TheCrew07

It's important to clear the pitcher to bring the top of the order back around.... err... wait a minute....

How do you know Farris isn't an organizational priority? I think you're assuming a little bit too much given whom we're dealing with.

Gamel had that long hit streak a couple of years ago that was really impressive, but I don't recal a power display out of the Brewer system the magnitude of BK's. My goodness Bucci was so bad his ERA is up over 4 now.

MLEs... whatever, even though the calculation actually agrees with me this time. Escobar actually overperformed his MLEs in 2009 and 2010. The fact he continues to get worse with age doesn't really make all that much all sense. In general I have a huge problem taking a standard average deduction to stats, applying them to a single prospect, and then definitively saying, "we can expect this X/Y/Z production out of a player based on his MLEs". There are just way too many factors to accurately predict what a player is going to do at both the start and the end of his career. I'm much more comfortable attaching a "should" to a player during MLB career years 4-8 than anytime else. I don't care about what MLEs, ZiPS, or PECOTA project a player's final line to be. I cancelled my subscription to BP a long time ago when I realized that baseball statisticians basically measure the result and yet it treat like it's the cause, and I went more scouting orientated with BA. See BABIP, FIP, xFIP, PAP, etc... it's all the same backwards analysis treating the effect like it's the cause... his BABIP is too high, he's going to regress to mean! Well no kidding, what MLB player produces at a constant rate over the course of an entire 162 game season? Essentially what's being said is he's been really hot and he's going to cool down. Shocking insight... or pitchers who are giving more runs than normal... his BABIP is too high so he's unlucky! No, he's pitched like garbage and has been getting hit hard, there's a difference between poor performance(which is usually poor pitch location) and being unlucky. Cause and effect has been turned completely on it's head... thank goodness pitchfx came around on the pitching side, but we still lose the context of the pitch which makes it's statistically difficult to quantify location. However it's much more sound analysis than FIP or xFIP. I'm alright going with Green because he's younger, keeps himself in better shape, should be slight upgrade defensively, I think he'll hit around league average, and he adds another LH bat. I never wanted the Brewers to commit to Casey long-term, I never believed in his talent to the extent that many around this site have. I don't care what Casey's final line will be, I know he's a fan favorite in Milwaukee because he has kind of an everyman quality that people can relate to, but I just don't get sentimental about players in baseball. Talent wise he was just never as good as his 2009 line, it's remarkable how long he rode out that streak, but he's just not a talented dude, not compared to his peers. I want to get younger/more dynamic athletically, Green is both, though only a slight upgrade in the athletic department.

Hope he gets healthy? Or we get nothing out of him. edit. I should add that if he needs surgery then it should have happened 6 weeks ago as he might have been ready for the AFL and could have worked hard over the winter... now the whole situation is just being drug out in typical Brewer fashion. Mess around with the diagnosis for month, try to avoid surgery for a month or two, then finally have the surgery that was inevitable. Since they messed around he'll come into ST not quite ready and the team won't have a place to stash him.

I've been intrigued by Dowell since draft day, happy he's in the fold early... Harris playing SS in Arizona, I like that too.

I didn't make any final judgements on him, I've seen him pitch twice, and if he pitches again on national TV I'll watch him again. I'll watch him pitch next year in WI... Right now he's getting people out mixing his pitches, he doesn't have a plus a secondary pitch, meaning he has no out pitch. Yes the curve was up in the zone, but I wasn't impressed by it's bite or it's depth, it's a very average pitch. While he located it for strikes quite a bit, it's simply not an impressive pitch. Like I said I actually thought he change was a better pitch the couple of times he threw it. I may have caught him on the 2 worst games he's ever pitched, but he didn't even show flashes of a dominant curve like Scarpetta did when I saw him in WI. Just about every pitcher I've seen pitch in WI regardless of organization has had an obvious out pitch, if not then they were a reliever like Meadows. Scarpetta's curve was loopy at times and at a times it was filthy. With Jungmann it's the same pitch over and over, that's all it is. I wasn't sure how to feel about the curve as it was a very consistent pitch, just consistently average. I didn't see a slider when I was watching, as after the 5th inning I was also watching the Brewer game and missed parts of his half innings here and there. He can certainly improve but if he's not going to sign early and get to work commanding that 2 seamer and tightening up those secondary pitches, he's years away from MLB. He has a plus arm, relatively decent command, good mound presence.... and that's it. If he develops his secondary pitches well then he'll be very successful, if not he'll struggle because everyone above A ball can hit a good fastball if there's nothing else around it. I understand now why many reviews had him pegged as a middle of rotation guy... he has the size, he has the arm, he's a bulldog on the mound, but his pitches just aren't impressive.

The more limited the relievers are the more of them you'll use in a game and the harder it is for a manager to use said players in a limited role. I'd prefer every reliever in the pen to be a multi inning guy with some flexibility of use. I don't like the idea of having to use multiple relievers in a single inning because this guy only gets lefties and these 2 guys can only get righties... so we use 6 relievers to get through innings 7-9 and have no one if the game goes to extras.

