rluzinski

I don't know the exact odds but I think everyone appreciates that the 88th to 92nd wins are very valuable since they have a higher probability of winning a playoff spot than the 83rd or 84th win. Without Fielder but with Gamel, perhaps the Brewers are an 87 win team, so upgrading from there could be very valuable. If the option was just Prince or no Prince, "win now" could justify overpaying for Prince somewhat I just think there could be better, potentially less costly options.

Franchises like the Cubs justify spending more for a guy than they know he's going to be worth over the course of a contract by using a "win now" mentality. Even with Fielder, I don't think the Brewers are necessarily a playoff team in 2012, everything else equal. Fielder is an elite hitter but he can be replaced with 2 or 3 above average players for less money overall, IMO. That's the luxury of having a couple of bad players in certain roles. As for being able to trade him in 5 years, I think that is far from a certainty. I hope that is not a hard scenario for people to envision.What? You don't think that the same team that is currently leading the division by 10 games would make the playoffs next year? First of all, I didn't say that I didn't think they would make the playoffs. I was suggesting that I didn't know if they WILL make the playoffs. I should have been more clear but what I meant was that even if the Brewers are the favorites to win the Cenral next year (and they probably will be), it still could be coinflip odds of them even making the playoffs. It's just the way it works. Furthermore, it shouldn't be shocking to anyone that sometimes a team's record doesn't always represent their true collective talent. While the Brewers currently have the record of an elite team, their underlying component stats suggest they are closer to a true 90 win team. Hell, the Brewer's simple pythagorean record has them on pace for 88 wins. Considering they were projected to win around 88 wins before the season started, is that really that surprising? As for 2012, if you knew nothing about a team except that they won 95 game the year before, you'd probably project them to win something like 90 wins for 2012 anyway. I would guess that for the Brewers in 2012. Almost certainly the front runners to win the Central but perhaps 50%-60% odds to make the playoffs? I don't know the true odds of course but not even close to a lock even with Prince. The Yankees, Boston and Philli are elite teams. Texas is a great team. The Brewers are somewhere below that, IMO. Very good but not great, like Atlanta.

Franchises like the Cubs justify spending more for a guy than they know he's going to be worth over the course of a contract by using a "win now" mentality. Even with Fielder, I don't think the Brewers are necessarily a playoff team in 2012, everything else equal. Fielder is an elite hitter but he can be replaced with 2 or 3 above average players for less money overall, IMO. That's the luxury of having a couple of bad players in certain roles. As for being able to trade him in 5 years, I think that is far from a certainty. I hope that is not a hard scenario for people to envision.

I'd be up for trading Greinke, Marcum or Wolf under the right circumstances. The Brewers need some more young guys they have control of for a number of years.

I really don't see the Brewers (or probably any NL team) offering him that long of a deal. It's painful to think how bad Prince would be defensively at 33 and 34 years old.

I could literally know nothing about a major leaguer and it would be a good guess that he could be a better defensive 1B than Fielder. 1B is the easiest position and Fielder is one of the worst of them defensively. It's statistically a very good guess.

I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about.You really dont think a player can choke up and ground out if they want to? Have you ever played baseball?Have you ever played in the majors? I think fans just spend way too much time screaming at their TV, claiming that it should be easy to do whatever.

The Brewers are accused of that every year. The reality is that teams don't score about a 3rd of the time with a man on third and 1 out. I think fans just have too high an expectation in that situation.Fans should have ahigh expectation because it is not that hard to do. The problem is that no one in the majors changes their approach in these situations and try to drive the ball in the gap/hit HRs which causes them to K (like Hart) or get jammed (like Braun). If you told Braun to try to ground out 6-3 he could do it every at bat if he wanted to.I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about.

The Brewers are accused of that every year. The reality is that teams don't score about a 3rd of the time with a man on third and 1 out. I think fans just have too high an expectation in that situation.

