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Recently posted article by Tom H. Dave Bush struggled in his outing last night and complained of arm fatigue after being erratic and awful for AA-Huntsville last night.

That means Mike Burns will make a start. If he’s out for any extended period of time, maybe even I’d advocate trading for a nice pitcher.

Manny Parra made his first start today after a four-start stint in AAA where he did pretty darn well compared to his big league disaster. His peripherals aren’t quite there yet (19K, 13BB, 24 2/3 innings pitched), but he did a good job of keeping the ball in the park and on the ground. He’s appeared to regain at least some confidence and with the rotation in flux as it is it’s time to bring him back.

He decided to perform admirably, to the tune of 7 shutout innings. He hardly had any jams and used the sun to his advantage (Todd Coffey, however, did not). He threw a ton of strikes after complaining about not having the confidence to throw any of his pitches for strikes and got ahead of hitters better than I’ve seen him do all season long.

With him coming back and hopefully being a solid rotation piece, should the Brewers still trade for another starting pitcher to last them through the rest of the season?

I wrote on Monday about the current state of the pitching market and why it makes sense for the Brewers to just stand pat where they are, with regards to Doug Davis. Now, all of a sudden, J.P. Ricciardi says Roy Halladay is available for trade and all of a sudden everbody’s nuts for Halladay! FOX Sports’ own Boras-mouthpiece Ken Rosenthal said in his article that Halladay is ‘all but gone’ in Toronto. Whoo, how exciting! Maybe the Brewers will finally add that pitching piece they so desperately need.

But wait! There’s more. Here’s what Toronto’s GM Ricciardi had to say about Halladay just yesterday:

It would take a lot for us to part with him. We’ve gotten a lot of calls from teams but none of them are telling us at this point what they’re willing to give up. If you’re coming at us with a ‘B” list of young players, don’t bother. This is one of the five best players in baseball. It’s going to take a significant package of players for us to even listen. So as the teams call we’ll go through the ones we feel are the serious ones and then we’ll start scouting their farm systems to see if there’s anything we can do.”

“My gut feeling is no we won’t [make a deal] because there aren’t too many teams out there who are willing to give us the significant package of prospects we would need to make this go. Teams protect their prospects.

In other words Ricciardi said that a player even as good as Halladay is available but it’s going to take a mountain of candy to sweeten the deal enough for them. This suspiciously sounds like the media is trying to create a story out of nothing.

Of course now that Halladay’s been brought up, the media has successfully made something out of nothing. The internet is abuzz with Halladay rumors. The problem with all this new trade talking is that the media has successfully created a story when there might not be one. No more complaining about how much attention Brett Favre’s gotten!

Here is a pretty interesting article about Halladay’s current trade value with what he should get on the market. Here’s some of the more important points:

First off, let’s look at Halladay’s win values over the years. Since 2002, he’s been worth about 46 wins in 1,585 innings, or right around an average of six wins per year. He’s on pace for about a seven win season this year, and he shows no signs of slowing down. Going forward, ZIPS projects a 3.21 FIP and 106 innings in his remaining 15 starts this year, which would be worth another 3.5 wins. Halladay is a +6 to +7 win pitcher, easily the best in baseball.

The market value for wins took a tumble on the low end last year, but at the high end, teams were still willing to pay around $5 million per win for premium free agents. Based on that, we’d say that Halladay’s fair market value is something like $30 to $35 million per season. However, those $5 million per win contracts were all long term deals, which carry extra risk to the organization and therefore pull down the annual average value that teams are willing to pay. With only a 15 month commitment, the long term risk with Halladay is substantially lower, and teams should (and will) pay a premium for that risk avoidance.

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But, you can’t forget about the fact that he’s very likely to be a Type A free agent at the end of 2010, and the acquiring team would be able to recoup two quality draft choices if they didn’t re-sign him as a free agent. Thanks to some good work by Victor Wang, we can see that the value of Halladay’s Type A status is around $8 million or so.

$52 million for Halladay’s performance + $8 million for the draft picks = $60 million in total value. He will be paid $22 million over that time frame, so 60-22 = $38 million.

To acquire the Jays ace, teams should be expected to surrender something like $40 million in value.

What does $40 million in value look like? Something like three terrific prospects who are not that far from the majors. No one’s giving up players from the Matt Wieters/David Price mold, but it’s going to take several players from that second prospect tier, the top 25-50 type guys.

So in order to obtain Halladay the Brewers would be looking at shipping away J.J. Hardy or Alcides Escobar, Lorenzo Cain, and Bret Lawrie, at the very least. Does that sound worth it to you?

I’m not the biggest fan of disarming the entire farm system to set the franchise back multiple years just to gain an extra win or two for 2009. The really nice thing about last year’s C.C. Sabathia trade was that it didn’t handicap the franchise for the upcoming years; Matt LaPorta was blocked and the other prospects involved weren’t exactly the major-league-ready types. If the Brewers were to give up $40 million for Roy Halladay…that would destroy the franchise. $40 million is almost half of the Brewers’ current salary.

