Brewers acquire Shaun Marcum for Brett Lawrie 1 for 1; 3/24/12 -- Jayson Stark article

[topper09er]

I think having ARod on that short list makes a difference.

 

ARod had a 16 OPS+ at age 18, his first year, then a 72 OPS+ his second season. He does not qualify to make the list.

[topper09er]

You can't rebuild forever, I'm glad our team now has the mentality to take some chances instead of being conservative. We just extended Weeks and no one thought McGehee would regress into Bill Hall. We had a big hole in the rotation, no where to play Lawrie and the last year with Prince. By adding Marcum we had the 2nd best roster in the league and ended up with the 2nd most wins. Ryan Braun was just entering his prime and Hart may be nearing the end of all-star level production. By your logic should we just wait and wait forever? Should we be aiming for forming our best core when Braun, Weeks and Hart are all 35 years old? Even though we lost a cheap, cost controlled Lawrie we added Ramirez who should be fine and Green is waiting behind.

[monty57]

You can't rebuild forever

 

But you can't stop believing that young players can succeed, and you can't build a small/mid-market team as if you had a major market payroll. We always need pre-arby / arby players playing significant roles on our roster.

 

I'm glad our team now has the mentality to take some chances instead of being conservative

 

What "chances" are we taking other than the financial risk of not being able to sustain our bloated payroll? A chance would've been letting Green play this year. Signing Ramirez is the opposite of taking a chance. A chance would've been trading Lawrie for a younger, less "proven" pitcher. Signing Marcum was the opposite of taking a chance, unless you consider injury history.

 

We just extended Weeks and no one thought McGehee would regress into Bill Hall. We had a big hole in the rotation, no where to play Lawrie and the last year with Prince. By adding Marcum we had the 2nd best roster in the league and ended up with the 2nd most wins. Ryan Braun was just entering his prime and Hart may be nearing the end of all-star level production.

 

I have said several times that I had no problem with trading Lawrie. In fact, I said that the article makes it appear the rift between Lawrie and "the organization" had become so wide that a trade may have been necessary. I just think that we traded the more talented player, who also had more team control and no injury history for the less talented player who had less team control and fairly serious injury history. In other words, we could've done better.

 

I normally don't chime in on "could of's," but it was reported that other GMs were surprised about the deal and said they wished they'd have known Lawrie was on the market. To me, that means that other GMs would have made offers, and one of them probably would have been for a younger pitcher with more control, better "stuff," and less injury history. But he wouldn't have been as "proven," so we would have had to take a bit more of a chance on him, which is what you say you want us to do.

 

By your logic should we just wait and wait forever?

 

Apparently you don't understand my logic. Sorry if I haven't been clear. I like that we've grown from a wasteland of a franchise to a playoff contender. However, we don't have unlimited resources, so we need to have young, cost controlled players if we want to retain players such as Braun, Yo, Weeks, etc. When we trade a lot of our good prospects for high-priced veterans and sign high-priced veterans who block the rest of our decent prospects, we end up with a $100+MM (and growing) payroll full of players on the wrong side of 30, a depleted farm system, and the few decent position prospects we have left spending their 20's in AAA.

 

Now, since we blew our wad on two pitchers with two years of "team control," we are scrambling. We don't have enough MLB-ready pitchers in the system to hope to replace them, and we're in a bit of a financial pickle, with the percentage of our money going to a limited number of players growing over the next few years. Since we're in such a "win-now" mode, we made our financial situation much worse by signing Ramirez to a back-end-loaded deal which makes him virtually untradeable. Now we have to try to extend Greinke, as we will otherwise fall from being a playoff contender this year to a sub-.500 team next year. However, this possible extension probably means we will have to trade at least one of our other good players (Weeks, Yo, Braun), as I don't see any way we can pay these guys as much as they're going to make in a couple years and still field a full 25-man roster.

 

Should we be aiming for forming our best core when Braun, Weeks and Hart are all 35 years old?