Unless something has changed he won't get LH hitters out and we already have that in Loe.

That's fine but you can't build a MLB organization 2 years at a time, there are not enough prospects, no team drafts that well. The Brewers gave up 8 legitimate prospects for a little under 5 years of Sabathia, Greinke, and Marcum. That's not good value regardless of the results on the field, it's not even the equivilent of 1 young pitcher like Yo through his arbtritarion years in service time, not to mention we paid in both dollars and talent to acquire the players. Neither pitcher is young, in fact Greinke is 27 and this is his 8th MLB season, he should be smack in the middle of his peak production years. Marcum will be 30 next season, which is on the downside production wise and upswing injury risk wise. The only way Greinke and Marcum are "young" is if you compare them to the pitchers Melvin acquired before them. I will agree that a great many posters around this site have always been in the win at all costs camp, I remember people wanting to trade Fielder, Braun, and Gallardo for proven MLB players when they were prospects as well. If you like both trades... I get it, but don't try to sell the trades on the misguided notion that we gave up young talent for young talent, that wasn't the case and hasn't been case or I wouldn't have been so critical of Melvin every time. I've been wanting to trade for young talent since 2006-2007, Gomez is as close as we've gotten. I'd do a WAR assessment as I usually do in these debates, but they generally get skipped over or ignored so it's not worth the time. I stand by my original premise... I hope Lawrie and all of the prospects we traded have MLB success. I should know better than to continaully rage against the machine of "prospects haven't proven anything" as it's such an empty and baseless argument but for some reason I still let it piss me off every time I read it. My bad. Good luck Brett, I hope you have a wonderful career becoming the poster boy for Canadian baseball, a Canadian national playing for a Canadian team and having great success.

I think you're ignoring your own premise Ajay, not to mention the answers that people have given you. In the first post you talked about trying to turn the Brewers into an iconic franchise, like the Packers are in the NFL. Milwaukee doesn't have the tradition or history to be that kind of franchise in MLB, we would a need decades long record of success to even think about getting into that conversation, and honestly I don't think the Brewers will ever be in in that conversation, the Brewers were not an original franchise, not like the Packers. The team has done a tremendous job tapping into additional revenue streams since Mark A took over, the payroll is already far beyond what most of us hoped it would someday be. Do you want to sign Fielder in addition to keeping everyone else currently on the roster? If so, there isn't a revenue stream out there to support his 20 million per season, including raising ticket prices. The simple truth is that if you want to sign Fielder so he retires a Brewer then other players will have to go to make room for him. You can suggest marketing and additional revenue streams, but how far is that really going to get you? How much more can the Milwaukee area give? If you want to have the same resources as the NYY then there's really only one solution. Once the stadium is paid for then the Miller Park tax stays in place as permenant revenue for the team, which is never going to happen.

People were saying the same thing about Will Inman when we traded him(and he put up better stats than jake did thru A ball). You can't assume guys who haven't made the jump yet to AA(the hardest one to make) will be on your major league roster within a year or two. Granted, i think Jake will be better than Will has been, but I'm not going to be day dreaming a bunch of what ifs until Jake is either flat out dominating in AAA(even then, probably not), or is successful on a Major League roster. It's unfair to drawn any comparisons between Odorizzi and Inman as they are 2 completely different pitchers. I'm guessing you've never seen Inman or Odorizzi pitch, because the difference is night and day when you watch them. Inman has a very distinctive pitching motion which helped him hide his fastball well, which is why he had so much success, it's difficult to explain. Jake has a legitimate 4 pitch mix, throws much harder than Will, and is a better athlete. Most of us are much better educated about pitching now, the love of Inman had everything to do with his statistical dominance and very little to do with what he actually threw as a pitcher, though we still entertain those debates between various posters regarding talent vs results from time to time. Furthermore, we traded Inman for a rental reliever, that's where most of the venom came from, a reliever whom wasn't going to make the difference to get the team into the post season pitching only 30 innings. He won't dominate AAA long when he gets there, he'll be in the big leagues by the end of July that first year he starts out in AAA. He'll be in AA before this season is out and once he hits AA he's only 1 injury away from the big leagues. He's clearly ascending as a player. I understand your basic premise that prospects aren't sure things, but in my opinion people have been awfully quick to dimiss the prospects we've traded in the various high profile deals because they want the Brewers to "win" the deal. Lawrie might be a tool, but fans of many other teams think Braun is a tool as well, I find their attitudes very similar in nature, they both have supreme confidence in their own abilities. I won't root against Lawrie, I want him to do well, because I rooted for him when he was in our system, same as any other prospect. Well if I didn't like Cleveland as a franchise I wouldn't root for LaPorta, he's as fake as they come, but he's really the only high profile prospect we had that I just couldn't stand. The players we gave up in the Greinke trade were technically prospects except for Escobar, but everyone of them excluding Odorizzi has MLB time now, they will be all MLB players and I'll continue to root for all of them as well. Jeffress and Odorizzi have a legitimate chance to be special, Cain will be a solid CF, and who knows what's going to happen with Escobar, but he sure has shored up his D this season. Everyone knows I don't like either trade from a timing or talent standpoint, but it would be dumb of me to root against Marcum and Greinke when they pitch, I still want the Brewers to win. My problem isn't with any of the players, my problem has always been with the front office. I don't know why posters will turn these trades into either/or scenarios... If I like a guy, I'm going to root for him regardless of where he ends up... to be honest, I still root for Hardy.

