monty57

Wasnt that Houston's strategy too? I think it's pretty common when stocking up a system devoid of talent, so a lot of teams in the early stages of a rebuild should do it. With that strategy, you forego what is presumed to be the best talent in order to get a greater number of high-upside players in the system. If you already have a talented system, you can still utilize this strategy, but you could also afford to go the opposite route, "punting away" some later picks in order to get the guy who is assumed to be the best player in the first round. Since baseball picks are something of a crapshoot, there is something to be said for always using the strategy of getting multiple high-upside guys instead of one highly touted but expensive player and a bunch of schmoes, but at some point, it may make sense to pick the guy in the first round who looks like he'll be a star, but wants over-slot value.

That was Melvin's strategy to start re-stocking an empty system. It will be interesting to see if they continue that strategy going forward. They could just as easily sign an over-slot guy to try to get more "star power" into the system, and then pick some college seniors later to save money.

Doubt the price went up. More likely we had a crazy price(that expected him to hit like this) and maybe we can get that crazy price now. Before teams were trying to knock down the prices over injury concerns and his lack of production for a big part of last year. Yeah, there are probably a few teams out there right now thinking "Boy, I wish we had made that deal with the Brewers." Now, Lucroy just has to stay healthy and productive until closer to the deadline, and the Brewers should get a nice deal for him. With not only his bat, but also his defense so far this year, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Gomez/Fiers type return for him at the deadline. Add that to the talent we already have in the system, and we will have one heck of a stocked farm, with a lot of talent ready to start showing up at the MLB level. I just hope that the headliner is a starting pitcher. Add one "blue chip" SP to join the Arcia/Phillips wave of prospects coming up, and I'm happy.

This thread was focusing on the possibly moving up the timetable on the rebuild and nothing suggests that is even close at this point. I agree there. I'm optimistic in that things are going pretty much as expected. The pitching has started off worse than expected, and the offense has started off better than expected, but overall we expected this to be a season where we would lose a lot of games, but hopefully answer some questions and put ourselves in a better position to improve in the future. I think some of our pitchers will settle down and bring their numbers to a more respectable level, while some of our hitters will cool off. Next offseason, we will have a clearer picture than we had this past offseason as to how far away we are from using some of our free cash to start adding pieces instead of trying to hit the jackpot off the scrap heap. There is no chance we're going to make moves to increase our chances of winning this season. Moving up the timetable would mean making our "Jon Lester" signing this coming offseason. That's probably a season or two too early, but we will see. There are a lot of "ifs," but if Arcia comes up and performs well, guys like Carter, Gennett and Villar remain productive and Braun stays healthy, it's possible that the Brewers hit the FA market this offseason in an attempt to win more games next year. We would certainly need a couple of SP to settle in and solidify a few rotation spots. Then, all we'd have to do is sign Stephen Strasburg this offseason, and we'd be fine. Should be easy :-)

The easy answer is: If the offer is good enough, you trade him. I personally would hold onto him if the offer was "okay," because an "okay" prospect wouldn't really do anything for our farm. We have lots of "okay" prospects, so unless we can get a "good" prospect, I'd hold him for another season and see where things are by next year's trade deadline. Now, if he ends the season with 50 HR and an OPS around 1.000, then we have an interesting situation. Realistically, I think he can be a .220-.240 avg /.320-.340 OBP guy with monster power, so I'm fine holding him for another year. He's fun to watch, he probably wouldn't bring a huge return in trade this season, and he's "controlled" for two more years with no MLB-caliber player in the pipeline. No rush to move him.

We are one month into the season. Are we really willing to disregard anything any of our guys have done in the past and bet that all of our major league and minor league talent is horrible based on this one month? The minor league pitcher have been flawed to a degree (Hader) to flat out horrible (Kodi, Lopez). The Biloxi rotation has looked pretty good Hader: ERA 0.78, 9BB:32K in 23 IP, 1.09 WHIP Ortega: ERA 2.60, 0BB:17K in 27.2 IP, 1.08 WHIP Wang: ERA 2.83, 11BB:20K in 28.2 IP, 1.08 WHIP Houser: ERA 8.63, 10BB:25K in 24 IP, 1.54 WHIP Salas: ERA 3.00, 12BB:21K in 27 IP, 0.96 WHIP Houser is the only one giving up runs, and he's still striking out over one per inning with a 2.5:1 K:BB ratio. The poor Colorado team has been playing in terrible weather in air that is thinner than Denver, so there is really no way to determine how well anyone on that team is doing. The sooner we're out of there, the better. You are correct the Kodi has had a rough start, but the other name prospect on that staff (Bubba Derby) is doing well, with a 2.49 ERA, 8BB:31K in 21.2 IP, 1.29 WHIP. Brandon Woodruff and Eric Hanhold are having good starts as well, but I don't know much about them. The T-Rats' pitchers are also off to pretty good starts. We have talent, so let's not jump to judgement after 5-6 starts. Some of the guys at all levels who are off to good starts will cool off (or else Perrin will have something like 250 K and no walks), and some of the guys who are off to bad starts will get better. Guerra is too old to be a part of a future contending rotation. If I had to bet, I'd say that Guerra probably won't be a big part of the future. However, if he can prove to be a capable #5 starter, there's no reason he couldn't hold that spot down for the next few seasons for league minimum. There is value in that.

