Marcum to the Mets

[Ennder]

I think it shows how barren the Brewers' history has been that many posters are jubilant about losing a really good young player because the trade got them to one NLCS (not a World Series ring). How would Packer fans feel if they'd have traded away Aaron Rodgers when he was "just a bench player" and the veteran guy they got back for a season helped the team make it to one NFC Championship game loss?

 

I would feel awful if we had traded Braun to make a run, but Lawrie is no Braun and he certainly is no Rodgers. Also this is being results oriented. That was a roster fully capable of winning a world series, it wasn't like we traded away the future to just get in the playoffs. If Greinke, Gallardo, Marcum pitch to their norms we had a team that could easily have gone all the way. We had a roster the next year that would have been in the hunt again if not for a miserable start.

 

I will be honest here with the Melvin era, there are parts of the story we just don't know about almost for sure. Are some of the more oddball signings because of the owner and not the GM like some of the background stories suggest? Is the reason we pushed our prospects up faster than we should have been part of the rebuilding the fanbase movement or a misjudgement by Melvin? How much of the win now mentality is Melvin going for it and how much is directed by upper management/ownership? How on earth did we ever hire both Yost and Macha? They are such complete opposites that the same guy hiring both of them makes no sense.

[monty57]

and he certainly is no Rodgers

 

Don't get me wrong, I love Rodgers, but his stock slipped to the point that the Packers got him late in the 1st round, he then sat the bench for three seasons behind Favre, and finally became a starter when he was 24 years old. He knew the system completely by that time and was ready to hit the ground running with a Super Bowl-caliber team. The Packers played it perfectly so that Rodgers was set up to succeed. This is how QBs used to be handled in the NFL prior to the mega-contracts they now get forcing teams to start their QBs basically from day one when many are not really ready. I think it has lots to do with why lots of highly-touted QBs flounder, while lower draft picks succeed when finally given their shot. Who knows, if Rodgers had been drafted by the 49ers and Alex Smith dropped to the Packers, their careers may have been reversed.

 

Lawrie just turned 23 and he's already got 1.5 seasons as a MLB starter under his belt. I don't know if Lawrie will play to his potential or what his career will look like, but he's still very young and should continue to get better and better. He certainly has a lot more "potential future value" than Marcum, so in that light, we did "trade away the future to just get in the playoffs." Prior to the Greinke and Marcum trades, Melvin shopped Hart and Fielder and didn't find the return he was looking for. Therefore, he changed his mind from looking to rebuild to looking to build a playoff team. He extended Hart and decided that he'd go for it in Fielder's final season. If we hadn't made the Marcum trade, we probably didn't make the Greinke trade. Without those two moves, we would have had a good offense with no pitching and would've been pretty hard-pressed to make the playoffs, thereby "wasting Fielder's final season." Therefore, we traded "the future" (Lawrie, Odorizzi, Cain, Escobar, Jeffress and whatever we would've got in trade for Fielder and Hart) for a short window to make the playoffs. He then "traded more of the future" by signing Ramirez to a back-end loaded deal to try to make the playoffs in 2012 (Greinke and Marcum's last season), knowing that they were going to have to cut payroll in 2013-2014, when the Ramirez contract would hurt the team's financial flexibility.

 

I will be honest here with the Melvin era, there are parts of the story we just don't know about almost for sure. Are some of the more oddball signings because of the owner and not the GM like some of the background stories suggest? Is the reason we pushed our prospects up faster than we should have been part of the rebuilding the fanbase movement or a misjudgement by Melvin? How much of the win now mentality is Melvin going for it and how much is directed by upper management/ownership? How on earth did we ever hire both Yost and Macha? They are such complete opposites that the same guy hiring both of them makes no sense.

 

While baseball fans are normally only interested in one goal... winning, the team has to be focused on two goals, winning and turning a profit. I agree that many of the moves in the Melvin Era have been done to help build up the fanbase, and I'm sure that the decision to hold on to Fielder and go for it in his final year, and the decision to sign Ramirez had a lot to do with making the Brewers seem relevant and building a rabid fan-base. I just worry that the image they wanted built is just a facade, and we really can't be big spenders, but that we need guys like Lawrie playing for league minimum and then signing a Braun(first deal)/Lucroy-like extension keeping him here for eight seasons. Pulling in the reigns now is probably a smart financial move and will save the franchise from having to make bad personnel moves in the future. Hopefully, it won't sour many of the fans, and we won't see diminished ticket sales from fans who think "we're not doing anything to win."

 

The Brewers should be sometimes entertaining/sometimes frustrating to watch this year. They'll have a little more knowledge of how their pitching will shape up going into 2014, and will be over the man-made "financial hump" going into the 2015 season. Hopefully we'll have a defined course of action going forward from there, and hopefully it will be centered on signing Lucroy-like extensions to the young "core" guys. But it would sure make things easier if we had a talent like Lawrie locked up cheap for the next six or seven years.

[mothershipconnection]

Bonus figures have been updated. It now looks as if Marcum can earn up to $4MM in bonuses, and not the $2MM that was reported earlier. Essentially, if he's as durable as 2010 or 2011, he'd make $7.5MM-$8MM. By my math, he'd make $5MM if he replicates 2012 (120 IP, 90 days active roster, 120 days active roster).

 

http://espn.go.com/blog/new-york/mets/post/_/id/60340/breakdown-of-marcum-bonus-money