Just some things to think about as we reach the midway point of the season…
*** Milwaukee’s spent the majority of the first half playing slightly above their record. However their recent 3-8 June Swoon has them at the All-Star Break with a negative pythagorean record. BP’s playoff odds say the Brewers only have a 20% chance to make the playoffs despite being 2 1/2 games out of first place.
BP’s playoff odds basically combine the team’s current record and projects their pythagorean record for the rest of the season. Since the Brewers have scored approximately as many runs as they’ve given up, they should be expected to have a .500 record over the rest of the year, according to BP. An 83-win team won’t make the postseason; they’ll either need some luck or better play in order to capture a playoff birth.
*** With that said, this team isn’t as bad as their June has been, and they should pick it up. Most of Manny Parra’s struggles may be behind him, as a fresh look at AAA have seemingly given him more confidence in his pitches — he should return back to the form we expected him soon. Dave Bush is coming back from an injury and pitched really well in a rehab assignment, so there’s no reason to believe he won’t be back to his form.
Remember that when the rotation is back to full strength it will be the same rotation that helped the Brewers get 18 wins in May and a 3.85 ERA. Everybody talks about trading valuable parts of the farm system away to get another starter at the deadline, but if the rotation comes back with full strength than I see no reason to trade away parts for a Jarrod Washburn when the pitchers the Brewers have at the moment are just as good as he would be. If there was a C.C. Sabathia type of pitcher available who wouldn’t cost everything but the kitchen sink to get (i.e. Roy Halladay), then I’d advocate getting someone, but until then, no dice. The pitching staff is just fine where they are; they’ll stop struggling sooner or later. Preferably sooner.
*** A could of weeks ago I wrote about management’s use of Casey McGehee over Mat Gamel in many key situations where it would have been better to put the lefty slugger in over the current hot bat. Well it appears McGehee’s finally cooled off: he’s 2 for his last 14 over this current homestand and has sat in favor of Gamel recently, probably because of the problems he has with his knee.
McGehee might be entering a prolonged slump here. I only say this because he’s a career .283/.340/.429 hitter in the minors and it’s really, really unlikely a 27-year-old would suddenly find his swing. If scouts for the Cubs would have seen this kind of power or discipline at the plate with any kind of consistency, they wouldn’t have placed him on waivers just a few months ago.
Since his knee is still struggling and it’s likely he’s starting to slump at the plate, now is the time to ride Gamel until Casey’s back to 100 percent.
*** The upcoming schedule for the Brewers is incredibly easy and the Cardinals lead just might evaporate pretty rapidly through August. After spending the last couple weeks before the All-Star break playing the toughest and best teams in the NL, they spend the next month and a half taking a break against them. Here’s a quick list of who they play until the end of August:
4 @ Cincinnati
3 @ Pittsburgh
3 vs. Atlanta
4 vs. Washington
3 @ San Diego
3 @ Los Angeles
3 @ Houston
3 vs. San Diego
3 vs. Houston
3 @ Pittsburgh
4 @ Washington
3 vs. Cincinatti
3 vs. Pittsburgh
The only good team the Brewers play until the end of August is LA, and every other series is absolutely winnable. That’s 12 of the next 13 series against .500 or lower teams. With the starting pitching coming back to full strength, I’m not so sure the Brewers need to trade for a pitcher, nevertheless anyone. I’m thinking 14 games against the Padres and Nationals coming up soon might solve some of the sicknesses that have been plaguing Milwaukee since the beginning of the year.
Another thing to consider is that the Brewers essentially started off the season with a 4-9 mark calling for the head of a couple of players. They were patient and waited it out — and were rewarded in May. Let’s wait a little while before panicking for Roy Halladay.
***Prince Fielder owns.
A lot of people aren’t swooning over Prince as much as I thought they would after bumping up his OPS by over .200 points from last year. His on-base percentage is a whopping .423 — he’s learned to take walks. He’s on pace for about 40 homers. Pitchers are too afraid to throw him strikes now that he just takes the free pass to first — this Dale Sveum hitting philosophy is way better than Jim Skaalen’s.
One more thing I thought about Skaalen: Last year with the Brewers, virtually every single hitter put up mediocre numbers compared to their career norms. After he was subsequently fired, he’s now the coach of the Oakland Athletics. The A’s are currently awfully underachieving due to the offense putting up incredibly mediocre numbers. Is there a coincidence here?
