Yet, this question about rebuilding is doubly meaningful after the 2017 campaign, a season that saw the Arizona Diamondbacks and Minnesota Twins immediately right ship under new GMs, with both clubs making the playoffs following dreadful losing seasons. 2017 also saw the remade Colorado Rockies receive their first taste of playoff baseball in quite some time, as well as a resurgent Brewers club that nearly caught the Rockies to make the playoffs after what has been an incisive rebuilding effort in Milwaukee.

GMs Derek Falvey (Minnesota) and Mike Hazen (Arizona) both overtook teams with 70-71 win averages during the three years preceding their respective tenures, and promptly turned those clubs into playoff contenders. Here’s how Falvey and Hazen compare with other current GMs and their respective scenarios upon entering their current organizations:

By taking a full industry overview, it will be possible to question the merits of rebuilding as a front office standpoint, while also questioning the potential sustainability of clearly non-rebuilding models like Arizona or Minnesota. By taking the full industry overview, unique models like the Cleveland front office system, or the Baltimore front office run by Dan Duquette, as well as efforts by the Dodgers to reorganize while winning, can also be questioned alongside the now-canonical “rebuilding” models of Houston and Chicago. The Houston and Chicago scorched earth rebuilds are indeed outliers in many senses, and current industry practices show that teams can indeed right ship quickly and effectively.

What is worth drawing from this discussion, as a Brewers fan, is that there are both good and problematic aspects of the Milwaukee strategy that defined the club from midseason 2015 through the end of 2017. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons that the rebuild had such a quick turnaround in Milwaukee is that two front office leaders oversaw the build, rather than one front office handing off the reins to another rebuilding entity. It is by now old news that President Doug Melvin’s midseason 2015 moves helped to define the 2017 contending club, but these moves should not be forgotten when assessing Milwaukee’s roster building scenario within the industry as a whole. Yet, it is also worth mentioning that Milwaukee was a middle of the road club to begin with, entering 2016. Given the recent ability of clubs from Boston to Cleveland to Minnesota and Arizona to prove that a substantial losing club can indeed be a 90-win playoff contender, one can continuously push back against the Brewers’ stated need to rebuild the system.

The key here is to understand that negative arguments about the Brewers’ build do not categorically mean that the rebuilding effort was not successful, or that there are not positive aspects to the club’s roster building approach. And indeed, David Stearns himself has proven this by taking a middle road in player transactions, as his best moves (Chase Anderson trade return, Travis Shaw trade return, Jonathan Villar trade return, Junior Guerra waiver claim) are decidedly not rebuilding moves (and in fact are simply “good baseball moves” when all is said and done). Arguably Stearns’s most questionable deals are his rebuilding moves in several cases, and at the very least those trades have the verdict out in the vast majority of cases (from the Jonathan Lucroy deal to the Khris Davis deal to the Adam Lind deal). But this analysis is a shift above the slog of individual moves. The point is to take these industry-wide practices, the problems and the strengths, and understand the proper application of roster building strategies to future contending clubs in Milwaukee.

Dan Duquette is one of the most successful GMs in the current MLB landscape. In fact, by many measures, he’s the best current GM in baseball, certainly a Top Five contender.

It’s worth stating this, and then studying Duquette’s oft-ridiculed or questioned roster building, organization building practices in Baltimore, as the Orioles unceremoniously fired off consecutive wins of 93, 85, 96, 81, and 89 from 2012-2016. These win totals are significant because Duquette inherited the second-worst three-year outlook of any current MLB GM; the Orioles averaged 66.3 wins during the three years preceding Duquette, a total only surpassed by Dayton Moore’s organizational inheritance in Kansas City. It is also interesting to note that Duquette inherited arguably one of the worst performing franchises in baseball during the beginning of the scorched earth rebuilds in Houston and Chicago, but unlike Jed Hoyer and Jeff Luhnow, Duquette instead spun five years of winning baseball fury from his inherited roster. In fact, Duquette’s Orioles win average (86.3), first playoff appearance (2012, his first season in Baltimore), and playoff appearances (three) beat both Hoyer’s Cubs (82.0 wins, fourth GM year, and three appearances) and Luhnow’s Astros (74.5 wins, fourth GM year, and two appearances).

In terms of basic system-building, the average playoff GM took three years to reach the playoffs. This fact alone should raise questions about the merits of a prolonged building approach.

What’s interesting about Duquette’s Orioles, of course, is that the executive will now have an opportunity to prove roster building acumen once more, as the Orioles fell behind the pack in 2017 (his sixth year at the helm in Baltimore). Having been dismissed by the 2012 Yankees, 2014 Royals, or 2016 Blue Jays, Duquette’s Orioles success will always be undermined by those fans and analysts who significantly value playoff success, as Baltimore looks like a club that was able to churn regular season wins while faltering “when it counts.” This is a fine line of argumentation for hot takes, but it is not an adequate line of argumentation to capture the full range of success within the MLB industry: Duquette did what no other current GM has done by taking a perennial mid-60s win team and immediately turning them into five consecutive years of contending or competitive clubs.

