Knock on wood - Could Chris Capuano be a factor on this year's team? Latest: Starting Thursday 6/3 (reply #171ish)

[TooLiveBrew]

You're absolutely right, my mistake. I was (incorrectly) remembering him only having 3 or so strikeouts in the 8 inning start, and then just assumed his K numbers were low. They're not great, but certainly not real cause for concern. I still have some reservations about how effective Cappy can be against big leaguers, though.

[FVBrewerFan]

Move Sharpie to the 60 day DL ,problem solved. That buys you some time to see how everything shakes out. Not sure what they do with the 40 man roster though.

[Invader3K]

Capuano has been promising so far this year, but really, isn't rushing him back to the majors about the worst thing they could do at this point? I'd rather make sure he's really ready than promote him too quickly.

[zzzmanwitz]

Doug Melvin hasn't traded high on anyone since Scott Podsednik. That's what frustrates me so much about him.

 

I guess you could argue Lyle Overbay.

 

If we are always trading players when they are at their peak value, we are going to have a hard time winning anything in the post season. We would be the Pirates.

[Invader3K]

Melvin has had some really bad luck though. A lot of guys have simply crashed after having peak seasons. Hardy, Hart, Turnbow, and Hall all come to mind. I guess you could argue that he should have seen it coming with Hall, but how many teams really trade a position player after a 35 HR, Team MVP season? And of course a guy who could play multiple positions too.

 

I do think he should have traded some veterans in July or August of last season. I have to believe we could have gotten something for Cameron, Kendall, Hoffman, Counsell, etc. I'd think he could have cut a gentleman's deal with Counsell or Hoffman to bring them back in '10 if that's what he was worried about.

 

He has sold high on others, though. Dan Kolb comes to mind. Doug Davis (sort of). Just because those trades didn't work out particularly well for the Brewers doesn't dismiss that he tried. Oh yeah, there was that Sexson deal too...

[sheethead]

how many teams really trade a position player after a 35 HR, Team MVP season?

 

It sure would have been a bold move. Would not have been a popular move at the time, and who could foresee the guy falling off the cliff the way he did?

[RobDeer 45]

Again, what would Stetter have gotten for us? Not a lot. It's so easy for us to look back and say.... ya we should have traded him on July 18th of last year, so dumb that he didn't. You can't just trade guys that are playing well, doesn't make sense. And lets not over value everyone who puts together a few good months.

[Invader3K]

I doubt Stetter would have gotten us much more than a marginal minor league type. LOOGYs really aren't all that tough to come by.

 

Not sure how all this trade talk developed in a thread about Capuano though.

[joepepsi]

You can't just trade guys that are playing well, doesn't make sense. And lets not over value everyone who puts together a few good months.

There's a prevailing attitude on this board that it's better to trade players than keep them on the team during their peak years. This must date back to the days when the Brewers were always horrible and in constant (albeit failing) rebuild mode.

[geddymd73]

how many teams really trade a position player after a 35 HR, Team MVP season?

 

It sure would have been a bold move. Would not have been a popular move at the time, and who could foresee the guy falling off the cliff the way he did?

Not totally out of the realm of possibilities.

I doubt it was popular for Colorado to trade Holliday in 2008 either.

As for cheapies, Seattle let Branyan go after hitting a career high 31 HR, albeit he had a herniated disk, but thats very recoverable.

[TooLiveBrew]

I doubt it was popular for Colorado to trade Holliday in 2008 either.

 

That's not a good comparison at all. The Rockies dealt Holliday due to his impending free agency (traded after the '08 season so as to get more value from him than as a rental player), not just because they were selling high.

[FVBrewerFan]

Capuano has been promising so far this year, but really, isn't rushing him back to the majors about the worst thing they could do at this point? I'd rather make sure he's really ready than promote him too quickly.

I don't know about that. If he's going to re-injure his arm, does it matter if it happens in Nashville or Milwaukee? I don't know how much more "ready" he can be. He's a vet who apparently has control of all his pitches, and his arm seems to be sound.

 

And yea, there's plenty of threads about Melvin's ability or inability to make good trades. This topic is abut Cappy. Please stay on topic.

 

 

[tigerbrew]

I would like to see Cappy promoted to the Brewers this week. Have Cappy pitch out of the bullpen first and see how he does. I think the addition of Cappy will improve our pitching staff.

