squally1313

They are half a game out of a wild card spot.

Managers don't matter. If they did, the biggest contract in managerial history would be a lot more than what Hector Neris signed for this offseason.

Think you're being a little harsh on Happ and Swanson, both have been above 3 (Dansby pretty comfortably) the last couple years and Happ is projected for 3, Dansby for 3.2 even with their suboptimal starts. But yeah, a 3 win guy making $20m-$25m a year? Sure, that's not going to kill you. Six of those guys? Well now you start running into financial and logistical issues. Now, that's not to say that this level of dude can't go off for a year. Swanson gloved his way there last year, Bellinger played at about the same pace, Shota is already projected for 3.8. But we haven't had the elite guy at the top of the preseason WAR charts in a long time. And in my mind there's two ways to do that: pay them all of the money, which we don't have for PTR reasons but also for lack of cheap developed production reasons, or (ideally) develop that guy and watch him go off. But we're already seeing PCA in a weird timeshare situation and getting sent back to Iowa...Caissie or Alcantara blowing up would just add to that, do we give up on Morel's cheap 'production'/potential for Shaw (you can substitute 'Busch' or maybe even 'Hoerner' there)? Obviously these are all lacking nuance. But, in a crude hypothetical, you'd trade 2 $20m a year, 3 win guys, say Happ and Seiya, for a $40m-$50m/year 5 win guy and then roll the dice with the top 100 prospect making $600k.

I don't entirely disagree here. Hoerner and Happ were both first round picks, and while I think you can be happy with what they've turned into overall, neither of them are offensive standouts. The rest of the line up is outside hires, typically at a premium, and then Morel (2.8 fWAR in 1100 PAs), and Amaya (which, so far, yikes). Looking through the 2021 top prospect lists is pretty bleak: Davis, Amaya, Hernandez (still hope yet), Howard, Morel, Strumpf, Preciado, Caissie (please save us), Roederer, Pinango, Made. Obviously the typical hit rate is low, but....that seems really low. And that's before someone like Hoerner seemingly levelling out at a 100-105 bat, Happ not taking the next step, etc. I'm more pro-Hoyer than most, but when things are going bad he kinda starts to look like the guy in the fantasy football auction draft who got a bunch of 'steals' in that they were projected to go for $20 and he got them for $15, but he never spent more than $30 and is left with the 7th best player at every position. I still don't think there's a bad contract on the roster, which is good. Individually, I don't think Happ, Belli, Suzuki, Swanson, Hoerner, Busch, even Morel are problems to be fixed given their expected production and cost. But it's also increasingly clear that we don't have an elite offensive bat at the major league level, we're scraping Ricketts imposed budget ceilings on all these second division starters, and we've limited ourselves on how much runway we can give the PCAs (and eventually Caissies and Shaws) of the world because handing them a starting spot comes at the cost of reliable MLB production during a 'competitive window'. I've taken issue, and will continue to take issue, with people saying guys like Happ and Swanson suck, should be traded, are the main issue on the team, etc. They're good players being paid like good players. But starting to wonder if we've eliminated the possibility of a 95 win team for the sake of putting out an 85 win team.

Like 7 innings of offensive competency doesn’t override a month of trash but…facing a very overexposed Milwaukee bullpen for these last three innings.

This seems like a weird thing to be excited about but you do you

These aren’t cheapies. Get them all out today I guess

Live wRC for Ian ‘trade him for a bag of balls’ Happ: 109

Oh no now shota is broken. Does he have options to go get straightened out??

I think the organization has earned the benefit of the doubt in being able to piece together an effective bullpen that's going to end up better than the sum of its parts, as much as we'd like to think we stole the key piece of that over the offseason. And that's with Devin Williams having not thrown a pitch but on his way back. Their starters look thin though. Peralta is a stud, obviously, but Miley is down for the year, Ross has a back issue, some lesser signings (Hall, Junis) are fighting injuries and also general ineffectiveness. This Gasser kid has come out hot (1 walk and no HRs in 23 innings), but isn't striking anyone out. Ashby looks broken and there's not much support left at the AAA level. You'll have to assume they'll figure out one or two guys to support Peralta, because they always do, but think the back half is going to be pretty dire for the foreseeable future.

a little bit of splitting hairs here, but Busch to the IL would also probably qualify

Assume there will be a roster move on the Megill front before tonights game, but otherwise according to FG the Brewers pitched every pitcher except for one last night, and that one pitcher (Hudson) threw 32 pitches the day before, so they're a little thin. If we think they try to avoid the 3 games in 4 days issue, that would also put Pegeuro, Payamps, and Paredes on the 'they'd like to avoid using them' list, and Milner is already going on three games in four days so assume he's definitely out (though he kinda seems to have a rubber arm with that funky delivery). This is all supporting Bryse Wilson who is already at 44 innings this year after only pitching 76.2 last year, and it looks like they tried to use an opener for him last time out, so it seems they're a little concerned about his usage. To continue the good news, while his ERA (2.86) looks good, he's running a .232 BABIP and a 90% LOB, so the advanced stats think he's been pretty mediocre. Yes, I'm aware, black holes, abominations, pathetic choking dogs, etc....but you have to like your chances with Shota (who they haven't seen before) against the current version of the Brewers pitching staff, which is the road split you're realistically hoping for (and I like Taillon vs Rea on Thursday too).

