The Brewers front continues to remain quiet with the holiday season as the most important news to come out of Brewers camp lately is that arbitration is beginning. For those not familiar with arbitration, here’s an article that explains everything. To sum it up really quickly:
Players who have been in the majors for in between 3 and 6 years who don’t agree with the contracts that their clubs have offered them can go through arbitration. If nobody can agree to a contract, the player can take arbitration where both his side and the team’s side present one-year contract offers to a three-person panel and present their sides on why their offer is more appropriate for the player. The panel then picks the best offer and that’s their contract. No in-betweens; it’s either one side or the other. (There’s much more to it, so if you want the whole of what arbitration is, read the link.)
You may be familiar with Ryan Howard’s expensive $10mm arbitration hearing last year– Tom Hardicourt notes that Prince Fielder has put up similar numbers than Howard over his arbitration time, and considering his fiery temper and previous public dismay over Brewers contract offers, I’m not convinced Doug Melvin’s ability to keep players out of arbitration hearings will hold up anymore. Thus, we can expect Fielder’s salary to explode this year — almost totally making up for the gain created with Eric Gagne’s salary coming off the books. We can expect $8-10 million heading towards this guy. Yikes. No wonder the Giants shot down the Prince Fielder for Matt Cain rumor that heralded the early offseason’s trade rumors.
Arbitration for a guy like Fielder would have to be pretty weird, I imagine. For example, imagine you’re Doug Melvin and you’re standing opposite Fielder and his agent in a room, and you’re trying to explain to three objective people why your player, that you have developed since he graduated from high school, everything that is wrong with his player in an effort to lower his stock. Simply talking to Fielder or his agent has got to be awkward after you just tried to argue that your player isn’t good enough to deserve a little more.
Then imagine if you were Fielder and you had to play hard for that guy. It wouldn’t be comfortable.
In the only other really relevant pieces of news, soon there will be news. Also, here’s your good news of the day.
On the note of the Brewers upcoming busy week, I’m going to note again that my Part 2 outlook of the 2009 season is going to wait until at least next week, since news about Braden Looper that went back to Christmas haven’t really been addressed yet, and when combined with the anticipated spike in activity this week, makes me think there’ll be a good pitching signing coming up soon. You can read Part 1 here.
In December, when I made a TV news package for a class of mine, I ran into Tubby Smith, who happened to be the Grand Marshall for Minneapolis’ Holidazzle parade. This is what I got to stand and record.
No new music to talk about this week, so I’ll rehash an old band I really like. Sometimes, when you’re listening to music, you have to go back and remember its roots. DJ Shadow does this for me. Although people were doing this sort of thing far before him, his revolutionary album Endtroducing… was the first ever CD ever recorded that only used previously recorded music. It’s an excellent CD for people who don’t really like electronic music that much, but don’t mind a little sampling done here and there. Helped pioneer an entire genre of music.