*** Prince Fielder owns.
img courtesy Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
People aren’t giving him enough credit this year for being incredibly awesome. He had a down year last year after his 50-homer season, but has only increased his OPS by 200 points from this year and is getting on base at nearly a .440 clip and is on pace for 40 home runs. Pitchers now fear throwing him strikes with a base open almost entirely and he’s really become a complete hitter.
I don’t think he’ll keep up his .440 on-base percentage; he has a higher batting average on balls in play (BABIP) than he’s had through the rest of his career. But his walk rates are so far up that it’s not inconceivable he could OBP over .410 by the end of the year, which would make him one of the top-5 non-Albert Pujolsian hitters of the game. He’s not getting enough credit for being awesome.
After Fielder signed his 2-year, $18 million contract I questioned his value to the team compared to what other people perceived his value as. He’s since exceeded any expectations I had for him, being a complete hitter and being more than worth his contract. A Fielder for Matt Cain trade I proposed awhile ago would probably have backfired.
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 internetis abuzzwith 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.
…
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.
I have over 150 new e-mails in my inbox that I simply haven’t had the time to sort through until now due to the lagging computer problems and increased business in school. Some of these releases go all the way back to February, so I’m a little out-of-date. I’ll slowly bring your back into midseason form; just give me a couple of weeks.
Detroit Techno
Duplex released a new tracklist. It’s your average hour-long mix set that will sound excellent assuming you’re in the mood for some Detroit.
Placid released another excellent mix of his entitled 3:03am. Anything I put on here by him is definitely worth a listen.
Kyle Cannon has a couple new mixes: a cool techno/deep house mix that I just love and a different mix that I like less but is just as good as the original.
Remember, as usual, all of these mixes are free to download and listen to.
IDM
FMControl released an online album that supposedly took two years to create. The album’s called “Objects 2007-2008,” and it’s really neat; very similar to Autechre during their glitchier days.
Posted below is a video from one of my favorite artists, Blamstrain. Blamstrain is actually Juho Hietala, a Finnish musician who happens to create some of my favorite stuff ever — if you ever see his album Ensi, absolutely pick it up and give it a listen, as it’s some of my favorite stuff ever. Anyways, he released a new track called Galaxy Sports in which he made available in Youtube (in HD! Internet HD video — that’s taking off right now) form so he could be a VJ that reaches out across the world. Oh, and the track is really good too:
Ambient
Mort Deuce released a new little mix, check it out.
Here is a link to a mix released by The Orb. A mix by The Orb? Where have I seen that before?
Techno
Omar S released a new mix. It’s a required download for any techno junkie — Omar S is one of the few guys who you know when you download something you will like. Download directly here.
Here is one of the most underrated mixes I’ve ever heard. This is Detroit techno at its best — slightly minimalist, but still bumpin’. This was done, by the way, by Marco Passarani, a really fantastic DJ in general.
Mark DiFelice is a 32-year-old career minor league pitcher who seemingly can’t find a home, having minor league stints with the Rockies, Orioles, Nationals, Cubs, and now Brewers. So far, he’s been a journeyman minor leaguer who just found his first big-league experience last year in a short 19-inning stint, only getting his opportunity when David Riske got injured.
In his 19 innings with Milwaukee last season, he only put up a 2.84 ERA and a 151 ERA+, which should give him another shot at a cup of coffee, but even the amateur baseball fan knows that 19 innings is a small sample size for any period of pitching time, so the rationale is that DiFelice is an AAA pitcher.
Problem is, he’s not your everyday AAA scrub. He’s a really good pitcher. Last year in AAA, he put up gaudy numbers, which he’s done throughout his minor league career. Last year, in Nashville, he went 5-1 with a 3.22 ERA and 0.90 WHIP, while striking out more than a batter an inning and walking only 1.2. He had a K:BB ratio of 8.13 in AAA last year!
DiFelice is a junkball pitcher, throwing an 87mph fastball as well as a slider (cutter), circle change, and curve. He threw his fastball less than 15 percent of the time in the majors last year. Some have thought hitters will eventually catch up to his lack of an “out” pitch and he wouldn’t be a good option at the major league level, but he’s proven himself at least capable of being a good big-league reliever and if he can at least keep up a really good K:BB ratio he should still be an expendable reliever at least for a year or two.
