Why are we so bad at developing pitchers?

[monty57]

There are plenty of guys as good as Hart in our system.

 

I hope you're right. Hart's actually got a pretty good bat, and 30 HR guys aren't easy to find. Morris was supposed to be our most MLB ready bat in the minors, and after a couple of so-so years followed by one good season last year, he's off to a slow start again this year. I really, really want him to succeed, as that would be a big benefit to the future of the Brewers, but he's 24, so he needs to step it up soon. There's still time, and he may have the potential to become as good as Hart, but he's not a sure-thing. For point of reference, Hart had a .792 OPS in a half-season in Milwaukee when he was Morris' current age after posting minor league OPS of .698 (rookie league at 18), .937, .884, .807, .827, .913, and .951.

 

Gennett is showing that he's probably our most MLB ready bat right now, and if the Brewers could find someone to take on Weeks' salary, I'd do it and bring up Gennett. That said, he's probably not going to be an above-average MLB bat (especially if you're comparing him to Hart). He looks like he'll be someone who is a good role player while he's cheap, holding a high-.200's BA with a low-.300's OBP with little power.

 

Khris Davis may become a decent MLB bat, but we don't have room to play him, so barring a Braun injury (which would eliminate any playoff hopes for the team) or the NL adopting the DH, we'll never find out.

 

I really wouldn't count on anyone from Huntsville or Brevard County to become even an average MLB bat. There are some intriguing bats in Wisconsin and while I hope they play to their potential, they're a long ways off.

 

So, I think the better statement is that we have a few bats in the system who have the potential to hit like Hart if they can put it all together, and a few more who have the potential to start for a few seasons while they're cheap. What we have a lot of are guys who could spend some time in the majors as a bench player or someone who gets called up to fill in for an injured player.

 

Our minor league position players are very thin right now. We're better (or at least more MLB-ready) on the pitching front, but other than Nelson in AA, most of the guys haven't taken that next step to force the Brewers to take notice. Right now, the best of them look like they could have some success at the back of the rotation or in the bullpen. I hope this changes for the better, as I hoped that by the upcoming offseason we would have the wonderful problem of having "too many" MLB-ready starting pitchers.

[Fear The Chorizo]

Right now 3/5 of the Brewer starting rotation are pitchers the Brewers drafted or found in Latin America and developed (Yo, Burgos, Peralta). Estrada was either a minor trade or waiver claim from the Nationals (can't recall exactly). There are a pile of minor league arms in the Brewer system between high A and AAA that have the potential to develop into MLB starting pitchers. Is there a perennial Cy Young candidate among them? In all likelihood no. But, you can see the shift in the minor league system going towards pitching - unfortunately it takes a long time and often a lot of luck finding a true ace to build the type of pitching depth teams like the Rays have.

 

Jake Odorizzi, Jeremy Jeffress, Escobar, and Cain essentially netted the Brewers a playoff berth and Segura, Hellweg, and Pena. Not making that trade to get Greinke, the Brewers don't make the 2011 playoffs before Fielder left via free agency. I'd call that good use of a projectable pitching prospect.

 

I think the biggest challenge for the Brewers' pitching system is to build enough depth to fill their MLB bullpen on a consistent basis. That will greatly help to keep the team's payroll in check and give the Brewers the ability to add veteran talent in areas of need. Just get more arms into the system that have the potential to pitch in the majors - eventually the good ones weed themselves out. No depth in the minors makes the 1st round failures of drafting Covey, Arnett, Rogers, etc all the more glaring.

[logan82]

There are plenty of guys as good as Hart in our system.

Are there? Hart was an all-star at every level of the minors. I am not sure we have anybody of his caliber.

[The stache]

 

It looks like you pulled those lists straight from BA? I think that both Nick Kingham who's in Bradenton and Orlando Castro who's in WV are going to make some noise and I'd add them to the Pirates' list, both have been extremely impressive thus far this season. Kingham seems to profile as a mid rotation guy and I don't know anything about Castro other than he's a LHP and his stats caught my attention a couple of weeks ago when I was browsing WV's stat page looking at Stetson Allie's numbers. Castro was just named the SAL pitcher of the week and if Allie keeps it going he'll be a top 50 prospect by next year.

 

I think the Pirate's system is every bit as good as the Cardinals.

 

I get the majority of my prospect information from Baseball America, MLB.com and Baseball Prospect Nation, and come up with a composite list.

 

I agree that the Pirates are pretty close to the Cardinals. If Josh Bell is able to recover from his injuries, it's very close. Marte is outstanding, and I like Cole and Taillon a lot.

[The stache]

 

Interesting to note that the bolded pitchers were not drafted by the team they are listed next to. Half of them (13/26) were traded for.

