Ultimately, though, Maldonado has already earned the “career backup” label. He will turn 30 this season and has only accumulated 841 plate appearances and +4.3 WARP across five big-league seasons. His .225 TAv perhaps indicates why he’s been unable to push for more regular at-bats. The native of Puerto Rico has been a serviceable backup, but he has not been able to challenge Lucroy for playing time.

But with Lucroy almost out the door, Maldonado’s future is now a matter for serious consideration. His age alone rules him out from being the club’s catcher of the future, but he could very well be a short-term stopgap should the Brewers decide to keep him.

One factor affecting Maldonado’s future is his contract. He signed a two-year deal before the 2015 season that was designed to buy out his first two arbitration years, but he will still be under team control (although arbitration-eligible) after that contract ends this fall. And as a part-time player without flashy numbers, he should remain cheap enough even once he does get to the arbitration process.

He’s obviously not a future star, and one would not and should not expect him to be starter-quality. However, a competent backup is worth something to a contending team. Someone of Maldonado’s quality isn’t worth anything to the Brewers. If they could even have the opportunity to take a flier on a hard-throwing A-ball pitcher with no idea where anything is going, such a gamble would be worth the risk.

The new front office has done an excellent job this offseason at acquiring low-risk assets who may turn into something more valuable. They have done this without sacrificing the future in any way. They have also done this without bringing in players who could block their two best prospects, who are on the cusp of the majors. However, while this is a smart strategy that attempts to not prolong the rebuild, it doesn’t necessarily accelerate it. General manager David Stearns hasn’t acquired any key members of the next good Brewers’ team who are in the majors. The hope of the rebuild, primarily Orlando Arcia and Brett Phillips, remain in the minor leagues, and even a best-case scenario for this winter’s additions would just see guys like Chris Carter and Garin Cecchini turn into solid role players, not franchise-altering ones.

What this means is that Maldonado doesn’t have much use to the Brewers over the next couple years as they are currently constructed. If the club trades Lucroy tomorrow, he can capably fill in and likely would not embarrass them if they had to play him for an extended period of time—and there is probably some sort of developmental value in that for the club’s young pitchers. However, he is a career backup approaching the back half of his career who will probably be 32 or 33 by the time the Brewers are good again, and that’s an optimistic scenario.

The conclusion of this, then, is that a Lucroy trade does not mean that the Brewers absolutely have to trade Maldonado as well. He’s shown that he can be moderately successful in the big leagues, albeit in short stints, and even if he were to be a disaster, the Brewers are not at the point of the win curve where his performance would matter. Major-league-quality backup catchers do have legitimate value, though, and the Brewers would be wise to explore the possibility of trading him should the opportunity present itself. Given Stearns’ activity this offseason, I expect he won’t hesitate to do that.

This means that a void exists, one that manager Craig Counsell will be looking to fill this spring. While the current sabermetric consensus holds that specific lineup compositions don’t impact overall performance in a significant way, teams still look to get high on-base percentages and speed ahead of their middle-of-the-order power bats. Additionally, there is probably some psychological benefit to lineup stability, as players prefer to know what to expect when they arrive to the ballpark each day.

The problem is that the Brewers’ key hitters — the ones who are likely to be penciled into the lineup everyday — aren’t great options for the lead-off spot. Ryan Braun, Jonathan Lucroy, Chris Carter, and the Rymer Liriano/Domingo Santana corner outfield rotation are better candidates to be in the middle of the order — though there’s some chatter that Santana could lead-off on a regular basis. On the other hand, the club’s center field options (Kirk Nieuwenhuis, Keon Broxton, Shane Peterson, Alex Presley etc.) should probably hit near the bottom of the lineup.

Essentially, this leaves three lineup positions unoccupied: second base, third base, and shortstop. The Opening Day shortstop should be Jonathan Villar, barring something unforeseen, but if Orlando Arcia’s development goes well, Villar could be shifted to second base or the bench by midseason. Aaron Hill is apparently the current favorite to be the starting third baseman, but a strong spring performance from Will Middlebrooks or Garin Cecchini (two players who could be a part of the Brewers’ future) could force Hill to second base. Scooter Gennett should get a shot at second base as well, but his .233 TAv in 2015 was so disastrous that he is unlikely to be given a long leash.

