Burgos Coming up?

[MVP2110]

Tom ‏@Haudricourt 14h

Mike Fiers is making it easier for the #Brewers to send him down and call up a new No. 5 pitcher for Saturday. Likely @Burgos196.

 

Idk if anyone caught this at all last night during the game but it looks like Burgos is going to get his chance to shine in the majors. I absolutely love this move

[RobDeer 45]

I saw that too and thought I was dreaming this morning, but I did find it again. I'm excited as well.

[Ennder]

I like Fiers and I do think he'll be a major league pitcher but I think sending him down is the right move. He just has not had good location this year at all and he is the type that has to locate.

[Thurston Fluff]

I hope it's true. We were told the benefit of these young guys was we had enough flexibility to shuffle them back and forth if they weren't performing well enough. Hopefully it puts Peralta on notice as well.

[BrewCrewForever]

Would love to see Burgos get a shot, that is something kind of exciting.

[SenatorShriv]

I really hope that they go with a short leash on all of the mid to back of the rotation guys. The key will be to stress that it isn't permanent and that they can get back to the big leagues quickly if they find they can work out the kinks.

[fondybrewfan]

I think Peralta should be on a little longer leash that Fiers is/was. You can tell the stuff is there; but I don't know if he loses focus or what but he just has a bad inning here or there that screws up his entire line. The 5th last night; the 6th inning the time before. I can't imagine he had run out of gas by then; his pitch counts were fine.

 

Burgos has shown what he can do in the minors; he definitely has earned a chance in MLB.

[Thurston Fluff]

Why should his stuff give him a longer leash? I don't care if he throws 110 with movement if he isn't getting anybody out he isn't helping.

[RobDeer 45]

I feel like Peralta is still learning how to pitch. I think he's a thrower and it hasn't clicked. For some that takes awhile, or never happens. He's got the stuff, I hope he can just put it all together.

[TheCrew07]

The last thing you want to do with young players is get them looking over their shoulders putting extra pressure on themselves to perform... "a bad outing or 2 and back to the minors for you!" If the player is fixated on "not failing" they are really fixated on "failure" and that's exactly what they will get or do... that's just basic sports psychology and the primary reason I never tell anyone "not" to do something. Like the fielder running down a ball thinking "I'd better not drop this" and what happens? They drop the ball. It's the same for receivers in football or someone shooting a layup in basketball... if you think about not screwing up, you screw up.

 

Ups and downs are to be expected with young players, building their confidence is the single most important part of success and that just requires patience. It's somewhat odd that in a game based primarily around failure that there is so little patience to let players develop, maybe the trial by fire nature of baseball is the reason so many prospects flame out?

 

The league caught up with Fiers, I still believe he can be a good reliever or back of the rotation guy. I'd like for Hiram to get a shot, but stuff wise he's not much different than the player he'd be replacing. Fiers was never the pitcher that people were trying to make him out to be last year, but he can still have a successful career.

[Thurston Fluff]

Don't get me wrong I think Peralta is going to be an very good pitcher. I just don't think he has earned a longer leash simply because he has better stuff. I think you are spot on that he hasn't learned to pitch yet. When he does he can help us a lot. Until he does not so much. If we had no alternative I could see going with the guy who has the best stuff. But we have alternatives. Why not use them?

[PrinceEatMeat]

http://i49.tinypic.com/2n72w69.gif

[igor67]

There is a pretty big difference in sending Fiers down over Peralta. Peralta was pretty good last September and really had only one truly bad start this compared to Fiers who really struggled throughout spring and this year and the end of last year. I think he can bounce back as well, but this is far different from having a short hook and trashing a guys confidence. The look Fiers got is the kind of extended look many of us hope guys do get before decisions are made. As was mentioned above now is the time to use that flexibility the options give you in a productive way.

[TheCrew07]

Why should his stuff give him a longer leash? I don't care if he throws 110 with movement if he isn't getting anybody out he isn't helping.

 

Why should anyone get less than a month of MLB starts to prove their worth? My goodness you can pick any MLB pitcher and they will string together 2 or 3 bad starts in a row multiple times during the season. I really struggle with the rush to judgement and lack of patience many posters here have always displayed towards first year players.

 

Look at Segura last year... it took about 5 weeks and then he started to put it together. The difference is that he got to play every day and build confidence... that's the way we should handle every young player. Give them the rope to fail, learn from their mistakes, improve, and gain confidence.