 

Braun's the only one who will be on the roster when he's 35, although Weeks will be well past his prime when his contract's up. However, if we took some chances on younger players (like we did to get to where we are), we could have a new, younger core locked up as the current core ages. That way we could have continued success as opposed to what we've done the past couple of years, which seems to be leading up to a big fall-off after this season, and little financial flexibility to fix our problems in the future.

 

Even though we lost a cheap, cost controlled Lawrie we added Ramirez who should be fine and Green is waiting behind.

 

Barring injury, Ramirez should be fine this year, but he will continue to regress as he ages, while his contract is back-end-loaded so it will balloon when he's probably not "fine" anymore, and we'll be stuck with a $16MM RH bat off the bench as Green (who apparently isn't good enough now) will be our starting 3B because in two years we won't be able to afford to throw money at our perceived problems.

[thebruce44]

I think having ARod on that short list makes a difference.

 

ARod had a 16 OPS+ at age 18, his first year, then a 72 OPS+ his second season. He does not qualify to make the list.

 

Right, in 208 PAs spread out over 2 years. Then, in his first full year, he OPS+'d 160. He is a perfect example of how your list cut off a lot of good players who had success early on and at a young age because they "do not qualify." Guys like Lawrie don't come around often. Sure he could still flame out, but he's a special talent.

[topper09er]

He is a perfect example of how your list cut off a lot of good players who had success early on and at a young age because they "do not qualify."

 

ARod did not have success early on and at a young age, what are you talking about. It took him 2 years of seeing MLB pitching to be ready for it. As was pointed out earlier Lawrie racked up a lot of stats vs September callup type players, we'll see how he does if he gets 600 PAs this season. He cannot be compared to Ted Williams who showed he could rake over a full season instead of 150 PAs.

[topper09er]

But you can't stop believing that young players can succeed, and you can't build a small/mid-market team as if you had a major market payroll. We always need pre-arby / arby players playing significant roles on our roster.

 

You can't win the World Series unless you trade away your prospects for guys that will help the team now. What better window was there, Braun entering his prime, last year of Prince etc etc. The chance we were taking was risking that Lawrie would turn into a stud in exchange for the chance to win now.

[thebruce44]

But you can't stop believing that young players can succeed, and you can't build a small/mid-market team as if you had a major market payroll. We always need pre-arby / arby players playing significant roles on our roster.

 

You can't win the World Series unless you trade away your prospects for guys that will help the team now. What better window was there, Braun entering his prime, last year of Prince etc etc. The chance we were taking was risking that Lawrie would turn into a stud in exchange for the chance to win now.

 

Pretty definitive statement there. Lets see how Texas does this year with one of the best farm systems in baseball and probably the best team on paper headed into the season.

[TooLiveBrew]

We just extended Weeks and no one thought McGehee would regress into Bill Hall.

I think you'd find differently if you re-read some of the older topics on McGehee or McGehee/Gamel. There were plenty of posters here who didn't drink the McGehee Kool-Aid.

[topper09er]

 

Pretty definitive statement there. Lets see how Texas does this year with one of the best farm systems in baseball and probably the best team on paper headed into the season.

 

Well they had to trade for Cliff Lee to make the WS in 2010. They also have the ability to sign the type of impact players we generally don't, like Beltre and Darvish. We wouldn't have needed to trade for Marcum if we just would have signed Cliff Lee.

[topper09er]

We just extended Weeks and no one thought McGehee would regress into Bill Hall.

I think you'd find differently if you re-read some of the older topics on McGehee or McGehee/Gamel. There were plenty of posters here who didn't drink the McGehee Kool-Aid.

 

Good point, there was concern, including from myself. But the extent of McGehee's failure still seemed pretty staggering.

[TooLiveBrew]

Agreed, but Bill Hall is actually a decent comparison, at least in terms of being a guy with very little in his MiLB career that would indicate he could sustain being a productive MLB hitter.

[monty57]

But you can't stop believing that young players can succeed, and you can't build a small/mid-market team as if you had a major market payroll. We always need pre-arby / arby players playing significant roles on our roster.

 

You can't win the World Series unless you trade away your prospects for guys that will help the team now. What better window was there, Braun entering his prime, last year of Prince etc etc. The chance we were taking was risking that Lawrie would turn into a stud in exchange for the chance to win now.

