They’re so easy to avoid…

You aren’t kidding, the first 3 so no one else has to go over there:

“Not Good”
“Why even let Villanueva pitch in a Brewer uniform ever again, he’s terrible.”
“Corey Hart REALLY believes he deserves a raise over last year?”

And then a debate about capitalism breaks out. Good times.

I always underestimate the power of the FA market to cancel out actual performance. In my head, I imagine a club making a “this guy sucks!” argument, and I never bother to think it through to the part where the arbitrator thinks: “yes, but you offered him arbitration, so must not suck that much, and even if he does, sucky RF make 4.5 million in this league.”

Think Hart’s wife ever tells him he’s s dumbass for turning down the multi-year contract offer he got from the Brewers before they found out that he had an aversion to trying to improve himself as a ballplayer? I suppose without knowing the figures, we’ll never really know if it was a dumb decision.

Gerut: $2MM
Weeks: $3.5MM
Gomez: $1MM
Hart: $4.5MM
Bush: $4.5MM
Coffey: $2MM
Villanueva: $1MM

So, I was high on my original projections for Weeks and Bush, but that was kind of the idea when i made these predictions. I didn’t want to overestimate the amount of money we’d have available this offseason.

Overall, I’d say we both did a pretty good job. You were damn, near perfect, nice work.

There won’t be room on the 25 man anyway, and Parra/Bush are out of options. Sure, you could get rid of Suppan, but that doesn’t save you any money.

I like Bush, but if we can get a better pitcher they should drop Bush. They have to, however, hold onto him as long as possible in case there is an injury in ST.

Bush was worth $4 million in 2008 and 2006 for sure and probably even in 2007 (he had some real bad luck on hits that year). I’m not sure why everyone underrates him so much. He’s not even close to being as bad a pitcher as Suppan.

All of sudden, every single pitcher started exploiting the exact same hole in Hart’s hitting game – the slider away. And even though he had to have seen it coming pretty much every at-bat, he failed to adjust, even given a year and a half.

I don’t think most people on this blog are all that negative towards him, rather disappointed that he has fallen off as a player the last two years since a promising start to his career.

Any additional animosity is likely stems from his decision to complain about the fans in September 2008, a month when he put up a .173/.192/.245 line, helping fuel a Brewers collapse down the stretch

“Actually, it felt more like a home game than playing in Miller Park,” said Hart. "We didn’t hear the boos that we sometimes here at home. That’s the way it goes. Everybody’s expecting (the team) to win. I guess they have a reason to be frustrated because we haven’t been winning.

“It’s not a lack of hustle or effort. A guy makes an error, a guy strikes out and you hear your home town booing you. It makes you ready to get out of there and go somewhere else for awhile. I think we’re all looser here.”

but I can’t. He summed it up perfectly. Hart got off to such a good start to his career, tanked at the absolute worst time and hasn’t really recovered.

Personally, I try very hard to not be too negative about Hart. He was breaking into the majors just as I was becoming a Brewers fan and he became one of my favorite players. But waiting and hoping for him to return to his former level of play is frustrating.

Full disclosure. He was better then the junk we had in the outfield, but I’ve grown sour on him.

1) When he has plate discipline he’s a pretty decent batter. But he likes to hack.. at everything. Just throw him 3 sliders low and away he’ll chase a lot of them. By a lot, I mean all of them. Then he’ll fail to adjust for it for months.

2) For as fast as he is, he sure doesn’t seem to have great instinct on batted balls. He should be a great RF with great range, but he kind of stands like a Deer in a headlight before figuring it out where it was hit.

3) For as fast as he is, he sure kind of sucks on the basepads.

He’s got tools, but he seems to not be able to put them together very well. And for the price/performance question, he better start to turn it around. Fans voting him into the 07 AS game kind of borked us now. And yes, I voted like nuts for him.