coolhandluke121 wrote:ColeWorld23 wrote:I can't believe it's been 10 years already. In May 2007 we had a lot to forward to, I remember it like yesterday.
I haven't harped on this for a while so I'll take the bait. This team suffered through one of the longest, leanest stretches of any franchise in my lifetime in order to stockpile one of the most talented farm systems I can ever remember, and they squandered it to the tune of roughly a .500 record and 6 total playoff wins over the next decade. Imagine if the Cubs went .500 over the next ten years, and you'd get an idea of how badly they botched it. And yet Mark A gets credit for turning the franchise around. It sucks. Yeah, he spent money... but he got it from the city and the fans anyway, and they'd often literally have been much better off if he had not spent so much.
I think it's fairly clear that I've always been in the camp of Mark A being a solid owner but not a deep pockets, patient, cutting-edge owner...
1. That stockpiled talent you speak of netted 0.5 good pitchers. Yovani Gallardo was pretty good but unfortunately didn't factor in an incredible amount to 2008 (yeah, they should have pitched him instead of Soup in game 4). Marco Estrada near the tail end will actually go down in history as a good pitcher but he apparently wasn't throwing the right pitches with the Brewers and his main tenure didn't overlap with the years that matter mostly.
2. In comparison to the Cubs, I know a the Suppan (OK I hated that because of how overrated he was), Wolf, Lohse, and Garza signings plus the Marcum trade were seen as awful, but the Cubs were able to just stroll in and sign Jon Lester and not bat an eye. They were able to get Lackey to tack on as their goddamn #4 or #5 starter. They were able to sign Heyward who seems like a bust and not let it affect their ability to spend. If the Brewers dumped $125 million into someone that busted - they'd be boned. Of course, the Arrieta trade which was a shrewd move but even Epstein admits they didn't expect this coupled with the Hendricks trade were the difference-makers. Given that Mark had no pitching to start with, he at least grabbed some 1-2 WAR guys for overpriced fees.
3. Staying on the pitching topic...what is Mark A supposed to do given he isn't the GM? I know the general hindsight call is, "well trade a young hitting prospect for a pitching prospect" and in the end he's responsible for getting the GM to do this. We may have gotten a smaller set of seasons out of what we traded for, but we did trade for Greinke, CC, and I guess Marcum with prospects. So, yeah, the only better way of doing things may have been to trade Corey Hart for example for a good pitcher. It probably would have taken Fielder for a young ace AND you have to hope that that ace would have panned out.
4. For all of the studs we had, none of their primes/good years lined up. Braun was the one constant except for 2013/2014 when we may have been able to squeeze out one more competitive season. Fielder also was but only up until 2011, of course. He also had a down year in 2008, one of the playoff years.
Weeks: Was pretty good from 2008-2011, but his dominant year was 2010 when we missed the playoffs. Injured 2009.
Hardy: 2007 good, 2008 great, 2009 terrible and traded
Hart: Decent in 2008, good in 2010/2011/2012 and fell off a career cliff.
Lucroy: Didn't make a real impact until 2012
Gomez: Mentioning just due to Hardy trade: Didn't really get going until 2012/2013.
Gamel/Lawrie/LaPorta: Oops.
Brantley/Odorizzi/Cain/Escobar: More on them next.
Basically, we had Braun through the entire "run," Fielder replaced by Lucroy for the whole run, and then 1-2 other players that had good years in each particular year. We never had all of them play well at once.
5. The final point is the trades. Now that we're on the back end of all of this, in hindsight, how good is a team of Cain/Brantley/Escobar/Lucroy/Lawrie/Odorizzi? I'd include Braun but he was suspended/injured for most of 2014/2015 when that core could have done anything at all. One could argue that we could have dealt Fielder for a package of more prospects but you then open pandora's box because we got Segura, then Diaz, etc. for Greinke. We were aggressive in 2008 and 2011 and nearly won it all 2011. Had we just stood pat and kept building up the farm for eternity, I would argue that we still probably would have only made the playoffs about 2 times.
tl;dr: How are you blaming Attanasio? The fault was that we had no pitching in this super group of talent and in hindsight I don't think any of the trades crippled any future chances. The only way we'd have been more consistent would have been if Mark A signed a mega contract pitcher, we struck gold with an unexpected pitching prospect, or lucked out in a hitting prospect for pitcher trade. He spent about as much as we could expect for a Milwaukee owner.