[RobDeer 45]

Do you think it would be better on his arm to start him? I haven't followed too closely but how many innings did he pitch in his last start? I'm just thinking when a pitcher knows when he's going to start he's going to tend to be loser. Also, I believe it to be easier on their arms if they got 6 innings and rest 5-6 days then go two innings rest a few days and go two more. I'd say whatever is best for his arm we should go with but I'd love to see him up if he's ready.

[TheCrew07]

Again, what would Stetter have gotten for us? Not a lot. It's so easy for us to look back and say.... ya we should have traded him on July 18th of last year, so dumb that he didn't. You can't just trade guys that are playing well, doesn't make sense. And lets not over value everyone who puts together a few good months.

I think this argument has begun to become extremist on both sides.

 

We don't need to trade every player performing well, of course not, it's silly to even argue that point. Likewise luck has absolutely nothing to do with this, the Brewers don't experience more pitching injuries than other organizations, our lack of success is not luck driven in anyway. We needed to trade high on 1 or 2 position players though, because we needed impact pitching. Whichever player(s) really isn't the issue, the issue that we have to give value to get value. How many people around are willing to part with any position player that's performing well? I would say the answer up until this season has been very, very few. Well if we weren't drafting enough impact pitching, developing enough impact pitching, and we aren't able to sign impact pitching in FA, how exactly do we acquire impact pitching if not through trades? It's one thing to draft enough impact arms and then it's an entirely different issue to get those arms through the system healthy and performing in MLB. I would really like someone to come up with a legit answer to that bolded question, because I've always felt the solution was fairly obvious.

 

When I talked about moving Hall it was because Hardy was clearly the SS of the future, not because Hall was going to drop off into oblivion and become dead weight. The same can be said of any player I've advocated moving, they were valuable and I want valuable pitching in return. When people make the, "Well who should Doug have traded for pitching?" argument and I throw names out there... I'm not saying he should have traded all of those guys, I'm saying he should have traded 1 or 2 of them because positional production is easier to replace that pitching production. It's simply of list names and choose 1 or 2, not a statement of "he should have sold high on every single one of these players" type thing. If you don't want to trade MLB pieces then we're left with just strickly prospects, but if we need prospects for long term solutions then we had better quit spending them on rentals. I would also really like to know how Melvin was going to acquire impact pitching after the Sabathia trade without using a MLB player as a centerpiece of the trade?

 

As far as Cappy is concerned, his K rate has dropped off significantly (yes we're talking in extremely small samples for both AAA and A+) since the jump up. I'd like to see him make 2-3 more starts in AAA and see how he does. He's extremely popular around here and rightly so, I even root very hard for the guy, but I just don't feel given his injury history that he's someone we can count on long term.

 

 

[zzzmanwitz]

I'd like to see him make 2-3 more starts in AAA and see how he does.

 

The problem is that he only has one more start before a decision has to be made.

[young guns]

I thought the 29th was just when Cappy could go elsewhere, not that it was up to the major league team or gone.

[TheCrew07]

I'd like to see him make 2-3 more starts in AAA and see how he does.

 

The problem is that he only has one more start before a decision has to be made.

I'm not concerned by that at all, they already moved the date once and I just don't see Chris opting for FA at this point. I think Chris genuinely would like to be a Brewer again, he's never said it directly but that's my gut feeling from his various interviews (audio and print) over the last 2 seasons.

[owbc]

Selling high is dangerous. Many Brewers fans wanted Casey McGehee moved

after 2009 and Gamel starting at 3B this year. That would have been a

terrible mistake.

 

The Capuano decision basically comes down to 1) whether bringing him up to the major leagues would improve the team, and 2) if there is a player available that can get sent down. The answer is a clear "yes" to both. Suppan is the obvious candidate to get released, and I think this could very well be the end of Suppan. We all knew that the plan with Soup was to see if he had anything left in the tank this year before he was released. He's had more than enough time to prove himself and has continually faltered. Even if Attanasio isn't going to pull the plug on Macha, he could easily approve dumping Suppan, which would have a positive effect on fan morale.

 

I think Capuano should take over Suppan's mop-up role and not be inserted in the rotation right away. He missed two full big league seasons, and he was not effective for most of 2007 as well. It isn't that hard to be better than Suppan or the 2010 version of Vargas, but it would be ill-advised to expect miracles.

 

Of course, Capuano could decide not to exercise his out clause (or be persuaded to decline it), and the status quo could continue.

[TheCrew07]

Selling high is dangerous. Many Brewers fans wanted Casey McGehee moved

after 2009 and Gamel starting at 3B this year. That would have been a

terrible mistake.

