MNBrew

Like it. You win with great pitching (or at least you should).

People have been expecting Randy Wolf to regress since before he got here. Other than 2 putrid months in the 1st half of 2010 (plus one bullpen-saving outing he endured for the team), overall he's been rather solid for 3 seasons (last one w/ LA, 2 in MIL) and hardly a detriment. As an aside, if you look through enough of the threads on this site and the multitude of glass-is-half-empty mindsets, I think you'll find evidence that pretty much everyone on the Brewers is expected (by one or more posters) to regress next year, and that we should trade about everyone but Braun, Gallardo, Axford, & maybe Lucroy before their value declines.

Big-time ditto!!! I abhor the white-panel caps. Gross! Looks like a bad 1980 softball team (like the one I played on after 6th grade). The Orioles' more recent uniforms have been among their best. Their retro-ish white-paneled caps are beyond ugly. They look cheap & amateurish. That look's exponentially more offensive than when bell-bottomed jeans and combinations of burnt orange, brown, & olive green together (like the recently re-built McDonald's near my house) came back into style. Some styles of the past are better left in the past because they went away the first time for a very good reason.

MLBTradeRumors.com is citing a report that the Marlins' offer is for less than $200M.

I think it's overly optimistic to expect that we could replace Wolf -- a 3W-over-.500 SP with a 3.70 ERA in 212 innings -- internally. It's not impossible, but not exactly highly probable. You could make a better case for replacing Narveson -- also 3 games over .500 but a 4.45 ERA in 160+ innings -- internally. Philly's rotation was strong & their offense was at times shaky last year, but what was their first signing? A stud closer (Papelbon). They're exploring hitters, but that wasn't their highest-priority move. I just don't think you can overestimate the value of outstanding SP. Even if our offense isn't better than last year, if the pitching staff amounts to the same quality and the defense is shored up considerably, I'd guess our odds of making the postseason wouldn't be much different than they were last year. And I'd gladly take those odds.

And if they ask him to play CF, they'll have enough time to make sure the corner OFs back him up sufficiently. :-) If Hairston's back, I think there's a better chance the 5th OF could be a Schafer or Gindl -- or someone else w/ a salary $500K or less. I like the develop/advance concepts at play in a situation like that.

After watching tonight's dismantling by the Packers (granted, MN's having a lousy, lousy year and few teams could've made it this easy for them to look so good) . . . I think Rodgers would do pretty well out of the bullpen for Milwaukee. The guy sure doesn't miss often and especially tonight sure made the other team look highly inferior. Those would be good things to be able to say about any possible new addition to our bullpen.

Super two has no effect on the free agency date, just when arbitration starts. Got a step ahead & therefore applied an unnecessary principle with the math. Point is, in 3 years, he still won't have accumulated the 6 full years necessary for free agency, thus 4 more years of team control.

Narveson isn't signed past 2012. However, he's got 4 more years of team control since he didn't qualify for Super-Two status.

Even if he's only a solid-and-steady SS who periodically shows glimpses of his All-Star past, I'd gladly take Rollins as the #2 option to Reyes at SS.

I don't think the Packers' QB is a bullpen option. I do think it's kinda funny how Mark Rogers' name seemingly has been misspelled more frequently since the Packers won the Super Bowl last winter with Aaron Rodgers at QB.

Green's become a better player than he was when he was the Brewers' MiLB POY. He just had a 2-year detour thanks to that lousy injury & the time it took him to truly get his game back. And McGehee's got zero track record for being as lousy as he was last year, so I see him rebounding at least some of the way back toward where he was in '09 & '10. Between those two guys -- one dirt-cheap & the other hardly overly expensive for what he could do -- I don't see any reason to waste assets on an area that's already got potentially quite good internal options for improvement. . . . unless, and only unless, such a move is made in tandem with another that uses those existing internal options to acquire better talent to fill a greater hole elsewhere on the roster.

Part of what makes these so bad is the trim/drop-shadow thing. Most of the trim or drop shadow is orange, but there's no visual logic or continuity when the first letter has no proper trim or drop-shadow -- just a whole bunch of colors stuffed into it -- but all the other letters do. It's not that the orange is bad. It's how they used it that's bad. In other words, there's less orange on this than there was teal on the old uniforms, at least in terms of what's readily visible. So as someone said above, they end up looking almost entirely black & white.

