Watching Another PC Guy Get Traded

Last year, the Brewers were very disappointing right out of the box. That wasn't the plan for 2015; the team was trying to compete. When things did not shake out well, the club started trading pieces away -- first Aramis Ramirez (for Yhonathan Barrios, who, unfortunately, will miss this year due to a shoulder injury), and then one of my current-player PCs, Carlos Gomez.

In the offseason that followed, David Stearns -- who, I am reminded, was three years away from being born when the Brewers went to the World Series -- started trading off everything and anything he could. Jean Segura was one of the casualties, and his trade out of Milwaukee led me to discontinue his PC. It felt like a personal failure.

Today's trades, though, were much more inevitable. 

Lucroy received his current contract on the heels of his 2010 rookie season, signing a five-year, $11 million extension with a $5.25 million club option for 2017 before the 2011 season. Lucroy had hit well at every stop on his way up to the major leagues, except for his short 21-game stay in Triple-A in 2010. The team wanted to build around the young catcher.

Lucroy liked Milwaukee too. While he was born and raised in the Orlando area, Lucroy went to college at Louisiana-Lafayette and really felt at home with the smaller-city feel. After the 2014 season, Lucroy's agent approached the team to try to work out a new contract extension -- a deal that would have made him a Brewer "for the rest of (his) career." Rather than jump at the opportunity to sign the 28-year-old to a second extension, however, the team instead was lukewarm at best about the idea.

Early in the 2015 season, the Brewers looked almost prescient. Lucroy started off terribly -- 6 hits in his first 51 plate appearances -- and then he hit the DL after he took a ball off his foot and broke his toe. As things fell apart for him hitting-wise last year thanks to injuries and, then, the team fell apart, he starting expressing his displeasure with the situation.

In 2015, he appeared on a Milwaukee radio show and criticized the organization greatly for its failure to make impact picks in the first round of drafts since 2005. In fairness, he had a point -- starting in 2005 (Ryan Braun), the team's first round picks either were traded away -- Matt LaPorta, Jake Odorizzi, and Brett Lawrie -- or made little to no impact in the major leagues. Indeed, only two more players of the 19 the team had selected in the first round to that point (Jeremy Jeffress and Taylor Jungmann) have made the major leagues.

Lucroy also made another good point: he just wanted to play for a winning team, whether in Milwaukee or elsewhere. Over this past winter -- after it was made clear as to the team's direction -- Lucroy again did not demand a trade but he made his position clear: "I want to win and I don't see us winning in the foreseeable future. I want to go to a World Series. That's what all players want. Rebuilding is not a lot of fun for any veteran guy."

David Stearns held out for a lot. He viewed Lucroy as one of his top trade chits -- rightfully so with his contract being what it is. In the end, the haul for Lucroy was good and the machinations of having made a trade with Cleveland, having Lucroy veto it, and then turning around and making another trade in a package with a pitcher with a Texas-based team sounds a lot like the PC guy who headed out of town in July of 2015.

In return for Lucroy and Jeremy Jeffress from Texas, the Brewers will be getting a player to be named later -- an intriguing fact since PTBNL might very well mean "guy drafted in 2016." We'll see, but that player will likely be icing on the cake. The main player the Brewers received was #21 overall prospect (according to MLB Pipeline) Lewis Brinson. Brinson is 22 and has been working on his batting eye and approach. He is a speed-power prospect -- a legitimate 30/30 threat -- and he is learning how to play centerfield. 

The other prospect the Brewers received from the Rangers was pitcher Luis Ortiz. He's on the DL right now with a strained groin, but he's a 20-year-old in Double-A. He can use the time off. MLB Pipeline ranks him the #63 prospect overall and says that he has the stuff already to profile as a possible #2 starter (with the usual asterisk regarding staying healthy).

The Brewers also traded the Fresh Prince, Will Smith, to the Giants just days after hundreds of Brewers fans bought 90s throwback Will Smith shirts. As a result of that trade, the Brewers picked up yet another top #100 prospect -- Giants 2015 First Round pick Phil Bickford. Bickford was drafted in the first round twice -- first by Toronto in 2013 out of high school and then in 2015 by the Giants. The report on Bickford is that he has electric stuff -- 98 MPH fastball in particular -- but that he has trouble with repeating his arm slot and can lapse into overthrowing.