Villar possesses dangerous speed on the bases, but he has a career .300 OBP, which is obviously not what one traditionally seeks in a leadoff hitter. Gennett is a below-average hitter whose .318 career OBP and .264 TAv establish that he isn’t the type of player to whom the team should want to give the most plate appearances of the game. Cecchini and Middlebrooks are unproven. They both have struggled in recent years and lost some of their top-prospect luster, so it seems more likely that they’ll hit at the bottom of the order to relieve any undo pressure. And once Arcia arrives, it seems logical to think that he’ll be given the same luxury.

Hill was once a quality offensive player, and his performances in some of his best seasons would make him an attractive lead-off hitter for this team. However, he’s now in his mid-30s and appears to no longer be the type of player who can perform on a daily basis, and—especially given his injury history—the Brewers cannot be counting on him to consistently set the table for their big hitters.

Thus, one argument could be made for Villar and the various second base options to receive some time in the leadoff spot. Villar’s speed makes him an obvious and stereotypical choice, while Gennett and Hill have each proven themselves to have an ability to make enough contact to not embarrass themselves. Without an obvious default choice (like 2015 Dee Gordon), Counsell is going to be able to mix-and-match, depending on pitching matchups, recent performance, and platoon advantages.

However, I believe the club should put Jonathan Lucroy at the top of the lineup. From 2012 through 2014, Lucroy was an above-average hitter at his worst and one of the better players in the National League at his best. At that time, he was a clear choice to hit in the middle of a relatively powerful lineup that featured various combinations of Ryan Braun, Carlos Gomez, Khris Davis, Aramis Ramirez, and Adam Lind. Now, the organization is in a different spot.  Braun remains, but a Quad-A rotation in center field has replaced Gomez and the unproven Santana/Liriano and Middlebrooks/Cecchini combinations have replaced Davis and Ramirez. Lucroy is no longer just one of several talented hitters; instead, he is one of the team’s only above-average hitters.

Even at his best, Lucroy was never much of a home run hitter, so it’s not as if his skill set is ill-suited to leading off. His ability to pound out doubles and get on base consistently, while perhaps not having the speed profile of a stereotypical leadoff hitter, would serve the team well at the top of the lineup. Additionally—and perhaps most importantly—even during Lucroy’s poor 2015, his on-base skills remained. His .326 OBP was still better than the marks put up by the options mentioned above. So even if his prime is truly over and he can no longer be the elite hitter he was for a few years, the skills that remain still make him a competent lead-off option.

A potential problem with Lucroy hitting lead-off is lineup balance. If he slots in atop the order, the remainder of the lineup lacks significant depth because there aren’t many good options to hit second, third, fourth, or fifth aside from Braun and Carter. On the flip side, if someone like Villar hits first, Lucroy can help provide some meat in the middle of the order.

Ultimately, though, lineup balance is less important than giving the most plate appearances to your best hitters, and Lucroy certainly falls into that category. Realistically, this is not a great team, and they don’t have that many hitters who are guaranteed to be productive. It’s tough to worry about lineup balance when you simply only have a few above-average hitters. Thus, while batting a catcher such as Lucroy first for significant periods of time would certainly be unconventional, it seems as if he is the best option for this specific group of players. It would afford many of the younger players the opportunity to hit in the less-pressured environment of the bottom of the lineup, while also allowing his specific skill set to thrive.

His actual quotes to Tom Haudricourt are worth revisiting. He never demanded a trade outright, and he was careful to emphasize that he would be playing hard and trying to win even if the Brewers didn’t trade him. And while that may seem to be an obvious statement, professional sports are littered with examples of players simply refusing to play for an organization of which they no longer wish to be a part. Thus, while Lucroy may be unhappy that he isn’t currently poised to contend for a World Series in 2016, he appears content enough to play the good soldier until the Brewers do decide to move him.