There are not a few aces available every off-season. It's rare for an ace to be available on the open market. Even if there were a few, no, the Brewers can't compete financially for a true ace in the open market. If they could, they would have signed Sabathia at the time. Completely different financial situation. We will have a lot of free cash flow going into the foreseeable future. I don't know that it would be smart to go into the $30M+ annual salary range, but we could do it. Santana, Phillips, and Nottingham are far from guaranteed to be average players, let alone really good players. Sometimes it seems like we're playing fantasy baseball. Just plug this guy in here, another guy there. These are all talented players, but we all know how many really talented players never make it to MLB, let alone stick. Sure they are question marks. So is everyone. However, Santana is already playing at the MLB level, and Phillips is a very good prospect, so they have better odds than most prospects. So to compete in 2017/18 we basically need FOUR starting pitchers I understand the frustration after watching how this team has pitched, but I don't think one month of poor play proves the quoted statement true. Peralta has proven in the past he can be a good pitcher. He may or may not "find it," but he certainly could. Anderson has a track record that shows he could be a decent middle-to-back-of-the-rotation starter, so I would expect him to level off into that role. Meanwhile, we can shuffle through the multitude of "fringy" guys we have in order to try to fill at least one middle-to-back-of-the-rotation spot before we see if some of our better prospects can fill the other spots. Going into the future, let's say Nelson is a #2, Anderson can be a #4, and one of the Jungmann, Davies, Guerra, Cravy, etc ("Fringy group") can prove to be good enough to fill the #5 spot. Then we have a group of more talented guys in the upper minors (Hader, Houser, Kodi, Lopez, Ortega) from which we could hopefully fill at least one spot. By the end of next year, even without figuring Peralta in anywhere, it would seemingly take really bad luck to not have the #2-5 spots filled with guys we already have in the system. Then we have the probable trade of Lucroy, which will hopefully bring back another good starter, and the aforementioned cash to sign a top-of-the-rotation guy. Of course prospects fail, but getting two pitchers out of the young guys we have at the AA/AAA/MLB levels seems reasonable. Then, we have a lot of pitching talent in the low minors. Hopefully, a few of these guys take the next step to continue to add talent to the Brewers as more years go by. Any plan can fail, but I think it's a bit disingenuous to state that we have to completely gut our rotation and start from scratch, searching for FOUR guys when we should have most of the answers in-house already, we have plenty of money, and we have trade chips that should bring in more young talent.

This had a chance of being a rather quick fix, but that's out the window now. I don't think one month of a season changes anything that much. Next year, we will have Braun and Santana in the corners, with Phillips likely to come up after the cutoff. Villar will likely move to 3B once Arcia is up after the cutoff, with Gennett and Carter manning 2B and 1B. Assuming Lucroy is traded, catcher is the only position that won't be spoken for, and hopefully Pina's AAA performance isn't a complete fluke and he and Maldonado can hold down the catcher position until Nottingham is ready (which may be 2018). We should also have a decent bullpen, so the concern is putting together a competent starting rotation. First off, I think our current rotation is better than they have shown, but by this coming offseason, we will know a lot more about what we have in our young pitching, and should be able to build a decent rotation out of it. This season should be about weeding through the chaff to see if any of the "fringy" guys show that they are capable of getting MLB hitters out, while our better prospects continue to grow on the farm. We have a lot of pitching at the AA/AAA levels, and hopefully some of them will step forward, so it's not nearly as dire as some are making it that we have to pull an entire rotation out of thin air. Plus, we should target a starting pitcher in the high minors as the prize of the Lucroy trade, so hopefully we will fill a big hole there. Then, when the time is right (I'd guess the offseason leading into 2018, but possibly as soon as this coming offseason), we will use some of the $60-80MM in free cash flow to go after a free agent pitcher or two. I don't think we should start expecting playoffs next year, but I hope we're back to pushing for .500, this time with young, cheap talent and a strong farm instead of old expensive guys and no farm.

