Brock Beauchamp

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.

I had to get my kids out the door this morning, really bummed I missed that game, it looked awesome.

Their hat is pretty good, I'm just generally not a fan of slanted fonts. But to each their own, it's certainly a solid design.

To be fair though, 75% of the WBC hats are awful. The exceptions are the cleanest hats: Israel, China, Panama, the Dominican.

Also, holy. moly are the Canadian hats terrible. The conversation: Person A: We have one of the most iconic flags in the world, should we just put a red maple leaf over a red background on our WBC hats? Person B: I like that but what if we took the maple leaf and then made it way worse?

I had to turn this game off in the second inning. Watching that 19 year old A baller brought nearly to tears after getting rocked by a Murderer's Row was not "fun baseball". And then Canada brought in another A-baller to replace him... What does the top of the USA lineup have between them, something like five MVP awards? That's not entertainment, it's just painful.

I didn’t say most, I said many. More to your point, I think it’s rather undeniable that US players prioritize the WBC less than players from other countries.

I agree that they have good chemistry on that show, I just find myself rolling my eyes at DeRosa's baseball takes pretty regularly.

Is he, though?

Never mind that we're not talking about robots here. Maybe Carroll just likes Arizona and knowingly "sacrificed" many millions of dollars to stay a place he likes and feels comfortable.

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 It's been one year, let's take a look at all of your contributions to the site. 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.

It's a problem on most staffs but particularly bad for the US team. Which makes sense given that many of the best US pitchers are older (Verlander, Scherzer) or injury prone (deGrom). The staff would have looked quite a bit different had even Kershaw been allowed to pitch (I believe he couldn't get insured and had to withdraw for that reason).

Isn’t he still hitting FA around age 29? If he’s good, he’ll still be in for a massive payday.

Without a doubt. I only brought up Arraez’s age to remind people how young he still is. I don’t even think he has turned 26 yet.

I mean any prospect has questions. Frelick as a .320 hitter is wildly different than Frelick as a .280 hitter. Both are entirely possible and competent at the MLB level but one is drastically more valuable. The same applies to 10-15 homers versus 15-20 homers. And mix and match those attributes together and the win variance becomes quite large. That’s my only point, really. Frelick has less margin of error than other prospects who display more power at his age. Living and dying by batting average is a tough road to travel in modern baseball. But from a spectator standpoint, I WANT to see Frelick not only succeed but thrive because that profile of hitter is badly needed in today’s game and is part of the reason the modern game is less entertaining.

There's a difference between projecting a 21 year old through age 34 and projecting a 28 year old through age 34, which is the difference. Burnes, Adames, and Woodruff have extended track records that increase their likelihood of being a competent MLB player at age 33. The same cannot be said for Jackson Chourio.

My point is that it's a huge assumption to believe Frelick will be as good as Arraez against MLB pitching. Frelick will certainly bring more defensive value, raising his floor, but given his (current) lack of power, he's almost entirely relying on his hit tool and discipline. And if his hit tool can't keep up with MLB pitching, throw that discipline out the window because it won't matter, pitchers will pound the zone because he won't be able to do anything against it. Arraez was almost a year younger than Frelick is today and he was already succeeding against MLB pitching. Frelick has a ways to go to show he can hit MLB pitching, much less hit like Arraez. Which is why I almost never assume a prospect will succeed in MLB until they do so. I'm cheering for Frelick just like everybody else but I'm skeptical someone with that toolset will be even average until they show competency against MLB pitching. (I was equally skeptical of Arraez in 2019, FTR)

I'm not bashing Frelick or anything but it feels like you're wish-casting on him a bit. Could he develop power? Sure. But he's also 22 years old, which is young but it's "good prospect young" not "historically young". Every Brewers fan should be wildly thrilled if Sal Frelick ends up being as valuable as Luis Arraez, never mind more valuable than Arraez. It's possible Frelick ends up being a perpetual 5 win player but realize that's at least a 95th percentile outcome for him. What's far more likely - a 50th percentile outcome - is that he's a decent starter for a few years and sticks around MLB in a bench capacity for several years afterward. Never treat a prospect as a sure thing unless they're so absurdly young and absurdly good that them becoming a star seems inevitable.

Oh yeah, getting to or a little past 30 is fine, I'm just not shocked the Diamondbacks didn't do that, nor do I really think it's a mistake. I could make an argument in either direction but would have a hard time defending signing a guy past age 32 or so.

Frelick's lack of power lowers his potential earnings in modern baseball, and by quite a bit. Batting average isn't the huge draw it was in the past. Luis Arraez, the 2022 AL batting champion with elite plate discipline but little power, was worth roughly two wins last season on offense. Chourio is the type of guy that could price himself out of Milwaukee in a hurry. Sal Frelick is not.

While it's nice from a fan perspective to lock up a player for 15 years, there are many reasons why teams are hesitant to do so and would prefer to lock up a young player through age 30-ish, which is what the Diamondbacks did here.

I don't think Frelick is the kind of prospect that prices himself out of anyone's range. I mean, what's his reasonable ceiling? Luis Arraez with better defensive value? That's not an expensive player to retain should a team wish to do so.