adambr2

A lot may have changed today. Injuries to Miley and Logan may end up opening the door to one of Woodruff and Guerra and *gulp* Oliver Drake cracking the opening day roster.

I am possibly the guy you're referencing here. I see the Brewers at around $91M right now, and I would bet that they could fit another $15M+ onto this year's payroll. Next year looks different. Braun, Cain, Yelich, Chacin, Thames, Anderson and Albers add up to $65.5M. Logan will cost either $4.125M or $0.625M if we don't exercise the option, and Jeffress will cost $3.175M if we exercise his option. That's $72.8M for 9/25 of the roster. Meanwhile, 12 of the remaining 16 roster spots (Nelson, Knebel, Vogt, Villar, Perez, Davies, Guerra, Shaw, Santana, Broxton, Bandy and Pina) are all up for arby raises. We could cut some of these guys, but this is a big part of the team and some of these guys could get big raises. We have some meaningful pre-arby guys like Arcia, Phillips, Suter, and Hader, and some prospects who could help, but there has to be some concern from the front office that adding another $15M+ in guaranteed salary to the 2019 payroll could push us well over budget and possibly even into the red. Attanasio has shown that he doesn't mind spending money, but he not going to voluntarily lose money. I'm not thrilled with our starting rotation, but we have a limited budget. Would we be better if Stearns had signed Cobb and not Chacin and some bullpen help? I don't know. We could have signed Cobb instead of Cain for roughly the same price, so I assume Stearns thought the upgrade from Phillips/Broxton to Cain was greater than the upgrade from the current back of the rotation to Cobb. Time will tell if he's right or wrong. We do have Nelson and some high-upside prospects who are close to contributing. Maybe he feels that if we skip the #5 a few times, our #4/5 mix will be good enough to get us through until the in-house reinforcements arrive. Maybe he's just higher on some of these guys then some fans/media are. I don't know the final answer to all of this stuff, but I do know that the Brewers are going in as one of the better teams in the NL, and I'm excited to get the season underway. Hopefully all the positives on the roster outweigh the negatives, and we end up in the playoffs. This is why I have always vehemently disagreed with those who say Ryan Braun's 20M a year doesn't keep us from doing anything we want to do. Maybe it already has. Maybe we would have gone 4/60 for Cobb and signed him but it was just outside Mark A's comfort zone with our existing commitments. I don't make this argument specifically about Braun. You could apply it to Cain too, in questioning whether or not 16M a year for Cain was a good idea. My argument is against shrugging off large payroll commitments when the payroll is low. Eventually you want to raise that payroll again, and that's when the payroll ceiling comes into play again.

Yeah I figured -- also I was referring to the other day when he was actually with Biloxi, not the intersquad games today. Thanks for the insight guys, guess I never paid much attention to spring training farm games before.

Yeison Coca in Biloxi? Wouldn't that be a highly aggressive assignment?

Eh partially true, maybe not. He can be traded to 15 teams in 2019, then it gets easier. It's hard to imagine we'd be looking to trade him in year 2 of a 5 year deal anyway.

Agreed, Miley needs to get shelled again today... Otherwise sadly he's in the rotation and probably Game 3 in SD. If Miley does make the rotation, then Stearns is full of **** with the young controllable talk... Otherwise our rotation would be... Anderson Davies Chacin Woodruff Suter You are taking the 'young controllable' concept way too literally. Was the Yelich trade not a move to add a young, controllable asset? 'Young, controllable' does not mean that every roster move we make will be in favor of the younger player. Sometimes the younger player will be additional depth in the minors to start out.

The trouble I have answering the original question is that it's kind of void of any real context. Do I already know what lies ahead if we win a World Series? Do I know that these 8 years of competitive baseball won't bring a World Series to Milwaukee? If so, I'll certainly pick A. If not, I'll take B. I value the journey as much as the destination, and Brewer baseball is a big part of my summers. 8 years of continuously competitive baseball would be a really fun ride. Winning a World Series in 2018, if a decade of miserable, meaningless baseball follows, isn't going to make those summers any more enjoyable. The only real life application I can think of that relates to this question is, Would you rather A) Go all in and do everything you can to maximize a 1 year window and win a title in that year, or B) Try to field a consistently competitive team that might have longer windows but have less of a shot than the 1 year in A? I would choose B in that scenario as well.

