The Weekly Dispatch: Everybody Makes Mistakes

The silence coming from 1 Brewers Way this week was deafening.

Sure, there were prepared, perfunctory statements released through the Brewers' comms team and the typical post-transaction presser via Zoom Monday afternoon, but the first time stakeholders in the Brewers organization fielded real, face-to-face questions from the media was Friday, as the team prepared for their 40th anniversary-slash-alumni weekend.

The Weekly Dispatch is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others.

And they needed to show their faces, because this quote from President of Baseball Operations David Stearns Monday froze like a spitwad at -10°: We're thrilled with the amount of talent and the diversity of talent that we were able to get back in this trade. We were able to immediately add to our major-league team and able to bring in two very high-ceiling prospects.

It brings me no pleasure to remind you that Josh Hader was traded Monday to the San Diego Padres – whom the Brewers may very well face in two months’ time – for Dinelson Lamet, Robert Gasser, Esteury Ruiz and Taylor Rogers. Lamet was designated for assignment Wednesday and claimed by the Colorado Rockies. Ruiz, the closest of the two prospects received to big-league readiness, was surrounded by the newly-promoted outfield trio of Sal Frelick, Garrett Mitchell and Joey Wiemer. Rogers has pitched in one inning since joining the Brewers.

In the strictest sense of the term, yes, Stearns added to the major league team and added two prospects – though Ruiz is about as polarizing a prospect as one can find and Gasser is by most accounts more of a sleeper prospect than a needle-moving acquisition.

Meanwhile, the Brewers looked like a team adrift on the field. After a week in which they showed major signs of life at the plate against the Rockies and Boston Red Sox and gave us renewed reason to believe in this roster, they went to Pittsburgh and suffered three crushing losses – two of which occurred in the vacuum created by Hader’s departure – at the hands of the Pirates, who some time ago traded in their privateer for a tank.

Friday night, the Brewers returned to Milwaukee and resorted to their frustrating first-half form: lots of walks, plenty of strikeouts, runs generated by homers. The win, coming against another tanking team in the Cincinnati Reds, was a palate cleanse, but Hader’s absence from the bullpen still loomed large as Trevor Gott couldn’t get the job done and Devin Williams needed to come in for an Eric Gagne save.

Of course, we’re relitigating the action on the field. What was happening both in the national baseball media and on social media was something else entirely.

Granted, what happens on social media isn’t typically representative of reality, but the uniform confusion, if not anger, from insiders, outsiders, analysts and fans alike, combined with the half-hearted comments from players in the wake of the clubhouse shake-up and the immediate on-field malaise, made it abundantly clear that the Milwaukee Brewers placed themselves squarely into crisis mode, and did shockingly little to meet that crisis head-on.

Crisis management is the process of preparing for and managing any disruptive or unexpected emergency situations that affect your business, stakeholders, employees, customers, and revenue.

I’d say HubSpot is right on the money: trading Josh Hader was disruptive and unexpected, while it also clearly affected business, stakeholders, employees and customers. 

And the Brewers clearly didn’t have a plan in place to get out in front of the crisis.

Bad business decisions typically start with leadership that has lost touch with either the organization they lead or the market they serve. In 2003, Mike Lazaridis infamously scoffed at the idea that a cell phone should have a camera. In 2022, BlackBerry has nothing to do with mobile phones. Circuit City eliminated an entire stratum of employees in 2007 and replaced them with lower-paid workers. That hit to an experienced workforce and company morale forced the retailer’s shutdown in early 2009. I could go on. Lehman Brothers. Countrywide Financial. Sears.

Or, at the risk of coming too close to the nose of current affairs, Bear Stearns.

If Mark Attanasio’s comments and body language said anything Friday, it’s that the Brewers’ organizational structure is firm: Stearns wanted the President of Baseball Operations role and responsibilities; he has them. The place to hold Stearns and General Manager Matt Arnold to account isn’t out in front of cameras and reporters. What Attanasio couldn’t do was hide his obvious discomfort, perhaps even disagreement, with the decision his baseball people made.

David Stearns’ actions took us from aspirational to Oakland in a week.