 

If you're looking to pull another Gallardo out of the minors, a guy who pretty much hits the ground running (and he wasn't lights out that first year) then you're going to be disappointed, we don't have that kind of pitching prospect in our system. We have a bunch of control guys without great stuff and bunch of big arms that need more control/pitchability. That's the just the way it is.

[Thurston Fluff]

Let me start by clarifying something. I have not said one more bad outing and he should go anywhere. In fact I didn't give a timeline at all as far as I can tell so I would prefer you not to insinuate that I did. I said this should put Peralta on notice that you have to perform in the majors or you don't get to stay. That is true and was something they all knew going in. After all Melvin was very public about that all along when talking of going with the young guys.

I think the whole idea of blowing someone's confidence is way overblown. Do you really think it's more confidence building to stay up and get hammered than to be told to go down and work on it? As far as comparing Peralta to Segura I think it's apples and oranges. Each player responds differently so assuming it worked with one guy it will work with everyone is off base.

I do think every major league player despite age or position knows this is a performance based league. You get to stay when you are performing and have to leave when you are not. If their mental makeup is too fragile to perform under those condition then I think there is very little hope they will ever be capable of dealing with it. The only time confidence matters is if they feel their stuff isn't good enough to be here. That they can see clearly enough by the results.

[danzig6767]

Why should his stuff give him a longer leash? I don't care if he throws 110 with movement if he isn't getting anybody out he isn't helping.

 

Because Peralta has the kind of stuff to potentially be a number two caliber starter, so a team needs to be more patient with an arm like that. That's the type of arm and stuff which all teams need to have a quality rotation, assuming he can harness command at some point.

 

Fiers on the other hand has a lesser ceiling and thus it makes more sense to send him down for say Burgos.

[monty57]

Everyone has bad outings from time to time. Everyone looks "overwhelmed" at some point. Right now, Roy Halliday has a 7.63 ERA, Cole Hamels 7.56, Brandon McCarthy 7.47, etc. If you see a guy as a key piece to the future, you stick with him.

 

I'd like to think the team has plans for Fiers, but giving him one outing as a starter, using that outing to shift the rotation around (moving him to the bullpen and going with a 4-man rotation) and then sending him to the minors doesn't really seem to me like they're looking at what's best for Fiers long-term. That's pretty much how you treat a non-prospect. I've said this before, but I think the Brewers realize the same thing most "prospect watchers" realize. Our "top prospects" aren't really "top prospects," so they aren't treating them as such. Peralta is the exception, so he will get more of a leash.

 

I do think they should give Fiers more than one start to see if he can turn things around, but it looks to me (assuming this rumor is true) that Fiers has been banished to AAAA purgatory.

[danzig6767]

 

I do think they should give Fiers more than one start to see if he can turn things around, but it looks to me (assuming this rumor is true) that Fiers has been banished to AAAA purgatory.

 

If this rumor is true, it's not as if Fiers would be DFA and replaced in the rotation by some say fringe 32 year old veteran who was getting innings in AAA. Instead, it would be Hiram Burgos, a prospect in our minor league system and Fiers could go down to AAA to hopefully get his command back on track. Stuff like this happens all of the time through baseball. A decent/not great prospect struggles, gets sent down, and has to earn his way back up, while a different prospect gets his chance in the bigs.

[TheCrew07]

I think the whole idea of blowing someone's confidence is way overblown.

 

I would suggest that you read up sports psychology if you really believe that to be true. The only difference between players of similar natural ability performing or not is whatever is going on in their head and baseball is tough to deal with, it's the only sport where everyone fails a constant rate. The difference between a great hitter offensive player and poor offensive player is only .1... 10%, think about how talented/good all professional baseball players in the majors or not really are.

 

I do think every major league player despite age or position knows this is a performance based league. You get to stay when you are performing and have to leave when you are not.

 

That's true of every professional league, sooner or later everyone has to perform. Baseball is unique in that there's very little coaching available and a very small tolerance of poor performance. Look at the difference in Alcides Escobar from year to year... that year with Macha every time he went 0-10 he was sat on the bench, very few young players are going ascend or maintain performance if they constantly worried about being removed from the game or being sat on the bench. It doesn't matter what level of sport or the game being played, that's not how you develop players.

 

Do you really think it's more confidence building to stay up and get hammered than to be told to go down and work on it? As far as comparing Peralta to Segura I think it's apples and oranges. Each player responds differently so assuming it worked with one guy it will work with everyone is off base.