I was at Spring Training this year and watched Carter take BP. I believe he hit 12 of 13 out and the other was a line drive that didn't get high enough to go out. It was unbelievably impressive. As you mentioned, doubt he makes the team, but if he does, he would be my bet to win the derby (if gambling was legal of course). I saw him take BP in Biloxi. They have a screen that goes up probably 30-40 feet above the left field fence to protect the street just beyond the fence. Carter was routinely mashing the ball over that screen causing pedestrians to scatter. I agree that "Unbelievably impressive" is a good way to describe it.

Not necessarily. It might be possible that each member was putting in a couple hundred thousand to cover overages each year. However, if the appraised value of the LLC (the Brewers) went up by millions, its possible that the owners would be just fine as they will be in line for a big payday when they sell their membership in the LLC. Yes, in the long-term the ownership group should do fine, which is why they are willing to forego big profits each year. However, that doesn't mean that they are willing to, or have the ability to, lose hundreds of thousands or millions per year in anticipation of the gain. The group doesn't want to force one of the member's shares to end up in bankruptcy court. I doubt the team went too far into the red for too many years, in large part because at some point they decided to do things like play Yuni B rather than borrow the extra money to pick up a real MLB player.

They ran out of money. It's like saying "if you want to get to work on time, you don't drive a car that continually breaks down." Sometimes you can't afford a better alternative. Melvin/Attanasio always ran over budget. In an LLC, if the team loses money, the owners either have to borrow money (adding to debt, which means higher future debt payments), or take the money out of their own pockets to pay the overage. At some point, they say "no more."

Since so many on this site think it is a common occurrence, and that it is actually easy to pick up players on the cheap, then flip them to teams who had a chance at picking up those same players at one time I reject your premise. I don't believe that anyone thinks it's easy, any more than picking the guy in the draft that will turn out to be a Hall of Famer is easy. That doesn't mean you don't do your homework to try to get talent any way possible. Hill is a "flip candidate." The Brewers probably didn't call the Diamondbacks saying "we want Hill," but since picking him up allowed us to make a trade that netted us Diaz, we took him and some of his salary. Now, if he plays well, we could potentially get something back at the deadline, especially if we eat his salary. If he doesn't play well, we cut him. Nothing easy, nothing that denotes a "common occurrence," just trying to get the most value from an asset. I was young, but I remember Rickey Henderson as a perennial "flip candidate," who seemed to sign with the A's every year and then get traded to the Yankees if the A's weren't in it. Our version of that was probably K-Rod. He was signed to help us win, but in years we didn't win, we traded him. I don't think this type of "rent-a-player" is very common. The more "common occurrence" would be that a team signs someone to help the team (or at least fill out the roster), and that player happens to be someone who can be flipped mid-season. More of a "Plan B" if "Plan A" doesn't work out. In the Brewers' current situation, it could be useful to attempt this strategy, as they can afford to fail on a player without it destroying their playoff hopes. In addition to the aforementioned Hill, Briggs is probably correct in stating that they likely held onto Garza instead of just eating his salary in hopes he could turn it around and get flipped. Additionally, part of the reason they held onto Young and Presley at the AAA level was in hopes that they could show enough to draw interest. Carter may have been picked up as a flip candidate, but he has years of control left, so he could have been picked up as a long-term answer. That's probably about it for this year's team. It's far from certain that any of these players will get traded for anything useful, and it definitely isn't easy to transform the team's future through "flip candidates," but hopefully we can get something helpful to the future by implementing this strategy as part of a bigger plan to replenish the farm and build a successful future. As for me (and I assume others), when I see a veteran guy signed to a short-term deal, unless the team is in the playoff hunt I'll expect that guy will be shopped at the deadline.

Ends up being Guerra replacing Jungmann and Goforth replacing Freeman. Just did it in a roundabout way to keep an extra bullpen arm for a few days. Jungmann needs to get things straightened out, and AAA is better for that than the majors. Guerra gets his shot as a 31-year-old rookie. Like Presley, this allows the Brewers to keep their better prospects in the minors, while attempting to "catch lightning in a bottle" and get some cheap value out of a vet. Freeman couldn't find the strike zone as a Brewer, so they couldn't keep trotting him out. Meanwhile, Goforth could be a valuable middle reliever for the next few seasons, so let's see what he can bring.

