wallus

Send Barnes down tomorrow.

Probably safe to expect an off day for Cain tomorrow?

The offending players will be gone before Counsell.

Nice range Braun...

Look at the front row on TV, I'm surprised it isn't louder.

He wasn't a Brewer when he was 39....

We need someone that can go 6 or more innings right now, I don't know if Burnes is that guy.

I'm worried when he isn't destroying lefties. I know it's early, but he just isn't the guy he was several years ago. 2016 was his last flash of greatness, and we missed the window to unload him. If he is the best hitter on this team by a wide margin as some say, this offense is in serious trouble. I remember my buddy's dad telling stories of Hank Aaron at the tail end of his career. Basically he looked bad most of the time be would hit a few homers every once in a while.

I'm worried when he isn't destroying lefties.

Good thing those aren't the most important stats out there by any means. I will agree the defense has been putrid however.

Find more than one poster that was saying Yelich would play all 162 games.

How did you find that? They mentioned it on the broadcast.

These guys are major regression candidates due to age.

It’s too bad he can be their 4th or 5th best starter and it not really be a detriment to them Optimism thread...

Why would a guy with his numbers get released?

We are going against dogma or something...

Santana+Hader+Phillips>>>>> Shaw plus the rest I would certainly enjoy reading your reasoning for that other trade being better. Yes, I know we sent them Fiers as well but Gomez was the headliner.

What does trading Cain in 2019 (definitely not happening and it is crazy to even discuss it) have to do with the 2018 25 man roster?

For the Brewers, I wish they had ponied up and signed Darvish. For me personally, I wish I would have not wasted so much time on the HH garbage. That whole thing brought a lot of crap to this website.

A few shows I am watching: The Blacklist Lethal Weapon LA to Vegas

This is amazing. Yelich is a great Benny the Jet.

You're correct but it also calls in to question just how much he is going to play there. Not really, he isn't the manager.

