 73-89 Rebuild year, still not too far out of line with our records in the high-budget, "go for it" years. I'd like to see the franchise at a point that we are not happy with strings like this, nor do we think that an NLCS appearance is worth mortgaging the future. I think we're on that path, and I hope that a decade from now fans' expectations will be significantly higher.

If we didn't get back MLB level or very close to it, the window closes with all those other guys. Then you might as well sell off all the rest too. If you do that, what exactly are we ever playing for? We lost Prince for nothing, so a group of prospects would have better than nothing in the "window with the other guys." Managing in a small market is tough, and sometimes you have to make tough decisions like whether or not to trade a good player with limited team control when you've got a good MLB team. I understand why they decided to hold onto Prince. But as I said, holding him and Hart and making two trades that wiped out most of the young talent in the system (pre-arby and prospect) is "all in," and if you're going to go all in, it should be followed by a fire sale. They did neither, so we got bad baseball for half a decade before finally deciding to go into rebuild mode. But I was really looking with a broader scope than just looking at this one scenario. Things like making sure we got Mench instead of a prospect in the Lee trade, getting a bunch of AAAA talent back for Sexson instead of getting high-end young talent, taking "MLB ready" Dave Bush instead of some good young prospects. Things like that. I hope with new management that we won't have a "window closing," but rather that we will maintain a strong farm so that when faced with a scenario of having a good player in his final year, we will have prospects there to replace him. Then, we can trade the vet for a boatload of talent and promote the prospect. You should only have "windows closing" if you construct your roster that way.

That's exactly what Melvin tried. For Prince, he asked for two young MLB starters. Since the only team trading for a guy in his last year would be a team shooting for the playoffs, and since no team shooting for the playoffs would trade away two guys from their MLB rotation, it wasn't surprising that Melvin couldn't find a trade. At that point, knowing it was Prince's last season with the team, they decided to go all in with the Greinke and Marcum trades. I thought at the time (and still believe) that Melvin shouldn't have been so hell-bent on getting back MLB talent in every trade. Prince signed a nearly $200M deal after the season, so I find it hard to believe the people who say he had no trade value. We could have gotten a lot for him.

Not a teardown at all. All I was saying was that the alternate route (what the team said they were going to do going into the offseason), was to trade Fielder and Hart as they were both going into their final season of team control. We still would have had a lot of talent on the roster, and trading Fielder and Hart would have brought a lot more talent into the system. Plus, we swould have made other moves, like adding a 1B if we indeed traded away Fielder, and as Thurston said, we still probably would have traded Lawrie, as Melvin didn't seem to want him around. We likely wouldn't have been as good in 2011 without Fielder, Hart or the Greinke and Marcum trades, but we might still could have compiled a playoff roster. We also would have had a lot more young talent in the system, so we probably would have had much better teams in subsequent years. We probably could have traded one playoff appearance for several playoff appearances depending on how things came together. But, we did what we did. We had a fun season where we ended up winning one playoff series and fell short of the World Series. On paper, we had a decent team in 2012, but it tripped up, and after that we had a series of streaky teams that usually ended up with worse records then we will probably end up with this season, when we have less than half the payroll, a lot more flexibility, and a much brighter future. I wasn't for the moves made in the 2010 offseason, but I really cheered for that team. It was obvious that we would have a solid team, and I really hoped we'd win it all, because it was obvious that we should do a firesale afterwards or we'd be in for an extended period of "blah." The natural result of mortgaging the future is that the mortgaged future will eventually arrive. If you're going to play the "all in" game, then you almost have to follow the Marlins' strategy. As much as people scoff at what they've done, they have some rings to show for it. If you don't want to do complete teardowns, then never go "all in."

Of course anything we discuss is pure speculation. We know how things turned out with the actions taken, but will never know how things could have turned out if different actions were taken. That said, the "alternate route" would have been trading away Fielder and Hart for prospects, and never making the Greinke and Marcum trades. We see how quickly a franchise can build talent through the Gomez and Lucroy trades. Had we traded Fielder and Hart for prospects, we likely would have been worse in 2011 (maybe no NLCS run), but we would have still had lots of talent on the roster, and would have had a good farm system, likely making the 2012-present teams much better. As has been shown over the past couple of years, the draft is only a part (in our case a small part) of developing a top-tiered farm. I would love for the Brewers to have a better history in the draft, but we went from one of the worst to one of the best farm systems in baseball, while our drafts have not been good. Which is why I feel that in the offseason prior to 2011, had we done things differently, we still would have had a playoff-potential roster, and could have quickly created one of the best farms in baseball. Fielder himself would have brought back far more than either the Gomez or Lucroy trade brought us, Melvin just asked for two young MLB pitchers in return for Fielder, and of course no playoff-hopeful team was going to give us that. Plus, Hart would have brought a nice package back, and we would have all the guys we traded away for Geinke and Marcum. On the other side of that, had we not had an historic start to the season, we never would have been in first. All of the teams from 2012-2015 were very streaky, and that was probably because they had a few good players who could carry the team for a period, but they mis-spent their money, so they had a lot of holes in the roster and when the stars weren't performing, the team was pretty bad. But again, this is all speculation. We know what happened, but we will never know how things may have turned out if things were done differently. Sometimes you have to take calculated risks, but I never like mortgaging the future for the present, but that's just my personality. We lived through some "blah" years, and are now we are in what I consider to be a better place, so we're all good :-)

