istanbultaye

To be fair, even the Brewers can absorb one bad contract as long as it isn't egregious. Suppan was already in the tank when they made their first playoff run in '08, and his salary didn't keep the Brewers from adding more free agents in the following years. Randy Wolf, Lohse, Garza all at least provided some amount of value in a couple years of their contracts as well, so while they weren't outstanding, none of those really crippled the franchise long term. Now, if they had pulled a Pujols type deal with Prince (as much as I am a fan of Prince in his playing days), that would have crippled them for sure. That said, expecting a small market team to fork out money a la old school Yankees payrolls, or to even be at the Luxury tax is pretty silly for anyone to expect.

A rotation of Chacin-Woodruff-Peralta-Burnes and (cross your fingers, pray to God, give Jobu some rum) healthy Nelson is sexy. With Anderson and Davies waiting in the wings in the pen with Knebel, Hader, Jeffress, Claudio and Guerra...MAN. Sign Moustakas and lengthen the lineup. I think Anderson or Davies would take Peralta's spot barring absurdly good/bad spring training results, due to veteran grit, service time, roster flexibility, and Peralta's overall inconsistency last year. I don't think it would hurt Peralta any to be in the minors again to work on his control a little more either.

If he could really be had at those numbers, I'd be on board, but it does seem a little low for what it would likely take to actually do it. Even at that price, I lean towards not wanting to lock in 5 years on a reliever, but his track record has been good enough that I wouldn't think it was a drastic mistake. Assuming it would take even more money to lock in 5 years on him, it would take it from being borderline acceptable to tie up payroll that long for a reliever to being a pass in my book. I just think that for the Brewers to maintain flexibility for the future, it's against their best interests to lock in contracts for such a long term. My loose guidelines for max length of contracts would probably be something like 3 years RP, 4 years SP, 5 years position player, if the players have the track record to back up a long term deal.

I would like to see less of the "well, it's late in the game, and it's a close play that didn't go our way, so we might as well give it a shot" challenges that seemed to be prevalent by the Brewers. If there's only 34 challenges in an entire season, it's not adding that much of a delay to the games really, but it's still a little annoying when it comes up.

I would be interested to see a breakdown of pitcher usage stats per team. Average # of pitchers per game, # of appearances greater, equal or lesser than 1 inning, etc. Though the Brewers did tap into their bullpen earlier than most teams, most of their relievers would go more than an inning if they didn't run into trouble.

Somebody stamp all those dollar bills with "Where's George" so we can figure out what the Brewers spend that specific money on!

What's in a name? A ballpark by any other name will still smell like beer.

Those guys were pre-qualifying offer system. Maybe it was someone that they offered arbitration to hoping to get draft pick compensation when someone else signed him, but he ended up accepting arbitration? The details are fuzzy in my memory and don't recall what player it was either.

Didn't the Brewers have a Qualifying Offer backfire on them early on after the QO change happened?

I don't have exact numbers or anything, but I remember the discussion about the TV deal back when they signed the current one was much in the same vein as the current discussion: "Our current deal is so bad, but when we get a new one it will be great!". While true to an extent, even if the Brewers see a nice increase which might bump them up in the rankings in the short term, in the long term, we know other teams will be renewing their TV deals and getting higher amounts as well. So, in relative terms, just because they see an increase in the new TV deal does not necessarily mean that they will make a big gain from it relative to the rest of the league.

My understanding is that the lower minors (Rookie - A ball) will fill out rosters with some undrafted free agents. But, we rarely hear about them since they would get very little playing time and chances of moving up the ladder are extremely low. https://www.mlb.com/cut4/best-undrafted-players-in-mlb-history/c-278967168

That's a pretty cool stat. But I would think there are a lot of players who never popped out to the pitcher in their career as pitchers generally don't catch fly balls. The same is a little bit true with first basemen as unless they don't have to move to catch it, the 2B is probably going to catch a fly ball in that area. 1b usually are the ones getting the foul popups on that side, unless they are pretty deep down the line.

If he can't throw strikes consistently when he has a straight fastball, I can't imagine adding more movement is really the solution to his problems... but then again, I'm not a pitching coach!

I think it's a little too soon to call Wily's switch to a bullpen role a complete success. Sure he did ok in terms of ERA/Ks in his 30 odd innings, but his walk rate was actually even worse... so doesn't really seem very sustainable. He at least did enough that the Royals can give him another shot next year.

If there's an above average defender who can carry a .330+ OBP / .700+ OPS and 5M or so, I'd do that in a heartbeat over Schoop, but not sure that many of those exist. Among the myriads of journeyman 2b out there, i'm sure there's plenty who can do a .300/.650 line with passable defense that could be picked up midseason if Schoop continues to flop though, so no reason to rush out and get a cheap body, just to get a cheap body rather than keeping him for 1 year.