Lucroy’s status in baseball’s catcher rankings is a bit dubious; however, the favorability of his contract is not. Milwaukee only owes him $4 million this year and can exercise a $5.25 million club option for 2017, which would be a bargain for a backup, much less a starting-caliber catcher who has an All-Star ceiling. This year-plus of team control makes him a valuable asset and allows the Brewers to be patient. After all, as long as the team that acquires him does so before the beginning of the 2017 season, he would be eligible for the qualifying offer.

However, his aforementioned 2015 season is the biggest factor as to why he wasn’t moved this past winter. In the three previous seasons, Lucroy appeared to have established himself as one of the game’s premier catchers, even garnering some MVP hype in 2014. But in 2015, he regressed both offensively and defensively. His TAv tumbled to .254 — his first below-average mark since 2011 — and his framing metrics were the worst of his career. The hows and whys of this have been covered ad nauseum on this site already (see Julien Assouline’s breakdown of his defense here and Ryan Romano’s analysis of his contact pattern here), so there is no need for me to rehash that information.

It is significant data when considering why Lucroy remains on the team, though. I have no interest in playing GM and pretending that I know what offers the Brewers have entertained for their starting catcher. Any leaks regarding his trade market are only made public when one of the sides has an ulterior motive for doing so, and David Stearns has earned the benefit of the doubt this offseason when it comes to properly valuing his assets. He’s been aces.

With that being said, though, my idle speculation is that the Brewers are probably valuing Lucroy the way they would have after 2014, and clubs who are calling are trying to get a discount. Realistically, were this not the case, it’s difficult for me to imagine a scenario where Milwaukee would not have already made a deal. Each game Lucroy plays in a Brewer uniform makes him less valuable to the team that would acquire him, so if the Brewers believed they could maximize their return this offseason, a deal would have made sense.

This, then, indicates that there are two factors that would affect Lucroy’s trade status: (1) another team’s injury woes, and (2) Lucroy’s performance level.

Injuries can happen at any point during the season, even during spring training. Any team that may have thought it was set at catcher could lose its starter to a serious injury and become desperate. The Brewers probably aren’t relying exclusively on this — it’s too dependent on outside factors — but it remains a distinct possibility this month. Were a contending team with just one catcher (like Houston, for example, who were linked with Lucroy this offseason) to suffer a devastating injury early in the season, Milwaukee would have to be that team’s first call.

The other, more concrete, issue is Lucroy’s performance. If we assume the hypothetical from above about what sort of offers the Brewers were receiving, then the club has to be counting on a bounce-back performance from him this season, or even obvious signs of life this spring. If other teams are concerned that he may not be the player he was in 2014, a strong start to the season would give Stearns ample ammunition in any negotiation. On the other hand, a disappointing first few months could force the Brewers’ front office to lower their asking price.

An injury that forced a contending team to get desperate would be unpredictable, and if one happened, it could unexpectedly alter the timetable for a Lucroy trade. Barring such an occurrence, though, I would not expect Lucroy to be dealt until the trade deadline or next winter. Presumably, if teams are concerned about what kind of player he projects to be at this point in his career, they would want at least a few months of data before solidifying their opinion.

All of this is to say that because Jonathan Lucroy has not been dealt yet, I expect him to remain a member of the Brewers until at least the end of July. He remains a quality player, but the fact that he hasn’t yet been traded indicates that there is a disconnect between what the Brewers are asking and what they are hearing. The Brewers have opted to be patient and wait for an offer they feel they can’t turn down. And with two full years until Lucroy is a free agent, they can afford to wait.

This system lasted just four years before it was replaced with something similar to the system in place today, in which any compensation or forfeitures come in the form of amateur draft picks, not players. By the 1985 Collective Bargaining Agreement, owners reverted to an old system of draft-pick compensation, the old Elias Type A/B/C system, which lasted until the current qualifying offer system was put in place in during the 2012 offseason.