 

I think it goes both ways, bringing a player up when you know he's not ready can permanently ruin his confidence just as bouncing a guy between AAA and MLB does. At some point you need to give a player an opportunity to sink or swim, but it needs to be extended chance, not 2 games here and 1 game there. It's an entirely different mindset when you go to the plate thinking that if you go 0-fer you're going to end up on the bench or you are the mound thinking that if you give up 3 runs you are going to the bullpen. As I said, you don't ever want players looking back over their shoulder worrying about what the coach is going to do, they should be focused on what the opposition is doing.

 

Of course every player is different and will respond differently which is exactly why your "perform or go home" theory on player development doesn't work very well and why no other league but baseball has such a trial by fire nature. It's just not that simple. You can think it's apples and oranges but it's not, the only difference is that people were willing to concede the season was over when Segura came up. Guys who've come up and struggled a bit at the beginning of the year always get the same treatment... hasn't mattered if it was Hardy, Gamel, or Peralta... if they don't hit the ground running like Braun they aren't ready and need to go back down, which is garbage. There's only so much players can learn in the minors and AAA, once they've solved each level they really aren't going to get any better need a new challenge. Spending 1 year or 3 in AAA, it doesn't matter, they have to solve the next jump, that big jump to MLB to continue to ascend as a player.

 

Sports are as much mental as they are physical. I could spend all day talking about the differences between "throwing" and "aiming" or "hitting the pitch thrown" vs "guessing at the pitch" but I honestly don't have the time right now. Those are mental issues that manifest themselves physically and cause poor performance. The harder a pitcher tries to throw strikes or "aim" the ball to the catcher the more velocity/rotation they will lose and the worse their location will be. It can be a hard concept to understand unless you've been on the mound or in the batters box and have been in that situation. "For the love of the Game" was a pretty cheesy movie but they had one part right, athletes that perform the best don't hear anything or see anything that doesn't matter, they don't hear the crowd, the entire focus is just the bat, the ball, and the glove and everything seems to happen in slow motion. When you get to that relaxed and focused state the game slows down, it doesn't matter what game, it's the same in football or basketball as it is in baseball.

 

If you aren't able to find that place then you aren't going to have much success regardless of sport or level.

[Oxy]

that year with Macha every time he went 0-10 he was sat on the bench, very few young players are going ascend or maintain performance if they constantly worried about being removed from the game or being sat on the bench. It doesn't matter what level of sport or the game being played, that's not how you develop players.

 

I agree with this for baseball, but not for all sports--particularly basketball. In basketball, if a player screws up you can yank him, tell him what he did wrong and put him right back in the game. If he screws that same thing up, you yank him again, then put him right back in the game. Eventually doing it right becomes automatic for that player and you can work on the next thing to improve. UW coach Bo Ryan has pretty much mastered this, and there are very few coaches in the college game that get his players to improve over their careers better than him.

 

Baseball is A LOT trickier since there is far, far, far more randomness involved in the way the ball bounces, the limited opportunities involved and the fact that you can only substitute once per game.

[Invader3K]

It's not like Mike Fiers is some young prospect that needs to be coddled; he's going to be 28 in a couple months. I have no problem sending him down with how bad he's been since end of last season.

 

Hopefully Burgos can make the most of his opportunity, if this is indeed what's happening.

[xisxisxis]

rearranging the deck chairs.....

[Thurston Fluff]

I would suggest that you read up sports psychology if you really believe that to be true.

 

I coached for over 25 years all the way from kindergarten kids to college kids. I have gone to countless seminars and read plenty to keep up on things like motivation and teaching. While each level is different there in one common thread. Every level up you go increases the amount of personal accountability the athlete is expected to assume. By the time kids got to college they were expected to handle being told the truth about where they are and where they need to be. I don't see why adults making literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce results would somehow need to be treated more gently than a college sophomore. The mental aspects involved in baseball seems more about how to get out of a funk not about worrying if they are good enough to play at this level. Peralta knows he has the stuff to be here. He just needs to physically do it. He isn't afraid to pitch. He just can't hit his spots regularly right now. Frankly that has always been his problem. Getting those kinks worked out can be done in the majors or minors.

 

That's true of every professional league, sooner or later everyone has to perform. Baseball is unique in that there's very little coaching available and a very small tolerance of poor performance. Look at the difference in Alcides Escobar from year to year... that year with Macha every time he went 0-10 he was sat on the bench, very few young players are going ascend or maintain performance if they constantly worried about being removed from the game or being sat on the bench. It doesn't matter what level of sport or the game being played, that's not how you develop players.

