Brock Beauchamp

I just looked up Fubo and they carry Bally. Which is where I'll be headed around Opening Day because DirecTV Stream is such an awful experience that I have to believe Fubo will be better. https://www.fubo.tv/welcome/channels

It won’t really work that way, though. Contraction simply eliminates a bunch of baseball money. National revenue would be distributed to a smaller pool but national revenue would also decrease. It’d probably be a net gain for each remaining team but not enough to move the needle.

It may not be enough but it'd create quite a bit more parity. I'm dropping off the top and bottom two teams in this post to prevent outliers from skewing how this would impact the majority of teams. If you remove the top two and bottom two teams from MLB attendance in 2022, the gap between #3 and #28 is about 2,000,000 paid fans. If you figure each fan is worth about $30 to the team, that's a $60,000,000 gap in revenue. If you do the same for television contracts, the gap between #3 and #28 is about $90,000,000. The median attendance was about 2,300,000 fans in 2022, or about 190% that of the #28 team. The median television contract was about $60,000,000, or about 215% that of the #28 team. It won't be killing every problem with a single solution but it increases parity while also promoting better on-field product and fan engagement. The Brewers are the #28 team in local TV revenue, for the record.

What Braden is doing with this series is exactly what we wanted from this user blog section: a place for new writers to find their voices, try their hand at writing, and practice the craft. I hope to see more people try it in the coming season!

Love this series! The only thing I knew about Adams is that he was drafted in the later rounds, he dropped off my radar after that point. It will be interesting to see if his size becomes a problem at third as he matures. From a writing perspective, useful information for this piece would have been *how* the Brewers lured him away from college; he received nearly $300,000 in signing money despite being a 12th rounder.

The fix to this is to create a revenue sharing system that benefits or remains revenue neutral for 24 teams. Then the six owners of the largest revenue teams can't prevent it.

Right now, home teams share gate revenue with their opponent. Get rid of that. 100% of gate goes to the home team. In place of this, share 50% of home team television revenue with the opponent. Teams like the Brewers - who have historically done pretty well with attendance - benefit from the local outreach efforts they make with fans. Inversely, it punishes the A's and Rays of the world for offering home field experiences more akin to a trashfire than a premier sporting event. It also directly - and severely - punishes teams for completely tanking and driving fans away from the ballpark. If MLB owners presented a salary floor of $140m and fix it to league revenue, I suspect players come around pretty quickly to a salary cap. Players bluster about being against a salary cap but I suspect that's primarily because the owners' offers of a floor have been quite pathetic to this point. Make a real offer of a floor that guarantees players a portion of revenue and suddenly a cap isn't out of the question. In fact, it makes sense for the players.

It's been one year, let's take a look at all of your contributions to the site. Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-USA TODAY Sports How has it been an entire year already? One year ago today, BrewerFan.net became Brewer Fanatic and being immersed in this awesome community has been a delight for me personally. Seeing new users register and contribute to the site while so many of our legacy users have stepped up and contributed in new and exciting ways has taken the site to another level over the past 365 days. Let's take a look at the numbers! In our inaugural year we saw 210,228 users visit the site at least once. That's a huge increase from the previous year of BrewerFan when 94,195 users visited the forums. We have to go all the way back to the same period of 2019-2020 - when the Brewer fans were excited about the future, fresh off the Yelich extension and back-to-back postseason appearances - to come close to that number. During that period of time, 149,463 users visited BrewerFan. By the way, if you want Brewers updates delivered to your inbox every day, consider signing up for our email list! It's one of the easiest and most effective ways to help the site and you get the reward of the news coming to you instead of you having to go find it. In our first year of operation, we posted 765 front page news stories while 343 people registered new accounts on the site. In the forums, you posted 2,036 topics and posted 68,615 comments while 462 unique people contributed to the site by commenting. All in all, you viewed 3,432,690 pages on this website. I cannot thank all of you enough for the advice, assistance, and criticism you've brought during this transitional year. I've never attempted to mold an existing community into a new, more comprehensive site structure and I'm the first to admit there were bumps along the way but your patience and legacy knowledge of this community has inspired me to get up and keep plugging away at this project every single day. I know I say this a lot but this site couldn't exist without each and every one of you making it what it has been, is today, and will become tomorrow. As we approach Opening Day, I couldn't be more excited about this team and this awesome site that covers it daily. Now let's get through the rest of Spring Training and GO CREW! View full article

I think there's a good chance that after 2023, Yelich moves to at least part-time DH. I think he'll still get reps in the outfield but with other, better options coming through the minors this season (hopefully), there won't be many reasons to keep putting him in the field every day.

