ESPN's Page Two Summarizes Our Pitiful Brewer Experience

[MickeyDavis]

As far as Molitor goes Bando should have offered him more but to be fair Molitor spent quite a few years on the DL as much as on the field.

Yes Molly had injuries in his career but he played 158 and 158 games his last two years and in fact had averaged 145 games in his last 5 years with the Brewers (154, 155, 103, 158, 158). So the injury argument isn't really valid in lowballing him after the '92 season.

[bork]

Bando's biggest crime was letting the farm system go down the toilet. Those teams of the late 80's and early 90's were competive because they had a steady stream of prospects coming up from the farm.

[brewers4eric]

Molitor's value the team was never more evident than it was in 1987. When he was hurt, the team couldn't win. I'm just going on what I remember reading in an old Street & Smith's baseball yearbook from 20 years ago, but if he missed 40 games that year, the Brewers were 8-32 when he wasn't in the lineup.

 

The 1992 team was one of my favorites. I just wonder what would have happened if they would have brought Cal Eldred up earlier to replace Bruce Ruffin in the rotation, or if some of the save situations would have gone to Darren Holmes instead of Doug Henry. The team didn't have much power, but they had guys that could hit in the clutch. It would have been a shame to completely blow up the roster after missing the playoffs by a few games, but some of the personnel decisions were pretty poor. Letting Molitor go was the kicker, but they also made some poor free agent decisions and protected some questionable players in the expansion draft.

 

The article puts the plight of Brewer fans into perspective, but you could write an article like that for any franchise. When the Huntsville roster graduates to the majors and we start winning I'll laugh about it. Until then, it jives with my sado/masochistic personality.

[pitchleague]

I was reading through my media guide some more this morning during breakfast and I totally had forgotten that the 1992 Brewers had 250-ish stolen bases as a team that year.

 

I can't check at work but that has got to be one of the last pure basestealing teams in baseball that finished with 200+ team steals. I can't think of any since, off the top of my head.

[Big Reed]

There were four unforgivable problems with bando offering Molitor that paycut.

 

the first was that Molitor had one of his more productive years and nobody gets a paycut after having a productive year. gee, I had a great year, and I'm offered a paycut?

 

second - prior to Bando offering molitor a paycut, there were only about 2 other baseball players in baseball history that were offered paycuts. offering a player a paycut was unheard of back then. those two previous paycuts were the result of injuries and the player missing the previous 1-2 years. their cuts were justified.

 

third - bando informed Molitor that the brewer finances were not very strong and he asked him to take a paycut to help out the team financially. he asked him to take one for the team.

 

fourth - at the time of the paycut, bando informed Molitor that he was giving him a paycut because of his age, he was not going to play him every day the following year and that he was going to start playing young guys like Joey Moyer more, so that Molitor would only get about 450 at bats and because of the lower projection in atbats, he was not worth as much, and thus deserving of a pay cut.

 

at that time, Molitor thought 3,000 hits was still attainable; Bando didn't think so. Molitor knew staying with the brewers would limit his atbats and by staying, he would be hard pressed to collect 3,000 hits. So he left for toronto and a chance to be the full time dh.

 

The sad part about molitor is that most people think of him as just being a dh. he could have played third base or outfield or first base his last three years and put up numbers like Mark Grace or Overbay. he was not as fragile as people make him out to be. he played third base for toronto in the world series after not playing there all season. he could have played a position, he just didn't. Molitor is kind of like big Poppy. Big poppy could play first base - he just doesn't because the red Sox have a great first baseman. Big poppy is probably just as good of an outfielder as manny is.

 

When it's all said and done, will Prince be remembered as a first baseman or dh who played first in his early years?

 

as for molitor - he got the shaft from the brewers.

 

as for the article- that's why i want the brewers to win now. I'm tired of hearing we have a 5 year plan and in 5 years our draft picks wil l make us a competitive team. I lived through all the bad years. i want just one good year before i die. I don't want to be like Cubs fans. Buy me a championship. and I won't complain if you sell all of the players next year. but me a championship. Unlike some , finishing in second or third with a winning record is just not enough. it's nice, but not enough.

[Big Reed]

it should be noted in bando's behalf that he was ordered by the brewers' ownership not to draft anybody in the first round that wanted a big or even mid sized signing bonus. At that time, the brewers had no money to draft players who had high signing bonus demands. So in saving money, bando drafted a bunch of losers. I blame this more on ownership than Bando. bando later remarked he would have wanted to draft certain players who turned out great, but couldn't afford to pay their signing bonus demands.

 

The biggest problem with the brewers in the 90's is that while FA signings were escalating, Bud Selig wanted to show other small market teams that they could could compete without spending a lot of money on free agents. and he used the brewers to prove his point. his idea backfired in his face, and created the big rift between teams that we see today. if bud had been able to get a salary cap imposed in the late 80's as part of the strike agreement, baseball would be a lot different today and a lot more competitive and even. it's too bad bud wasn't the owner of the yankees or St louis or Kansas City.

