Brock Beauchamp

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.

Throw the Pirates in there too, mainly due to Nutting. Nothing against the players.

Been watching the A's/Cubs series. Wow, the A's are horrible. A complete joke of a team and stadium.

I know everyone has PTSD over the Cardinals but that pitching staff is not good, I'm still confused why some projection systems had them ranked so highly overall.

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.

Are you speaking about the MiLB forum being too full of articles? Because I kinda forget to clean that forum up... pretty much every day. If that's what you're talking about, I'll try to be better about remembering to clean up that forum every morning.

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).

Super hard sell.

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.

Welcome to Brewer Fanatic, we're looking forward to seeing your Mudcat commentary this season!

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.

Welcome to Brewer Fanatic!

MiLB season is BACK!

must resist... but cannot... NICE