Thought I’d post a little rumor that fell into my lap today. Don’t take this as truth obviously, but something to think about:

Inside source with significant previous hits (had the Wolf, Braun, and Gallardo contracts a few days before they were announced) says he has the Brewers offer to Fielder:

It is a 7 year deal w/ a club option for the 7th year, but that option vests if Fielder finishes in top 10 of MVP voting.

Total guaranteed is $109 mil

if they pick up 7th year or if it vests then the total guaranteed is $128 mil.

Has full no trade clause and a hotel suite on the road.

There are a bunch of incentive built in for all-star, gold glove, mvp, etc. which range from 50k to 150k

Now, who knows whether this is true or not, but if it is, I don’t see Prince accepting. A couple weeks ago he saw his player comp Ryan Howard snag $25 mil/year for an extended period of time… I don’t think he’d be OK with $19 mil/year, even if he was willing to accept a hometown discount.

Add that to all the times we’ve read Ryan Braun or Fielder himself say that he’s going to get paid a bunch of money someday, I suspect the Brewers might trade him this offseason for pitching + prospects and restock for 2012.

Since school began taking over, I haven’t had the time to write about the Brewers… that doesn’t mean I haven’t been following them. Although posting will continue to be sporadic until I actually finish, I’m going to write as much as possible.

As everyone knows by now Doug Melvin traded J.J. Hardy for Carlos Gomez in a trade made to free up some money and solve the CF logjam. I defend the move, personally… even though I really like Mike Cameron it’s pretty clear keeping him is more of a sentimental move than a proper business move, and since baseball is a business, saving the money trumps keeping friends. The ~$7MM the Brewers save by bringing in Gomez will be spent on pitching, and the ~2 wins or so they lose should be more than made up for if they bring in a pitcher or two worth as much as they have left in their pockets. Let’s take a look at what next year’s payroll is going to look like realistically…

Conveniently Al’s Ramblings already took a look at the 2010 payroll. Here’s what he had to say:

Without buyouts and Hall, they are at $37M with guaranteed deals. Add in estimated payroll from guys not eligible for arby, you have Yo, Parra, Escobar, Stetter, DiFelice, McGehee, and I’ll add in Narveson…that’s seven guys at about $450K per, so that’s $3.15M, so a total of $40.15M for a dozen players.

Realistically, one catcher will be very cheap, be it a backup or a youngster. So will one utility IF. That’s 14 players for $41.05M. Weeks, about $3.75M in arby. Hart, about $4M in arby. Gomez, about $1.3M in arby (as a super 2). That’s 17 players for $50.1M. Coffey will likely get about $1.5M in arby…$51.6M for 18 players. You can probably pencil in Counsell or another backup IF for about $1.5M…19 for $53.1M. There’s two reserve OF spots still open, Gerut would probably get $2.5M in arby, but we do not know if he’ll remain. I’ll budget $3.5M for the pair of bench OF’s…21 for $56.6M. That leaves the catcher’s spot, a bullpen spot, and 2 SP’s remaining. Also, one of the commitments for next year is Dave Riske, who will probably not contribute ’til midseason, if at all. If the two bullpen openings are filled with guys like Carlos V, McClung, or the like, they’ll probably cost about $3-4M. We’ll use $3.5M for estimates, and that’s $60.1M. I keep thinking a veteran catcher of some sort will be brought in, at a cost of $2-3M. Again, splitting the difference, we’ll use $2.5M, the total is $62.6M.

How much is payroll? Well, Doug always says Mark never gives him a budget of $X. Last year’s Opening Day payroll was about $80M, and I’ve seen numbers used in the $85-90M range for last year…with additions such as Lopez, and including DL replacements. Assuming no increase, that would probably mean they “could” spend from $17-25M on these two SP’s that Doug is supposedly looking for.

Of course these are all estimates and ‘what-if’s regarding holes being filled, so obviously this $17-25MM number should be taken with a grain of salt. But let’s take a look at a couple of hypotheticals…

Trade for Edwin Jackson

Jackson is a young, cost-controlled pitcher still in arbitration. Despite all the trade talks and the talk of Detroit needing to grab some salary relief, it’s really unlikely he’d be “salary relief” since Detroit is a $120M+ payroll and Edwin still has two years of arbitration left. Likely the Brewers would have to take on one of their bad contracts or give up good prospects to pry him away… my guess is probably at least Mat Gamel.

