And That

If he's remaining with the organization regardless of whether he makes the 25-man or not, it doesn't make sense to *not* bring him if there's a more than remote chance he'll be on the 25-man roster. If you send him back to AZ, there's a chance he couldn't get back in time.

Yes.

Top 100: [pre]1. Keston Hiura 2. Corbin Burnes 3. Brett Phillips 4. Brandon Woodruff 5. Lucas Erceg 6. Trent Grisham 7. Freddy Peralta 8. Mauricio Dubon 9. Tristen Lutz 10. Troy Stokes 11. Corey Ray 12. Jake Gatewood 13. Jean Carmona 14. Luis Ortiz 15. Jacob Nottingham 16. Jon Perrin 17. Gabriel Garcia 18. Aaron Familia 19. Tom Jankins 20. KJ Harrison 21. Cody Ponce 22. Taylor Williams 23. Bubba Derby 24. Phil Bickford 25. Adrian Houser 26. Max McDowell 27. Nate Orf 28. Joaquin De La Cruz 29. Mario Feliciano 30. Carlos Rodriguez 31. Nate Kirby 32. Zack Brown 33. Michele Vassalotti 34. Aaron Wilkerson 35. Cody Beckman 36. Jorge Lopez 37. Caden Lemons 38. Zach Clark 39. Tyrone Taylor 40. Josh Pennington 41. Jose Sibrian 42. Max Lazar 43. Braden Webb 44. Dallas Carroll 45. Drake Owenby 46. Kodi Medeiros 47. Nate Griep 48. Larry Ernesto 49. Ernesto Martinez 50. Kyle Wren 51. Marcos Diplan 52. Yeison Coca 53. Pablo Abreu 54. Nick Egnatuk 55. Tucker Neuhaus 56. Blake Allemand 57. Trey Supak 58. Tyler Webb 59. Wendell Rijo 60. Johnny Davis 61. Wes Wilson 62. Tristan Archer 63. Cooper Hummel 64. Gabe Friese 65. Brad Kuntz 66. Rob Henry 67. Nick Ramirez 68. Quintin Torres-Costa 69. Karlos Morales 70. Carlos Herrera 71. Ronnie Gideon 72. Jesus Lujano 73. Francis Florentino 74. Devin Williams 75. Antonio Pineiro 76. Wuilder Rodriguez 77. Bryan Torres 78. Clint Coulter 79. Luis Avalo 80. Brendan Murphy 81. Pat McInerney 82. Jayson Rose 83. Payton Henry 84. Jorge Ortega 85. Devin Hairston 86. Brandon Presley 87. Bowden Francis 88. Nelson Hernandez 89. Freisis Adames 90. Josh Uhen 91. Nic Pierre 92. Jon Olczak 93. Blake Lillis 94. Demi Orimoloye 95. Austin Rubick 96. Nash Walters 97. Daniel Missaki 98. Gilbert Lara 99. Javier Betancourt 100. Daniel Brown[/pre]

Haven't looked at the player index page recently but there are currently 56 players officially rostered either with the DSL or DSL2 (co-op) club. Of those 56, one is injured and will miss most to all of the 2018 season (Luis Cordero). Other players may have undisclosed injuries. There are 6-10 players that have at least a decent shot at moving stateside summer of this season. They include Freisis Adames, Luis Avila, Bryan Connell, Johan Dominguez, Francis Florentino, Yorki Franco, Jose Parra, Maiker Pinto, Edwin Sano, and Bryan Torres. There will also be some releases. So it seems like there are a lot of players, but really there's not a huge roster crunch at the moment, assuming the second DSL club remains in play.

I currently count 50 players projected to start the season in the DSL. That's probably enough for two full clubs with another 5-10 tryout signings prior to the start of the DSL season. It's also not too many to not have another shared club in 2018. They could go either way with it.

It's the ultimate transaction rumor.

From the Minor League Spring Training thread, pitching coach Steve Cline notes that the Rattlers are looking to break camp with 2 sets of tandem starters and 3 standalone starters, which is a big change from years past. My guess would be Webb/Bettinger/Herrera for the standalone guys, but we'll see. Joaquin De La Cruz has pitched a lot for the Rattlers as well, and Bettinger might go straight to Carolina.

Garrett Richards is one of the most talented pitchers in the game, just can't stay healthy. I guess the catch-22 is that if he's great, Brewers might not be able to afford him. If he's injured a lot again this year, there's possibly too much risk especially on the wrong side of 30.

Medeiros' slider shape and command got noticeably better in the second half last year, and the pitch was dominant at times. I think it's easy to forget that Kodi is still just 21 years old, and will be in AA to begin the year. If anyone's given up on him, I would urge them to reconsider.

