Would you make this trade again?

[3and2Fastball]

Man if I ever meet Doug Melvin I'm gonna punch him in the face....

 

Would that be before or after you thank him for trading Gomez/Fiers for Hader/Santana/Phillips/Houser?

 

I think that trade showed that Melvin was perfectly capable of making intelligent rebuilding moves. I've been as critical of Melvin as anyone, but in retrospect I think he was mostly acting on Mark A's "win with a limited budget" directives.

[pacopete4]

Man if I ever meet Doug Melvin I'm gonna punch him in the face....

 

The man that helped bring back playoff baseball to Milwaukee? Like it or not, that was a turning point for this franchise again. It was important to clean that hurdle and begin winning again. It had been far too long.

[xisxisxis]

Any GM who trades for Yuniesky Betancourt and then follows that up by signing him as a free agent 2 years later needs to be punched in the face...

[OnTheBlack]

Seems like a common trend that another organization makes a change to a player we had and they become good.

 

 

I'm really not seeing this. It's happened obviously, but I think it's worked the other way at least as often if not moreso and I can't really think of too many players we had and then traded thinking they weren't as valuable as they ended up being. I can however think of two significant trades we made where we got back several nice pieces, young, controllable talent for players who ended up going from all-star caliber players to replacement level players for the teams that acquired them(Luc and Gomez).

[OnTheBlack]

Man if I ever meet Doug Melvin I'm gonna punch him in the face....

 

 

Then I think the team you should be rooting for resides on the South Side of Chicago, not in Milwaukee.

[tmwiese55]

What's done is done, but going forward I'd prefer that we do not trade away good prospects for marginal short-term improvements to the MLB roster.

I agree. Wouldn't it be great if we had the same reputation for batters that the Braves had with pitching in the 90's. The Braves always seemed to keep their best pitching prospects and trade the ones who weren't very good. They were so successful it actually started to impact the view of the prospect if they were willing to trade them. I understand the need at times to trade prospects to add complementary players to the organization/ML team, but not at the expense of the players that actually develop into above average major league talent. We should be trading the prospects we don't see a future when they have value. I know much of this occurred on the Melvin watch, so we may see a completely different result with Stearns.

 

 

A lot of Brantley’s development took place with the Brewers also, but it’s hard to say if he would have been the same player (or been given the same opportunities) with the Brewers.

yes it is impossible to tell how his trajectory changed due to the trade to Cleveland. My main concern is that we were taking on a rental for several months with Sabbathia and even with a legendary performance by him we only just made the playoffs, yet we gave up a prospect who developed into an above average OF, while the prospects we held onto fizzled (or as you state we traded - Cain) and we had zero other OF prospects develop and contribute since then (except of course trading Hanigar as part of the Parra trade that ended with ZD). Man if I ever meet Doug Melvin I'm gonna punch him in the face....

 

If Sheets doesn't get hurt to end that year who knows what happens. With two aces like that anything is possible.

 

And where was Brantley gonna play with Hart and Braun in his way. I don't recall if when young he was capable of playing CF, I think he could've but you also had Cain in the farm too. Trade from a place of depth/strength to fill weakness is kind of common sense. BRantley didn't become a full time contributor until 2012 when MKE's window was basically coming to an end. Even still by then you'd filled out your OF with Gomez and Aoki too. They never really had issues with filling out the OF

[Eye Black]

Man if I ever meet Doug Melvin I'm gonna punch him in the face....

 

Would that be before or after you thank him for trading Gomez/Fiers for Hader/Santana/Phillips/Houser?

 

I think that trade showed that Melvin was perfectly capable of making intelligent rebuilding moves. I've been as critical of Melvin as anyone, but in retrospect I think he was mostly acting on Mark A's "win with a limited budget" directives.

 

I am not picking sides and I certainly don’t advocate hitting anyone in the face, but in the words of Garth Brooks... sometimes I thank god for (Doug Melvin’s) unanswered prayers...

 

[monty57]

Man if I ever meet Doug Melvin I'm gonna punch him in the face....

 

Would that be before or after you thank him for trading Gomez/Fiers for Hader/Santana/Phillips/Houser?

 

I think that trade showed that Melvin was perfectly capable of making intelligent rebuilding moves. I've been as critical of Melvin as anyone, but in retrospect I think he was mostly acting on Mark A's "win with a limited budget" directives.

 

"Reading between the lines" of Melvin's interviews over his final years as GM, I don't think that he and Attanasio were on the same page, with Melvin feeling that we shouldn't continue to mortgage the future for a slight chance at winning in the present, and Attanasio overriding him all the way to the point of directly speaking with agents and making deals himself when Melvin didn't think they were a good idea.

 

I think Attanasio needed to get that feeling of despair he felt right before he finally decided to rebuild. That's what made him realize that he was making some mistakes, so long term I think the frustration I (and many others) felt was probably worth it if it was what it took for Attanasio to realize that he needed to hire a smart GM with a long-term strategy and let that person handle the make-up of the rosters from rookie ball all the way to the majors.

 

Stearns seems to have done a good job so far, and I'm enjoying seeing how this is all playing out.

[FVBrewerFan]

What's done is done, but going forward I'd prefer that we do not trade away good prospects for marginal short-term improvements to the MLB roster.

I agree. Wouldn't it be great if we had the same reputation for batters that the Braves had with pitching in the 90's. The Braves always seemed to keep their best pitching prospects and trade the ones who weren't very good. They were so successful it actually started to impact the view of the prospect if they were willing to trade them. I understand the need at times to trade prospects to add complementary players to the organization/ML team, but not at the expense of the players that actually develop into above average major league talent. We should be trading the prospects we don't see a future when they have value. I know much of this occurred on the Melvin watch, so we may see a completely different result with Stearns.

 

 

A lot of Brantley’s development took place with the Brewers also, but it’s hard to say if he would have been the same player (or been given the same opportunities) with the Brewers.

yes it is impossible to tell how his trajectory changed due to the trade to Cleveland. My main concern is that we were taking on a rental for several months with Sabbathia and even with a legendary performance by him we only just made the playoffs, yet we gave up a prospect who developed into an above average OF, while the prospects we held onto fizzled (or as you state we traded - Cain) and we had zero other OF prospects develop and contribute since then (except of course trading Hanigar as part of the Parra trade that ended with ZD). Man if I ever meet Doug Melvin I'm gonna punch him in the face....

 

A wise man once said (earlier this week):

 

I don't find anything in life that is black and white and I am amazed people can treat so many things as bits.

 

Irony is a beautiful thing.

[Ennder]

Haniger was not much of a prospect at the time and he was 'fixed' by someone outside the organization. Hard to call that a fail. That was also at an awkward time for the team where the organization was fine with taking a long term loss for a short term gain because it was going to put butts in the seats for years to come. The Melvin era Brewers were all about just getting a competitive squad on the field, not about sustaining it. The Stearns era is about sustaining it, very different approaches for very different organizational needs.