In the end, as much as I could hope against hope that the Brewers would take a right turn and announce a contract extension, I know that this is the right move for the team. Lucroy deserves the opportunity to win and to go to a team in a location that he had approved contractually through his limited no-trade clause. 

I'll keep collecting Lucroy's cards from his time with the Brewers as a player collection, just as I did for Carlos Gomez and Yovani Gallardo and Rickie Weeks. I hope, though, that Lucroy wins and wins a lot now.

And who knows -- maybe David Stearns can find a taker for that last guy on the team that is an active PC for me? Perhaps the Marlins will come calling for a hometown guy with a longer contract that looks decent right now so that they can plug him in at first base. All we need is, say, Braxton Garrett. I mean -- isn't that a win-win for everyone?

I think it would be.

I Wanna Baseball All Night

Peter from Baseball Every Night has been extremely generous to me. Hopefully, my latest envelope that was sent to him -- now, for a second time...thanks USPS! -- gets to him so that he can drink in all the Strawberry cards I've sent to him. 

Of course, with the title I've used here, there can only be one theme song for the second batch of cards Peter sent my way last week:

Here's the setup: the past two years, I have come out of the gate rockin' when it comes to collecting the Brewers for the Topps flagship set. By that, I mean that both in 2015 and 2016, I bought into case breaks for Series 1 and ended up with about a dozen of each of the base cards, about a half dozen of any inserts, and even a relic or two. 

By the time Series 2 rolls around, though, I miss it. I don't even notice it. Series 2 sneaks out into the world like the stealthiest of leopards, unleashing itself on an unsuspecting collecting public.

Or, at least unleashing itself on me.

I mean, I think I still need a Jason Rogers from 2015 Series 2 at this point. Seriously. I haven't found one at my local show, and no one has sent me one either. I mean, I'll probably just end up getting it eventually if it doesn't show up, but that is pretty indicative of how Series 2 usually treats me.

Since that first song got me in the mood, how about a KISS-powered post to go with the 2016 Topps Series 2 cards that Peter sent my way?

Perhaps the most appropriate KISS song for the 2016 set -- I'll call it forevermore the "smoke" set -- this song from Animalize (which I owed and may still own on a 33-1/3 RPM record):

Let's go for the basic ones first:

That top card -- the Brewers Team card -- features Ryan Braun giving third base coach Ed Sedar a low five after hitting a homerun and passing third base. I'm now tied up in knots thinking of all of the terrible Passover puns (pass, seder/Sedar...) so I'd best move on.

Ariel Pena lasted one outing with the Brewers this year to start the season before getting sent to pitcher's hell, er, Colorado Springs. Interesting trivia tidbit: Colorado Springs is the highest elevation stadium featuring professional baseball. It's a full quarter mile higher in elevation than Coors Field. The Brewers ended up with a Triple-A team there thanks to the classless organization that is the Nashville Sounds -- which used the Brewers to get a new stadium built then promptly changed affiliations. 

Michael Blazek just returned to the bullpen from the disabled list. He's the rare player who started in St. Louis, left, and got better instead of worse!

Finally, Keon Broxton suffered one of the worst starts to a major league career that I could imagine. He went 0-for-2 last year with Pittsburgh, then went 0-for-16 to start the season this year with Milwaukee. He got sent down on April 16. He came back on May 20, and he went 0 for his next 6 before finally picking up his first major league hit in the 13th inning against the Atlanta Braves on May 25 (and giving Michael Blazek the win). Broxton's big problem so far is making contact. In 71 plate appearances, he has struck out a ridiculous 33 times. That is no way to make a major league career take off.

Okay, we need some help to get through these next cards...

How about a little Cold Gin? 

To be fair -- and I'm sure to the chagrin of at least a couple of you -- I'm not a huge KISS fan. This is probably the first time I've heard this song. It's not awful. It's okay. It's too repetitive in the guitar licks for my taste, though.

Peter sent me a couple of gold parallels as well. Topps has been doing these gold parallels for what -- fifteen or sixteen years? They are okay, I suppose. It's sort of like that guitar in Cold Gin. 