This system is sold as another method meant to help redistribute talent to the small market franchises, much like revenue sharing, the luxury tax, and the various caps on spending in the international and draft markets. But what actually happens? As I’ve been asking with revenue sharing and small-market rhetoric this entire offseason, who is actually helped by this system?

Let’s take a look at the Brewers and their history with draft compensation. First, the picks they’ve received (all data from Baseball-Reference):

It’s an extremely underwhemling group. Kelly Wunsch went on to finish fifth in Rookie of the Year voting in 2000 with the White Sox after leading the American League in games out of the bullpen; Odorizzi was a key piece of the Zack Greinke trade; Coulter or Haniger could still reach the majors. But largely, this is bust city, and that’s just how things go with draft picks coming in the 20-50 range. Only one of these players, Todd Dunn, has even made the Brewers, and he put in 130 plate appearances of exactly replacement-level performance between 1996 and 1997.

The CC Sabathia situation in particular shows how much of a crapshoot this system can be for teams losing free agents. Because Mark Teixeira ranked first among all free agents after the 2008 season, when the Yankees signed both Teixeira and Sabathia, the Brewers received pick number 73 from the Yankees and the Angels instead received New York’s first-round slot, number 25 overall, where they drafted Mike Trout. The Brewers weren’t the only ones screwed by the Yankees’ spending spree — the Blue Jays wound up receiving only pick number 104 (third round) from the Yankees after they plucked A.J. Burnett from Toronto’s rotation, as he ranked behind both Teixeira and Sabathia in the Elias rankings.

Meanwhile, the Brewers have only dared to dip into the free agent compensation market four times, listed here:

Mixed results. Slaton was a key relief piece on the American League Champion 1982 squad and was well liked after his previous stint in Milwaukee. Howell struggled throughout his Brewers career, hitting just .253/.307/.377 (95 OPS+) over four seasons. Parker had his one All-Star season before the Brewers traded him for Dante Bichette, who was flipped for Kevin Reimer the next season. Reimer promptly tanked, hitting .249/.303/.394 (87 OPS+) after producing a 113 OPS+ or better in each off the previous three seasons in what turned out to be a disaster of a deal. And finally, there’s Lohse, who was a solid part of the rotation in 2013 and through the Brewers’ attempt at contention in 2014, but completely lost his game in 2015.

Can we really say this compensation system is helping the Brewers? They have received next to nothing in return for their free agents, barring a major surge from Clint Coulter over the next few years. The Sabathia situation was a particular disaster, as part of the Brewers’ plan in dealing Michael Brantley and Matt LaPorta to get Sabathia was that they would be receiving a first-round draft pick when he left, all to see that go up in smoke because the Yankees could afford to sign both of the top free agents in the league.

But I think the more revealing problem here is how draft-pick compensation actually works to price teams like the Brewers out of the midsection of the free-agent market. We already know teams like the Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers are going to sign the top free agents, aside from anomalies like Arizona’s signing of Zack Greinke this offseason. But by forcing teams to give up a high draft pick to sign mid-level free agents like a Kyle Lohse (or this year, a Dexter Fowler) it actively discourages teams like the Brewers from pursing these players. And even if, in many cases, these players wouldn’t have pushed the Brewers over the top, having the option of signing them to mid-level, long-term deals would have allowed the Brewers another option to build their core besides simply waiting and hoping for draft picks to hit.

So in reality, instead of making life easy for the Brewers by ensuring they get something in return for their prized assets, the compensation system is making it harder for the Brewers to acquire said assets in the first place. And since the draft pick penalties don’t hit teams like the Yankees nearly as hard, they have no problem taking the hit of giving up a draft pick, allowing them to re-enter that market again and again with progressively lesser penalties every time.

