Brewers off-season ranking

[piccione88]

Sporting News Magazine recently ranked all of the major league teams off-seasons, and gave the Brewers a C-. The article was written before the Brewers signed Braden Looper, a C- however still seems about right to me, I would probably give them a C. Melvin did not have a ton of money to work with, unless he traded someone which he at least had discussions about that with Mike Cameron and the yankees. Even without a ton of money the Brewers front office did some good things.

 

I like what was done with the bullpen, the Brewers have over a dozen players that are legitimate options for the pen. Most of the relief pitchers picked up this off-season are inexpensive and have high ceilings. In the end I believe our bullpen is better than last years, esspecially in the depth department. That however is the only spot where our depth has been improved.

 

With Kapler gone our outfield is one injury away from having Duffy, Gwynn, or Nixon starting. With Branyan gone, we are a little thinner at third, although Gamel is hitting well enough to produce at the plate, and Branyan is not a sure thing anyway. Obviously the biggest hit we took was when Sabathia, and Sheets left. Melvin was not going to replace them, and I do not think anyone expected him to. Melvin was apparently going for depth with the addition of Green, and Wright, both of whom could probably start a few games and not emerrass themeselves. The Brewers still have plenty of time to figure things out, and I am sure at least one reliever will be traded.

 

As our off-season stands at this point, my opinion is that the Brewers did not make any moves that will come back to haunt us, but nothing that we did was very impressive either. A grade of C seems perfect to me, we had an average off-season to this point. What you all give the Brewers front office for an off-season grade.

[alwz4gbp]

I would actually give Doug a bit of a higher mark, not much but a bit. I say B-. Snagging Wright, Looper and possibly Gagne brings him up above average in my book. He has set himself up well to have a powerful bullpen or potential trade chips towards the end of spring training. Just my opinion.

[DonMoney4Mgr]

I don't think he did anything to improve the everyday lineup. This is an inconsistant offensive team that lacks righty/lefty balance and below average OBP. He jumped the gun with Cameron. A small market like Milw. should not be paying a player of his caliber 10M. You take away a few hot streaks and he was a 200 hitter most of last year. Who wants to see Mike Lamb in the lineup? Bill Hall? Craig Counsel? (not again!) Jason Kendall? This team is full of holes.

 

The bottom line is on paper this team does not look like a 90M team. If we finish at 500 or below Melvin should be fired before he gives away the rest of our young talent.

[Ennder]

I disagree with almost everything in DonMoney4Mgr's post, especially the last sentence.

 

I'd give Melvin a B for the offseason, it isn't his fault that we lost good players and he did a good job filling the holes. It would be nice to have another LH bat but there really was no full time LH bat available and yeah Cameron isn't as great a deal as it looked but there really was no full time CF out there. Signing and Abreu and moving Hart to CF would have been a disaster defensively that more than makes up for the offensive problems.

[Invader3K]

I'd give Melvin about a B - . I think there were some missteps, but a lot of things that happened this year were simply out of his control, such as the Yankees spending like drunken sailors when they haven't even sold out their first home games at their new stadium, and Sheets needing surgery.

 

Also, Cameron is not really overpaid. Honestly, the way some fans talk about him, you'd think he was Corey Patterson or something.

[CheezWizHed]

If you look at the overall picture of who we lost and who we gained and compare that to all other teams, a C is about correct.

 

However, if you consider we expected to lose CC and most likely Sheets, and have a limited budget, I would say Melvin gets a B. We will see how things pan out, but he really did fill a lot of gaps in the last couple weeks without spending a lot of money. The Cameron deal looks worse now, but at the beginning of the offseason it was more understandable. (BTW, if you take away everyone's hot streaks, they are all .200 hitters - except Bob Ueker, he becomes a .100 hitter).

 

My personal feeling is that he isn't done yet, also... We can't keep all of those RPs, so someone will be trade bait.

[Invader3K]

Well, the thing is, Mark Attanasio was quoted very recently as saying that again if they have the chance to make a move mid-season, they will. That's re-assuring to me. There's a long term plan here, where as when the Seligs were footing the bill, everything seemed to be short term.

[Yeti73]

All things considered, I would give them a B+ on the baseball side of things. Melvin played the market well, got his closer, got depth and kept our young guys happy by not going to arby.