Oversimplification, but when they decided to hold onto Fielder and Hart instead of trading them, and took the further step of trading the farm for Greinke and Marcum, they basically ended the period of building from within, and decided they were putting all their cards on the table for a one (maybe two) year window to try to win it all. This got us probably the second best season in Brewer history, but the opportunity cost is unknown other than to say that the Royals had pretty good success with a lot of the guys we traded away, and we don't know how much talent we could've received from Fielder and Hart if we had targeted minor leaguers instead of "MLB ready" talent. After the one good year, we basically started patching things together trying to retain fading glory. We had just enough success to keep Attanasio feeling that we were one piece away from contending, and his statements that fans like seeing names on the jerseys that they know assured me that we would continue to get relatively expensive "name players" rather than relying on young "unknown" talent. Sports are a young person's arena, and as we have seen, trading "known" guys for a group of young "unknown" guys can quickly lead to a more talented organization. I argued at the time that we should do things differently, but what's done is done. I love how Stearns is operating, as it is in large part what I was begging for during the aforementioned period. I'm happy where we are at, and where we are headed, and if it took a few mistakes on Attanasio's part for him to learn a bit about being a successful owner, then it was probably worth it.

To be fair, how many big market teams other than the Yankees back when they had a tremendous monetary advantage over every other team in baseball have won consistently over a long period of time, including World Series wins? I'd say a good model was the Rays under Friedman. They won consistently in the toughest division in baseball at the time. As soon as Friedman left, they stopped being a perennial contender. The Cardinals aren't a big market, but they have a pretty good history. The Twins under Ryan were good until they got into the unwinnable situation of feeling the need to sign "hometown boy" Mauer to a monster contract that crippled the franchise. The A's were winning until they decided to let a book be published that gave away their winning strategy to all of their opponents. Having good management with a solid strategy is a winning recipe in any business, including baseball. I think a big reason smaller markets don't sustain success is that they feel pressure to "win now," so they throw their long-term plans out the window. Friedman proved that a good GM with a good plan can win regardless of market size, and the Cardinals have proven that if you develop a winning philosophy, you can take a small market team and make it one of the winningest teams in history. We don't yet know if Stearns is "the next Friedman," but if he is I hope Attanasio pays him a boatload of money to stay.

Without going into the long, drawn-out posts I wrote at the time: There didn't appear to be a defined strategy. In what looked to be a futile effort to compete, we used our farm as trade material for MLB upgrades, while never making any moves that would add talent to the farm. At the same time, payroll was normally over budget, mainly being spent on past-their-prime veterans, with few good players at league minimum, so we had to fill the gaping holes in the roster with subpar talent that we could afford, making it hard to be competitive. Overall, it seemed pretty obvious that it wasn't going to end well.

The low payroll allows us the opportunity to take on a player as an upgrade to the MLB team when a non-competitive team is looking to dump some salary in July. We don't really have to give up much, just eat the remaining few months of the contract.

It seems from interviews I've seen over the past few seasons that Attanasio had an epiphany of sorts after the team collapse, followed by the horrendous start to the next season. He's a smart guy, and it seems that he realized that he was wrong and needed to change his ways. In his "day job," he has to be very formulaic, but like many people, he didn't "follow his own prescription" in his early years with the Brewers. Sort of like a doctor who smokes. After his "epiphany," he brought in someone who runs a team in much the same way his bond managers would run a portfolio, so I don't see a reason he would alter a winning formula. I think he'll view this much more as a business than a hobby going forward, allowing his "five star manager" to do his job.

Agree. I just did a quick scan of SS with a minimum 75 PA, and Arcia ranks: 26th in OPS at .637 28th in OBP at .277 His defense is helping his overall value, but his hitting is pathetic. I think we have a number of options at SS who could provide as much or more value to the team right now than Arcia, and by having him on the team now (and half of last year) we are going to lose out on some of his prime years when he will be tremendously valuable. It won't happen, but I see no problem with sending Arcia to AAA to work on things.

It is very hard to be consistently good, and from that perspective, I always worry about everyone, especially players with whom we have a guaranteed multi-year commitment. I'm looking at this thread as "are we worried enough that we make somewhat major roster decisions." In that light, right now I'm worried enough about Villar that I'd give him a day off here and there, and may move him down in the rotation, but I would not name someone else as the starter. I agree with you on Arcia, who has still not done anything at the plate to justify being in the majors. Other than injury concerns, there is nothing that would make me consider changing anything about Broxton, Shaw or Thames at this time.

Favorite:Franklin. Next in line: Sogard. Darkhorse: Feliz. So you want them to go with a 14-man pitching staff and 3-man bench?

This. I actually think Peralta is perfect for the pen. I think if he knew he was only pitching the one inning, he can easily get into the upper 90s with his fastball, could make a big difference. I hope they don't just make him the long man, as he'll encounter the same problems. I'd really like to see what he can do going one inning at a time. Peralta certainly pitched his way out of the rotation, and I'm excited to see how some of the guys from the minors due. That said, this move probably assures that Peralta will be let go after the season. He's making $4.275M in his second year of arby, meaning he'll likely make $6-7M next year. If by some chance he could have "found it" as a starter, he could have justified that salary, but I can't imagine the Brewers will pay that for a middle reliever. But, we might as well see if we can get some value out of the $4.275M we're obligated to pay, so hopefully he will pitch well out of the pen for the rest of the season.

We won't know what will happen until it happens. That's why everything here is just theoretical. If we're sitting in first place in July and Garza is still pitching well, then we are not very likely to trade him away. If we fall back in the standings and Garza is still pitching well, then there should definitely be some teams willing to give us a decent return in trade. Regardless of anything else, if Garza starts to suck it hurts the team, so I just hope he continues to pitch well.

If they were down in the standings, they probably would have let Peralta have one more start to try to "find it" before Guerra returned. In the current situation, they probably want to give the team a better chance to win, while getting a chance to see Espino, who's having a great year at AAA.