adambr2

It wouldn't even take an epic collapse on this road trip to be closer to .500 than 1st place after this road trip. 4-7 would accomplish that, and 4-7 is quite realistic on this road trip.

If there is a hypnotist out there that could hypnotize 25 guys into thinking that they're at Miller Park for 3 hours every day, that would be way more valuable than any player we could acquire.

You suck tonight, Yo.

Hart is disgusting me tonight. Is it not enough for you to strikeout and ground into a double play? Now you have to make a throw to home when you have no play to allow the runner to 2nd?

On the plus side, Casey ran down to 1st on that faster than I've seen him run the bases this year.

Casey...buddy. If you stare at a 3-2 pitch down the middle, you generally don't get to walk to first base. If you wanted to do that, that 3-1 pitch was the one to take.

I hope 'Rillo wasn't suggesting we are done dealing. Something has to be done about the left side of the infield. If we have McGehee and Betancourt butchering the left side of the infield and batting 6-7 the rest of the way, we're going to be hurting.

I'm trying to remember a time when I have ever seen Prince end up with the ball in his glove on any play that involves him diving for a sharply hit ground ball.

Way to make 'em pay for intentionally walking Prince in front of you, Corey.

Don't believe so, I think you have to pay the buyout for the option and then any arby deal is on top of that. But it's kind of a moot point anyway since New York is paying for the buyout.

Who did Brian just say is not available on the trade block? I missed the name.

Just to clarify for anyone who isn't familiar with MLB contracts, pretty much every player is under their club's control for the first 6 years of their career. Generally speaking, with some limited exceptions like Super 2's that would just confuse matters now, a club can pay a player whatever it wants in the player's first 3 years of service time. It does not matter whether they are a bench scrub or All-Star, the club sets their pay, and it's generally close to the minimum. Sometimes they'll get marginally more for major accomplishments early in the career, but we're always talking about a number less than $1 million. Their next 3 season are considered arbitration years where they are still under club control but have a little bit more control over what they get payed. Usually arbitration pay increases every year, and by the 3rd year they're pretty close to making what they would make in a year on the FA market. Also, there's no UFA's or RFA's, etc. They're either under contract or a free agent, no degrees of free agency.

Are you talking about next year's deals? Because Axford, Narveson, and Lucroy are all 0-3 players. We can pretty much dictate how much they make, and it will be in the ballpark of $500,000. You're probably in the ballpark with Gomez and Morgan (thought $3M would be a lot for a first year arby guy), and I can't see Marcum getting more than $7M as a 2nd year arby player.

IMO you have to offer him arbitration. Worst case scenario, he accepts, and you have to overpay him a $10M - $12M contract next year. So you've probably got $5M or so more than you otherwise would want to tied up in K-Rod, and you're completely set at the top of your bullpen with Ax and K-Rod next year. Could be a lot worse than that. In the end it's just a 1 year deal anyway, just like the one we gave Gagne a few years ago. In all likelihood I don't think they would have to worry about it. Boras isn't going to want a 1 year arbitration deal for the top FA closer on the market, and neither one of them are going to want him to be anywhere where he's not guaranteed to be closing full time and thus affecting his future value. For a team that has completely gutted the farm like the Brewers, extra picks at the top of the draft are golden. If you end up getting burned and end up having to overpay K-Rod for a 1 year deal, so be it. But I still think that he'd be unlikely to accept.

I'm sure someone has a logical explanation for this so I'd really like to hear what it is. For the life of me, I can't figure out how we got K-Rod so cheaply. I understand that we can't really judge this until we know who the PTBNL's are, but judging by Melvin's comments, it isn't guys like Peralta and Thornburg. Couple points I'd like to make: -- K-Rod is a projected Type A free agent. Presumably, there's no way we'll let him make his option, we'll offer him arby after using the Mets money to buy him out, and collect the Type A compensation when he likely declines in favor of another long-term deal. -- Bullpen help, especially for a setup man or closer, is notoriously expensive and hard to come by this time of year. The Royals are asking the moon for Soria, and K-Rod is having a pretty respectably better year (though Soria isn't a rental like K-Rod). -- Our farm system is already pretty weak, and Melvin said that the two PTBNL's aren't top prospects. We can't know who they are at this point without speculating, but especially coming from our farm system, they can't be much. Am I meaning to understand that the Mets gave us K-Rod for a (guessing, speculating, hypothetical) future 4th OF'er prospect and middle relief prospect? Do they not realize that Type A compensation alone would quite possibly exceed that? -- This wasn't a strict salary dump. The Mets gave us money, about half of his remaining contract this year, plus his buyout money next year. They got very little for prospects and had to pay most of his remaining obligations? That just makes no sense to me. So, help me understand how this happened. I mean, I'm not complaining, but am I missing something? Are we unlikely to offer K-Rod arbitration to get the picks at the risk of him accepting? I would think he would opt for the longer term contract especially being the top closer on the market this winter. Was this just a situation where the Mets were stuck between a rock and a hard place, and had no other options for closer the rest of the year but were scared to death of being on the hook for $17.5M for him next year, so rather than appear shady by pulling him out of the closer role, they decided to just trade him and steer clear of any controversy and/or overpriced closer contracts? Were other teams that afraid of the possible controversy of either letting him reach his vesting option or not making him the primary closer that they were just afraid to make a decent offer to the Mets? It just all seems a little surprising to me.

