Walsh is a low-upside player that the Brewers brought in as a potential infield option, but that doesn’t make him unique in any definable way.  The Brewers brought in several players who fit that same archetype, and Walsh doesn’t have a particularly better chance of succeeding than Will Middlebrooks or Garin Cecchini.  But Walsh is the one who made the big league club out of spring training, and he is the one who has gotten the first opportunity to prove himself.

I don’t have a great explanation for why that is, to be honest.  Walsh was a college draftee in 2010, and college players with any sort of promise are supposed to move quickly through minor league systems.  But Walsh didn’t; despite spending years in the Cardinals’ magical player development system, he didn’t make his big league debut until this season with Milwaukee.  And Walsh’s minor league line doesn’t engender any confidence, either.  His career minor league line of .278/.395/.422 is acceptable but not anything special, particularly for someone who was not especially young for any level he was playing at.

That line is also indicative of the type of player Walsh appears to be, and his pedigree supports this idea as well.  As a mid-round Stanford product, one would reasonably assume that Walsh was a polished, disciplined hitter without a ton of power–with any sort of power upside or exceptional hit tool, he’d have been a higher-round pick.  And his minor league numbers support this idea: his string of high walk rates and low ISOs indicate someone who has a very good idea of what he is doing at the plate but lacks the elite talent to capitalize on this.

All of this creates an image of a journeyman who is finally getting a chance to establish himself.  However, it is coming at the expense of equally unqualified players who at least have prospect pedigrees.  Both Middlebrooks and Cecchini were top-100 prospects at one point in the distant past, and Walsh was never thought of that highly.  In a vacuum, then, giving Walsh this much playing time seems a bit bizarre.

But there are a couple possibilities, and it is difficult to know exactly what the Brewers were thinking when they decided to keep Walsh.  The practical and pragmatic perspective would be that Walsh’s Rule 5 status makes him unique–the Brewers view him as just as valuable an asset as anyone else, but the only way for them to keep him in their organization was to put him on the big league roster.  This way, at least, Walsh gets an opportunity to prove himself.  After all, if Walsh fails, the Brewers can still give Cecchini or Middlebrooks a chance.  But if the Brewers had not opened with Walsh on the big league roster, he would have been offered back to the A’s.

The more optimistic view is that the Brewers simply decided to give Walsh a chance.  Cecchini and Middlebrooks have been on big-league radars for years, and neither has lived up to the promise they showed a few years ago.  Walsh, though, has never had that same type of opportunity, so perhaps the Brewers simply decided to give the unknown a shot.

I am, of course, assuming that the Brewers did not make a decision based on just spring training performances, as such an overreaction would be completely out-of-character for a front office that has been so progressive on every other level.  This is especially true given that Cecchini got just 15 spring training at bats with the big league club, so clearly the organization had some preconceived ideas about what it was going to do.  Ultimately, though, I don’t know which rationale was the club’s primary motivating factor, but we do know that Walsh is the one who is getting the first chance.

For whatever reason, I wrote the team preview essay for the Brewers in this year’s Annual. Although the piece broadly analyzes the nature of innovation in baseball as a whole, the nominal topic is bases on balls, something which Milwaukee has lacked in recent years. Over the four seasons since Prince Fielder left via free agency, the Brewers rank 26th in the majors with a 7.0 percent walk rate. This alone hasn’t doomed them to obscurity — just read the damn essay already, if you want to know why — but it hasn’t helped their cause.

Things could change in 2016, however. According to the most recent iteration of PECOTA, the Brewers should garner free passes at an 8.0 percent clip — which would catapult them to 14th in all of baseball:

Milwaukee hasn’t ranked in the top half of the majors in walk rate since 2010, which would make this a pretty big development if it happened. But will it? Can the Brewers fulfill this projection, or will they fall short?

Well, these figures are incomplete — they don’t include pitchers. If Jimmy Nelson, Wily Peralta & Co. maintain their 1.9 percent walk rate from 2015 (which placed 13th in the National League), the Brewers will tumble a few spots in the major-league ranks. So perhaps we should temper our expectations a bit. Still, the players Milwaukee has acquired in the offseason, along with those they’ve sent away, suggest a legitimate change in approach.

Last July, Doug Melvin traded star center fielder Carlos Gomez to Houston. While the decision obviously hurt, it helped the team’s plate discipline. In his Brewers career, Gomez walked only 6.2 percent of the time. Meanwhile, the major-league-ready outfielder that the deal brought back, Domingo Santana, has the opposite skill set. Across his 145 Milwaukee plate appearances last season, Santana walked 12.3 percent of the time, after doing so in 10.8 percent of his chances as a farmhand. With Santana indirectly replacing Gomez, the Brewers should earn a few more bases on balls (and cost them many runs elsewhere, of course, but that’s beside the point).