The Brewers clearly liked Kyle Lohse back in 2013; they were interested in him all offseason and may have made an attempt to sign him even without his market tanking as a result of the qualifying offer. Without the draft-pick compensation, they may not have been able to get him — his market may have reached higher than, for example, the four years and $52 million Edwin Jackson received that offseason. But the current system put the 2013 Brewers, a team with an extremely strong core between Ryan Bran, Jonathan Lucroy, Carlos Gomez and Yovani Gallardo, in a position where they had to either look forward and waste their stars’ peak years or sacrifice the future in the form of a top draft pick. And with the other recent changes to the CBA, the Brewers can’t make up that advantage in talent by going over slot in the draft or over the cap in the international market — the taxes are too prohibitive, in ways they aren’t for large-market teams.

And so the Brewers are left where they are now, in tanking (or tanking-ish) purgatory, waiting again for another wave of prospects to hit and left with little else to do but sit and wait for next year. It’s not just because the team is limited by small-market resources, but because the only way for such a team to stretch above its means is to sacrifice its future. And so again, I ask: Who is this system really helping? Because it sure doesn’t seem like it’s helping anybody who wants to see good baseball in Milwaukee.

Somehow, though, the Brewers have ended up with just one veteran in limbo. Only three players on the roster have even accumulated enough service team to have reached free agency, and a fourth is just a couple months away. But Jonathan Lucroy will be the team’s starting catcher on Opening Day (assuming he is not traded before then) and nearly everyday thereafter, Matt Garza will be given every opportunity to stick in the rotation given that he is signed for one more year, and Ryan Braun will play everyday in either left or right field for the foreseeable future.

This leaves Aaron Hill, who was recently acquired in the Jean Segura deal and is generally unlike every other player on the roster. He can be used either as depth or as trade bait, and he has some value in either role. I’m sure that, ideally, the Brewers would prefer to flip him for someone younger and more potentially useful for their future, but if they can’t, he might actually be useful on the field.

The 2016 infield will have very little resemblance to the 2015 one. New signing Chris Carter will play first base, new acquisition Jonathan Villar will likely open the year as the shortstop, and new acquisitions Garin Cecchini and Will Middlebrooks will likely platoon or split time as needed at third base. Both Carter and Villar seem like acceptable stopgaps; neither can possibly be expected to be a star, but both are competent big leaguers who fill a role but would be easy to shove aside should prospect promotion require a rejiggering of the defensive alignments.

Cecchini and Middlebrooks represent an interesting combination of players. Cecchini hits left-handed and Middlebrooks hits right-handed, so in theory they could platoon. Both are former top-100 prospects whose developments have stalled, although Cecchini only has 40 career big-league plate appearances so there may still be some room for growth. Overall, though, the Brewers are likely to give each a shot to earn the everyday job, and they will hope that some combination of the two is good enough to get by.

Second base continues to look like a wasteland, however. Scooter Gennett got the majority of the playing time there in 2015, but he is not very good and doesn’t have much potential left either. Once Orlando Arcia arrives in the big leagues, Jonathan Villar will likely shift over, but that isn’t likely to happen on Opening Day and Villar isn’t a permanent solution anyway.

So here enters Aaron Hill. Given that he was a salary throw-in to a larger deal just a couple weeks ago, we can assume that there wasn’t much of a trade market for him this winter and so David Stearns is unlikely to have much success trying to trade him between now and Opening Day. This leaves two options: play him or designate him for assignment.

A DFA is always possible, and it certainly would not surprise me. However, I expect the Brewers to give Hill the opportunity to play. Gennett’s performance over the past two seasons clearly indicates that taking playing time from him is not really harming the club’s future, and Arcia is unlikely to break camp with the big-league club (if only for Super 2 reasons) so Villar will be counted on to be the everyday shortstop.

This means that, in all likelihood, Hill will have the opportunity to earn playing time, and that would probably be the best-case scenario for Milwaukee. He has the potential to be a relatively valuable bench bat who can play second and third in a crunch. So, while the Brewers have no need for someone with that positional flexibility—assuming Cecchini and Middlebrooks prove competent enough at third—other teams might. And if Hill hits well enough to earn a spot in the big leagues, the Brewers just might be able to get something from him at the trade deadline, which would go a long way towards justifying their $6 million investment.

