Brock Beauchamp

They’re seriously considering SLC as an expansion team so that’s not really true. If anything, more high elevation teams existing is good for the sport, it allows for more exploration of the effects and how to manage it.

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The biggest problem with Mexico City is and will always be travel distance. Even Los Angeles is a significant flight away. The only city within what I'd frame as a reasonable distance is Houston. No city is ten hours away from Mexico City but even their division rivals would face significant flights and the burden on the Mexico City players would be brutal over 162. Attendance and TV rights would be lower revenue per person but Mexico has 120,000,000 people. The team would capture all of that. It's nearly quadruple the population of Canada. The phrase of the day is "make it up in volume" when it comes to a Mexican MLB team. And given the resounding success of Mexico in the WBC and the fact Mexico already has a strong baseball following, it's a market just waiting to be tapped by MLB. But then there's the travel issue.

And we need to get over the American interpretation that Mexico is a Mad Max hellscape. It's wrong that Europeans think that about America and wrong that America thinks that about Latin America. Are there dangerous parts of Mexico? Of course. But there are also loads of really nice parts with quite a bit of wealth.

I wonder how close MLB is to being at the end of the leash of extorting existing cities for stadium deals. Most of the stadiums are 25 years old or less and I think there's going to be increasing hostility toward post-Camden teams asking for new stadiums. And I suspect teams like the Jays will just get new stadiums when they're ready to do so, it's not as if MLB is going to take a team out of Toronto. Most of the truly old stadiums are local treasures: Wrigley, Fenway, Dodger Stadium... maybe the Angels ask for a new stadium relatively soon but locals seem to really like that place, even though I despise it (the Angels were my local team for eight years or so). I suspect we'll start seeing a lot more requests for assistance with refurbishment and a lot fewer requests for new stadiums. I still can't believe Atlanta allowed the Braves to pull the crap they did.

CHS Field where the Saints play didn't meet the qualifications for a AAA stadium. It was pretty new but needed more seating, I believe. That didn't seem to be a problem, as the Twins and Saints agreed to expand the stadium but I'm pretty sure for the first year or two, it technically didn't meet the standards of a AAA stadium. The Brewers could easily do the same thing in Biloxi.

No, the Braves would have changed their name with the move to Milwaukee, and those records would stay with Milwaukee. Maybe the Brewers name would have come back 15-20 years earlier had that been the case.

Agreed. Team history should be tied to the city, not the team.

Ugh. The thought of the Brewers leaving Milwaukee makes me nauseous. I think it’s really unlikely but definitely possible. We almost lost the Twins a few times in the late 90s and then the contraction fiasco happened. It was a hard time to be a baseball fan.

I actually agree with a lot of this, but direct it solely at ownership of the team. I understand that teams will sometimes move and that sucks. Maybe baseball should require an ownership change before moving a team. That would allow local people to try to save the team and if they can’t do it, the team is allowed a completely fresh start somewhere else with new ownership in place.

It's possible but man, I struggle to see that being the case for baseball. Hockey, basketball, especially football, yes... but there just isn't anything special about any single baseball game most of the time. Will some tourists check it out? Sure, but having spent a lot of time in Vegas, I'm skeptical it will happen in the numbers needed to succeed. Honestly though, I hope I'm wrong. I hope the franchise revitalizes in Vegas.

Yeah, but the Twin Cities are way bigger than Las Vegas, 3.7m to 2.2m population. This choice seems... weird.

Awesome piece. Getting away from Wong turned out to be the right decision in the early going.

Personally, I'd like to know more about some of the starting pitchers in the lower minors. I haven't been able to follow them as closely as I'd like to.

Well, we've been doing this for 13 months now! That seems impossible but it's true. As always, I try to be as transparent as possible so let's look at some of the numbers. Overall, we're doing pretty great. We're still a fraction of the size of Twins Daily but given how long that site has been around and how it was formed, it would have been pure insanity to expect competition on that level. Year over year, we've seen a 92% increase in users visiting the site... that's great, but that's not really the entire goal. The goal is to bring this community back to its heyday of several years ago. And I'm happy to report that we're making significant strides in that regard, though the road is long and we have more work to do. The best (ie. easiest) way to bring in new users is search engine optimization. If we can place highly on various Google searches, it's essentially "free users"! Most of those users view one or two pages and leave. That's okay. A few create accounts. That's great! A few of those post a comment. That's the goal! So you need a really big funnel working for a really long time to create inertia. We're moving in that direction, thankfully. Organic search results (fancy for "people who clicked from Google/Bing to the site) is up 130% year over year. Another facet of a big switch-over like this is retaining the users we have, which has mostly been the case as well. That is monitored by direct traffic (ie. people who just come directly to the site). Year over year, that's up 73%. But how does that compare to previous years? Let's take a look at the 30 day period of March 19 through April 17. Obviously, there's a ton of noise here because, as we all know, 2020 was the COVID year. 2022 was the lockout year, which hampered traffic a little but mostly from January through March. User Direct Visits 3/19-4/17 2023: 10,093 2022: 5,831 2021: 5,479 2020: 3,511 (COVID) 2019: 16,117 (wow!) 2018: 8,058 2017: 6,241 As you can see, the brass ring is the 2019 season when everybody was pumped about the Brewers. And we're building our way back to that, one user at a time. I think we'll get there in time. As always, thank you all so much for sticking with us through the first year and helping us sort out the bugs. And, as always, my door is always open. If you see something that bothers you, please speak up and let me know about it, either here in the comments or via private message. Go Crew!

I had no idea Tommy Milone was still in the league.

I’ve only been there 10-ish times and usually after my friends bought seats, unfortunately. I moved to LA just before it was built so basically told my friends “buy tickets, let’s go to a game!” I don’t even think I’ve seen a day game at Petco for that reason. As far as bars and eating, it’s the gaslamp. Bars and eateries change as quickly as the seasons, just pick a spot and sit down.

First, welcome to the forum! Second, Kwan has been bandied as a comp to Frelick, though I think we can all agree that's an upper-end comp.

Love Petco. I feel it's akin to Target Field in a lot of ways. A decent - not great - stadium that has the best location possible (even if how they leveled that arts district to build it was... not great, to say the least).

How did I not realize this until right now? I knew they hit a lot of homers but I never would have guessed third in baseball. As always, great analysis and breakdowns on those swings, Matt.

Wonder how much it would cost for us to buy scoreboard space with a "Negative Nelly in 203" segment the moment the starter is pulled from the game.

With Urias going down for awhile, getting 2017-2020 Anderson is a huge deal for the Brewers early in the season.

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MiLB season is BACK!