Really illustrates how important it is to get things right in the Draft, and if you don't, it can negatively effect a franchise for years. The Brewers passed on Jose Fernandez and Sonny Gray to take Jungmann! The Brewers were still in the "signability" an "find guys who can help the team right away" mentality that year. Meaning: they could have signed guys that were more expensive, but they put all of their money into the MLB roster, so they didn't have an extra few million to sign draft picks, and they wanted to win in their "window" so they wanted older college guys with lower ceilings but higher floors, hoping they would get to the majors quickly. I consider Melvin's rebuild to have started once they got out of this mentality and started drafting higher upside guys. I think this was the Kodi/Gatewood/Harrison draft. Of course, the new rules that Melvin lobbied for helped them with the whole "signability" thing.

I see a team that if it had 4 decent starting pitchers to go with Nelson could be competitive right now with all but the elites in the NL, Washington, Chicago, and NY. The odds of ever getting to their level are long no matter how much young talent is acquired, but one would think finding 4 competent starting pitchers between now and when the bulk of the talent arrives, doesn't seem all that insurmountable provided they don't continue to sell off their productive players to do so. One or two, or maybe 3 might already be in the system. I never bought the idea that you had to be awful for multiple seasons to build a contending team from within. I still don't. I think we are much further ahead in our rebuild than Chicago or Houston were when they started their respective rebuilds, so I agree that it shouldn't take nearly as long for it to bear fruit. A big reason we are "ahead of schedule" is that we were willing to trade away some valuable chips for prospects. This season is a necessary "audition year." As to pitching, we are probably going to cycle through a lot of our "fringy" prospects to see if any of them stick. If some of the Jungmann, Davies, Guerra, etc group can become serviceable guys, even at the back of the rotation, that's huge. Then we should get our top-and-middle-of-the-rotation guys from our better prospects. Finally, we should have a lot of payroll room, so I think we will make a splash in free agency to get a good SP or two once it makes sense. I think we will be better next year, but not quite there. By 2018 we could be. There will be a few more big trades before then, but I think Stearns will have been able to find a lot of pieces to the puzzle by then.

Umm.. why? If those guys have proven all they need to in the minors, they have no business being held down. I'm really sick of this idea that we have to hold onto these players like they are golden unicorns when it comes to service time. Eventually these players have to come up and play and those three very well could be opening day 2017. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. We are not likely to be a playoff team in 2017, so waiting a few months to bring them up in order to have another full year of service time in their prime would probably be wise. Having them under control when they are in their prime and hopefully the Brewers are contending is far more valuable than losing that year of service because we didn't wait a couple of months in a losing season.

I don't care too much about Freeman. Unless he figures out how to throw a strike, he's pretty useless. Flores has potential, and could be a useful backup OF for the next five seasons. We'd probably lose him if we tried to send him down, so unfortunately he's just going to have to figure things out with limited PAs at the MLB level. Hill is only there in hopes that he can play well enough to be traded at the deadline. At the very least, he's shown himself to be a decent defender at 2B & 3B, and that in itself might be enough to get a playoff team to trade for him. If his BABIP moves up from his career low .203, he could even look good enough to get something better than salary relief in return.

The options on the farm aren't really better and Lopez/Hader are probably not options at all. I get Hader, but why not Lopez? Sure he'd be "burning service time," but part of this season is to get young guys some playing time to get their feet wet. It's probably not a good idea to have all of your good prospects coming up in the same season. Better to get some guys up each year so we'll have a shot of being good in a couple of seasons. I'd guess he wasn't called up simply because he has some service time already, so they want to keep him down until they get another year's service time, but Lopez should be up sometime this season. Hopefully when he's called up it's permanent. -Nelson is our best pitcher. -Peralta is in his first arby year and has to keep starting to see if he can "find it," at which point he would be a great trading chip. This year or next off-season seem like the ideal time to trade him if he can regain his value. -Garza will eventually come back and pitch to see if he can be traded this off-season as he's still under contract through next year. -Anderson is in his final pre-arby year, with four arby years of "team control." He will have a long leash to see if he can hold down a rotation spot for the Brewers for a few seasons as the prospects trickle in. -"Fringy" guys like Jungmann, Davies, Guerra, Cravy, etc. have a window to show what they can do. Hopefully some of these guys can step forward and secure a rotation spot for a few years. -Hopefully, our better prospects (Lopez, Kodi, Hader, Houser, etc) will work their way into the rotation over the next few seasons and we will have a much better, homegrown rotation in the not-too-distant future. * I also hope we get a guy in the eventual Lucroy trade who could be a top-of-the-rotation guy, but until that happens we can't count on it.