Let’s say his CHONE or Marcel projections hold to be true. CHONE projects DiFelice to have a 3.41 FIP, while Marcel projections think his walk rates are going to go way up and decrease his FIP to essentially league-average (4.5). I tend to think, at least at the beginning of his big-league career, he’ll be closer to the CHONE projections and be a good pitcher who nobody really knew about. Instead, the Brewers most likely are going to keep Eduardo Morlan who had an FIP of 3.4 in AA last year for Tampa Bay simply because he will have to be offered back to Tampa if he’s not kept on the roster. Morlan is good, and projects to be a future stud in the big leagues, but if the Brewers want to win now they’ll place DiFelice higher up on the food chain than Morlan.
That leaves the bullpen situation looking like this:
Trevor Hoffman
Seth McClung
Carlos Villanueva
R.J. Swindle/Mitch Stetter
Jorge Julio
David Riske
Mark DiFelice
I actually really like that pen. Especially if they keep Tim Dillard and Todd Coffey in AAA. Dillard just isn’t that good, and Coffey could stand to work on his pitches for a little while while being the backup for the pitcher who’s ultimately going to get hurt sometime during the season.
But DiFelice is ready for the bigs. I think he’ll be a great pitching candidate, even if he doesn’t rely on the fastball.
Welcome to the first of your two posts today. Check out all this new stuff! Remember, it’s all free to download and check out and not illegal to have!
Techno Luke Slater released a live mix he played in Glasgow in January. If you’re going to listen to any mix I post today — do this one. It’s 100% rad.
Surgeon released a live tracklist that he played in Leeds. More good stuff.
IDM
Pi.o.tr has a new release entitled Guarded. Cool album.
Idiot Dog Brain released a couple of tracks available for download on his website.
Ambient
Darren Harper released a variant of the Buddha Machine. For those unfamiliar with what the Buddha Machine is, here you go. This is actually a really, really cool variant.
The Orb
The Orb released a new track! OOPA is the name. very ambient and psychedelic, as that seems to be the way that The Orb is going today instead of the dub music that they seemed to hang onto.
Starting now, on Tuesdays I’m going to put together a little roll of electronic mixes of various genres and types that have recently been released. They’ll always be sorted by genre, and they’re all free to download and distribute, so no worries about this being taken down. If you have something you want me to post, email me at cody at czwief dot com, and I’ll check it out!
Detroit techno new stuff
Echospace – Talking Shopcast Mix: Here’s a little thing released by Echospace last month that’s pretty darn good. You can check out a full interview with the artist here talking about his mix and about a host of other stuff.
David Powers released a few tracks he mixed on Abelton Live. This one’s nothing special, but that doesn’t make it a good listen!
IDM new stuff
Zeno remixed a B1t Crunch3r song, all dubstep-style. It’s cool. Dubstep really is an underrated genre. Even those who aren’t fans of reggae can appreciate it.
David Powers released a little something, which I’m a huge fan of. More dubstep/techno. Sounds great.
tl; dr version: Prime Brewers shortstop prospect Alcides Escobar’s wife wrote a post on Bleacher Report detailing how Escobar, since getting called up from the minors in the September callup binge, has been abrasive, silent, and big-headed, getting to the point where he skips out on his wife and baby child and supposedly got kicked off the team in Venezuela. He hasn’t made a minor league appearance in winter ball since the end of December, although he’s still on the lineup card. Continue reading →
The biggest news of the day comes from Tom Hardicourt. The Brewers have inked a 2-year, $18 million deal with Prince Fielder in order to buy out two years of his arbitration and keep him on the team.
The deal in itself doesn’t sound too bad, as it’s kind of a wash — Prince Fielder rated as about a 2.2 adjusted VORP for 2008. The average win in 2008 was valued at $4.5m. That cost in 2009 might go down due to the struggling economy — unless you’re the Yankees — so Prince’s value can be placed around $9m or so per year. That’s about what he’s worth. Not bad. Continue reading →
While I’m still finishing tinkering this blog, I think it’s about time I start full-out blogging instead of posting here and there. Let’s use this post to outline what you can expect to see in this blog. Continue reading →