Again, Hill hasn’t been a productive player since 2013, which was the last time he posted a competent TAv (.288) and was approximately average overall (1.8 WARP). This makes it unlikely he will be any good in 2016, either, especially in a situation that will not guarantee him regular at-bats. The most likely outcome for his Brewers’ career is a quick exit, whether that be in spring training or the first couple months of the season. However, the best-case scenario would be that he hits just enough to make him an attractive candidate for a contender looking for a bench bat, and the Brewers would have to be thrilled if that came to pass.

Jack Moore already covered this topic in depth as it relates directly to Miller Park, but the question of public funding remains an issue for the people of the city of Milwaukee and the state of Wisconsin. However, there is no way to remove the Brewers and Bucks deals from the context of what is happening across the country, and those other stories do provide hints as to what may occur in the next decade or two in Milwaukee.

The people in the greater Milwaukee area began paying for Miller Park in 1996; twenty years later, that debt is still not paid off. Per Don Walker of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, “the district still owe[d] $195 million” as of March 2015, and this debt will simply grow with the recent decision by the state government to provide public funding for the Bucks new arena. While the stated cost to taxpayers is $250 million, a key lesson we should learn from the Brewers story is that interest and unexpected building costs can raise that number unexpectedly.

An additional factor when considering public money being spent on Milwaukee stadiums/arenas is that Miller Park is now twenty years old, and a vast majority of major league baseball stadiums are under twenty-five years old. So while Miller Park is not yet on the chopping block, seeing a push for a new stadium in the next few years would by no means be a surprise.

Local governments agree to finance these events for a few major reasons, some more altruistic than others. The primary motivating factor for agreeing to fund stadiums for teams that the public owns no part of is fear of relocation. This is exactly what happened with the Bucks; new ownership threatened to leave, and—rather than risk losing the area’s only professional basketball team—the state agreed to funnel a quarter billion dollars towards a sports team.

Other possible factors are either extremely optimistic or extremely cynical. On the one hand, officials can actually believe their cities are better off by having a professional sports franchise because those teams can provide economic benefits or public morale and cohesion. But, at least economically, that argument has been proven invalid repeatedly. And on the other, far more cynical hand, city officials can simply be greedy, expecting that supporting these billionaires plans will have positive impacts for them personally without any regard for the city’s financial health. We almost certainly saw this happen this past weekend in San Francisco for the Super Bowl, when the city paid for an extravagant celebration despite the fact that the game was in Santa Clara.

The relocation fear is probably most real, and it has to hit Milwaukee hard. Because they play in the second-smallest market in baseball, the Brewers are a prime candidate for relocation should a city such as Portland decide it wants to make itself available for a major-league team.

And they need look no further than St. Louis for an example of what can happen when an owner decides to leave. The Rams left for Los Angeles because it offered the owner a chance to make more money, establishing once again that owners view their teams as for-profit businesses and generally do not feel beholden to the city that pays them millions. There is clearly no market open for baseball as attractive as Los Angeles was to the NFL, but that won’t prevent Brewers (or Reds, or Rays) ownership from holding their cities hostage should the opportunity arise for them to milk the public for extra money.

Funnily enough, the flip side of the Rams move may provide the key to this dilemma. The Rams’ new stadium in the Los Angeles area will reportedly be entirely privately financed, thus saving the city millions of dollars. Perhaps, if other owners see that a member of their exclusive club is willing to pay nearly $2 billion without any public help, they will follow suit.

And, make no mistake, this is an issue that needs to be addressed. While many arguments about sports center around public discourse—of which there is more than enough to go around—this one centers on government money, of which there is not enough. Money that is being spent on sporting events could be going towards other, more generally useful causes. And while your definition of “generally useful” undoubtedly depends on your political leanings, one thing we should all be able to agree on is that a quarter of a billion dollars would be better served on a larger group of people rather than to save billionaires a relatively small percentage of their wealth.