Duquette’s success should place a cloud over the rebuilding efforts of the Cubs and Astros. Analysts should not be tempted by the recency bias that “the Astros and Cubs have built better roster cores for sustained success,” as Duquette has already done something neither Hoyer nor Luhnow have yet to prove capable of (five consecutive winning-or-contending seasons in MLB). Moreover, Duquette’s five years of success are interesting in the sense that they offer a satisfying anti-cyclical feel; five years of sustained MLB success is enough time to churn through contractual cycles, injury cycles, and development cycles.

Now, Hazen and Falvey (Minnesota) have a chance to match Duquette’s success in the midst of another group of rebuilding clubs (most notably Cincinnati, Atlanta, San Diego, and now maybe Detroit or Tampa Bay). In one sense, playing the market contrarian may be quite a successful executive strategy, as sharp GMs can take advantage of the MLB talent available via free agency or trade when more than 10 percent of the league’s clubs decide to focus their resources in the minor leagues (or, in “young, future talent”). If the Orioles are the ultimate foils to the Cubs and Astros, it will be interesting to see if the Twins and Diamondbacks can successfully fend off the likely coming accolades to whichever club succeeds with the latest scorched earth building effort. In this regard, it could be noteworthy that none of the existing rebuilding efforts seem as focused or as “good” in terms of talent stockpiled as the Cubs and Astros.

Where do these roster building trends leave Stearns?

The Brewers GM is in a strange place. On the one hand, he’s undoubtedly one of the most successful GMs among those that have failed to reach the playoffs thus far. While overtaking a slightly below average franchise (based on the three years prior to his hiring), Stearns immediately improved the club in 2016 and tied for the best second-year record within this group (86 wins). That’s certainly a significant accomplishment. As demonstrated above, Stearns’s overall improvement during his first two seasons rates as solidly better than average (if not as spectacular as the very best GMs in the game). In terms of on-field product, Stearns has started to deliver tangible improvements to the club.

On the other side of this equation, however, it is worth piling on to the argument against rebuilding in the MLB. Even excusing arguments about the Yankees (although Brian Cashman’s recent revitalization of their roster and system is praiseworthy) and Dodgers as extremely big market clubs and therefore incommensurable with Milwaukee, there are successes by Bridich, Duquette, Falvey, Hazen, and Chernoff that are laudable for several reasons. Without playoffs appearances, it is difficult to gauge Stearns’s success against that of Michael Hill (who improved the Marlins despite a rather tumultuous organizational standpoint), or even Dayton Moore’s early season building effort in Kansas City (this is a much more controversial stance).

Most notably, the rebuilding clubs did terrible jobs at improving their respective rosters within their first three years. With the Cubs, the Theo Epstein-Jed Hoyer group inherited a better-than-average team (compared to their industry counterpart GM changes), in a strong market (albeit with ownership questions), and promptly drove the club into the ground. For this reason, the Cubs front office is arguably one of the least praiseworthy in the game in terms of a purely results-driven criterion; one only need to compare their scenario to the below average situations in Baltimore, Minnesota, and Arizona that were immediately righted and immediately produced playoffs appearances to leap into criticism of the Cubs. Reaching the World Series in five years is hardly impressive, unless one is inclined to heap equivalent praise on the Sandy Alderson Mets or Jon Daniels Rangers.

It is interesting to see Stearns’s name aside generally analytically inclined front offices in Seattle, Tampa Bay, and the Dodgers on this list, for outside of Farhan Zaidi, not one of these GMs has a playoffs appearance with their current club in their current capacity. This is perhaps fitting for Stearns, who generally seems to be well-regarded in terms of MLB pedigree (an Astros background that gets the Brewers within one degree of separate from the consistently praised Cardinals front office). In this sense, one could ask which class of GMs Stearns is competing with most heavily, in terms of pedigree and on-field performance.

Stearns has not orchestrated the fastest turnaround of a club among current GMs, but his overall performance has turned in better than average results within the industry. These results should highlight the importance of competing at the MLB level, and the diverse paths to postseason glory possible within the MLB. Rebuilding is a problematic strategy for many reasons, not the least of which boils down to the simple fact that a club is never out of the running: 90-loss clubs are indeed 90-win clubs with the proper roster management, coaching, development, and farm system in place. If it takes a club four or more years to reach the playoffs under a new GM and system, that system should be endlessly critiqued and questioned.

The industry says 2018 is the Brewers’ year to reach the playoffs under Stearns. Can the GM deliver?