 

I get what you're saying, and I am glad we got as far as we did. However, Melvin in the past few years has really seemed to ramp things up for this window, kind of disregarding much after this window closed. Coincidentally, without his recent extension, this ramp up for a World Series run in 2011 & 2012 would've been just as his contract ended and he retired, leaving the next GM with no pitching and expensive contracts for aging players (see Cubs, Chicago).

 

In two years, we will owe Braun $10MM, Yo $11.25MM, Lucroy something like $2MM, Ramirez $16MM, and Weeks $11MM. That's $50.25MM for five players. Axford and Narveson (I think) will be in Year 2 arby, and Morgan will be in his final arby year. Probably another $10-15MM or so there. That's around $65MM for eight players. If we revert back to our projected $80-90MM budget we were supposed to have this year, we'd have somewhere around $20MM for the other 17 players. At league minimum, 17 players would cost around $8-9MM, so while we apparently can't trust Green and Gamel to both start as rookies in the same season now, will have to trust Green, Gindl, Schafer, Peralta and others to start as rookies in the same season in the future. We basically will have to hope that all of our prospects (from a still bad farm system) will pan out as everyday MLB players.

 

Now we want to extend Greinke, which is probably necessary to remain good enough to keep the fans buying tickets. How does he fit into this budget picture? If we do extend Greinke, in addition to Hart, I expect Weeks to be traded either before or after next season. I also expect that Greinke's contract would have to be structured around Ramirez's contract, which could be the hold-up as to why it's not done. We'll still owe a lot in 2015, but at least Ramirez will be off the books, so a Greinke deal would have to be for a lower base in 2013 and 2014 and balloon starting in 2015, when he & Braun would make around $40MM between them... will our payroll be big enough in the future to have two players making that much?

 

So yeah, I get what you're saying, but if you're willing to trade all of your prospects for that shot at winning the World Series, then you have to be willing to trade your stars for a boatload of prospects to reload every once in a while. This offseason probably would have been a good time to have shopped Hart, Marcum, Greinke, Wolf, etc and reload. We probably could have gotten enough in return to stay competitive now and into the future. Instead, we signed Ramirez.

 

I really hope we win it all this year.

[topper09er]

We need to accept the unfortunate reality that we CANNOT be perennial contenders. Period. We are not the Yankees, we can be good a while but then there is a mandatory period of being bad. The only way out of this is if we get really, Tampa style, lucky that we get a whole crop of mlb contributors at the same time. That is very unlikely, it is almost a given that we will have to overpay for veterans who can fill in where our farm system missed.

 

We have to realize that to win it all we need to decide on some time to sell the future for now. I think last year was an excellent time, and we won 96 games, the division and even ended up with homefield advantage throughout the playoffs. I think the gamble worked just as we hoped, but our manager gave away the NLCS. Lawrie may be an all-star the next few years but it would have wasted on a team without the pitching necesary to win it all.

 

I really think we should not have the model of trying to be competitive every single year, Id rather have the ups and downs of going between great and terrible. Im glad we have an owner/GM who is willing to take the chance that a move for now may hurt us down the road.

[Ennder]

but our manager gave away the NLCS

 

I'd blame the craptastic strike zone we were given and our pitchers complete inability to adjust to it more than the manager.

[kalle8]

lawrie was caught stealing home with the bases loaded and bautista at the plate....

[Invader3K]

but our manager gave away the NLCS

 

I'd blame the craptastic strike zone we were given and our pitchers complete inability to adjust to it more than the manager.

 

Don't forget the defense reverting to a bunch of Little Leaguers, especially in the final game against the Cardinals.

[GormanHarvey]

lawrie was caught stealing home with the bases loaded and bautista at the plate....

 

I did not see this...wow.

[jjfanec]

lawrie was caught stealing home with the bases loaded and bautista at the plate....

 

I did not see this...wow.

 

He also got caught later in the game stealing second. His average is nice right now and I am sure his power will come around. He had his first extra base hit of the season (home run) today.