That might be a little extreme, but Dave Kaval at one time not too long ago was one of the most engaging and fan-friendly baseball executives in the game. Now that the Athletics are stuck in bureaucratic and litigious hell with regard to Howard Terminal, it’s a very different story: a truly atrocious ballclub, an alienated diehard fanbase stuck with a dilapidated stadium where the concourses fill with poowater and leadership that, when not sniping at fans or subtweeting rivals, is being openly courted to uproot from the Bay Area and join their former co-tenants in Las Vegas.

Brewers fans aren’t there yet, if at all, though a vocal contingency of them are adamant Mark Attanasio is a cheapskate while also complaining about $8 beers they weren’t going to buy in the first place, while also selling surplus (and, in some cases, purloined) Robin Yount giveaway jerseys on Craigslist by the time the sausages race on Sunday. They’ve also conveniently memoryholed Bud Selig’s threat to move the Brewers.

We are so good at forgetting the things that might blow up a preferred narrative.

In fairness to Stearns and Arnold, there’s a lot we don’t know about what was happening leading up to the trade deadline. There was the suggestion of other deals that didn’t materialize for whatever reason. (Curiously, Juan Soto got namedropped by both ownership and management on Friday.) The former can’t afford to play the long game with Rogers, Gasser or Ruiz as he could with Eric Lauer or Luis Urias, and with Stearns’ contract running through the end of the 2022 (or is it 2023?) season, he likely won’t.

My guess was that they wanted Lamet to work in the Arizona pitching lab, while Rogers worked out whatever was plaguing him in San Diego in the bullpen. Then they designated Lamet – there was no way he was going to clear waivers – and buried Rogers. Between the Hader deal and aftermath, the Luke Barker fiasco and then landing on adding Matt Bush and Trevor Rosenthal, none of this seems like work of the same guy who landed Christian Yelich or Rowdy Tellez, or even John Hammond’d his way into Hunter Renfroe.

I’ve half-joked on Twitter that the oral histories that will be told later about the 2022 Brewers will be most interesting reading, but right now, in the midst of a crisis that has strained a fanbase, a clubhouse, a good portion of the baseball world and has seen the Brewers drop from first place in the Central to, as of Saturday night, on the outside looking into October, there’s just not a lot to laugh about.

The reality is that none of this will move the needle with stakeholders. Major League Baseball and its teams won’t implode due to competition or discover a public sense of self-awareness due to a sudden, direct loss of revenue. There are no disruptors that will shake it from its own sense of self-contentment. There are no Bill Veecks to remind owners that fans are integral to the baseball milieu.

Standard tickets are a decreasing percentage of overall revenue, with luxury boxes and group sales acting as tentpoles. Broadcast and streaming rights, in-stadium advertising and sponsorships cover most of the ground, while revenue sharing insulates teams from fan disinterest or discontent (i.e., #SelltheTeamBob efforts in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.) It’s not truly possible to vote with one’s pocketbook, not showing up ultimately drives up costs elsewhere, either in ticket or parking rates or merchandise markup. In fact, withholding dollars will only hasten further changes we don’t want: jersey ads, more naming rights, a ticking timebomb situation with MLB’s cringey, cozy relationship with gambling outfits.

Fans that protest press for their own marginalization, or ironically serve to make a case for franchise relocation stronger. In the same thought, I need not remind anyone that the clock is ticking on making sure a clear plan for a renovation of or replacement for American Family Field is in place. 

And that’s where we’re at: a business that isn’t really a business at all, protected by Supreme Court ruling from federal oversight and accountability that has also protected itself from its own customers and, if anything were to change with their status vis-à-vis antitrust law, has threatened to nuke minor league baseball as we know it. This is the ultimate business-to-business enterprise that also manages to demand more money from fewer fans. There is nowhere else in American life where this works so brazenly (aside from perhaps the Internal Revenue Service.) 

What’s left to say? There was no crisis management plan because this season and its bizarre developments are only a crisis to those of us who choose to follow this team and love this game. The Yankees are the Yankees, the Rockies are the Rockies, the A’s are the A’s and in all those cases, there’s nothing that can or will be done about that.

All that remains is just this single, uncomfortable notion: This is not your crew. And this last week made that abundantly clear.