Like all other major cities (and most minor ones as well), Milwaukee has some issues. A March 2015 article from the Journal-Sentinel mentions that Milwaukee’s black unemployment rate is nearly twice the national rate. A September 2015 article from Time reports that Milwaukee is one of the poorest big cities in the United States. It would be naïve to suggest that the $250 million that is going to the Bucks arena or the estimated $1 billion that has been (and will be) spent on Miller Park would solve all the city’s problems. Some of that money would undoubtedly have been diverted to other useless projects, and money alone can only do so much, so not all of it would have been put to good use.

But all of that billion dollars was allocated to sports stadiums, which leaves less for solving the other issues. And spending that money did ensure that both the Brewers and Bucks would be in Milwaukee for the foreseeable future, but at what cost? Again, without a clear alternative like the NFL had with Los Angeles, the Bucks and/or Brewers leaving wasn’t even a certainty. Ultimately, though, the state and city decided it wasn’t worth the risk. And as a result, Milwaukee remains among the poorest cities in the country, and is that worth keeping your professional sports teams?

The Pirates pocketed $69 million in revenue sharing and made $29 million in profits as they lost 189 games between 2007 and 2008. The Marlins reportedly made $300 million in revenue-sharing checks from 2002 through 2010. When faced with a formal grievance from the MLB Players Association, the club agreed to put all revenue-sharing money towards player salaries and development. Shortly after the end of the 2012 season, when the agreement expired, the Marlins promptly traded away all but one player on their roster making more than $1.6 million (the lone exception, Ricky Nolasco, was gone before the trade deadline).

Part of this is because Major League Baseball teams are run by snakes like Jeffrey Loria and Bob Nutting, of course. But part of it is a structural problem with the way baseball’s revenue-sharing program is designed, to the point where it actively incentivizes failure. Instead of creating a rising tide that lifts all boats, revenue sharing has instead acted to make teams into spendthrifts regardless of where they fall on the revenue spectrum.

The problem comes from the system’s use of actual revenues to calculate who pays in and who gets a payout from the system rather than a measure of potential revenues — something akin to market size that accounts for structural differences in team revenue rather than rewarding a team that is simply failing to earn because it is poorly run. The best illustration of the absurdity this system can produce is the 2005 revenue sharing numbers, in which the Philadelphia Phillies — in the fourth-biggest media market in the league and the largest market without a second team — were paid out $5.8 million.

(If you’re interested in deeper proof of this concept, William Colby, an Amherst graduate who has also worked in the Rays front office, published a paper in 2011 analyzing the actual impacts of Major League Baseball’s revenue-sharing programs. It attacks the problem from both a theoretical and empirical angle to prove MLB’s program creates disincentives for teams to spend and actually increases competitive imbalances.)

By creating a system in which increasing revenues by buying talent and winning games actually reduces profit margins, Major League Baseball instead created a disincentive to spend. I have a hard time believing this was an accident, considering the recent changes made to the draft and the international talent market. The institution of hard slotting in the draft and spending limits in the international market act the exact same way, levying huge penalties on every dollar spent over the limits in both cases.

This has made it tougher for teams like the Brewers to dive into the international market or gamble in the draft. But the Yankees? Assigned a $2.2 million cap on international spending in 2014, they went out and spent nearly seven times that, $14.4 million. The $12.31 million in taxes levied on the Yankees as a result would be anathema to most teams, but to the Yankees and their structural advantages, it’s a pittance.

The result is the exact opposite of what these programs are supposedly trying to accomplish. Instead of creating a more competitive game in which teams aren’t limited by structural disadvantages, teams are economically encouraged to lose as cheaply as possible and reap the rewards of revenue sharing until a short competitive window emerges as a result of their many years of top draft picks.

It might sound counterintuitive, but that’s mostly because we’ve been inundated with Bud Selig’s small-market idealism for some three decades now. It was easy to sell because it was what we all wanted to hear — that our teams weren’t losing because they were incompetent, but because the odds were stacked against them. As nice as the logic sounds, though, it has proven to be broken both in theory and in practice.