I don't think it is going to. Stearns' plan is to "stick with the plan", and the plan just might be that this is another rebuilding year as we wait another season for Burnes & Hiura to be ready. I think a lot of Brewers fans will be very disappointed in the 2018 season, but I trust that 2019-2021 will make the growing pains seem worth it. I just want one World Championship. I don't care about contending for the wild card year in and year out, just want to win it all one time! This may very well be it, and I think you can make a very good case that the Yelich deal, to get a player of that caliber and age, was made more as a big picture move than a move with the immediate future in mind. That said, if 2018 is still considered a 'rebuilding' season, the Cain deal is a bit of a head scratcher for me. I like Cain a lot, but I like him a lot more for the next 2 seasons than I do for the following 3. I supported the deal, but did so presuming that other deals to target a run this year were to follow. As I said before I'll defer to the judgement of Stearns until we see what happens, but if 2018 is still a rebuilding year I think you could certainly make a strong argument that just rolling with Yelich in CF, keeping our existing outfielders up here and saving the $80M invested in Cain would have been a better long-term strategy.

I also think (hope?)if our #4/#5 spots end up being a disaster, we may turn to Burnes sooner rather than later. We only need to keep him down a couple weeks to buy another year of service time.

Well another contract I’m good with us not being involved in. Cobb was only to be added at the right price and this wasn’t it. And Im absolutely furious... Briggs you got scooter, davis. I got this. 48/3 or 60/4 is exactly what I wanted. God help me if theres a mutual option on that 4th year. Pretty fair to say Baltimores band box is possibly slightly worse than his conditions in the NL in MKE so we'll know how stupid this was. Good luck piecing this together and carrying this rotations top with what we have... or enjoy bleeding our farm into the 20s mlb wide. Brilliant... freaking brilliant. This is where I'd remind people that just because Cobb took 4/60 from Baltimore doesn't mean he would have taken the same offer from us. He's from Florida. He has spent his entire career playing primarily on the East Coast. He may have preferred to keep it that way. Sure maybe he would have had a price that would have been the tipping point to bring him here but that could have been 4/72 for all we know.

I disagree with a lot of what went on this off-season as far as roster construction. I also realize that Stearns and Arnold are really smart baseball people who have way more insider information and scouting information than I ever will. They have a plan here. They are not just winging it. I certainly think DS has earned the benefit of the doubt until we at least see what happens this year, and he'll certainly get that from me. If it's July and we are 40-55, then by all means fire away.

Uhh... Erceg? Wow, autocorrect on my phone did a number on that one!!

We have a guy that was a rookie of the year as a 3rd baseman! Make us an offer, L.A.

With the games the pen lost early last year I can't understand why anyone wouldn't want Williams in the MLB pen immediately with his late inning caliber arsenal. Or perhaps some of us, myself included, were spoiled by Hader last year and as a result are expecting too much too soon out of Taylor. I'm willing to admit it's a possibility.

Not that I'm aware of, but if you follow @BrewersPD...they provide some highlights. Yeah, I've been looking, but no luck. Thanks!

Holy cow, Grisham for another borderline starter to add to the Miley/Suter/Guerra/Woodruff pile? No thanks. I realize opinions differ on Grisham, (I really like him personally), but if we wanted to give up a quality prospect for rotation depth we would have just outbid the Twins for Odorizzi.

Is there anywhere to find minor league spring training box scores?

My concerns on how skillfully he can play the position are somewhat at ease. Besides, it's not like Thames is a gold Glover. I think it's legitimate to question how well his body will hold up at the position however.

Is Braun's RF defense really bad? I honestly don't even remember. If he's close to the same in LF or RF, it makes sense to keep Yelich in LF when Braun plays the OF.

No...I would trade Keon for him and take on a portion of that contract. No interest in dealing Domingo for him though. Pretty much this, but it would have to be a very large portion. Samardzija has about 3/60 remaining on his contract, and no way is he a 3/60 guy on the open market right now.

I'm kind of surprised that they didn't wait the full 5 days strategically to put us in FA limbo.

I for one am certainly not OK with having 5 relievers with 4+ ERAs if we happen to have 3 top guys who can cancel some of those numbers out. Depth is important too, a top heavy pen will have some issues when top guys are injured or on rest which will especially be a problem down the stretch. I'm not saying we should necessarily expect that from our bottom 5, but if we go in anticipating a 4.25 ERA from Yo and we decide we're just OK with that since the pen overall is still good; while Williams could have done better, that approach makes no sense to me.

I admittedly haven't crunched the numbers with the new deals but the Bears came into this off-season with one of the best salary cap situations in the NFL. I assume they still have plenty of room. It seems inexplicable to me that they'd let their top corner just walk to a division rival for nothing unless we really overpayed.

I thought they've pretty much cracked down and outlawed poison pills.

I expect the Bears to match, but the transition tag is a weird and pointless move by them in the first place. All it does is let the market dictate what they pay their guy, instead of negotiating it themselves.