Hoping for everyone’s sake here that fangraphs makes it easy to exclude extra inning statistics from their misery porn

Feel like morel is the prime example of third and fourth time through the order penalties. Once he sees a dozen or so pitches, he just locks in. Obviously would be nice to have it not take that long, but that was max effort from peralta and morel didn’t flinch

lol elite announcing performance tonight

👀

Because it's a thread essentially calling the entire contract a mistake when he's produced 5 fWAR in one and a third seasons. It's ignoring 4 months of being really productive, half his time here, and only looking at 4 months of mediocrity. Agree that more recent performance should be weighted heavier but it's also a pretty consistent entire career of performance and arguing that he permanently fell off a cliff in the middle of last year seems a little unfair. What the rest of the team has done this month is pretty irrelevant to this particular conversation.

In the last two months across all of baseball, league wide OPS starts with a 6. I think in the other thread you mentioned how some people were too easily satisfied. I think your expectations are not in line with what modern baseball looks like. You went out of your way to cut out the first 2 months of 2023 where he had the 9th most offensive fWAR in all of baseball just to showcase a sample size where he was the 63rd best offensive player (Correa: 76th). If this is ultimately just a 'I hate how WAR is calculated' thing, then, sure, whatever, take it up with Fangraphs/BR and then, I don't know, put Matt Shaw at short, Busch at second, and Caissie at first and see how that plays out.

Ignoring whatever else you were trying to say there in that wonderful response, going back to the beginning of last year Dansby has been the 8th best shortstop in baseball and Javy has been the 52nd. I understand that for 90% of the people here, the most fun sample size to use is 'beginning with when they started to struggle and ignoring any success before then' (and then like, you just move on when that stops working, people have been real quiet about Happ and his 115 wRC this month lately!), but it's ok to occasionally acknowledge stretches of success.

Well this year Swanson has been worth 0.4 fWAR and Baez has been worth -0.5 fWAR. Unfortunately that makes it pretty tough to run a 'Dansby Swanson is X times better than Javy' calc. 55 points in OBP, 55 points in slugging, actual defensive productivity. xwOBA is 57 points higher. But if you'd like to use all of 36 ABs as the best measuring point for the remaining 6 years of the contract, I guess...good point? So anyways, like I said, no, there is no comparison.

Since Swanson signed his contract he has been 13x more valuable than Baez, so, no.

Playing devil's advocate here, Busch seems to very much be a bat first guy, Suzuki was never supposed to provide much value defensively, to the extent you believe they were choosing between Chapman and Bellinger at the end of the offseason, they went with the guy with the higher offensive ceiling and are more or less letting Morel sink or swim at third (to varying results). I don't think it's fair to say they chose Gomes over Contreras as much as they just chose not to spend $90m on a catcher in his 30s. There's actually something aesthetically appealing, to me, about a version of baseball where you are solid defensively, you steer away from the three true outcome guys, you make good baserunning decisions, and you're solid up and down the line up with good/not elite hitters that can work counts and put the ball in play. Which is the kind of baseball that drove so much of their hot half a season last year and was working for them in April of this year. But, yeah, it's seemingly all fallen apart the last few weeks, to the extent where I'm wondering if the kind of baseball team I theoretically enjoy does not line up with the type of team that actually consistently wins games. Tinker at the edges with Madrigal/Bote/Vasquez/whatever all you want, it doesn't mean anything with Seiya, Swanson, Morel, Busch and the catchers all playing like they are currently.

Yeah no sorry, I’m just being weird and thinking about how like, during every poor Steele start last fall there was an opponent lineup that had a mini hot streak, who in theory should have been just as worn out. Like, I highly doubt there’s an increase in league wide ERA in September. Is it an actual thing or is it something that’s just easy to point to

I was very much in this camp down the stretch last year, but now kinda wondering if ‘fading down the stretch’ is somewhat of a convenient excuse for poor performance or regression to the mean or whatever. Totally appreciate the gradual ramp up of pitcher innings, but curious if there’s actual documented proof of like, a September swoon phenomenon

We don’t have to guess. Go see what Vasquez had been doing in AAA. Then, for fun, compare it to what madrigal did in AAA last year.