After the season, David Stearns started some wheeling and dealing of his own. One of the players he sent away, first baseman Adam Lind, actually took a lot of walks last year. His 11.5 percent free-pass rate finished 21st among qualified hitters. That didn’t match up with his past accomplishments, however — before 2015, he’d walked in just 7.3 percent of his plate appearances — which explains why PECOTA projects a mere 8.5 percent figure for 2016.

Chris Carter, who should man the position in 2016, has a much rosier outlook, at least in terms of walks. PECOTA expects him to cruise down to first in 11.2 percent of his plate appearances, which jives with his career clip of 11.5 percent. While Carter clearly has his offensive flaws, of course, he possesses the ability to lay off pitches, which means he should take his share of free passes.

Perhaps the most intriguing piece of this puzzle came to the team in the Rule 5 Draft. Utility player Colin Walsh has even more warts than Santana or Carter — that explains why he’ll be a 26-year-old rookie this season, and why the Brewers were able to acquire him in the first place. Based on the direction of this article, you can probably guess where he excels. The extent of it, however, might surprise you.

Walsh has gone to the dish 2,452 times in his minor-league tenure. A total of 377 of those — or 15.3 percent — ended with a base on balls. For comparison: Joey Votto walked 13.4 percent of the time when he was in the minors. Obviously, Walsh won’t hit at that godlike level, nor will his plate discipline reign supreme above his contemporaries (and frustrate mythical executives). In fact, PECOTA thinks he’ll accrue only 98 plate appearances in 2016. If he does receive more playing time, though, he could make it count. For a club that has struggled to accumulate free passes, a 13.3 percent projected walk rate looks quite appealing.

We should make the distinction between taking walks and reaching base. PECOTA currently thinks the Brewers will rank 22nd in the majors with a .308 OBP, chiefly because they won’t earn too many hits (it predicts a 24th-place finish in batting average). Like many of their teammates, Santana, Carter, and Walsh each have problems with strikeouts, which have somewhat negated the walks and kept them from becoming truly valuable players.

With that said, a few more bases on balls do have some worth, especially for a franchise that has sorely missed them. Many fans would love it if, facing off against Jon Lester or Adam Wainwright, Brewers hitters took a more patient approach. The team has fallen behind the curve to a degree, but they still have time to catch back up.

Of course, Melvin didn’t always struggle in this facet of management. The first five years of his tenure (2003-2007) saw the Brewers draft Ryan Braun, Yovani Gallardo, Rickie Weeks, and Jonathan Lucroy, among others. Those players combined with Prince Fielder and Corey Hart, J.J. Hardy, and Bill Hall — whom the team had selected in the pre-Melvin seasons — to form a strong nucleus that helped the club make playoff runs in 2008 and 2011.

After that, however, the prospect well dried up — such that, for five years running, the Brewers have placed in the bottom five of BP’s organizational rankings:

[Note: These rankings began in 2008.]

With the aforementioned core heading to the Major Leagues, Milwaukee sorely needed to replenish its system. Melvin responded with the opposite due to the club’s competitive window. In deals for CC Sabathia, Zack Greinke, and Shaun Marcum, he sent away Matt LaPorta, Zack Jackson, Rob Bryson, Michael Brantley, Lorenzo Cain, Jake Odorizzi, Alcides Escobar, Jeremy Jeffess, and Brett Lawrie. Some of those players didn’t end up accomplishing much, but the prosperity of some of them — particularly Brantley and Cain, each of whom has played at a borderline-MVP level in the past couple years — have made many fans regret the trades retrospectively.

Inadequate drafting compounded the woes of those deals. Jack noted in his piece that the club’s picks from later years haven’t yet amounted to much. Over the past few years, teams such as the Rangers have managed to maintain a solid minor-league system despite swinging big trades, and they’ve done so by constantly restocking their affiliates through the draft and international free agency. Part of that is good scouting, too, while part of that is a willingness to spend money. Melvin’s Brewers partook in the former half of the equation while neglecting the latter half, though, and it has come back to haunt them.

With that said, Milwaukee has made recent strides. BP’s writeup of the farm system stated that it possessed “talent to makes several teams quite jealous” — a massive improvement from its standing over the past several seasons. After spending the first half of the decade in the minor-league cellar, the 2015 Brewers have taken the necessary steps to move back up to the top half.