 

I can't believe the article didn't mention the brewers switch to the national league when at the time the brewers three best minor league prospects were all projected as dh only. That was well thought out Bud.

[TooLiveBrew]

I can't check at work but that has got to be one of the last pure basestealing teams in baseball that finished with 200+ team steals. I can't think of any since, off the top of my head.

 

The 2007 Mets stole exactly 200 (81.3% rate). It's like searching through a pile of legos for one particular piece -- ask someone walking past you to help find it, and they find it right away. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/wink.gif I didn't recall the Mets doing that either.

 

Anyway, for the rest since 1992:

 

'93 Expos stole 228 (80.3%)

'96 Rockies - 201 (75.3%)

 

 

That's it. In '96 the Royals stole 195 (69.6%) -- I think this was the closest to 200 but not equal/greater than since 1992.

[MNBrew]

That whole article is scary, but it's also extremely selective (granted, with a nice supply of gems to choose from). For example:

 

They talk about Turnbow still closing games in July 2006 after citing his full-year stats. Turnbow stunk in '06, but he really only stunk starting in late June. There was that stretch of horrible games for nearly a month that foreshadowed this year and killed any hope of good stats for the year. But he started out very respectably in April, May, & June, making the All-Star team VERY justifiably.

 

The one difference between Melvin and his predecessors is that Melvin is pretty proven at mining for nuggets. Dalton's later years, plus Bando and maybe also Taylor, those 3 guys did far more bottom-dredging than nugget mining. Any nuggets seemed to turn up more by sheer numbers and by accident than anything else.

 

It really used to frost me that they'd keep signing guys for one year who'd have good years, then say they couldn't pay them, then sign someone else for the same money it would've taken to sign the guy they already had. The Brian Harper-Joe Oliver-etc. sequence was a textbook example of that. Scott Fletcher, Willie Randolph, the list goes on... That was in the early '90s pretty much up 'til the strike.

[Bring Back the Stein]

Well, that's the last time I complain that the Brewers never get any national press.

[bando1234]

I always wondered how the thin air of Denver (our AAA team) affected this team. It always seemed like we had the next big hitter whose was going to take the world by storm. Todd Dunn, Tim Pyznarski, Joey Meyer, Glenn Braggs &Dave Nillison are part of that era that I remember hearing big things about but did not pan out as advertised.

 

I dont think we had much of a scouting sytems in the 90's either. We can draft Giambi,Garciaparra, Matt Morris & Alex Fernadez but not sign them.And if Im not mstaken we were one the last to scout in other countries.

[mothershipconnection]

To be fair, Nilsson was a pretty decent hitter, especially his .932 OPS in 1996 and .954 in 1999. Had he remained exclusively a catcher, his numbers at the plate look pretty good.

[DougJones43]

The whole premise of the article is the 'disaster' of letting Gagne still close? Not sure what to make of that.

 

According to Schoenfield, Eric is in a "career crisis" http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/eyes.gif

Have you looked at Eric Gagne's numbers since the trade deadline last season? ERA around 6.50. Whip around 1.8. That's in 36 appearances, or roughly half of a season. He's 32-years-old. I don't think it's a stretch to say that for a "closer", he's in a career crisis. That's atrocious.

[TooLiveBrew]

I've had this back & forth too much in the Gagne thread to go into it here http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

[DougJones43]

I've had this back & forth too much in the Gagne thread to go into it here http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

Fair enough. I haven't gotten around to reading that one. I will concede the point that he's been getting squeezed bad, if that was discussed! http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

[SoCal Brew Crew Fan]

That's the first sportswriter that ever made me cry.

 

I give.

[pitchleague]

Tomorrow they'll probably edit their article and add the 2008 entry to the list.

[MickeyDavis]

I can't believe the article didn't mention the brewers switch to the national league when at the time the brewers three best minor league prospects were all projected as dh only. That was well thought out Bud.

Agreed. But at least we were put into the only 6 team division in baseball. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/mad.gif

[SoCal Brew Crew Fan]

It strikes me how darn snakebit we've been with starting pitching over the years. Ever since Teddy Higuera won 20 games and got the big contract, we've been cursed. We've had great prospects too, some have had great years. Juan Nieves was a huge get as a young free agent phenom. Cal Eldred was awesome when he first came up and burned out way too early. How about Jeff D'Amico? Now it's Ben Sheets who dazzles one day and pulls a muscle the next. Or YoGo, our best pitching prospect in years who tears an ACL on a freak play. WE ARE CURSED!!!

 

I feel bad for the 6 college pitchers we are about to take in the first couple rounds next month.

[MickeyDavis]

Nick Neugebauer