It would be different if Halladay was sour grapes about his time in Toronto and the Blue Jays were looking to get what they could for him. However it sounds like Halladay is happy in Toronto and Ricciardi is just as happy keeping him there. In other words, he’s not going to take pennis on the dollar for Halladay. $40 million in talent seems about right.

It just doesn’t make sense to trade away the farm system — or anyone, for that matter — with the rotation the Brewers have at the beginning of the year. Parra’s only slightly broken (and hopefully is back for good) and when Bush comes back the rotation will be back to where it was at the beginning of the year and in May when the Brewers were the best team in the major leagues. Overpaying for Halladay or Javier Vazquez isn’t going to be the answer. It’s just not going to be worth it.

Lost in all this talk about the destruction of Milwaukee’s starting rotation has been the recent slide offensively. Outside of the Cleveland series, the Brewers have scored 4 runs or less 14 times this month. For reference, they did this 12 times in April and 16 times in May (note that this month still has 6 more games to go including today’s and the Brewers played more games in May than in June). Their hot hitters are starting to cool off and guys like J.J. Hardy are starting to fall off a cliff.

There’s still nothing to worry about quite yet. Even if the Brewers slump until the All-Star Break, their schedule works out really nicely. From the end of the AS Break to the beginning of September, the Brew Crew plays a total of one team that is currently over .500 — the Cincinatti Reds. Other than the six games played against the Reds, they play a whole mess of games against the Padres, Nationals, and Pirates. If they’re 4 or 5 games out at the All-Star break, which would be absolute worst-case scenario, I won’t be too concerned.

The Cubs still scare me though. They’re going to get ultra hot sometime this year and I really hope it’s not next weekend’s series.

Here’s a little tidbit I saw in the Journal-Sentinel:

Assistant general manager Gord Ash said it’s becoming evident that the Brewers won’t be getting a contribution from left-hander Chris Capuano this season. Capuano remains in Arizona, undergoing a throwing program after his second “Tommy John” reconstructive elbow surgery in May 2008.

“He threw a bullpen the other day,” said Ash. “It’s been a long, slow grind. He gets full marks for grinding it out.

“(As for pitching for the Brewers), probably not until next year, which probably isn’t a bad thing.”

It’s been really disappointing to see Chris Capuano continue to be pushed back. Not just because he’s a good guy, and a class act, but because his last twentysome-odd appearances with the Brewers always left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I’d really like to see him com back from a second Tommy John surgery and pitch the Brewers to a win.

With two Tommy John surgeries and continued small report in the news of “no, he’s experienced another minor setback,” I’m not too confident he’ll be back with the full force that he had when he made the All-Star team in 2006. A ligament can only be restructured so many times before it finally breaks down.

This also continues to compromise Milwaukee’s pitching depth.

So, The Hardball Times has a neat stat looking at how “cluch” each hitter has been so far this year. “Clutch,” in this case, is produce from Bill James’ formula. I’ll let THT explain:

“Clutch” is the name we’ve given to the portion of Bill James’s Runs Created formula that includes the impact of a batter’s batting average with runners in scoring position and the number of home runs with runners on. The specific formula is Hits with RISP minus overall BA times at bats with RISP, plus HR with runners on minus (all HR/AB) times at bats with runners on. This stat is not a definitive description of “clutch hitting,” just one way of looking at it.

Anyways, here’s what we have so far:

I would have thought J.J. Hardy and Mat Gamel were going to be worse and Mike Cameron would have done much better. Even though this is a fairly crude way of measuring clutch (hitting with RISP is weighted the same in a 9-0 game in the 3rd inning as it is in a tie game in the 9th), it’s still early enough in the season where these stats could nearly flip by the end of the year and I wouldn’t be really that surprised.

Another thing you may have noticed is the pitches/plate appearance stat in that image. P/PA is a useful way of looking at a hitter’s patience, and a hitter’s patience is a useful way to evaluate a player. More pitches seen generally mean more walks, and OBP is obviously a good thing. Here are P/PA stats for every Brewers player up through last night:

Considering the frequency that Hardy looks at the first pitch (which is pretty much every single time), I’m surprised to see that he’s in the middle of the pack in terms of P/PA. This also shows so far why I’m still really high on Mat Gamel.

One of the biggest reasons for the Brewers success this year is due to the Brewers ability to take a walk and get on base. While their batting average and slugging percentages have remained basically the same throughout the year, they’ve had a huge spike in OBP which can only be attributed to an increase in walks. The more pitches you see, the more walks you get. Simple as that.

On the pitching side, THT also has a database on the team’s xFIP this year. Check it out:

Just judging from this, I think Doug Melvin is going to make a trade for another starter. Seth McClung isn’t fit to be the 5th starter. Now that Erik Bedard is on the DL, expect another Dave Bush (in the form of Jarrod Washburn or Brad Penny) to join the rotation near the end of this month.

