When your front office sabotages the season and you turn around and dump payroll during the offseason, how do you win your fan base back? Just wondering as a former season-ticket holder.
— @crewsin1234
No fuzzy warm-up questions here. Welcome back to the Inbox.
We’re off to a bad start because the premise of the question is that David Stearns sabotaged last season by trading Josh Hader. That’s frustration talking. As for the charge of salary dumping, the only offseason trade that falls into that category is Hunter Renfroe to the Angels.
The Brewers added salary when they traded Kolten Wong to the Mariners. They’ll add a lot more salary when they start signing their arbitration-eligible players. And with so much offseason to go, we don’t know yet whether payroll will be up or down from last year’s club-record total north of $130 million.
On to the Hader trade… yes, there was a financial component to that deal, in that the Brewers got out of his final year of arbitration eligibility. (Cot’s Contracts projects Hader will earn something like $12.75 million in 2023.) But there was also a baseball component. Some markets bear $100 million closers; some don’t. And those that don’t, also can’t afford to let elite talent walk into free agency without refreshing the system with prospect talent. For all of those reasons, the Brewers determined they were going to trade Hader before he reached free agency.
The thorny question was when.
When his performance plummeted in July, there was urgency to make a decision. What if Hader continued to sputter in August and September? Instead of pushing the decision to “2023 Trade Deadline or bust,” the Brewers opted to make a deal they thought would work now and later: Hader to the Padres for Taylor Rogers, himself an elite closer in a rough patch (with no commitment beyond ’22) plus two prospects they really like in lefty Robert Gasser and outfielder Esteury Ruiz. Over the ensuing months, the Hader-for-Rogers exchange backfired. The Brewers missed the playoffs. Hader rebounded and helped the Padres get within one step of the World Series. Stearns, Matt Arnold and Craig Counsell all acknowledged the trade didn’t work as they’d hoped.
Only time will tell whether the Brewers got good value for one of baseball’s best closers. Ruiz already paid off by landing five years of an All-Star catcher (William Contreras). We’ll see what happens with Gasser, the Brewers’ No. 10 prospects, per MLB Pipeline.
So that’s the logic of the Hader trade. Brewers officials should have been better prepared for the negative reaction from fans and their own players, considering the team was in first place at the time and off to a great start to the second half. Internally, they know they fell short in the messaging. They’ll have to do better the next time an unpopular trade occurs.
Where has this team gotten significantly better in the offseason to improve from the last two years of poor offense to be an above average group once again?
— @falkster16
The premise of the question is off. The Brewers were an above average offense in 2022’s run scoring environment — 4% above average, to be precise, based on their 104 wRC+. That ranked 11th out of 30 teams. They were 10th of 30 teams at 4.48 runs per game. They were 13th in on-base percentage and 10th in slugging percentage and third in home runs. They also had the fourth-most strikeouts and ranked in the bottom half in hits and batting average, so no one is saying they cannot be better. But in today’s game, they were an above-average offense.
Do you think the Brewers put themselves in a position to gain from MLB’s new prospect promotion incentive by opening the season with Sal Frelick on the roster?
— @miscfan888
Baseball’s latest Collective Bargaining Agreement introduced the prospect promotion incentive, a clause meant to discourage service-time manipulation that can have enormous benefits for teams. It applies to rookie-eligible prospects who are on at least two Top 100 lists between MLB Pipeline, ESPN and Baseball America for Opening Day, and accrue a year of MLB service. If that player wins the Rookie of the Year Award that year or finishes in the top three of MVP or Cy Young balloting in any season before qualifying for salary arbitration, his team nets an extra Draft pick. A single player can earn up to three picks over the years if he consistently ranks among the leading vote-getters.
The Mariners were the first team to benefit, with Julio Rodríguez winning last year’s AL Rookie of the Year Award. Seattle gets the 29th pick in next year’s Draft, which is a big deal.
Are the Brewers ready to take a shot with Frelick, ranked as the No. 46 overall prospect by MLB Pipeline? He advanced from High-A to Double-A to Triple-A last season and logged a .943 OPS in 217 plate appearances at Nashville.
Would the Brewers consider Freddy Peralta closing to keep Devin Williams in the eighth inning? Solidify both roles and help keep Freddy’s workload down for health.
— @acwilber
I appreciate bold thinking but don’t like this idea, and not because using Peralta as a late-inning, high-leverage reliever blew up in the Brewers’ faces during the final homestand of 2022. With the development of his offspeed pitches in recent years (largely under the tutelage of former Brewers pitcher Carlos Villanueva), Peralta has the arsenal to be a starter. He has much more value to the team in that role.
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