Normally this wouldn’t be a bad thing but Edwin isn’t that great of a pitcher in the first place and giving up a highly touted prospect or taking on a bad contract in addition to him would be silly. It’d likely mean taking on Curtis Granderson’s ~$26MM remaining salary as well, and he’s looking more and more like a platoon player only. Now that the Brewers have Gomez, Granderson would be a significant downgrade. Besides, the Mariners are going for him too, which might cause an unnecessary bidding war.

Verdict: No thanks. We already have Suppan and Hall to worry about.

Sign a free agent, like Doug Davis or Jarrod Washburn.

Both Washburn and Davis are so-so pitchers who have been underrated by being in lower market areas (or in Washburn’s case, getting old). They’re not going to impress Brian Cashman or Theo Epstein, but they’re perfect for a mid-market team looking for a slightly above-average pitcher for a cheap price.

Davis himself might be a little overpriced, as people have noticed they might get in a bidding war with Seattle over him, and anything over a two-year deal is probably giving up too much for him. Seattle’s looking for pitching just as much as the Brewers are… and with their recent ‘defense-first’ mentality (trading for Franklin Gutierrez, resigning Jack Wilson), they can afford to sign an average pitcher, much like what Doug’s planning to do. Jack Z came from Milwaukee.

Washburn on the other hand had his value skyrocket in the middle of the year and then had it plummet after he was traded. He no longer was the beneficiary of a great D and pitcher’s park in Detroit, and he started regressing. Now his ceiling is a two-year deal worth about $10MM… just the kind of deal Doug should make. He’s getting old, which is turning some people off, but he’s a soft-tossing lefty, which means he should age well, and a fly ball pitcher with Gomes patrolling center is a recipe for success.

Verdict: Bring in JW.

On Monday I took a quick glance at four similar baseball players just by looking at their statistics and nothing else. Each player played the same position and therefore had the same normalized stats:

Chicks obviously dig the long ball, but let’s run a few comparisons, “mystery game” style. Check it out, using 2008 statistics:

Player A: .270/.341/.500, 25 HR in 492 AB, 123 OPS+, UZR/150 -7.1
Player B: .251/.339/.543, 48 HR in 610 AB, 124 OPS+, UZR/150 2.6
Player C: .276/.372/.507, 34 HR in 588 AB, 128 OPS+, UZR/150 -8.7
Player D: .247/.377/.494, 31 HR in 590 AB, 127 OPS+, UZR/150 3.8

Check out how similar these players are — you can’t guess who’s who without specifically looking up the statistics first. Without doing that, rank these players from who you’d most want and why, and I’ll lay out the same (putting contracts in mind) on my next post and explain why the three players who aren’t Ryan Howard are more desirable to have on your team than the big slugger himself.

Just for the record, if I were looking at these statistics by themselves, I’d rank the players, from best to worst, 4-2-3-1. Let me know what you think.

Those players, in order, were Adam Laroche, Ryan Howard, Prince Fielder, and Carlos Pena. I was a little bit surprised to see that Laroche was almost as good as the other “big three” first basemen in this category in terms of pure statistics, even though he lost quite a bit of value defensively for not being that good at first base.

These four players are very similar statistically, with about one total win being the difference between them (assuming they all had the same amount of PAs). However, their contracts appear to be wildly different. Check out what each of these players are getting paid:

Adam Laroche: 1 yr/ $7.05 million plus $10,000 in incentives for reaching PA plateaus
Prince Fielder: 2 yrs/ $18 million plus $500k for reaching 500 PA
Ryan Howard: 3 yrs/ $54 million with incentives for various accomplishments that could reach an additional $2.5 million
Carlos Pena: 3 yrs/$24.125 million plus $25,000 for each Gold Glove

It’s incredible to me how much the media can change the face of a player simply by means of how much hype they give him. Howard is considered a first-class slugger in the majors because he can hit home runs and plays for a major market team. Alternatively, Carlos Pena had a higher OPS+ than Howard, was better defensively, and gets paid less than half of what Howard makes. The only real “knock” against Pena is that in 2008 he only hit 31 HR while Howard blasted nearly 48 hitting in an extreme hitters park in Philadelphia.