Based on what? Isn't the objective to win games? If you aren't winning with a guy, what's the difference if he's on the team or not? The team without McGehee wouldn't have had the same make up, it wouldn't be the same personnel, so how you can possibly call trading a McGehee "a terrible mistake" without knowing what the return would be? Was trading Josh Hamilton a terrible mistake because Volquez got hurt? What about trading Delmon Young? This is exactly what I've been posting about, every time we have a position player that performs at a high level very few are willing to trade him.

 

The team's fortunes won't improve until the pitching does, how exactly do we acquire impact pitching without trading for it when we don't have enough of it? I'm willing to be convinced be otherwise but no one ever offers a solution, they just post what a terrible idea it is to trade player X without offering an alternative solution. We know what the problem is, how do we fix it?

[TooLiveBrew]

You often cite that people don't have an answer, but I think the biggest hole in your theory is the assumption that you can go out & trade for impact pitching as easily as selling high on a hitter. I know you can produce two or three semi-recent examples, as we've had this discussion many times. I just think it's a bit misleading to so often talk about selling high & bringing in top pitching when the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't happen very often. My conclusion from that is that it's a darn hard thing to do (Melvin even tried to bring in Buchholz last season when he was squeezed out of Boston's rotation), and not that all GMs aside from Andrew Friedman aren't competent enough to build that way.

 

 

We know what the problem is, how do we fix it?

 

It would seem like the best answer is trade high-caliber pitching, which seems a bit like spinning the wheels to me. Cost-controlled impact pitching is the new OBP in baseball. The market deficiency, to sneak the Moneyball phrase in there, is gone, and now it's not as easy to come by as it was even a couple seasons ago. I think the way we could think about this is that we'd have to offer up something like Jeffress+ (imagining that he hadn't had all the drug test baggage & missed time). That's roughly what I think the cost would be to acquire someone like, say, Clay Buchholz.

I know one name you might drop is Niemann of the Rays, and iirc you read or know that he was being shopped for a bat. And yet, he wasn't traded. I just seriously doubt that no other MLB team was competent enough to notice that pitching is more valuable than hitting at this point, and offer a solid bat if that's all it would've taken. I'm much more inclined to believe the Rays were shopping him to see if anyone would overpay (and kudos to them for doing so). I want the Brewers to acquire top-flight pitching, too. I just don't think that's as easy anymore as you do.

[LouisEly]

Based on what? Isn't the objective to win games?

Yes the objective is to win games, but if you keep "selling high" on players who are you going to have left who is above replacement-level who is good enough to win enough games to get you in the playoffs? That's the toughest part of being a GM - trying to figure out who will sustain their success and who will not.

 

You mention the fleecing of the Giants by the Twins. The thing is, they had the second most valuable trading commodity next to good young pitching - they had good young catching in A.J. Pyrzynski to trade, who posted a .824 OPS as a 26-year-old in 2003. Look at the haul that Atlanta got for Saltalamacchia. Good young catching is very valuable.

 

You mention the trade for Garza by TB. They had young talent to trade - Delmon Young, the #1 overall pick in the 2003 draft, good enough to play 162 games in the majors at age 21. Regardless of being the #1 pick in the draft, anyone who is good enough to play 162 games in the majors at age 21 is someone who everyone including you would think has a world of potential. Hell, Young put up a .924 OPS as an 18-year-old rookie in A-ball, and a .881 OPS combined at AA-AAA as a 19-year-old. That's what it took to get Garza.

 

You mention Edwin Jackson being acquired by the Tigers. He was traded for an OF who posted a .831 OPS as a 23-year-old rookie. For reference, Corey Hart as a 24-year-old rookie posted a .796 OPS in 2006 in slightly fewer plate appearances. If all you knew was someone who was 23 posted a .831 OPS in the majors, you would think that person had a tremendous amount of potential. The first time Jackson was traded - by the Dodgers to the Rays - it was for a 27-year-old closer who saved 41 games and had a 2.86 ERA in 2005.

 

So who have the Brewers had to trade who has the potential of a 21-year-old good enough to play 162 games in the majors, or a 23-year-old who posted a .831 OPS, or a 27-year-old closer who saved 41 games and had a 2.86 ERA? Not many players the Brewers have had have fit those descriptions or that level of talent/potential.

 

Yes, young pitching can be acquired, however it takes a lot of talent in return, and I think you underestimate how much talent/potential was given up to get those pitchers.

 

Edit - sorry, that was way, way off topic. My apologies. Back to the Capuano discussion.