 

I agree, and initially I had the players not originally drafted by their current team designated as such before I simplified the list. The thinking behind the list is that even teams with payrolls similar to ours are able to acquire top-tier young arms. The Rays ability to draft and develop young arms have helped them stock up even more. Trading James Shields and getting back Wil Myers AND Odorizzi was a coup. Hell, I'm not convinced that Mike Montgomery, who the Rays also got as part of the deal iirc, won't bounce back going through the Tampa machine

[PrinceFielderx1]

I think it might be time to think about stealing someone from the Cardinals or Pirates organization that has a good eye/philosophy for pitching.

[The stache]

 

Bit ironic to show a list of other teams pitching prospects in an effort to show the lack of Brewers ability to develop pitching has one who came from the Brewers system.

 

Nothing ironic about it, as I mentioned that Odorizzi was drafted by the Brewers in my first post. The list you're referring to was meant to show that teams with similar financial means have been able to load up on upper echelon pitching prospects.

 

To be honest, I don't care how we get great arms in our system. Draft and develop, or acquire via a trade. But I think it's pretty clear that we don't have any real great arms in the minors right now. I'm hoping Thornburg proves his critics wrong. We'll see.

[The stache]

I think it might be time to think about stealing someone from the Cardinals or Pirates organization that has a good eye/philosophy for pitching.

 

Or the Rays.

[The stache]

There is a lot of massively overrating other teams prospects in this post, that is all I'll say on the matter.

 

I don't think so. The prospects listed are in the top 100 lists for the 3 sites I frequent most.

 

I do agree with you, however, that the Brewer minor league talent is somewhat underrated.

[paul253]

I think the Brewers need to focus less on velocity and more on getting guys who can throw strikes. Rogers, Jeffress, Arnett, Jungmann. All first round picks and all guys who have/had a very hard time avoiding walks. It doesn't matter if can throw 130mph if you can't throw strikes. They traded for Johnny Hellweg who, again, has a great arm but can't throw strikes. Same with Ariel Pena. Stop piling up as many hard throwers as you can get and start getting guys who can throw strikes. I'll take 92-93 with control over 95-96 with little control any day of the week.

[narwhalattack]

I think the Brewers need to focus less on velocity and more on getting guys who can throw strikes. Rogers, Jeffress, Arnett, Jungmann. All first round picks and all guys who have/had a very hard time avoiding walks. It doesn't matter if can throw 130mph if you can't throw strikes. They traded for Johnny Hellweg who, again, has a great arm but can't throw strikes. Same with Ariel Pena. Stop piling up as many hard throwers as you can get and start getting guys who can throw strikes. I'll take 92-93 with control over 95-96 with little control any day of the week.

 

That's what the Brewers were trying to do when they drafted Jungmann. At the time he was a strike-throwing guy, albeit with a little less impressive stuff.

 

I'm still fuming about how they passed on Fernandez and Guerrieri.

[reillymcshane]

Answers to this kind of question are rarely simple. Usually it is a combination of things that contributes to the issue.

 

1. Poor scouting - face it, we've made some bad decisions. I will assume (and that's just me assuming) that there are guys we should have seen red flags on. Again, in hindsight, we probably should have seen some issues with guys that would have made us not make the pick.

 

And on the flip side - we didn't see the value in a some guys that we passed on for whatever reason. Again, in retrospect, there are probably guys the Brewers (and other teams) should have taken greater notice of.

 

Maybe more money in the scouting department would help this situation (see item #2).

 

2. Not wanting to spend money - again, face it, we have made decisions based on money. The team has rarely gone over slot. I don't think it's that big of deal anymore with the slotting system. However, in the past, it was a huge deal. We rarely took risks and drafted guys with signability issues. This kind of attitude kept us from getting some quality players.

 

This comes into play in the international arena as well. The Brewers never rolled the dice on a big time Latin players. Lots of these guys have been busts, but others have been very good.

 

I don't know how our spending in the scouting department is compared to other teams.

 

3. Bad luck. Again, we have to chalk some of the problems to bad luck. Who could have known our top pick would find out he was a diabetic the day he was supposed to sign? That's crazy bad luck.

 

Sometimes thing just don't fall your way. It's part of life.

 

4. Amateur pitchers are difficult to assess, while hitters are simply easier to project. That's a blanket statement that I don't have stats on, but I believe others have done studies on it. Amateur pitching - especially high school pitching - is the hardest thing to predict.

 

All of these things become intertwined. Why don't we sign good players from Latin America? Because we don't spend enough money to make good scouting decisions, which leads to poor decision - or doing nothing. When we limit our pool of talent (not taking expensive draft picks, or signing expensive amateur free agents), it's makes every decision more difficult. Pitching is already hard enough to predict, but when you aren't even allowed to consider some very talented pitchers, that makes it all the more difficult to nail your pick.