Instead I'd look at that as 1) Greinke being diplomatic since the interview is w/ a Nationals beat writer type, as a result of & evidenced by 2) Greinke being a very thorough thinker about where he's going, and realizing the Nats likely didn't have the talent to be a strong team if some of their best young talent went back to KC in exchange for him.

I'd like to see a link on that b/c I don't recall that at all, and comments like that would've resulted in quite the outrage on this site when he has 2 years left on his contract. I'm highly doubtful that this occurred because... 1. Saying that in the media would've been terrible form, and pretty much everyone around here would've remembered it. 2. He refused to alter his NTC to go to the Nationals in the first place. In any case, you're making a lot of assumptions and most of it's all your conjecture. You're against signing Greinke. That's fine b/c we can all have our opinions. I, for one, sincerely hope they do extend him because you need top-caliber pitching -- and quite good depth of it, to boot -- to have a serious chance to win in the playoffs, not just just a single stud pitcher and some potentially-top-caliber pitching. We've seen for long enough how far a hugely strong but still somewhat imbalanced will get you -- to the edge of hope, essentially -- but it becomes a whole different game with a stable of aces. And I'd take Jose Reyes as my SS in a heartbeat. Reyes, Greinke, Marcum, Fielder, . . . we've become so conditioned to the small-market, we're-gonna-go-broke mentality even as hard-core fans that it's funny how now not the front office but we, the fans, are more the ones parroting the front office's "company line" from the mid-'90s ("We can't afford the stud players the big markets can," essentially paraphrasing) 'til Mark A. came in & bought the team. This is different ownership which still knows it has to be sensible but has been far more willing to be aggressive for the right kinds of players (Greinke, Marcum, Sabathia, Rodriguez, etc.) than the last 10 years of Selig ownership was willing to (Hammonds, etc.).

Neither the orange nor blue caps were anywhere to be seen during the unveiling. Sadly, I watched the whole thing live. Blah. The basic uniforms are still either white or gray w/ black, and the other colors are minimally noticeable at best. The yellow/orange/blue mostly only barely make their way into the trim and really aren't very clear from a distance (like the camera distance during the unveiling ceremony). The orange jerseys are themselves okay. It's all the other colors that get lost in the trim stuff that make it very unappealing. The "piping" thing around the collar that gives the illusion of being like a ring-neck collar on a pullover is a new style but sure isn't a good thing. Yuck. Subtle, but very much yuck. The black jerseys are extremely unoriginal and uninspiring. I grew up in FL and still visit family every summer. I still love it down there, but NOBODY sane wears black all the time outside when it's 90-95 degrees or more, which is most of the time. It's not just hot. You feel like you're getting baked in an oven. What a way to make yourself very physically miserable! Beer and mediocre baseball aren't nearly enough to offset the effects of that! Very, very, very, very, very bad choice!!! They wanted to be trendy and clearly succeeded in coming up with something "fresh" and "new." Too bad it's also so blasted boring & ugly. We can just hope someone has better judgement & style when these things become so passe 10 years hence! I really hoped they'd feature an aqua color like the Dolphins do -- a break from the previous teal, a much richer color that would stand on its own very well and still lend itself to some unique (aqua) or at minimum trendy-but-cool (orange) alternate jerseys. Missed that good opportunity this time. (Edited for lousy grammar.)

Barmes is a FAR inferior offensive player, even though he's strong on the D side, so I don't get how anyone including himself could see him as worth $1.5M more per year than Carroll. Yes, Carroll's older, but if their offense over the life of their new contracts (2 years for Carroll, TBA for Barmes) mirrors their past 2 years, Carroll's a far better value. I find it ironic that Yuni's terrible OBP inspired so much loathing but some of those same haters diminished the value of his power, yet Carroll's got the great OBP Yuni seemingly may never have but now some are saying he's a lousy investment, presumably because he has no power? I'd take the solid OBP, frankly. It takes a mix of skills at the plate, a variety of types of hitters, to make for a well-balanced offense. Not everyone will be a power hitter. Carroll's BA, OBP, & defense should all be major upgrades over what the Twins trotted out at SS last year -- and the $3.5M he'll make per year he'll make is $500K/yr. less than Punto made on his last Twins contract (2 yrs., $8M) to be what amounted to role-playing super-utility guy. Assuming Carroll can at least maintain most of what he's done the past few years, I can't see how anyone would consider that a foolish deal.