I completely missed that Rodriguez was on the mound for Nicaragua (man, it's hard to keep track of everything in the WBC). Great write-up!

I’ve never been particularly high on Taylor and was shocked by his defensive play last season. That *completely* changes his profile and gives him a floor that virtually guarantees him to stick in MLB for at least a few seasons.

One thing I would have liked to read in this piece is what to expect from Lara in 2023. Will he move to rookie ball to open the season?

I suspect Varland has the inside track, given his Rule 5 pickup status. The Brewers will give him every opportunity to make their draft selection worthwhile.

I'm kinda behind the curve on Areinamo so thanks for the informative write-up!

I used to follow the Angels extensively, as I lived in Long Beach for eight years and worked right next to the stadium during the 2002 run (and worked in Anaheim for 4-5 years). I borderline loathe the franchise at this point because of how much they've deprived Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani from October baseball.

Your Angels write-up is perfect.

Hahahah, this was a really fun read @sveumrules. Well done!

I don't see that outfield alignment working at all, especially the way the Red Sox deployed it. It's really risky to move your left fielder to center and essentially immobilize your center fielder in short right field. If you keep the CF in place, do you want your left fielder sprinting back and forth to short RF on a regular basis? Looking at Tellez's batting ball graph, I hope teams try to deploy that alignment against Rowdy because those balls to left field suddenly become doubles. Which is why teams won't do it. You're stopping several low-impact singles and replacing them with the occasional extra-base hit that could completely turn the tide of a game. I was skeptical when MLB didn't impose any kind of OF shift restrictions but after seeing it play out, I like this balance. They can still shift you but now it's a damned risky proposition for the pitcher and defense. And when something is that risky, it will encourage hitters to start exploring how to exploit that gap in coverage because the reward will be much better than a station-to-station single.

I've been kinda down on Mitchell, maybe unfairly. First, his defense gives him a high floor and it's easy to see him becoming, at worst, a fourth/fifth outfielder that can play center very well. That's valuable in itself. Second, I was recently listening to MKE Tailgate's minor league report and the guest mentioned that Mitchell's swing decision peripherals aren't aligned with his results (ie. he looks worse than he has been). He's not chasing a ridiculous number of pitches and he's not missing a ton of pitches, the sequencing is just killing him. I haven't had a chance to dig into this yet but plan to do so.

Considering what the Brewers gave up for Contreras, if they can improve his framing a bit and get anything over a 110 wRC+ for several years, that's a big win for them. It turns catcher from a problematic roster spot to a well above average roster spot.

I buy cheap tickets so that I don’t care if my kids force me to leave early but it’ll be nice to leave in the seventh or eighth instead of the fifth or sixth.

I find it interesting that Arnold seems very much in charge of the organization's baseball operations but he's still the general manager and not POBO. I suspect this will get sorted out at some point but honestly, I thought it'd already be sorted by now. It's bloody hard to run an MLB organization and losing one executive official (POBO and GM versus only a GM right now) seems like it'd be a strain on an organization over the long term.

I used Burnes in BTV because I think their value for Woodruff is pretty broken. It's fair value based on BTV but I just don't see the Twins doing this for logistical reasons. First, they'd lose Miranda - a staple of the lineup going forward - and I'm not sure they're ready to trade Lee. Which is a good illustration of how difficult it is to make a trade in MLB. Both teams could improve in the short-term (Twins) and mid-term (Brewers) but I don't see either team being willing to make the trade for personnel reasons. Woodruff makes the Twins better but not a lot better. The floor they'd be replacing with Woodruff might already be something around a 1.5-2 WAR starter.

I agree that I'd target Woodruff first and foremost but ultimately, it comes down to dollars and performance. While slightly favoring a Woody extension, I'd ultimately extend the player who is willing to sign for the dollars and years that most closely align with their projected performance.