Rebuilding, Retooling, Remodeling, or Whatever

Rebuild has become a toxic word in the baseball community. As selling clubs maneuvered to move established players for minor-league talent at the trade deadline, general managers tried to spin their “sell” trades as best as possible. Dave Dombrowski of the Detroit Tigers called their midseason exodus a “reboot” rather than a rebuild. The Brewers have consistently talked about “retooling” rather than rebuilding. Doug Melvin recently employed the word “remodel” to describe what his club was doing.

These semantics are largely used because rebuilding has become associated with long-term fallow periods. Rebuilding clubs have nothing and must start from the ground up. Rebuilding clubs have a poor big-league club and a terrible farm system. In other words, fans of rebuilding clubs have no reason to pay attention to the team, much less pay for merchandise, attend games, or watch on television. Teams have grown to understand the ramifications of being seen as in a state of rebuilding and are desperate to avoid that public perception.

On one hand, worrying about whether the Brewers are rebuilding, retooling, remodeling, renovating, reconstruction, recombobulating, or even engaged in an organizational renaissance feels remarkably stupid. In trading Carlos Gomez and Mike Fiers — two players not due for free agency after the 2015 season — the club acknowledged that its window for contention has closed. No matter the words Doug Melvin and his staff wish to use to describe the recent sell-off, the Milwaukee Brewers are building for the future and do not expect to contend next year.

At the same time, this exercise in wordplay does point to the misconceptions about rebuilding in Major League Baseball — namely, the fact that it’s an all-or-nothing endeavor. This argument contends that all players with trade value must go. Pretty much immediately. They bring no value to the club during years of non-contention. The Brewers should have traded Jean Segura this summer; because they didn’t, they “lost” the trade deadline. Not trading Adam Lind was a massive mistake. Milwaukee has no reason to keep Jonathan Lucroy on the roster and should be traded for a massive package of prospects.

This argument, however, ignores multiple human aspects of building a team — i.e., the idea that a team needs leaders, the idea that the organization would like Lucroy to help develop its young pitching staff, the idea that young players don’t develop well while losing two out of every five games for years, etc. This doesn’t even address the (legitimate) business reasons for not selling off everyone of value. People point to the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros as “success stories,” but even then, it’s essentially planning to miss the postseason for at least another half-dozen years. And only six years for a total overhaul is optimistic as hell.

The Milwaukee Brewers fully acknowledged their status as non-contenders and their lack of talent, broadly speaking, in the entire organization. That’s undeniable. What they’ve attempted to do through the trades of Carlos Gomez, Mike Fiers, Gerardo Parra, Aramis Ramirez, and Jonathan Broxton is to capitalize on an improving farm system, in hopes of short-circuiting the rebuilding process and keeping it to only two or three years. The club has acquired significant talent at the lower levels of the minors in the past two years. The quartet of deadline trades adds impact talent to the upper echelons of the Brewers’ system, too, rounding things out a bit more. Successful teams have a constant stream of talent entering the big leagues, not groups of prospects with massive gaps in years or levels.

Too much focus has been placed on what hasn’t been done. Multiple industry folks have suggested to me that Milwaukee is expected to shop Jean Segura this winter. The Brewers listened on Adam Lind in July, but no one met their asking price and he’s also expected to be on the market in November and December. I’ve even had a couple of non-Brewers people wonder if Milwaukee will look to sell Khris Davis this winter, now that Domingo Santana is waiting in the wings and doesn’t have many other avenues for playing time with Ryan Braun entrenched in right field. The trade deadline is not the end of the Brewers’ attempt to amass young talent. It will continue this winter and into the following summer, most likely.

Through the first four months of the season, we’ve commented on the cluster of exciting talent in the lower levels of the Brewers’ system. The AZL and Pioneer League clubs have been enjoyable to track. That remains true, but Double-A and Triple-A now feature much more heavily on my personal midseason top prospect list. Here’s my top-10:

(1) SS Orlando Arcia (Double-A)
(2) OF Brett Phillips (Double-A)
(3) OF Trent Clark (Rookie)
(4) SS Gilbert Lara (Rookie)
(5) RHP Cody Ponce (Class-A)
(6) OF Monte Harrison (Rookie)
(7) OF Tyrone Taylor (Double-A)
(8) RHP Devin Williams (Class-A)
(9) RHP Jorge Lopez (Double-A)
(10) OF Domingo Santana (Triple-A)

The Brewers now have a top-half minor-league system in MLB and one with ample depth. One could make a compelling case to add guys like Zach Davies, Josh Hader, Michael Reed, Clint Coulter, Taylor Williams, Kodi Medeiros, or even Demi Orimoloye to this top-10 list. If Nathan Kirby proves healthy this fall, he’ll also threaten to jump into the top 10. It perhaps still lacks the star power of an Astros and Cubs systems in their respective primes, but those featured multiple top-five draft picks — something the Brewers have not had to this point, and something they will likely add in 2016.

Overall, if you’re looking for three key takeaways from this trade deadline season, they are thus:

• The Milwaukee Brewers understood their organizational weaknesses and worked diligently and creatively to address those deficiencies. For example, the addition of Mike Fiers to the Gomez trade — amongst rumors that he was borderline unavailable — increased the quality of the upper-level prospect package the squad got in return. No one can accuse the front office of refusing to trade players with multiple years of team control remaining.
• Despite the desire to nitpick the returns the Brewers received for the various trades, the industry consensus is that Milwaukee did well to acquire the pieces they did. I talked to a handful of scouts and front-office types about the Brewers’ trade season, and each of them generally had positive impressions. A couple much preferred the Wheeler/Flores package to the one Houston offered. One would’ve liked to see the Brewers grab a second prospect in the Parra deal, while another didn’t like Malik Collymore at all. Everyone has their own preferences. Broadly speaking, though, this trade deadline is seen as a quality step in the right direction for the franchise.
• Doug Melvin continues to target players in Double-A or above when trading established big-leaguers for prospects. He’ll occasionally dip down into the lower levels — as he did with Marcos Diplan in the Gallardo trade — but the core pieces in any “sell” trade will almost certainly come from the upper levels of the minors. That’s by design, too, as players who have already successfully navigated the jump from High-A to Double-A should have a higher success rate when they try to jump to the majors. In this way, they’re not as “high-risk.” I think some ceiling is sacrificed in such moves, but the decision to target high-minors players makes logical sense.

This success of this trade deadline for the Brewers should not be judged on whether the prospects acquired pan out. Such a results-oriented approach lacks nuance, is filled with hindsight analysis, and misrepresents the decision-making process at the time of the trades. In my view, Brewers fans should be happy with the club’s actions at the trade deadline, as they moved the club in the right direction, and should expect more maneuvers and roster turnover this winter. For the first time in several years, it feels as if the organization is building toward something, rather than scrambling to hang on. That inspires hope and, really, that’s all Brewers fans have been craving over the past few seasons.