It's especially fun to hear Schroeder get all excited about leading the league in sacrifice bunts and saying that they are part of the reason the Brewers have been playing so well lately. RIGHTTTTTTT. I don't even know what games he's watching anymore.

I don't think anyone is unhappy with Lucroy's overall play this year. I just want to know Lucroy' defense has been below average and if we should expect it to be for years to come. And it seems like people really focus on CS% but that's just one part of a catcher's defensive responsibilities.

I don't really care how the Brewers play against the Phillies in a 4 game series. It's the 5 and 7 game series that are going to matter at this point.

Brewers have about a 99% of making the playoffs. I feel good.

League average CS% is 29%. So I think a lot of it is Greinke, Yo and Marcum's secondary stuff, Narveson will bounce a lot of curves up there, and while Wolf seems to keep his down and not in the dirt as often, he can bounce a 0-2 curve as well as anyone. Did you look up the numbers? http://www.baseball-refer...com/teams/MIL/2011.shtml Yo, Greinke and Ax have 24 of the 57 wild pitches but the rest of them are shared pretty well. Greinke is on pace to have more WP then in any other season (he has 8 now). Marcum only has 3 and Gallardo has had a bunch over the the last 3 years (of course Lucroy has probably caught over half of those).

Sounds like Boras/Weaver took a pretty team friendly deal then which is surprising.I think everyone missed my post where I noted that Weaver is a California native. He obviously loves pitching there, hence why he wanted to stay long term.Since we are just repeating ourselves, my point was that it wasn't particularly team friendly. It was pretty much the going rate for great starting pitchers. Only Santana, Cliff Lee and Sabathia has gotten better deals since 2007.

Is it just me or has Lucroy seemed to be a well below average defensive catcher this year? The numbers seem to back that up. He's thrown out only 25.9% of steal attempts for one. He has only 1 official pass ball but the Brewerslead the NL in wild pitches by a wide margin and I think Lucroy deserves a lot of blame for that. He also does terrible here: http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2011/7/19/2282186/beyond-the-box-score-2011-catcher-defense-ratings-july-edition I don't follow the minors as closely as many here. I know his offense was always mentioned while in the minors but what was his reputation defensively? I know he hits well for a catcher but I am worried his defense is really going to cut into his value over the next few years.

That record is going down IMO........ For the Brewers to finish over 30 games over .500, they would have to finish 20-12. That's almost certainly not going to happen for a number of reasons. Hell, I'd probably guess 16-16 or 17-15 as they cruise to a division title.

Is Weaver's contract really a discount? Like I said, it's about $20/year in "free agent" money. And how many starting pitchers get longer than 5 year deals these days? Since 2008, Sabathia... Santana... anyone else? (EDIT: Cliff Lee got 5/$24) Pitchers just get hurt too often. It seems like 5/$20 is the default for the best pitchers, unless they are going to a New York team apparently. Boris can spout whatever he wants publicly but Weaver's largest concern may have simply been getting hurt before he could sign his big free agent deal..

I agree that Greinke is roughly comparable but all those guys signed with at least a year before free agency. When you adjust for that, they are all basically making around $20 mil/year in "free agent" money. So Greinke might be looking at something closer to 5/$100. Certainly not 5/$80.

This is the guy RR thought was the best option at 2B and apparently he was the 4th?

Got one through HP's site... now let's see if it actually ships. Can't wait until someone roots this thing and gets Android on it!

Did the people who said the game was over stop watching?

That's teh good thing about gritty vets. They WILL take their walks!

Any game you have a 6 run lead in, *should* be a W. Regardless of the lead in the standings, there's no way I'm not going to be pissed about losing a game that the Crew had a 6 run lead going into the bottom of the 7th inning. I should have said hard for ME to get too upset. And when I see the Brewers record in one run games, i feel like the Crew has gotten a lot of karma this year. Hey, winning run is batting!

Whenever I see "Good teams don't..." I just skip ahead. Good teams do all kinds of bad things.. they just don't do them as often. Hey look, the Brewers are batting. I guess that means they haven't lost yet.