 

Also, do we spend enough money on scouting? Would we make better choices if we had more scouts, better scouts, etc. I don't know this answer - just a thought. But it does come down to money (again).

 

Like I said from the start, I don't think there is any one thing that reflects our poor development of pitchers. It's a myriad of items.

[The stache]

Well, the smart money would be to find a scout in the Rays organization that feels he's underpaid, throw some bucks at him, and get him scouting for us. Great scouts don't develop arm problems, or have to worry about hitting a curve ball. If we have a little less money to play with, let's give some more to talent evaluators so we hit on pitching prospects a little more often.

[Roderick]

The Brewers should just somewhat give up on drafting pitching and go with position players and then trade those players for young pitching. The Brewers have been rather good at developing position players why not take your strength and use that to fill your weakness?

 

That was the strength under Jack Z, with higher draft picks than what we have had since then - so hard to say that we could just replicate that strategy.

[Fear The Chorizo]

I think the biggest issue is the Brewers haven't had top-5 draft pick position for a long time. The Rays got their organization off the mat by drafting top 2 or 3 for almost an entire decade - they've been great since at identifying pitching in the draft and via trades. The Pirates system is currently well regarded because they finally started paying the going rate for top-5 draft picks. The Royals built their current roster largely through very high draft choices. The Nationals got two #1 draft picks in a row and lucked into Strasburg and Harper. The Orioles have been drafting high forever and now have a young roster showing those results.

 

Unless you're consistently drafting very high every year, it's tough for a small-mid market team to build a deep farm system full of high-impact talent, especially from a pitching standpoint. The big market teams that normally draft later have the advantage of international scouting and academies to find young talent outside the draft more consistently than the Brewers. They also tend to have much better financed and organized scouting departments in the U.S. that do a better job of identifying players.

 

In a way, Milwaukee's run of decent - good seasons over the past 5-6 years has limited how many high-ceiling prospects they've drafted. That's not the sole reason, I think their scouting department and organizational instruction share the blame, particularly on the pitching front. They've dedicated enough 1st round draft picks over the past 10 seasons to expect some of those arms to have an MLB impact - at this point the closest ones have been Mark Rogers and Jeffress, which is pretty pathetic. But then at the same time arms like Peralta and Burgos are pitching in the majors. As a whole, I think the Brewers minor league system has built some depth on the pitching side, but what they lack are 2-3 high-talent arms with alot of polish. They'd have those arms if some of their recent 1st round picks weren't total flameouts (Covey, Arnett, even Jungman/Bradley if they keep scuffling in A+/AA for their ages) - it goes back to being able to identify the best arm available from a scouting standpoint, having the funds available to sign them, and then having the right people in place to properly develop that pitching prospect.

[adambr2]

There are plenty of guys as good as Hart in our system.

 

Who? Hart, at full strength for a season, is a 30 HR, 3 WAR player at the MLB level. I don't see our system stocked with players like this.

[adambr2]

There isn't a Braun, a Fielder...in the system right now.

I know, man, it's just embarrassing how bad the Brewers have been lately at drafting Hall of Fame players.

 

That's not even the point, everyone knows that not every Braun and Fielder level prospect turns out to be a Hall of Fame player. The point is that most teams have someone in the system with that kind of potential upside, we do not.

[danzig6767]

I'm sure there are a variety of reasons why the franchise has been so abysmal at drafting and then developing pitching, but when you think about the vast number of pitchers the team has drafted over say the last 15-20 years, it strike me as being statistically hard to do odds wise for so few of those pitchers to amount to anything in the majors, be it starter or bullpen guys.

 

Clearly the hit rate is low overall throughout the league given most drafted pitchers never will reach the majors, much less be a quality MLB pitcher. That said, what has been the Brewers hit rate over the last 10-15-20 years?

 

Off the top of my head, roughly 1 every 100 pitchers drafted?

[The stache]

I think the biggest issue is the Brewers haven't had top-5 draft pick position for a long time.

 

And the Cardinals have? In the last nine years, they've been to the World Series three times, winning two of them. And in two other seasons, they made it to the league Championship series. Six of the last nine years, they've been to the playoffs. They're not drafting in the top 5, yet their pitching prospects absolutely blow ours out of the water. Shelby Miller is better than any pitching prospect the Brewers have had in the last decade, including Gallardo.

 

So how are they able to do it? Is it luck? Or maybe they just know pitching talent when they see it, and know how to develop it.