These two cards are of two guys having very different seasons. Jeremy Jeffress wasn't the experts' pick to be the closer this year -- Blazek, perhaps, might have been, or Will Smith, or maybe even Tyler Thornburg. But Jeffress ended up being the guy coming out of spring training almost by default being the only one healthy and pitching well. Lo and behold, as of June 27, Jeffress is in fifth place in the NL with 21 saves in 22 opportunities. Not too shabby.

On the other hand, Wily Peralta has been a train wreck wrapped in a volcano eruption thrown into a hurricane hit by a tornado. He looked like he might be a stud in the making in 2014 as his numbers looked pretty good -- 17-11, 3.53 ERA (4.11 FIP) 9 H/9, 1.0 HR/9, 2.8 BB/9, 7.0 K/9. He was hurt in 2015 and his numbers all went the wrong way -- 10.8 H/9, 1.2 HR/9, 4.84 FIP, 3.1 BB/9 and 5.0 K/9. 

Then, this year...UGLY: 6.68 ERA (5.60 FIP), 13.2 H/9, 1.6 HR/9, 3.7 BB/9 and 5.7 K/9. All of those numbers are terrible. Every single one of them. It has a lot of folks in the Brewers organization scratching their heads. It also is likely to end up with Wily getting non-tendered, joining the Cardinals, and winning the Cy Young in 2019.

I need a pick me up now.

  

At least it is an uptempo song. The more I listen to old KISS, the less I like it, to be honest. I know -- sacrilege, right? But the music is kind of...mediocre. Sorry guys and gals who have devoted your lives to KISS -- basically they are an average band with a great gimmick.

I'm probably wrong about that, so please -- attack me at will for that comment in the comments below. 

Speaking of repetitive and mediocre, I sure am glad that we have our 948th version of Robin Yount's rookie card making an appearance in the Berger's Best/Cards your Mom Threw Out/whatever the excuse is this year insert set. I think the real reason this is in the Series 2 inserts is to make up for the typo in Series 1 which said this card was from 1974. 

Of course, it also said that the mini 1974 version was highly sought after. And that is so true. I am still looking for it.

Peter -- thank you again for the great cards, and I hope that KISS isn't one of your favorite bands since all I've done here is call them average, mediocre, repetitive, and gimmicky.

Then again, I'm a baseball card blogger. What do I know about gimmicky or being repetitive?  

New Stickers and Cards from Mark Hoyle

I've been the recipient of multiple envelopes of fantastic cards from Mark Hoyle over the two-plus years I've been blogging. So, for post 499 for Off Hiatus Baseball, it is appropriate that this post features...new cards and stickers?

Yeah, it isn't appropriate at all considered Mark's reputation around the blogworld for sending vintage cards. 

Still, the set this year features the 1967 Topps design. If you know anything about Mark and his collection, you'll know that one of his main collecting interests is the 1967 Boston Red Sox "Impossible Dream" team. 

It sounds crazy to modern ears, but the Red Sox of 1967 provided the team's first winning record since 1958 -- a nine-year drought -- and featured a three-team race in the unified ten-team American League involving the Detroit Tigers and Minnesota Twins that finished with with the Red Sox winning the league by just one game over those two teams. After 1967, the Red Sox would not have a losing season until 1983.

Even crazier sounding to modern ears is the idea that, in 1966, the Red Sox drew just 811,172 fans -- a number that more than doubled in 1967 to 1,727,832. That attendance -- again, crazy to modern ears with everyone drawing 2 millions fans, basically -- set a record for Fenway.

Let's learn a little more about that 1967 team through strange parallels drawn with the 2016 Milwaukee Brewers -- who will almost certainly not spring out of nowhere and win the National League this year but, then again, you just never know. Just look at 1967.

The Superstars: Carl Yastrzemski and Ryan Braun

Whether you like him, hate him, or are agnostic toward him, there is no denying the fact that Ryan Braun is the best player on the Brewers currently. Similarly, there is no denying the fact that Carl Yastrzemski was the Red Sox best player in 1967 -- and it was not even close. Granted, Yaz was in his age 27 year and was simply transcendent in 1967 --more like Braun in 2011. It's not that much coincidence that Braun and Yaz each won MVPs in those seasons.