I don't know about their payroll obligations, but I do remember this telling item: The Marlins are the ones who were found out a year ago for taking their revenue sharing money and pretty much NOT spending on players to help achieve the competitive balance that revenue sharing was intended to facilitate. MLB wasn't very pleased about that. P.S. The thread's title is misleading when the article clearly says "almost a done deal."

I don't know about their payroll obligations, but I do remember this telling item: The Marlins are the ones who were found out a year ago for taking their revenue sharing money and pretty much NOT spending on players to help achieve the competitive balance that revenue sharing was intended to facilitate. MLB wasn't very pleased about that. P.S. The thread's title is misleading when the article clearly says "almost a done deal."

I don't know about their payroll obligations, but I do remember this telling item: The Marlins are the ones who were found out a year ago for taking their revenue sharing money and pretty much NOT spending on players to help achieve the competitive balance that revenue sharing was intended to facilitate. MLB wasn't very pleased about that. P.S. The thread's title is misleading when the article clearly says "almost a done deal."

There's just too much logic behind going after Reyes for it to be a bad idea (my thinking, anyway). Not that there aren't potential drawbacks, but i think the pros outweigh the cons. If they don't get him, they don't get him. But it gets hard to continue to play with the heavyweight teams if you don't ensure that you have a multiple high-impact bats. It can get risky, sure. But the Brewers didn't get to a 96-win season by playing it safe. There were risks in those moves, too. But they worked and there's a good lot of momentum to the Brewers right now, which doesn't guarantee anything going forward (nothing does), but I think they have to continue approaching things by being both highly & sensibly aggressive.

Classic, Hawing! I was thinking "Shine a Little Love," actually. Or it could be "Don't Bring Me Down" if the Fish are rallying from behind. The orange could be cool but paired with yellow & especially aqua it's rather unpleasing -- or strong, at minimum. I'd've far preferred to see them favor a Dolphins-esque aqua and have alternate tops & maybe caps, too, that bore more resemblance to the Dolphins' color scheme than to the Hurricanes'. At least it's not pale or burnt orange, which would look too much like those plain & ugly U. of TN football uniforms!!! It's worth taking heart, though, because we all remember the then-Devil Rays' green-yellow-purple rainbow thing that went out of style quickly & was replaced by a solid baseball uniform (only to be replaced by an even better one a few years later when the "Devil" was dropped out of the name). . . . . And on a total tangent, I never understood why Tampa's ownership went with Devil Rays b/c those are actually fairly small ("wingspan" typically not exceeding 4 ft.). By comparison, manta rays are HUGE, just plain massive -- wingspan over 20 ft. is not uncommon -- and the Manta Rays would've made a much better (& respectable, non-shallow-marketing-motivated) team name.

Man, these Marlins things just keep getting worse. I've been looking forward to the uniform unveiling on Friday but my moderate excitement feels more & more like painful & morbid curiosity.

Did I miss something? I thought I'd read a few times that Wood has said it's the Cubs or retirement. Did anyone else read that, too, or am I off base?

The article leads us to infer that these things don't happen in other interviews, and some of you with a jaded view of Roenicke seem convinced nothing in Melvin's interview process ever asked any questions like this because you heartily disagree with anything & everything Roenicke & Melvin do, and they clearly never do anything right. In other words, I think you're reading into this what you want to. . . . The fact is, Epstein's only ever interviewed for one other previous managerial opening, so he's just doing again now what he did then. I don't see all of this as being so novel at all. The Chicago Cubs are going to pitch to the media anything Epstein's doing as new, innovative, and surely the right & logical steps that will lead the Cubs and their fan-dom to the Promised Land. That's what goes on with a new GM, esp. one with a championship under his belt. The article also talks about each interviewee having a Q&A with the media after his interview. That's exactly what Melvin did with all the candidates when Ned Yost was ultimately hired. That's when Yost said something about not wanting to manage just any team, but wanting to manage the Brewers, because he knew from experience how the team & its fans can be when top-caliber baseball is going on in Milwaukee. . . . which made sense at the time for why he'd be a better candidate than Macha or some of the others interviewing at the time.