If I was saying yank him if he has none more bad start maybe some of that would have been relevant. All I said is this should serve as awake up call that he has to improve or he will get sent down. He should be given a fair shot to show he is ready. If he gets the fair shot and he is still not up to par time to find someone who is

I do not believe that A- he doesn't already realize this is a performance based league (though it probably would drive the point home more) and B- that he would bust into flames and never be the same again. I don't think it would even set him back a day. It could just as easily be a motivating factor as it could be hamper his confidence. That is assuming it is a confidence issue. Frankly I don't think his problems are confidence related at all right now. He just can't hit his spots.

 

Sports are as much mental as they are physical. I could spend all day talking about the differences between "throwing" and "aiming" or "hitting the pitch thrown" vs "guessing at the pitch" but I honestly don't have the time right now. Those are mental issues that manifest themselves physically and cause poor performance. The harder a pitcher tries to throw strikes or "aim" the ball to the catcher the more velocity/rotation they will lose and the worse their location will be. It can be a hard concept to understand unless you've been on the mound or in the batters box and have been in that situation. "For the love of the Game" was a pretty cheesy movie but they had one part right, athletes that perform the best don't hear anything or see anything that doesn't matter, they don't hear the crowd, the entire focus is just the bat, the ball, and the glove and everything seems to happen in slow motion. When you get to that relaxed and focused state the game slows down, it doesn't matter what game, it's the same in football or basketball as it is in baseball.

 

Working on not over rushing or how to be properly aggressive is something that is required in any sport that requires timing. I've experienced it myself. TO compliment my rather weak offense on my feet I was told to learn a footsweep. I worked at that move for almost two years with little success. Then suddenly I felt it. After that I could just see it develop in slow motion. Learning it had nothing to do with confidence or being told I could stay on the roster even if I sucked. What really helped was repetition. Keep doing it over and over then suddenly it just clicks. I've seen that happen countless times. I know that is the same in baseball. It's called muscle memory. It is created by doing it over and over until it becomes second nature. Repetition can be had in AAA as easily as it can in the majors.

Because Peralta has the kind of stuff to potentially be a number two caliber starter, so a team needs to be more patient with an arm like that. That's the type of arm and stuff which all teams need to have a quality rotation, assuming he can harness command at some point.

That is a good argument. It's probably why he was penciled in as the third starter even though Fiers had a longer record of success at the major league level. But at some point he has to produce. If he is given a fair shot to get squared away and we have other pitchers who can produce better results he should be sent down until his potential turns to production. It isn't like he dominated at AAA last year or that he has nothing left to learn as a pitcher. As it is he is the best option and first choice. When he isn't he shouldn't be given the spot because he has better raw stuff or potential to help next year. WE want to win now. We have an awesome offense and pretty good defense. WE have enough pitchers to choose from that we should be able to find enough to be competitive. Unless we decide to forgo success this season so one pitcher can learn to harness his potential. The minors are for raw stuff. The majors are for production.

[logan82]

I think by a the time a player goes through the minors the weak minded ones get weeded out.

[danzig6767]

 

Because Peralta has the kind of stuff to potentially be a number two caliber starter, so a team needs to be more patient with an arm like that. That's the type of arm and stuff which all teams need to have a quality rotation, assuming he can harness command at some point.

 

That is a good argument. It's probably why he was penciled in as the third starter even though Fiers had a longer record of success at the major league level. But at some point he has to produce. If he is given a fair shot to get squared away and we have other pitchers who can produce better results he should be sent down until his potential turns to production. It isn't like he dominated at AAA last year or that he has nothing left to learn as a pitcher. As it is he is the best option and first choice. When he isn't he shouldn't be given the spot because he has better raw stuff or potential to help next year. WE want to win now. We have an awesome offense and pretty good defense. WE have enough pitchers to choose from that we should be able to find enough to be competitive. Unless we decide to forgo success this season so one pitcher can learn to harness his potential. The minors are for raw stuff. The majors are for production.

 

It's only been three starts so far though and Peralta pitched well after being called up last year. In those three starts he was ok vs Colorado, good vs the Cubs, and bad yesterday.

 

FWIW, I share your concerns about Wily going forward and mainly because of one thing, that being he has almost always walked to many hitters since being signed as a teen. Unless a pitcher has absolutely dominating stuff, most will give up to many runs to be really good if they consistently are giving away free baserunners via walks.

 

Yesterday was a prime example. He was given a 9-3 lead and then in the 5th inning, after an infield single he proceeded to walk two batters. Suddenly Peralta is in big trouble. To me, the by far the biggest issue which will decide if Wily can cut it in the bigs for years is if he can cut the walk numbers by at least a 1/3 and ideally roughly in half. Not an easy task, but not a really unlikely task either given he's only 23.