Yea but we usually found those out through local stories or through other means, the team usually releases batches of names.

My take on Jungmann... Well I've now seen him pitch twice. The first time my brother just had the game on in the background at his bar and I was hardly paying attention to game except when Jungmann pitched because I recognized the name from this forum (he's much more of a college baseball fan than I am). The second of course was yesterday where I was just sitting here on the couch taking notes. He doesn't have a plus secondary pitch and struggles with his control in spurts. I actually liked the change he threw to strike out a batter in the 3rd much better than his curve. At minimum he has to tighten up that curve and locate his 2 seamer better. I don't think there's any way he's in Milwaukee this season or likely next season. Right now all he's got is a 4 seam FB and curve that's more of a hanger at the next level, and I thought he pitched to a pretty generous strike zone last night. The curve is nothing like Scarpetta flashed in WI or Sheets used to rock, the best way to describe it is the pitch would be considered a "hanger" in MLB. As I said, the ASU batters made consistent contact with it and hit a couple of them pretty hard. He seems to be a decent athlete, so I hope both he and Bradley sign early and get to work. The arm is definitely there, he must have been throwing his 2 seamer more in the regional game which is why the velocity appeared to be down. In hind sight I wish I would have been paying closer attention to that game and less attention to the conversation and drinking. It will be interesting to see where he starts and how much success he has, last night he was definitely catching people guessing to get strike outs more than he was getting batters to swing through pitches.

It was a simple question about the relative talent in the draft in the draft, not a player by player analysis request. I think you're out of line. It was a pretty innocent question, certainly not worth the spite and venom it invoked. Paul was just looking ahead at another draft where the Brewers should have a fair amount of early picks. People talked about the 2009 draft after we acquired Sabathia looking ahead to the compensation picks the team would get for Sheets and Sabathia, I don't see why it's not appropriate to discuss proper compensation for Fielder moving on as well?

Actually there are plenty who frequent this forum that would know about 2012 draft and I don't think the question was out of line at all. I'm not sure he's the one who needs to relax?

Yea that's pretty much exactly what his MLB.com scouting report said, I'm guessing Mayo wrote that a well. I'm not seeing a plus secondary pitch early. He's thrown one change, a couple of 2 seam FB, a ton of 4 seam fastballs, and a bunch of curves, and as I mentioned the ASU hitters are making consistent contact with the curve.

Yea that's pretty much exactly what his MLB.com scouting report said, I'm guessing Mayo wrote that a well. I'm not seeing a plus secondary pitch early. He's thrown one change, a couple of 2 seam FB, a ton of 4 seam fastballs, and a bunch of curves, and as I mentioned the ASU hitters are making consistent contact with the curve.

Yea that's pretty much exactly what his MLB.com scouting report said, I'm guessing Mayo wrote that a well. I'm not seeing a plus secondary pitch early. He's thrown one change, a couple of 2 seam FB, a ton of 4 seam fastballs, and a bunch of curves, and as I mentioned the ASU hitters are making consistent contact with the curve.

Yea that's pretty much exactly what his MLB.com scouting report said, I'm guessing Mayo wrote that a well. I'm not seeing a plus secondary pitch early. He's thrown one change, a couple of 2 seam FB, a ton of 4 seam fastballs, and a bunch of curves, and as I mentioned the ASU hitters are making consistent contact with the curve.

Yea that's pretty much exactly what his MLB.com scouting report said, I'm guessing Mayo wrote that a well. I'm not seeing a plus secondary pitch early. He's thrown one change, a couple of 2 seam FB, a ton of 4 seam fastballs, and a bunch of curves, and as I mentioned the ASU hitters are making consistent contact with the curve.

He's not inducing many swings and misses with that curve, but he locates it well. Just threw his first 2 seam, 89 MPH.

He's not inducing many swings and misses with that curve, but he locates it well. Just threw his first 2 seam, 89 MPH.

He's not inducing many swings and misses with that curve, but he locates it well. Just threw his first 2 seam, 89 MPH.

He's not inducing many swings and misses with that curve, but he locates it well. Just threw his first 2 seam, 89 MPH.