Let it be known too that Pena went nuts in 2007, putting up an incredible line of .282/.411/.627 with 46 HR and 172 OPS+ with some plus defense in first base as well. Since he plays in Tampa, though, he doesn’t get near the amount of media attention that he deserves.

The discrepancy in salary between these two players is an obvious choice when deciding who I’d rather want as a player. Considering Howard’s massive $18 million salary next year, I’d just as soon take the services of Adam Laroche because he costs $11 million cheaper, and I can make up for Laroche’s dropoff in production by signing someone else to fill in the gap somewhere else — an extra $11 million will be able to buy me some more wins somewhere else where there’s a market to upgrade. Or that $11 million can be put back into the system for next year in order to afford a cool free agent coming out. Or, I can try and lock up a pre-arbitration player. The possibilities with extra money are endless; $11 million to lose out on one extra win is a gamble I’d be quite willing to take.

I decided to take a look at some of the best values of some of the best players in the majors. I used Beyond the Box Score’s Top 50 Players in 2008 list and compared the salaries of players with how much they’re worth on the field. Just a few notes before I publish the spreadsheet:

– I sorted players by those in their arbitration years and those who have signed longer-term contracts. I did this because players in their arbitration years get smaller contracts than those who have proven themselves and are ready to become free agents. This is so that we’re comparing apples and apples; not apples and oranges.

– Players who are in pre-arb years were omitted; the salaries are too similar. Of the top 50 players on Beyond the Box Score’s list, that means I’m skipping out on Josh Hamilton, Geovany Soto, Joey Votto, Carlos Quentin, BJ Upton, and Mike Aviles.

– Because some players’ contracts are backloaded, I decided to normalize cost/win values by averaging the entire contract of the player in terms of price/year and finding out the cost/win that way in addition to the player’s contract in 2009.

– Manny Ramirez hasn’t signed anything yet and I just estimated his salary at $20 million, since that’s the base number that gets thrown around a lot.

– Chipper Jones’ salary isn’t disclosed, so I just estimated it based on what MLB Contracts said. Nothing scientific there.

So, here’s what I found.

One of the things that jumped out at me was the incredible value ballclubs are getting by signing pre-arbitration players to long-term contracts that translates to guaranteed money for the players when they are just one injury away from losing millions of dollars (see: Ben Sheets). Evan Longoria is the best deal among the top 50 players, and likely the world — at $120,000/win, he’s an incredible bargain, no matter what team you are. And he’s only 23. Considering his contract is a little backloaded, he still only costs $630,000 per win, and when you consider he didn’t play the entire season last year (which means his WAR over a full season would be higher) and you expect a 23-year-old to improve as he continues to make progress in the big leagues, he’s probably going to come cheaper than that. The Rays paid their superstar virtually no money to go out and add 5 wins above replacement.

With that said, it’s widely known at this point that the Angels are not the most efficient of spenders. They considered Gary Matthews Jr. enough of a talent to pay $10 million/year to OPS .675 and play terrible defense. Torii Hunter is the lone Angelic who appears on this list, proving to be an inefficient purchase, even though he adds 3-4 wins to their win total.

Of course these numbers aren’t perfect. I personally don’t expect Ryan Ludwick to repeat his 2008 performance since it seemed like a flukish year and I don’t trust an oft-injured player like him to repeat an entire season’s worth of good hitting. However, if it’s a good quick cost-benefit analysis for players where you’ve already evaluated talent levels on.

For my part 3 preview (which I’ve started by the way!), I’m going to do a spreadsheet on all current Brewers and how they can project to do for the 2009 season using this analysis. Using Beyond the Box Score’s cost-per-win analysis to use Milwaukee’s current payroll to determine who’s worth it and who’s not.

Anyone want to undertake the task of doing this for the entirety of MLB?