McClung has been one of the luckiest pitchers so far considering his secondary statistics compared to his ERA. If any pitcher is going to do that, though, it’s Chucky — he’s a very lights on/lights off type of pitcher. Outings where he can locate both his fastball and his curveball usually result in scoreless innings where he can hardly be touched. When his pitches aren’t located, he walks people and gets hit like a punching bag. Ken Macha should know when he’s not pitching at 100% and yank him accordingly. Better bullpen arms should be able to clean up his mess at a rate better than he’d be able to.

This post was really disjointed. That’s OK though — the charts here are what’s interesting about it.

…isn’t going much better than his Major League starts.

6 innings, 4 hits, 2 runs (1ER), 4 K’s and 4 walks. 114 pitches.

That doesn’t sound like anything dominating. He still has a few more starts, so at least only giving up two runs is encouraging.

First I said Bill Hall will revert back to 2006 Bill Hall and put up a drastic improvement. Well, that’s gone to hell, since the great majority of his secondary stats have gotten worse and he’s become a replacement-level player (even against lefties, it seems now). I’ll be changing the title on the main page here in the next few minutes since I’m jumping off the bandwagon.

Then I said the Brewers should be patient with Manny Parra. He responded to my post by giving up 6 runs in 1 2/3 innings and getting sent down to the minor leagues before the game even finished. Parra was getting extremely unlucky and he should be back and in full force after a short trip to the minors, but in the clubhouse he said he didn’t feel comfortable throwing any of his pitches for strikes and it seemed whenever he did just that someone blooped it for a double.

I went to Saturday’s game (and had amazing seats to boot) and noticed during the second inning Parra was unable to throw his secondary pitches for strikes and looked totally lost on the mound for awhile there. It was a testament to his stuff itself that he was only able to escape with the inane amount of bloops and texas leaguers he suffered. It’s kind of metaphorical for his season so far. It was about then I decided he could use a two or three week refresher course in the minor leagues where there isn’t nearly as much pressure as the bigs.

But, moral of the story: Not only am I unfit to be the general manager of a franchise, but I’m terrible at talent evaluation as well.

The world lost a baseball legend today with the passing of Harry Kalas. Kalas was probably my personal favorite announcer and arguably the second most important baseball announcer outside of Dodgers great Vin Scully. I’ve always had a beef with the Phillies and Philadelphia in general (I’m still not over 4th and 26), but there was nothing cooler than listening to Kalas slowly and dramatically boom, “struck him out,” or call Jimmy Rollins “J-Roll.” At least he got to see his team win a World Series the year before he passed.

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Now on with Tuesday Techno.

This doesn’t really count as techno, but it’s awesome nevertheless. Watch this video.

This ThruYou dude has an entire website and album dedicated to remixing youtube videos and making awesome hits based off of things he found. My first impression among hearing this was, “oh man, this is pretty cool, but mostly just quirky,” but after thinking about it this guy is totally legitimate and creating music out of youtube videos is something nobody’s ever thought of before and is exactly the same as taking song pieces and crunching them together. They’re musical artists one in the same.

Techno

DJ Mani released a live set. This one’s from about a month ago — but it’s pretty darn good.

Anton Banks’ radio show called “The Vault” was recorded and released online. There’s a nifty little set list here…

Cuole De Song released a mix that’s worth a download.

IDM

Here is a mix by AA21 (I think?) that’s not really all that great in my opinion but you might like it.

Blamstrain remixed one of my personal favorite albums Ensi and released it via youtube links. Above is a link to my favorite song off the CD — to view the full album list, click here.

More to come next week!

Using the Baseball Musings Lineup Simulation tool, here’s a quick look at what the offense will do in 2009.

Note that these numbers are all CHONE projections, with one objection: I’m predicting Bill Hall will do much better than his projections, considering he’s due for a BABIP correction year and I have a good feeling his LASIK surgery will be able to make him see the ball better, and post a Denard Span-like transformation. I’ve shown why Hall’s problems are inherently linked with his ability to see the ball already right here. I’ve beefed up his numbers a little bit to adjust for what I think will happen…

5.2 runs per game is obviously unrealistic considering how odd the top lineups are. So, let’s adjust for the reduced performance that lineup will have. 5.05 runs per game sounds like an appropriate approximation.

Of course, there’s more. This isn’t the lineup that’s going to be playing every single day. Whenever J.J. Hardy needs a day off, he’ll be replaced by the soft-hitting Craig Counsell. Sometimes, Chris Duffy or Tony Gwynn Jr. (whichever one) is going to start in center. Brad Nelson might take some at-bats away from Ryan Braun. So, if we adjust playing time further, we amount to about 5 total runs per game with our lineup.

5 runs per game is nothing to scoff at. That’s 810 runs throughout the duration of the entire season. For reference, they scored 750 runs all of last season. Depending on how well the patchwork starting rotation holds up, we may very well have an underrated team here. 800 runs isn’t a small cup of coffee, and that could easily carry a team to a .500 record. If Braden Looper and