Oh, I can guarantee that "these five" (Anderson, Davies, Chacin, Suter, Woodruff--or sub Miley in if you wish) will not "carry us into a wildcard spot." In fact, I'd even bet dollars to doughnuts that Stearns himself doesn't believe that, either. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole point of this rotation experiment. But wait, you might say, didn't Stearns express confidence in this current group of starters? Sure did. Or, didn't Attanasio say late in the offseason that money was available to add a new piece? Yep (and more on that in a minute). Others have noted this already, so I won't belabor the point too much, but our Brewers, as an organization, cannot get trapped into two fallacious modes of thought: 1) we must go tit for tat with the big-spending organizations on every single acquisition and 2) the way teams have been constructed in the past is the way they must always be constructed in saecula saeculorum and is The Only Right Way to Build a Champion ©. Many of the problems with this should be obvious, but in short: 1) We do not have the money to make the kind of mistakes the Cubs and Yankees can make and still field an above-average ball club. Guaranteed contracts and the difficulty we will always seem to have in luring people to spend much of their lives in Milwaukee mean we need to make all our dollars count as much as we can. Now, granted, I love Milwaukee as a town, although I've never really lived there, and sure, some people like Lorenzo Cain seem to like it a lot, too, but he seems more of an exception, not the rule. So we have to play a slightly different game. But, consider, the big-ticket FA route is still risky: if Darvish goes down, or Lester and Hendricks regress, all of which are serious possibilities, and the Cubs are in trouble, even if their offensive struggles last year were an aberration and the bullpen is improved (which, I will note, are still ifs and will have to be proven on the field this year). 2) Roster construction and deployment of pitching is changing. Relief aces are becoming more valuable all the time. In a sort of renaissance of the old fireman principle, people like Andrew Miller and his imitations (Josh Hader, anyone?) are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how teams are rethinking what it takes to build a successful pitching staff. It is about survival as much as it is about anything else. Your biggest threat to lose a game might not be in the 5/6 innings your starter happens to pitch, and it might not be in the 9th inning, either. If it comes after your starter leaves with two on and one out in the 5th inning, having multiple solid options to come into the game and take care of that situation is invaluable. Maybe that is a Hader who can go two and a third wipeout innings against the top-7 hitters of a squad like Chicago or New York. Maybe its a swingman like Guerra who can get you through an otherwise nightmare game without taxing the bullpen. And, in the biggest rethink of all, teams seem to be finally appreciating the fact that "those five" guys you start the season with are not the only ones you will ever hand the ball to at the start of ballgames, and those fill-in starts still count, too. A few years ago, Fangraphs (https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/so-how-many-starters-does-a-team-need-then/) estimated that on average, baseball teams have a 65% chance of two of their "preferred" starters will be hurt at the same time, and 32% chance of it happening to three of those starters at the same time. Most crucially, if a baseball team sees only average rates of attrition (6 DL stints for their starting staff throughout the year, totaling as many as 360 days), then that team will have it's preferred starters together for only 22% of the season. Even excluding year-long DL stints, that could still account for 32 starts made by starters 6-??. I don't have to tell you in a two-team wildcard scenario, those 32 games could more than make or break reaching the play-in game, or even winning a division. So how do the Brewers look on that front? Baseball Prospectus Milwaukee (http://milwaukee.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2018/03/12/the-rotation-is-good/) has a good rundown, but TL;DR--"While the Brewers’ overall rotation may have an 'average' outlook, once replacement rotations begin to appear in the 2018 MLB, the Milwaukee replacements will have a runs prevented advantage of at least 30 runs (assessed against other teams’ replacements)." That means our rotation is in position to save 30 runs above average just because of our fill-in starters when compared to the fill-in starters of most other clubs. Teams like the Cubs, Dodgers, National, and Yankees have invested a lot of resources in fielding great "top of the rotation" talent, and, sure, when all those pitchers take the field, advantage those teams. But they won't all take the field every 5th day, what's more, the Brewers know this, and have prepared enough above-average replacements to claw back the difference once attrition rears its ugly head. That is the plan for competing with the big wallets. Finally, however, what about Attanasio's quote mentioned above? Maybe he was feeling good and was only telling an energetic crowd what they wanted to hear. Cynics might say its all a ploy by hucksters and cheapskates to sell more tickets and improve the bottom line without ever spending enough to field a real winner. That is possible, I suppose. Or, perhaps Attanasio and Stearns know something else: while what we might call the "defend against attrition" strategy is a great way to win games over a long season, it can all quickly go for nothing in a 5 or 7-game series during the playoffs. You don't have time to just play the averages when there might be no tomorrow. That is when you really need your aces. And having the prospect capital and financial wiggle room to go get a guy like that (and whatever Cobb is, I feel pretty confident in saying he isn't "TOR") when the season is nearing its second half is how you put an otherwise good team over the top for a championship run. That is how the Astros did it last year, and not trading for an Archer or signing a Cobb/Lynn/Darvish/Arrieta now means we can still do that when we absolutely need to and know our time is at hand. So I say, forget about Cobb (although I wish him well), and let's realize we're looking at the bleeding edge of how to make a small-market club competitive. I don't have a crystal ball, so maybe this all doesn't work. Round balls and round bats lead to some pretty random results, and all the planning in the world won't guarantee you a championship sometimes. But I am confident in saying that Stearns and Attanasio really do want to build a winner, and really do think this roster as constructed is the best way available to them to do it. I can't wait to see what happens. I got more out of this post than all of the other ones in this thread combined. Thank you!

1. Burnes 2. Huira 3. Woodruff 4. Peralta 5. Lutz 6. Ortiz 7. T. Williams 8. Phillips 9. Grisham 10. Carmona 11. Nottingham 12. Ponce 13. Erceg 14. Houser 15. Feliciano 16. Dubon 17. Perrin 18. Gatewood 19. Garcia 20. Herrera 21. Kirby 22. Diplan 23. Supak 24. Derby 25. Ray