 

When you include the loss of JP and the hiring of CP, I'd move that down to a D for an offseason.

[RobertR]

I'm still formulating my opinion of Ken Macha which is one of the most significant moves.

 

To me a C seems about right for personnel. There wasn't much Melvin could do about Sabathia and Sheets, so that doesn't bother me, but for the most part Melvin ended up standing pat and taking a few calculated risks, mostly with the bullpen. If the young players take a significant step forward, it will probably all work out, but there's definitely less margin for error. And I really can't get too excited about the additions of Hoffman, Looper and a whole bunch of relievers. That said, there's no move the Brewers made that I see Melvin regretting in the long run either.

 

Robert

[Fatter than Joey]

I'd give Melvin a "C" -- He didn't do anything remarkable, and he didn't do anything that I didn't like.

 

If you really like Luis Pena, I could see Melvin getting a C-

[MessiahRp]

I'd give Melvin about a B - . I think there were some missteps, but a lot of things that happened this year were simply out of his control, such as the Yankees spending like drunken sailors when they haven't even sold out their first home games at their new stadium, and Sheets needing surgery.

 

Also, Cameron is not really overpaid. Honestly, the way some fans talk about him, you'd think he was Corey Patterson or something.

Cameron is not overpaid by last year's market rate. He's overpaid by this year's market rate. I also disagree that Corey Hart in CF would be the disaster he believes it would be. Hart is not a horrible fielder, he just tries to hard to make catches sometimes that he should probably sit back on and allow the one hop. Braun looked like a great fielder statistically because he usually wasn't going to try to make a crazy catch... he'd let those drop and throw it back in.

 

I think there should have been more of an effort to get a front of the rotation starter. If you lose Sheets and CC and your best options are one guy who has ace potential but hasn't pitched a full major league season and another who burned out 3/4ths of the way through last season I think you need to try harder to acquire a front end guy. I sort of wish we'd have taken a shot at Peavey. I know Milwaukee was not his destination of choice but even if it were to keep him out of Chicago (not to mention he'd be cheaper than what we offered CC for similar numbers) we should have made some sort of effort to acquire a lights out front end guy.

 

Not to mention if the Cubs were interested in keeping him out of Milwaukee at the very least it would have driven the asking price up for them.

 

Rp

[JohnBriggs12]

I don't think he did anything to improve the everyday lineup. This is an inconsistant offensive team that lacks righty/lefty balance and below average OBP. He jumped the gun with Cameron. A small market like Milw. should not be paying a player of his caliber 10M. You take away a few hot streaks and he was a 200 hitter most of last year. Who wants to see Mike Lamb in the lineup? Bill Hall? Craig Counsel? (not again!) Jason Kendall? This team is full of holes.

 

The bottom line is on paper this team does not look like a 90M team. If we finish at 500 or below Melvin should be fired before he gives away the rest of our young talent.

 

DonMoney4Mgr,

 

Your first paragraph is pretty close to accurate, though Braun, Fielder and Hardy at least should cover some of the obvious offensive deficiencies elsewhere. It wasn't a horrible offseason, but it could have been a lot better had Melvin been bolder. I'd give him a C.

[Brian the Automator]

So far, I give him a "C+". It's really hard to give these kinds of grades though, because you don't know what kind of deals were out there to be made. The FA market was pretty weak at the positions where the Brewers had a need (SP and RP). So while it looks like on paper the team is at BEST treading water, I'm not sure if Doug deserves a bad or failing grade on the offseason.

[Ennder]

I still fail to see this magic high OBP LH bat that would have saved the team. If we sign someone like Dunn or Abreu to play RF with Hart moving to CF we cost the team 25-30 runs on defense and more than offset what good their offense will do.

 

This isn't a magical world where everything you want can be had each offseason. There just was no player that made sense to fit the role you are asking for. Closest thing out there is Edmonds. The last thing this team needs is a defensive deficient OF moving Hart who is only adequate in RF to CF where he becomes a liability.

[logan82]

I think Melvin did a good job considering our budget constraints. He held out and got a bargain rate on a starter. Not that Looper is anything to get excited about, but at least we shouldn't completely tank when a pitcher goes down. C I guess. Nothing special, nothing horrible.

