Brewers after "Very Veteran" Pitchers

If I remember right.

We just need some sort of Veteran leader in the rotation

Last year we went out and brought in veterans like Kapler, Cameron, Riske, Gagne, Sabathia…

Perhaps they feel the hitters are becoming enough of veterans to carry themselves through a season, but I don’t see the veteran pitcher for young guys to look to.

After listening to the insight that Smoltz had during the playoff broadcast, I would love to have him teaching parra and gallardo.

I’m wondering if the strategy is to wait till the heavy hitters spend on ginormous contracts and what is left are much lower bidders for the remaining free agents at which time DM will spend on a few pieces.

I hope that is what DM is doing

he says DiFelice should be an automatic for the rotation. When challenged with DMs comment that he struggles against LHers, he said his minor league numbers against LH were similar to Gallardos. I’m not sure where to go to check splits on minor numbers.

He also thinks Weeks is greatly underrated.

I trust Doug. If he doesn’t want to give Sheets 3 years or whatever he’s asking for, I’m fine with it. I’d really like him back— I think he’d be a fantastic signing— but if there’s a health or some other issue that we fans aren’t aware of, I’m not going to get worked up about it if they don’t bring him back.

I would think the Yankees will make an offer to Sheets if they can’t get Pettitte.

that we literally “Swindled” one of our new acquisitions.
http://www.soxprospects.com/players/images/swindle.rj.jpg

… in a way at least. Not the lost bidding war for CC, obviously (and I note your point there), but the bottom-feeding for help. Is it smart? Possibly (I’m not in a position to say it isn’t). But it has that same depressing feel to it; like there’s a party going on and we’re not invited. I used to get extremely frustrated with baseball’s economic structure on at least an annual basis (actually bi-annual: during free agency and at the trade deadline), but the last couple of years I hadn’t so much. Even last year, while some of our signings were poor decisions, it felt like DM had the freedom to make choices, for good or ill and live with the consequences of his own choices. This year, with the exception of the CC offer, it feels like he’s wearing the old handcuffs again and we’re left with little but the hope that he can turn up a few retreads that others have given up on. And it feels like that leaves us with no chance to compete for a wild card, let alone the division.

It’s not a rational response I’m voicing here, but an emotional one. It’s colored by the disappointment I feel that after all this time I spent waiting for this group of young players to force open a window of opportunity for this franchise, the window is closing much more quickly than I’d hoped not because this is a poorly run organization and not because the players aren’t as good as we’d hoped, but because other organizations that may not even be run as well have competitive advantages they have not earned.

I knew that before, of course. I hated it then too. But somehow it was easier to take when you knew that the primary reason the Brewers were perennially bad on the field was because they were terrible off the field as well. Now that the long years of effort and better management have come to some fruition, it’s harder than I expected for me to watch the disparity in resources limit the opportunities for success of well run organizations, while others write checks in the hopes of filling the holes in their organization that were created by their own mismanagement.

Yesterday my brother, who once was an MLB fan, asked me how I could keep following the Brewers and the MLB given the competitive imbalance. I told him if he didn’t know after the Brewers 2008 season, I couldn’t explain it to him. He told me that if I couldn’t tell why he didn’t follow the MLB any more after the Yankees signings and a comparison between the Cubs resources and those of the Brewers, then he couldn’t explain his position to me either.

Thing is, I know I’m right. But I know he is too. I managed to convince myself the last few years that things were different now. It wasn’t the 1992 offseason anymore and small and mid market teams were as likely to win titles as the big boys. There’s some truth to that. But MLB has failed where other sports have succeeded in that its system doesn’t reward good management over the long term. Until it does, and it likely never will, my relationship with MLB (though not with baseball) will be include as much hate and resentment as it does joy. But I’m just too much a fool to turn my back on it the way my brother did. I used to wish he’d still come to games with me, but right now I wonder if he hasn’t been right all along.

Put more succinctly, I think Buster Olney is right, and I think it’s bullshit that baseball still let’s it happen.