Over the next few days I’m going to start compiling a list of legitimate Brewers websites — blogs, official sites, or whatever — on the linkroll to the right of the page. If you have one, or you know of one that I’ve missed, e-mail me at cody@czwief.com or comment with the link on this post; I’ll certainly put it up on the linkroll. I want to create a nice little database here of everything Brewers-related, so that I can easily read everything instead of using bookmarks and other links.

There’s a messy situation developing in Milwaukee which everyone’s surely heard of. Ben Sheets will get surgery on his right elbow to repair a torn flexor tendon (something which shouldn’t be surprising), so he’s not going to be able to pitch again until around August. The problem with that is that Sheets wants the Brewers to foot the bill for the surgery and they’re inevitably going to have to do it whether they like it or not.

Gord Ash and other Brewers insiders seem pissed — Tom Hardicourt keeps calling it a “mess,” and in general it’s a sticky situation, as both sides are (and should be) considerably frustrated with the other. Sheets passed up $12 million to not do anything except rehab until August, and has since found his value plummet due to his long list of medical problems to the point where nobody wants him anymore. The Brewers have to pay for a pitcher’s surgery that they’re not going to ever use in the future. They have to fix a broken product for someone else, and because of that, they lose two draft picks they would have gained if the top-notch free agent signed somewhere else.

What to make of this “mess?” Milwaukee should quietly shut up and pay for Benny’s surgery and try to keep him under the radar for the duration of his rehab. The Brewers have nothing to lose at this point by signing Sheets around the time his rehab is done to a cheap contract. I’m thinking something like 2 years, $7 million, with the salary backloaded for 2010. This assumes he can come back for the last two months of 2009. Here’s why I like this idea:

1) At this point in time, it’d be buying low on Sheets. His value has plummeted so much over the past couple months that signing him would be really cheap — especially for a pitcher who is as good as Sheets. The risk is low ($7 million dollars is nothing more than the Brewers have paid for Sheets in the past) and the reward could be high. If he can pitch 150 innings of ball in 2010 and help the Brewers for a month or two in ’09, then that price tag will be more than worth it because you know he’s going to put up wonderful numbers while trying to help the Brewers get back to the playoffs.

If Sheets does flame out and my predictions of more elbow and arm problems plaguing Sheets for the rest of his career, then it’s a definite loss, but it’s not as terrible of a risk as one might think. Friendly reminder here that Eric Gagne made $10 million last year and decided to be a terrible pitcher.

Considering that a win is going to be worth about $4 million this coming year, a 2-year, $8 million contract would mean that Sheets needs to be worth about 20 runs above replacement level in order to make the deal worth it. Ben’s WAR (wins above replacement) every year since 2002:

2002 – 3.8
2003 – 3.7
2004 – 8.0 (!!!)
2005 – 3.7
2006 – 4.0
2007 – 2.3
2008 – 4.6

In 2007 he threw 141 innings of injury-plagued, OK baseball (OK by Ben Sheets standards). If he throws 141 innings of good baseball over the next two years, he will be well worth the risk. Anything more is icing on the cake and would help soften not only the up-and-coming animosity between Sheets and the Brewers but will also get the Brewers back on the right track in terms of pitching. The only question is whether or not he would accept that kind of contract.

2) Considering his current status, I think he should accept it. He might still be bitter over refusing Milwaukee’s arbitration offer, but he’d be stupid not to take two years of guaranteed money considering how ready his body is to explode. You see it more and more among players these days — Ryan Braun for example decided to skip all of his arbitration years and take guaranteed money at a discounted rate from the Brewers. Evan Longoria is another recent example — and neither of these two guys have been especially injury-prone.

Guaranteed money for a guy like Ben Sheets would definitely be worth it since he’s going to be unemployed either way until August, and if he can muster a league-minimum salary this year (hey, it’s better than nothing) and know that he can earn another $7 million or so the next year, well, he’d be giving away even more money at this point. Even if Sheets’ rehab goes wonderfully and he pitches the last month and a half of 2009 pitching for a different club and goes back into the pitching market, I don’t see him getting much more money than $8 million per year anyways, since no team ever anymore will sign him to a long-term deal due to his extensive medical history. It’s guaranteed money for a not-guaranteed arm.