But Yaz in 1967 was much better than Braun in 2011.  Indeed, if we look only to post-World War II seasons, Yaz's 1967 season by WAR was the second best. Yaz racked up an incredible 12.4 WAR in 1967 -- literally equal to Babe Ruth in 1927 -- and just 0.1 of a win behind the best season after World War II, which belongs to Steve Carlton's ridiculous 1972 season.  For comparison, Barry Bonds's best two years came at ages 36 and 37 -- post steroids -- in which he had 11.8 WAR.

Braun has never been anywhere near that good, in many respects because Braun's WAR gets very little help from his defense.

The Managers: Dick Williams and Craig Counsell

Counsell is in his first full season as a manager in Milwaukee, though he managed for much of last year after the horrendous start to the Brewers' season caused the Brewers to fire Ron Roenicke. 

Dick Williams had managed only in the minor leagues prior to 1967 and, when appointed, the job was his first major league opportunity. Williams took the opportunity by the reins and ran with it. He instilled discipline on his team -- drilling the team in fundamentals for hours and requiring players to play for the team and not for themselves. It clearly worked.

Traded Away: Don McMahon and Jean Segura

Segura's trade to Arizona for what seem to be parts and further trade bait. There really is no good analogy in 1967 Red Sox story, mainly because teams didn't really rebuild in the way that teams try to rebuild these days. By the time that Don McMahon was traded, it was June 2 and the Red Sox could tell that they might have a winning team. 

McMahon was traded for Jerry Adair -- a thirty-year-old utility infielder who did well for Boston in his 89 games.

The Closers (?): John Wyatt and Jeremy Jeffress

Word out of Arizona is that Jeremy Jeffress and Will Smith will split the closer duties in Milwaukee this year, and that the decision on who will close from night to night will depend on matchups. I'm not so sure -- I think Smith will probably end up as the closer so long as his left-handedness doesn't preclude that from happening. It is nice, though that Jeremy Jeffress is straight Suttoning.

Wyatt saved 20 games for the 1967 Red Sox. While it wasn't his final season, it was certainly his last hurrah as a closer. He appeared in 60 games, closing 43, and finished with a 10-7 record and a 2.60 ERA (3.24 FIP) in 93-1/3 innings.

The Starting Pitchers: Jim Lonborg and Matt Garza

Garza needs to have a major bounceback season this year if the Brewers are going to surprise anyone. Okay, let's be clear: if Garza is doing reasonably well by time July rolls around, I'm quite certain that the Brewers would trade him for a bag of balls and some Gatorade mix. 

The same cannot be said for Lonborg. The 1967 Red Sox were not known for the strength of their starting pitching. Only one pitcher -- the 25-year-old Lonborg -- started more than 25 games. Lonborg was a workhorse. He started 39 games, completing 15, and pitching 273-1/3 innings. No one else had more than 181-2/3 (Lee Stange did that). 

Lonborg led the American League in starts with that 39, in Strikeouts with 246, in hit batsman with 19, and in wins with 22. His FIP was 2.95 -- right on par with his 3.16 ERA. For his efforts and based in part on his team's success, he was named the Cy Young Award winner with 18 of 20 voters selecting him. Joe Horlen of the White Sox was better, though, and probably should have won the Cy Young based on the advanced statistics.

Of course, Lonborg never was the same pitcher after that. The closest he came to being that good came in 1974 with Philadelphia -- two years after being traded there by the Milwaukee Brewers with Ken Brett, Ken Sanders, and Earl Stephenson in exchange for John Vukovich, Bill Champion, and Off Hiatus PC Don Money. 

Completing the comparison, the pitcher most like Lonborg at the ages of 27 and 28 was none other than....Matt Garza.

And the circle is unbroken.

Thank you, Mark, for the great cards!

Next time out: Post #500 on Off Hiatus!

A PWE That Should Have Come with Bubblegum

Recently, Jeff from "Wish They Still Came with Bubblegum" peppered the blogging world with PWEs, and I was one of the lucky recipients.  On this Black Friday, how about we recap the cards he sent with music? To be in the spirit of Black Friday, I've got a theme that'll be pretty obvious pretty quickly.