We're getting closer to the point where if Villar suffered a serious injury, that Arcia could come up and take the spot. It will be interesting to see what the Brewers plan to do with their top guys. Will Arcia/Phillips see the majors this year, opening 2017 as the starting SS/CF, or will they come up after the cutoff next year, buying another year's service time? Barring a miraculous push that puts them in the playoff hunt, I doubt what happens at the MLB level this year will change what they were planning for these guys before the season started. Perez has over 400 games at SS in the minors and Counsell said he saw Perez was capable of playing there in the spring. With Villar playing virtually every day and certainly adequate defensively, carrying a defensive specialist as a backup makes little sense. Agree. Since Gennett went down, Hill has played 2B with Walsh starting at 3B and Perez coming in as late-inning defensive replacement for Walsh. Rivera is talented, and if he isn't starting now it makes sense to send him to AAA to start everyday at 2B. Hill is going to start everyday until they decide to either trade him or cut him. To topic, that should be when we potentially see if we have anything in Cecchini. There are always individual players I really want to see do well. This year Carter and Cecchini were two of those guys. I would love to see Cecchini put things together and be our 3B for the next half-decade.

When Broxton was sent down, I thought Reed would be the call up, but I understand calling up Presley. He and Young were kept as "insurance" at AAA, but they were taking up space at AAA when we have a lot of young, talented OFs that will eventually need those spots, so eventually they had to either be called up or let go. Presley was hitting well, and has continued to hit since the call up. Part of this season is seeing how young "fringy" guys can play at the MLB level. Reed fits in this category, and I believe that he will see time at the MLB level at some point this season. Another part of this season is to see if some "buy low" veterans can play well enough to either secure themselves roles on future Brewer teams, or to build some trade value for deadline deals. It's not "let's play the best option so we can win," but it's also not "let's play the worst options so we will lose." It's really about trying to figure out how to put our players into the best position to add the most future value to the franchise, whether that's keeping them in the minors to retain more "team control," whether it's playing them at the MLB level even when they aren't performing in hopes of a hot streak that allows for a trade, or whether it's some other situation. Since in my opinion Presley and Young were retained as "insurance," it makes sense that Presley was the first call-up, but it also leads me to believe that they won't hesitate to dump him if he plays bad or trade him if he plays well. Kirk is playing well enough that he will get most of the starts in CF for now, and at some point they will bring up a RH hitter as well. Broxton has been playing well since his demotion. If he keeps that up, I think he, not Reed, will be the first option when the Brewers think it's time to make a move. But barring injury, that could be a little while, as they can't move Flores without losing him and Presley has played okay since being called up.

They're not giving Hader too many innings per start. With his numbers, he's not getting pulled because of performance, so they must be really monitoring his innings. That makes me doubt he would be called up, at least not this soon. Seems logical that Goforth is just adding another arm to the pen until another starter is needed. If And That is correct (and he usually is), and Lopez and Houser would be on normal rest, I'd guess it's one of them, and the more likely would seem to be Lopez.

Thanks. That 29K:0BB for the season just jumped out at me. Hopefully he'll get promoted and continue to dominate.

With Perez up now it is more feasible to do that. That said I think I'd rather let Cecchini stay in AAA for a good couple months at least. From what I remember he is trying to regain his swing from a few years ago. I think it would be better for his overall development to do that in AAA. Let him become good instead of good enough and he might end up helping more down the road. Agree. If Cecchini can find the form that had him considered a top prospect, he could be a long-term answer at 3B, so I hope the Brewers think more of his development than of the MLB team's current needs. We have plenty of fringe guys we can use to see what they can do, but Cecchini is the only guy above A ball that has the potential to be an above average MLB 3B. My guess is that Hill has until mid-season to see what he can do. If he plays well, we should be able to trade him. If not, someone else should get the majority of starts at third. If Cecchini is still playing well at that time, he could be the guy.

Anyone know anything about Jon Perrin? This is a 22-year old 27th round draft pick (2015) who now has a career 71K:7BB ratio in his first 73.2 IP as a starter, leading to a 1.03 WHIP and 3.30 ERA in 17 games. Is this someone we should be keeping an eye on?

And that's what this positive post thread is all about :-) Honestly, I'm enjoying this season much more than the last few, and it's because I can finally understand the strategy and believe it will bear fruit. I take this year for what it is, a time to audition some players at the MLB level while the future Brewers get "seasoning" in the minors. Hopefully we will get some pleasant surprises like Gennett and Carter have been so far, and we will add a few more bricks to the foundation so we can build on it through the additions from the farm and free agency so in the not-too-distant future we will be back in the playoff mix, only this time with a mindset that the farm is our lifeblood, and not just a place from which to trade.