I think it's more than plausible. Arnold literally ran the Rays' biomechanics unit from 2009 onwards. If anyone outside of the Rays' organization has insights into Cobb, it's Arnold. If the Brewers' offer was indeed for one year, I think it speaks pretty loudly of how they thought Cobb was going to hold up over the long haul.

Houser and Medeiros will indeed by piggybacking in Biloxi. Similar to what Williams and Perrin did last year, and it worked out well for both of them.

No. He'd have to be added to the 40-man roster first. 60-day DL is for major league deals.

For now, #Brewers are calling Boone Logan's injury a triceps strain. But Stearns said there is some concern it is in area of lat tear last season. Will have more tests to get better handle on it. Is a DL situation in any event.

Options for the Brewers and Wade Miley: 1. Put him on the roster and big league DL. (Not happening.) 2. Pay him a $100K retention bonus on Saturday and rehab him in the Minors. 3. Release him with the intention of re-signing him to a Minors deal after Saturday. 4. Release him.

A quick survey of groin injuries that are more than extremely mild in severity seems to indicate at least a 6-8 recovery period. Tyler Beede was shut down for the remainder of last season after suffering a groin strain in mid-July.

Harber has an extremely high spin rate curveball that makes him a relief prospect almost all by itself. Whether or not he can figure out the command/control piece and find a changeup will dictate if he sticks as a starter. He was one of my favorite pitchers going into last season, but like you said had a control meltdown. I only saw him pitch a few times so I don't have any insight as to why the control problems developed so substantially.

I like the old adage that in general, you're going to win about 1/3 of your games and lose about 1/3 of your games - it's the other 1/3 that matters. If you transpose that over to starting pitching, one could argue (which I'm not necessarily doing), that the middle 1/3 of your starter's innings are the ones that matter the most. I do think it makes some sense. But also an oversimplification.

Yep - I was just referring to BPro in my post. B-R gave him a negative in 2016, too, and Fangraphs gave him a -0.1 back in 2011. If you take the average of all three WARs for each year, Miley has a very small -0.0 WAR in 2011, but he's positive every other year.

Right, I agree that FIP isn't terribly useful but DRA was designed to replace FIP, not be the new FIP. From my understanding DRA is also more useful for its descriptive value as opposed to its predictive value.

You'd have to dig through the BPro site for the math, but their WAR is based of their DRA calculation, which is generally defined thusly: Deserved Run Average (DRA) uses a collection of mixed models to tease out the most likely contributions of pitchers to the run-scoring that occurs around them. Unlike other component metrics, DRA considers (and adjusts) home runs and balls in play, and achieves significant improved reliability over the raw versions of those and other statistics. DRA has equal descriptive power to Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), and offers much improved reliability and run prediction. DRA is park, platoon, framing, and opponent-adjusted, and is scaled to follow the distribution of RA9. From 2008-onward, it includes specific characteristics of the subject pitch, as tracked by PitchInfo. It also includes the pitcher's command runs (from CSAA), basestealing runs (SRAA and TRAA), and errant runs (EPAA).

At least by BPro's formula, Miley has never not had a positive WAR outside of a 0.0 in 40 innings back in 2011.

I made the point with Odorizzi, and I'll make the point with Cobb as well. With Matt Arnold as the Brewers' AGM, the Brewers should have insights into Rays' pitching that other teams do not. Whether they are valid insights I guess depends on what you think of Matt Arnold, but that the Brewers did not give a pittance for Odorizzi or give Cobb $50 million tells me that at a high level the Brewers just weren't sold on either. For whatever reason. Could be something to do with the fact that Arnold ran the Rays' biomechanical/human movement analysis team from 2009 until he joined the Brewers and surely would know details on both of those guys that he could have passed on to the Brewers' medical team. Pitching coach Derek Johnson is also a biomechanical guy, so between he and Arnold perhaps the decision was to pass on both. We'll never know. Going in to the offseason, I was fully expecting the Brewers to add at least one starting pitcher. They didn't, and I will admit to being a little disappointed by it. However, not adding a starting pitcher now does not mean the Brewers' pitching is awful or uncompetitive with other playoff-caliber teams, and there will be multiple opportunities to add more pitching through the end of July. It's also important to remember that the Brewers' window for contention looks to stretch over the next several years, and money/prospect capital they spend now will not be available later. Maybe they have a plan to go all-in on Keuchel next offseason and wouldn't be able to get him if they spent money now. Again, I'm disappointed the Brewers weren't able to add a pitcher now, but I am willing to keep an open mind as to why, and to the fact that it might be part of a bigger plan. Or maybe they're just cheap knobs lining Attanasio's pockets and we're all suckers. We'll find out.

Clint Terry was released last year at some point.

I don't think so?

It's pretty safe to say that the Brewers know lots of things beyond publically available information.