[The stache]

First round picks by year

 

2012 Cardinals 19th, Brewers 28th

2011 Cardinals 22nd, Brewers 12th

2010 Cardinals 25th, Brewers 14th

2009 Cardinals 19th, Brewers 26th

2008 Cardinals 13th, Brewers 16th

2007 Cardinals 18th, Brewers 7th

2006 Cardinals 30th, Brewers 16th

2005 Cardinals 30th, Brewers 5th

2004 Cardinals 19th, Brewers 5th

2003 Cardinals 28th, Brewers 2nd

 

Average draft position:

Cardinals 22.3

Brewers 13.1

 

Look at our first round picks recently:

2011:Taylor Jungmann, 12th pick of the 2011 MLB Draft, and Jed Bradley, 15th pick of the 2011 MLB draft. Passed on Jose Fernandez (#7 rated prospect in baseball), Matt Barnes (#37th), Robert Stephenson(#48), Taylor Guerrieri (#41), Henry Owens (#89)

2010:Dylan Covey, 14th pick of the 2010 MLB draft. We didn't even sign him. Passed on Jessee Biddle (#57), Taijuan Walker (#5), Zach Lee (#74), Noah Syndergaard (#28)

2009:Eric Arnett, 26th pick of the 2009 MLB draft. 4th year in our system, hasn't even made it to AA. Knee surgery start of 2013 season.

2008:Brett Lawrie, 16th pick, and Jake Odorizzi, 32nd pick of the 2008 MLB draft. Both are gone. Evan Frederickson, the 35th pick in that draft, is out of baseball.

2007:Matt LaPorta, 7th pick of the 2007 MLB draft. Gone.

2006:Jeremy Jeffress, 16th pick of the 2006 MLB draft. Gone.

 

Between 2006 and 2010, we had six first round picks, and another at #35. Of those seven players, we did not sign one, one is out of baseball, one had season ending knee surgery before his 5th professional baseball season (still in high A), and the others now belong to other teams.

 

How is it that for five years of first round picks, we have one of those players left, and he can't make it to AA ball???

 

Forget where we are drafting. Who we are drafting has been terrible. We haven't hit on a single draft pick since 2005, when we took Ryan Braun with the 5th overall pick (hard to screw that one up). The two pitchers we took in the first round of the 2011 draft are not in the top 100, and have had a minimum amount of success.

[AJAY]

Shelby Miller just pitched a one-hitter tonight. He retired 27 straight after giving up a leadoff single. Oh yeah, the Cardinals also have 11 championships, make the playoffs almost every year, and have not had back to back losing seasons in a million years.

 

The Brewers have one World Series appearance in 44 years.

 

Why are we still sticking with the same old failure approach to building a franchise? I don't pretend to know what exactly the Cardinals can see that the Brewers don't, but it goes beyond just developing pitching. They knew to trade for Adam Wainwright and sign Chris Carpenter long before the rest of us could figure it out. They knew to trade for Jim Edmonds. Their managers always seem to make ours look like idiots. Their farm system rocks despite taking late picks every year. They just seem to know something that nobody else does.

 

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Rickie Weeks to figure it out after 8 years.

 

Sorry to vent, but can Doug Melvin really take us to that next level? Is he the right guy? Is there someone smarter out there? I am getting very skeptical now.

 

Can't imagine what's going through Mark Attanasio's mind.

[danzig6767]

 

Can't imagine what's going through Mark Attanasio's mind.

 

Probably a lot of what goes through Melvin's mind given Attanasio seems to have taken a pretty prominent role in some of our bigger free agent signings and he signed Doug to a contract extension.

 

Between the two playoff berths and likely as important to Mark, the vastly improved attendance since Melvin took over which equals more revenues, i just don't see Attanasio making a change at GM anytime soon unless the team both loses a lot of games over say the next 2-3 years and attendance takes a dive with the losses.

[The stache]

I have Miller and Matt Harvey on my fantasy team

[The stache]

 

Can't imagine what's going through Mark Attanasio's mind.

 

Probably a lot of what goes through Melvin's mind given Attanasio seems to have taken a pretty prominent role in some of our bigger free agent signings and he signed Doug to a contract extension.

 

Between the two playoff berths and likely as important to Mark, the vastly improved attendance since Melvin took over which equals more revenues, i just don't see Attanasio making a change at GM anytime soon unless the team both loses a lot of games over say the next 2-3 years and attendance takes a dive with the losses.

 

And in the mean time, the prime years of Ryan Braun's career waste away.

 

I'm afraid he's going to end up another Robin Yount. A Hall of Fame caliber player who will never win a ring. At least Robin made it to the Series.

[RockCoCougars]

I've ranted on this before here, so I'll keep it brief... but in a nutshell, the Brewers have never been able to develop pitching. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong... but as far as I can tell, this franchise has never drafted a single 20 game winner. I know they've had some bad luck with injuries, etc., and that wins are somewhat overrated, but that is a pathetic stat.

 

I was knocking back a couple of brews with my Brewer savant friend tonight, and this discussion came up. He quickly pointed out that I was wrong, and that the Brewers have in fact drafted one twenty game winner. In the realm of Brewer trivia, this would be a great & difficult question... any guesses for bragging rights?