3) So what if my optimism is wrong, and Sheets is the next Mark Prior?

Then it’s an $8 million loss and a risk that in hindsight the Brewers shouldn’t have taken. These same risks have been taken with guys like Prior, Kerry Wood, or Mark Mulder and they’ve turned out horribly. With other injury-prone pitchers, like Rich Harden, taking risks on these guys banking can turn out well. It would suck if he didn’t turn out, but then again, it would suck if Sheets stuck the cost of his surgery on the Brewers and then the Cardinals got him for the stretch run in August and September.

Quite a few people have been murmuring about free agent pitcher Ben Sheets and reuniting with the Brewers after a tumultuous offseason that has seen contracts dwindle from astonishing and incredible to downright highway robbery. Free agents who are still in limbo like Sheets, Adam Dunn, Manny Ramirez, and Derek Lowe just aren’t going to come anywhere near what they thought they were going to be swimming in. Even if the economic situation weren’t so dire, and the Brewers had cap room, it would still be shooting themselves in the foot if they were to sign him again.

Everybody knows by now how good Sheets is (career 116ERA+ pitcher, hasn’t pitched a season below 117ERA+ since 2003, had a ridiculous 2004 season with 264K and 32BB in 237 innings), and how much time he spends on the DL (significant time spent there in ’05, ’06, and ’07; with 2008 being a good year but Sheets’ arm still fizzled out in September). Sometimes people think that all of his injuries have just been totally random and unrelated; while a little of that is true (in ’05 he missed significant time because of a viral infection in his inner ear and had extreme dizziness), most of it can be attributed to his pitching mechanics. Let’s hit the way-back machine and check out this post on Big Ben:

The latest injury for Sheets has been coined, “right triceps tightness,” but it might as well include the rotator cuff. In my clinical experience, I have seen very few baseball pitchers present with a pure, isolated “triceps strain”—rather, there is almost always an involvement of the rotator cuff muscles in what is called the “Quadrangular Space.”

Why do these injuries continue to mount for Sheets? The culprit appears to be his high arm slot. Although it’s partly responsible for the large 12-6 curveball, it’s also responsible for taxing the rotator cuff to the max. As a rule of thumb, the higher the arm slot, the harder the rotator cuff and biceps must work to stabilize the head of the humerus. This places stress on the rotator cuff interval, which includes ligaments in the front of the shoulder that also add stability.

The two main injuries I’ve found that have been the kiss of death for pitchers are injuries that irritate the rotator cuff and damage to the UCL (which leads to Tommy John surgery). Sheets has one of these problems already: an torn shoulder muscle in 2005, posterior shoulder strain in the beginning of ’06, shoulder tendinitis in May of ’06, and a triceps strain in ’07. The more recent injury he’s had to deal with smells to me like there might be something wrong with his overall mechanics in his elbow, too: his torn flexor muscle in his elbow might hint at future arm problems because the flexor muscles in his elbow work closely with the UCL and, if he continues to have surgeries and irritations in his elbow as well as his shoulder, I’m not confident he’ll ever hit 200 innings again.

In today’s economy, it’s not hard to argue that signing Sheets to a lowball salary would be a low-risk, high-reward type of contract and definitely something worth taking a risk on. I’m not so sure. His work ethic has been called into question before, and the evidence here is that he takes an abnormally long time to recover from seemingly non-serious injuries. Torn flexor tendons usually need surgery to repair fully, and Sheets hasn’t bothered with it yet, which is just a recipe for disaster to his elbow and hand. No, sir, I don’t think he’ll pitch enough to justify the contract he’s going to get ever again, and I don’t think it’s worth it to sign another risky starting pitcher. Especially when the thing Milwaukee needs most is pitching depth.

In other news, I’m happy that this isn’t there anymore. That was the report on shortstop prospect Alcides Escobar claiming he was a womanizer and bigheaded buffoon. Perhaps the Bleacher Report took it down due to a lack of credibility. Perhaps there is a shred of it in the blogosphere. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Here’s also a quick youtube to end this post:

The song is Modular Mix, by ambient band Air.