[trwi7]

Look at the haul that Atlanta got for Saltalamacchia.

A year of Mark Teixeira where they also had to give up Andrus, Feliz, Harrison and Jones? Yeah, that's not really a haul for Atlanta.

 

 

[TheCrew07]

Based on what? Isn't the objective to win games?

You mention the fleecing of the Giants by the Twins.

 

Look at the haul that Atlanta got for Saltalamacchia. Good young catching is very valuable.

 

You mention the trade for Garza by TB. They had young talent to trade - Delmon Young, the #1 overall pick in the 2003 draft, good enough to play 162 games in the majors at age 21. Regardless of being the #1 pick in the draft, anyone who is good enough to play 162 games in the majors at age 21 is someone who everyone including you would think has a world of potential. Hell, Young put up a .924 OPS as an 18-year-old rookie in A-ball, and a .881 OPS combined at AA-AAA as a 19-year-old. That's what it took to get Garza.

 

You mention Edwin Jackson being acquired by the Tigers. He was traded for an OF who posted a .831 OPS as a 23-year-old rookie. For reference, Corey Hart as a 24-year-old rookie posted a .796 OPS in 2006 in slightly fewer plate appearances. If all you knew was someone who was 23 posted a .831 OPS in the majors, you would think that person had a tremendous amount of potential. The first time Jackson was traded - by the Dodgers to the Rays - it was for a 27-year-old closer who saved 41 games and had a 2.86 ERA in 2005.

 

So who have the Brewers had to trade who has the potential of a 21-year-old good enough to play 162 games in the majors, or a 23-year-old who posted a .831 OPS, or a 27-year-old closer who saved 41 games and had a 2.86 ERA? Not many players the Brewers have had have fit those descriptions or that level of talent/potential.

I don't recall ever mentioning the Twins or Giants. I never liked the Teixeira deal for Atlanta from the start.

 

What's an overpay? I thought Young for Garza was actually a better deal for MN at the time, I thought Young was a rare hitting talent, the next Griffey Jr. Did Cincy overpay to acquire to Volquez trading Hamilton away? Detroit certainly didn't overpay to acquire Jackson from TB. Where are the overpays for prospect pitching? Certainly teams give up too much for Sabathia, Lee, and Halladay... but those are all CY candidate pitching, when I have ever advocated trading a for a player like that?

 

Acquiring pitching is certainly possible, but it's all about timing. I've never said Melvin could go and trade for pitching today just because he wants to, but he will have to give value to get value. In fact Melvin's position has only been weakened because once he acquired Sabathia and Sheets was no longer an option, everyone in the world knew the Brewers weren't going have enough pitching going forward. I would be willing to give up quite a bit to get the pitching... Hardy+, Hart+, Fielder, McGehee+... how many other posters on this site would do the same? Would Melvin?

 

You'll never convince me that impact pitching has been a priority for Melvin, not in Milwaukee, not in Texas, there is nothing in his history as a GM to suggest that. For example, even though Chapman isn't ready yet, I would rather given him Davis' money than sign Davis. If my options are spending 5-7 million per year Looper/Davis/next random vet vs throwing 30 million for 5 years at Chapman.. I would have rather thrown that money at Chapman, at least he has the chance to be special. Granted it would have been a huge risk for Melvin, the kind of risks he doesn't take on players who aren't proven, but I think it would have been money better spent there then on declining, aging verteran version 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 as we progress forward.

 

I'm surprised that people don't seem to understand how dire the situation has become in that we're hoping a 2 time TJ surgery pitcher can come back and bolster the rotation. I'm really into Cappy, after all he's a lefty, but I'm not sure how much can realistically be expected out of his elbow going forward. The projections on a 2nd TJ surgery are incredibly dire, just the like Brewers prospects in the division going forward. I have to get to work so I'm not going to go through all of the names again but STL, CIN, and CHC all have better rotations today, and all have more impact talent closer than Milwaukee for the future. In fact Cincy's worst pitcher to this point has been Homer Bailey, but Bailey has a higher GameScore this season than any pitcher in the Brewer's rotation, and he's also pitched a complete game shut out. What are we going to compete for with the 4th best rotation in the division?

 

So again I ask, if Melvin won't aggressively pursue young pitching, what's going to change? How does he move the team forward without more pitching? Is improving the team defense going to save us? Is scoring more the runs the answer?

[brewmann04]

I think the Bigger focus would have to be on the scouting Dept for their Inabilty to Produce any pitching besides Gallardo.