Part of this, in fairness, happened before this year. In August, Julien Assouline analyzed the team’s drafts under Melvin, who had perhaps not received the credit he deserved. Some of Melvin’s strengths there stem from the early years, but even in the later part of his run with the Brewers, they fared moderately well. Derek Harvey commented that the club’s drafts from 2009 to 2014, under late scouting director Bruce Seid, provided them with numerous quality players that presently stock their system. Indeed, of the top-20 current Milwaukee prospects, eight — Jorge Lopez, Devin Williams, Monte Harrison, Tyrone Taylor, Jake Gatewood, Kodi Medeiros, Yadiel Rivera, and Michael Reed — came from drafts during that span, while Orlando Arcia and Gilbert Lara signed with the team as amateur free agents in that period.

Still, an improvement of this magnitude, and in this short a span, suggests something different in the past twelve months. Part of the difference stems from the 2015 draft, which has (to this point) yielded incredible rewards. Four of those top-20 prospects came to the team in June: Trent Clark, Cody Ponce, Demi Orimoloye, and Nathan Kirby. Clark stands out as the best of the bunch, but all four have intriguing upside and could continue to blossom further. New scouting director Ray Montgomery, as Harvey observed, seems to have taken off.

The team’s decision to finally rebuild has helped with that. July saw them deal away established starters Aramis Ramirez, Gerardo Parra, and Jonathan Broxton, as well as (relative) stars Carlos Gomez and Mike Fiers. Those trades — which, as J.P. Breen correctly posited, meant the team had recognized that its window has closed — brought back a great deal of prospects. Yhonathan Barrios, Zach Davies, Malik Collymore, Domingo Santana, Brett Phillips, Josh Hader, and Adrian Houser now occupy various levels of the Milwaukee system; Phillips, Davies, Houser, and Hader ranked in the top 20, while Santana has already begun to contribute at The Show. Together with Marcos Diplan, an intriguing top-20 farmhand whom the team acquired in last January’s Yovani Gallardo swap, they amount to a formidable group.

Overall, David Stearns inherited a solid amount of prospects when he became the GM in August. Surveying the trove a couple weeks before Melvin stepped down, Derek Harvey concluded that the system had gone from the bottom to the upper half of the league — a prediction that, as stated previously, we’ve likely seen come true. Stearns didn’t stop there, though. In his four-odd months atop the organization, he’s made several trades to bolster the minor- and major-league depth, further improving the system as a whole.

The first two transactions came in mid-November. Stearns swapped Cy Sneed for the Astros’ Jonathan Villar, then followed that up by shipping Francisco Rodriguez to the Tigers in exchange for Javier Betancourt and a player to be named later (catcher Manny Pina). Seth Victor described Villar at the time as “a good acquisition for a team that needs middle infield depth and flexibility,” a player who won’t make a noticeable difference yet should still provide some value. Betancourt — who rounded out the top 20 — is, in Chris Crawford’s estimation, “a high-floor prospect with a fairly well-defined ceiling.” In other words, he could become a Villar-type player a few years down the road.

After BP published its top-20 list, Stearns has made a few more moves, evidently in an effort to muck up the rankings. First came the Adam Lind trade, which brought back three young pitchers: Carlos Herrera, Daniel Missaki, and Freddy Peralta. While I can certainly see the logic in Jack’s distaste for the deal — Lind gave us something to cheer for in this dreadful 2015 season, and those players always hurt to lose — I ultimately come down on the side of J.P., who expressed cautious optimism regarding it.

Not long after that, three more prospects came to Milwaukee. The day following Lind’s departure, the Red Sox sold Garin Cecchini to the Brewers for cash considerations. BP’s Bryan Grosnick called the deal “[t]he definition of ‘buying low,'” as a disastrous 2015 had caused Cecchini’s stock to plummet. Likewise, the players Milwaukee snagged in the Rule 5 draft — Colin Walsh from the Athletics and Zack Jones from the Twins — don’t carry elite pedigrees, or much upside, for that matter.

These deals nevertheless give the Brewers plenty of options for 2016 and beyond, as J.P. outlined a few weeks ago. (Plus, the quantity acquired from these transactions only increased thereafter, when the Brewers sent Jason Rogers to the Pirates, receiving Keon Broxton and Trey Supak in return.) Overall, the solid 2015 draft, along with Stearns’s willingness to trade anything not nailed down, has translated to a complete turnaround in Milwaukee’s minor-league system.

What does this mean for 2016? Well, as J.P. pointed out, the Brewers have more routes they can take at the Major League level; although few of those will likely lead to wins, the results should give the team some clarity for 2017. More immediately, it means the Triple-A Sky Sox will presumably play better in 2016. Michael Schwarz explained how that affiliate would progress with legitimate prospects filling its roster. The biggest takeaway here, though, is general optimism. Years and years of no future, at long last, appear to have come to an end. Now, more so than at any point in recent memory, there could be hope on the Milwaukee horizon.