"It will be a mild upset if the Brewers aren't the worst team in the majors come 2013" Kind of a ridiculous statement. Yeah the farm isn't good right now, but the heart of the team Braun, Gallardo, Hart, Weeks, and Axford are all contracted to be here in 2013, and I'm confident we'll keep at least one of Greinke or Marcum. It's too early to say if we'll be a contender in 2013, but there's absolutely no reason to believe we'll be the worst team in baseball.

Are you sure about this? I think if the Brewers flounder around .500 this season, Melvin's job is most certainly at least in some degree of danger. And Roenicke, unfortunately, you're probably right, but you never know. Mark A. pulled the trigger on Yost despite a winning playoff contender in '08, even well into September, when he didn't think Yost was the right guy to put them over. It's unlikely that it would happen again, but depending on what this team does in September, you never know.

Not buying it. Since Greinke's bad outing the first game of the Yankee's series, only twice has a Brewer starter failed to go at least 6 innings, and they won one of those. A poor overworked bullpen is not the reason they're losing. If the bullpen is overworked, it's only because it's mismanaged and basically a 3-4 man bullpen when you consider those are the guys getting the vast bulk of the work. And if you still want to say it's overworked, Doug and Ron have to shoulder some blame for only carrying a 6 man pen.

"I'm not putting this on 'Wolfie,'"said Roenicke. "Why can't we come out and score three or four runs in the first inning?" This is hilarious. "I'm not blaming the pitcher for giving up 7 earned, I'm blaming the offense for not scoring 3-4 runs in the 1st inning." Well Ronny, aside from the fact that 3-4 runs in the first inning alone is a ridiculously unrealistic expectation for any MLB offense, you could help matters by not putting out a lineup that includes a 5-6-7 of Betancourt/McGehee/Josh Wilson.

And RR goes with Craig Counsell in a 4 run game with 2 on and 2 out in the 8th. Is anyone even remotely surprised?

We kept Braun/Prince together and added 2 near ace caliber pitchers in the offseason. I don't think Ken Macha would feel very sorry for Roenicke's level of team talent given the pitching staff he had to work with. Betancourt, yeah, that's on Melvin for not doing more to improve it, but that's one position. No team is strong everywhere. Hell, the Yankees have gotten similar shortstop production from Jeter this season. The good teams are able to overcome one position of weakness. On Nieves, pinning the team's difficulties on the level of talent because of the backup catcher is a bit silly, as is feeling sorry for Roenicke that we had him as a backup, since he was the kind of guy Roenicke was pining for all offseason, despite the fact that we already had a decent backup catcher, it was more or less a case of Roenicke getting exactly what he asked for. Kotsay sucks, don't get me wrong, and he's a lousy choice by Melvin. That being said, he's the 5th OF'er. No one has forced Roenicke to send him to the plate 156 times this year. So though the bench is awful, we aren't flirting with .500 again because we had a bad backup catcher for 2 months and Kotsay was signed.

You really suck right now, Greinke. Seriously, we gave up our best farm pieces to acquire an ace. Not a guy that we could build up 5 runs leads for and see if he could protect them.

There seems to be some kind of misconception that Wilson is a good defensive infielder. He's not. Better than McGehee, sure, but that's not saying much.

If you're going to give him a few days off why not just option him down rather than going a man short? So they're going to not play him for a few days, and then maybe give him 3 days (12 AB's) to see if it helped, which really is not nearly enough time to see if it helped? That seems stupid to me.

Brewer management, I don't care how much you love Kotsay, I don't care how much you admire guys at the tail end of their career, this bench is unacceptably awful. It's bad enough to have a bad bench, but when you have pieces to fix it and refuse to do so, that's worse. Here's my plan: Who goes: Wilson, Kotsay Don't be fooled by Wilson's game-winning HR against the Marlins. There's a reason he was released by the Marlins -- he isn't a good 25 man option for any winning ballclub. And don't be fooled into thinking he's a great defensive replacement option -- he's not. Which is the only reason I give the nod to Counsell to stay. As far as Kotsay, there's no reason for him to be here. I am really sick of management's apparent mentality that we need to allocate 2-3 roster spots for veteran leadership, regardless of performance. We only have 25 spots, I would like to give them to our 25 best players. We've got leaders in Prince and Braun that have been the heart of this team for years, and a management staff that the players respect with guys like Sveum. If that's not enough for the clubhouse, they've got more problems in there than guys like Kotsay and Counsell are going to fix. So the rest of the plan....McGehee goes down to AAA to "work it out", Green is promoted and plays 3rd every day. Gamel stays in Kotsay's old role, first PH option off the bench, and possibly an occasional spot start at 1B, 3B, or perhaps even a corner OF spot. I understand that's not the best thing for his development right now, but it may be the best thing for our division hopes. Counsell can spot start around the infield for Green, Betancourt, and Weeks. Eric Farris who is already on the 40 man gets Wilson's spot, and can also be a right handed utility infield guy to supplement Counsell. I see no need to replace Kotsay with another outfielder. Gomez, Morgan, Hart, or Braun will always be available off the bench. Presumably, Gamel could fill in at a corner if the situation arose. I understand the idea of Gamel doing even an inning in the outfield is probably not appealing to most (though he's probably not going to be much of a dropoff from Kotsay), but keep in mind such a situation even coming about is going to be extremely rare. Braun and Hart have the corners locked down, for the most part, and Morgan will always be the first option to fill in at either corner. I'm sure some probably have better ideas for improving the team/bench, and feel free to mention them, but I think this would be a good start. I'd feel a lot better about guys like Gamel, Kottaras, and Farris being available off the bench, and Green starting every day for McGehee, than I feel about our current situation.