A team shouldn’t try to shape its roster specifically around its home park. While the Brewers do play more games in Milwaukee than in any other single city, they still have to be a competent road team if they wish to succeed, so—obviously—the best way to win is just to build a talented overall team. But ballpark and environmental factors are important, and they can be helpful in building a successful team if utilized correctly.

San Diego is a great (and probably the best) example of this. The Padres have a decent track record of turning mediocre relievers into effective members of their bullpen simply because it is so hard to give up runs in their ballpark. While the Brewers do not enjoy this big of an advantage, Miller Park is a relatively easy place to hit home runs, which does should hypothetically be exploitable with the correct roster construction.

Park factors can take years to stabilize (which is why Baseball Prospectus uses five-year averages in its calculations), but multiple systems agree that Miller Park was the easiest (or among the easiest) ballpark to hit the long ball in 2015. BP, which splits its park factors up by handedness, notes that Milwaukee ranks first (lefties) and seventh (righties) in home-run factor. ESPN ranks Miller Park first in home-run factor as well, and FanGraphs ranks the Brewers fifth. While decoding exactly how (relatively) easy it is to hit a home run in Milwaukee is difficult, the agreement among those methodologies clearly suggests that there is a significant boom in home runs at Miller Park, and the Brewers have to live with that.

The problem with devising a strategy to deal with it, though, is that there are two logically-viable approaches. A front office could decide to either try to counteract the ballpark’s tendencies, or it could steer into the trend. Either method makes some amount of sense; the Brewers can try to acquire marginal players whose talents will be either enhanced or hidden by their ballpark.

Targeting average players is important in this type of strategy because great players will be great regardless of where they play. Taking Jose Bautista out of the hitter-friendly Rogers Centre would only do so much to dampen his numbers. However, as San Diego has proven, veteran relievers at the league minimum can succeed in Petco more than they historically have elsewhere simply because of the park’s dimensions, which makes such players more valuable to the Padres than they are to anyone else.

In Milwaukee’s situation, targeting the specific type of player that Miller Park would benefit is definitely more difficult—relief pitchers are essentially a dime a dozen—although, again, there are two approaches the club could take. They could choose to acquire hitters with marginal power and hope that the ballpark will allow their power to play up a grade, or they could target sluggers who are undervalued for various reasons and hope that their power numbers jump enough to make them more valuable in Milwaukee than they would be anywhere else. It is worth noting, of course, that Chris Carter is probably the ideal candidate for this type of bet.

On the pitching side, the club would have to choose between two similar decisions. They can try to target sinker-slider pitchers who keep the ball on the ground, or they could chase mediocre pitchers with fly-ball problems under the assumption that everyone gives up home runs in Miller Park anyway. Toronto’s acquisition of Marco Estrada is an excellent example of the latter.

I would guess that the path most likely to produce positive outcomes is to target average players whose faults will be hidden by the park—that is, low-power hitters and fly-ball pitchers. First, both will be significantly cheaper than their counterparts, as the Brewers would be moving one direction while everyone else in baseball hunts home runs and strikeouts. Second, positions players without power will have more diverse skill sets (or they wouldn’t have made it to the big leagues in the first place), and adding a few extra home runs to a defensive specialist is more valuable than adding those same home runs to a four-corners type who can’t figure out which fingers to use to close his glove. That player will still be giving back a ton of runs on defense.

Unfortunately for both cheapskates and game theory enthusiasts, this strategy has limited upside. It could be an interesting experiment for David Stearns to try while the Brewers are not a very good team, just to see if there is in fact a way to target an undervalued subset of players that will benefit from being in Miller Park. However, the Brewers won’t be able to compete just by utilizing strategies such as this. Instead, they will have to build a winning team. If all goes well, though, they may be able to augment a talented roster with castoffs that are particularly well-suited to Milwaukee.