Of course, that's The Beatles "Can't Buy Me Love" off their album, "A Hard Day's Night." That early Beatles stuff is so upbeat and light and airy and poppy. Literally every rock band borrows from The Beatles -- I mean, if you have both Kurt Cobain and Noel Gallagher on the same page, you know that there is something pretty incredible going on.

Speaking of pretty incredible, here's the Stadium Club Members Only Insert commemorating Robin Yount's 3000th hit. The Brewers lost the game in which Yount got his 3000th hit thanks to a Darren Holmes and Doug Henry combined blown save. Henry put two guys on, and Holmes finished it out when he threw away a bunt by Kenny Lofton and allowed two runs to score.  Not so good, Darren.

Here's a catchy country song that's out now that gets stuck in my head every time I hear it. It's called "Buy Me A Boat" and it's by Chris Janson. The refrain goes, "Yeah, and I know what they say, Money can't buy everything. Well, maybe so, but it could buy me a boat." I'm telling you -- if you're prone to getting songs stuck in your head, you might not want to listen to this.

Jeff sent a couple of great oddballs of Robin Yount to go with the Stadium Club card. On the left, that's the 1993 Post cereal card for the 3000th hit, and on the right that's a Baseball Cards Magazine special. 

See, money can't buy everything -- and maybe so, but it could buy me an oddball.

Now here's something you don't see everyday -- T-Pain singing without his autotune. Dude can actually sing...including the first song called "Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin')."

Mascot cards are okay. I'm not as enamored with them as some people are. I think it goes back to my freshman year of college. I was involved for a year with Vanderbilt's intercollegiate debate team, and we had a tournament at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. My partner and I did okay but we didn't break to the elimination rounds. 

More to the point, nearly all the teams in the tournament were staying in the same hotel. On the Saturday night after the final regulation rounds, SIU's debate team bought some kegs and hired a DJ to come to the hotel. It was a great party. Oddly, though, SIU's Saluki mascot was at the party. She was actually pretty cute under the oversized head. Still, it is seared in my memory how weird it was to have been flirting with someone with a big dog head and mascot outfit on. 

Twenty years ago, Everclear was pretty big -- especially with their song "Santa Monica." Personally, my favorite Everclear song is "Volvo Driving Soccer Mom" but that song doesn't fit this theme -- "I Will Buy You a New Life" does.

Speaking of new, here are two Update cards that I needed that Jeff sent. I finally got around to updating my Topps need list for 2015, so take a look and check it out. There are a few cards that I am surprised I needed, but hey -- that should make for some good trade fodder.

Let's finish on a weird note. As I do sometimes when I do these musically themed posts, I put the word "buy" into Spotify to remind myself of some songs, find new ones that are popular but which I haven't listened to, and then perhaps find something off the wall.  This is the off the wall.  

The band is called Electric Six, and they are from Detroit. Despite this American origin, the only place they have had any singles hit the charts is the United Kingdom.  The always-reliable Wikipedia says their rock is "infused with elements of 'garage, disco, punk rock, new wave, and metal.'" To me, it sounds like Meat Loaf met Stone Temple Pilots or something similarly horrifying.

By the way, the song is called "I Buy the Drugs."

I'm pretty sure Jeff sent me this. Sometimes, when I get a bunch of envelopes in at once, things get mixed together. I hope that isn't the case here.  This card is the most appropriate for that Electric Six song. O'Leary became a short-lived minor star for the Boston Red Sox in the late 1990s, totaling 117 HR in a little less than 1000 games as a league average hitter (OPS+: 100; .276/.331/.459 slash for Boston).  

The Red Sox got the benefit of those 1000 games because Sal Bando, in his infinite lack of wisdom as a GM, decided instead to keep a 27-year-old Matt Mieske (OPS+ for Milwaukee: 90; .260/.317/.436 slash for Milwaukee) instead of the 25-year-old O'Leary. Those two years of development matter at that age. Mieske was never going to be more than he was already, but O'Leary could develop a bit more power and hit slightly better -- and did in 1999 with 28 HR, 103 RBI, and a .280/.343/.495 slash line over 661 plate appearances.

Perhaps the Electric Six were buying Sal Bando his drugs.

Jeff, thank you very much for the cards. I sent you some Braves back your way -- I hope you like them and can use a few of them.