[DonMoney4Mgr]

I think Melvin did a good job considering our budget constraints.

Budget constraints? Going into 09 there are only 12 teams spending more than the Brewers. How much do think they should spend?

 

I give Melvin a D for money not well spent.

[patrickgpe]

it was an odd offseason. For most of it all we heard about is that they were not taking on payroll because they had to sign our arbitration eligible players. They put on this fake courtship of sabathia. Then towards the end he went in and swooped up Looper and Gagne. I think the team is slightly worse than they were on September 28th, hence i agree with the C-.

[logan82]

DonMoney4Mgr wrote:

Budget constraints? Going into 09 there are only 12 teams spending more than the Brewers. How much do think they should spend?

 

I give Melvin a D for money not well spent.

Most of the money on our roster was spent on raises for our current players. He didn't have much to work with considering the number of hole we had to fill through free agency.

 

Edit: This off season Melvin didn't do anything that will have a long term detrimental effect on this team.

[And That]

A small market like Milw. should not be paying a player of his caliber 10M. You take away a few hot streaks and he was a 200 hitter most of last year.

If you arbitrarily take away "hot streaks" from any player, their offensive production is going to drop. Fortunately, you can't remove hot streaks from the statistical record and Mike Cameron was one of the top handful of CFers in the game last year - Fangraphs pegged his value at $18.5 mil last year and that was with him missing the first 25 games. He's a darn good guy to have in CF. I wish his OBP were a little higher, but plenty of teams have CFers with worse.

 

As to whether Milwaukee should be paying him $10 mil - who else would they put there? In-house options are limited to Gwynn and Hart. Gwynn is terrible at the plate and the defensive dropoff from Cameron to either is staggering. Trading for someone would have involved some sort of indeterminate cost. They might have been able to get a good deal on a solid replacement, but who knows?

 

I'm not impressed or unimpressed with Melvin's moves this offseason. Losing Pena on waivers was stupid, but other than unknown moves that could have happened but didn't (like Cameron to the Yankees), I can't recall anything else I disliked. The bullpen looks a lot more solid than last year, I think Lamb/Hall will be fine at third base and if Hart can bounce back and Prince can play better defense, we're as good or better than we were last year at this point. I'm just a little worried about the rotation, though the Looper signing went some way to assuage that. I'll give him a B- if Gagne makes the roster, C+ if he sucks.

[owbc]

Find cheap starters to replace Sabathia and Sheets -- check

Avoid arbitration with current players -- check

Fill in bullpen -- check

Find a respectable new manager/coaching staff -- check

Long term contracts--Fielder signed for 2010--nothing on Corey Hart

I didn't see a need to do anything at 3B or Catcher

 

I know he didn't put together a World Series team, but I think we have a solid team for $90 million based on the age of the players. They aren't 23 years old anymore--Hardy, Weeks, and Fielder cost 5-10 times as much as they did a few years ago. We could have traded them and put in Escobar, Gamel, Nelson, etc. but we chose to spend the money and keep them.

 

Grade: B+ (above what I expected, but nothing extraordinary)

[Ennder]

nice post obsessed.

 

To fill in what we didn't do that we might have wanted

 

Find front line starter - There was a pretty thin market on this and larger market teams pretty much took all of them. Lowe is the only one that was plausible for us.

Find LH high OBP hitter that isn't a hack in the field - Pretty much nobody that fits this profile was available. We could have signed a horrible defensive LH corner OF and moved Hart to CF but overall this doesn't help the team at all.

 

Overall Melvin did a decent job given the market.

[BrewCrewForever]

I think obsessedwithbrewcrew pretty much said it all. I don't know if I would say B+ thought probably a B- or C+. The offseason started really slow but Doug picked it up right before spring training by getting more pitching depth in the pen and in the rotation. I don't think he made one move I didn't like. He didn't make a huge signing or splash but improved the club with needs.

[pete]

Front line starter would have been nice, but as has been said, not many choices. Peavy's contract is scary. Lowe was probably undoable and not cheap either. It'll be interesting to see if a quality starter, maybe a #2 or #3 can be had without giving up premium prospects as the year progresses. Probably not, but the economy may create opportunities.