Photo Credit: Danny Wild, USAToday Sports Images

• (1) Casual fans that will tune out rebuilding
• (2) Everyday fans that vocally oppose rebuilding
• (3) Everyday fans that support rebuilding “as is”
• (4) Everyday fans that support tanking

These distinctions might seem useless, or trivial at best, but nearly every future value decision for the organization will find vocalized groups across the internet. #BrewersTwitter is quite a divided place, a perfect environment to find this type of debate. For the purposes of this feature, the most interesting difference will be between (3) and (4). Given David Stearns’s rebuilding trades (such as the Khris Davis or Jonathan Lucroy deals) and counterbuilding trades (such as the Cy Sneed or Trevor Seidenberger deals), it is easy to anoint the rebuild a smashing success. Stearns has added to Doug Melvin’s previous rebuilding deadline deals with future values across the organization.

Yet, glancing at the standings after play finished on Sunday, one might be disappointed with the Brewers’ relative lack of futility. Or, perhaps, shocked at the futility across MLB as a whole. Alongside other stated rebuilds in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Atlanta, teams like Arizona, the White Sox, and Minnesota utterly failed at building competitive rosters, and the Padres, Rockies, Athletics, Rays, and Angels are in some kind of limbo. Struggling contenders in the Bronx and Kansas City might also fall into the “tank standings,” depending on how their battered ranks play out the string as well.

By almost any rank, the Brewers are quite likely to draft Ninth in the 2017 Rule 4 draft. If the bottom falls out on the second half, the club could make a valiant effort at the Seventh seed, but at least five other clubs face roughly the same prognosis.

Why does this matter? One suspects that the reason some fans support pure tanking — where the front office fields a largely replacement level team in order to lose as many games as possible (thereby maximizing draft placement) — is that the highest possible draft position yields an extreme draft slot bonus advantage, not to mention the best shot at superior talent. Indeed, by the fifth pick, the median MLB draftee is basically a replacement level player; fans might not expect it, but if a club drafts sixth and merely gets that player to the MLB, that’s quite a solid pick in terms of history. In this case, however, one might focus solely on the draft slot bonuses, since larger draft slots give a team the chance to sign “above slot” / “difficult signability” players later in the draft (see the Brewers with Chad McClanahan and several other picks in 2016; or, more famously, the 2015 Houston Astros maximal first round).

Pricing out the first ten draft picks should show the benefit of tanking, as well as the dangers of failing to tank: if a front office wishes to tank, they ought to really go for it, for if they miss and draft third or even fourth, they have lost significant value without necessarily adding future values elsewhere in the roster. For this exercise, I priced out bWAR (drawing draft figures from Baseball Reference) by placing WAR in the context of a 90-win, $150 million club fighting for roughly $20 million in playoff revenue (a rough estimate), which is arguably a scenario in which each additional win is most important (and therefore priced accordingly).

On the whole, the draft is extremely overrated as a means of acquiring talent. It is one tool for acquisition. Nevertheless, one might see that a successful tanking effort yields a chance to acquire approximately $50 million in future value.

Pricing Brewers Future Values

Comparing additional means of acquiring talent, one can also find that a potentially tanking club could be mistaken in placing such importance on using the draft for acquiring talent. For the 2016 Brewers, David Stearns exhibited one of the benefits of not tanking: Stearns added MLB future values in Jonathan Villar, Keon Broxton, Rymer Liriano, Junior Guerra, and Hernan Perez through a variety of means (trade, waiver, and minor league contract). Taking one example, the Brewers have played .647 ball in Guerra’s starts, and while that pace takes at least four losses away from a Brewers “tank effort,” establishing Guerra’s future value is much more significant (and much more valuable than four losses in the the tank standings).

While each of these players may not earn a roster spot on the next contender, they each have defined a role that can help the Brewers reach a more competitive status faster than expected. Some of these players may start on a rebuilding club, while establishing their benefits as potential bench or depth options for a contender. In this sense, MLB roster roles are demonstrably flexible, which should give a rebuilding club all the incentive in the world for acquiring MLB ready future values.

The six players on this roster demonstrate the value of rebuilding: on a contending club, one might not have expected the Brewers to provide roles for each of these players. Their valuable performances as a group provide a great lesson for the next contending Brewers club, which will need to maximize low cost talent acquisitions. In this case, Jacob Barnes is a “future value discovery” since he graduated to the MLB and established a role during the rebuild; someone like Corey Knebel is not counted because Knebel established his basic role last season. So, this group does not even exhaust the Brewers’ future values (which still includes Orlando Arcia, Jorge Lopez, Michael Reed, and others on the 40-Man Roster).

A rebuilding effort can also be enhanced by shedding contracts and currently valuable MLB players, in order to add to the future depth and potential production for the organization. The 2016 Brewers also excelled in this regard: imagine a Brewers club that won even fewer games than their current outlook. Would such a club have featured a successful return by Jonathan Lucroy? Would Jeremy Jeffress have become a successful closer? Would Aaron Hill have reestablished his value as a trusty veteran? These are not trivial questions: along with southpaw Will Smith, this gang of players produced 5.7 WARP for Milwaukee, which provided a great opportunity to trade them for more future values (including top prospects, organizational depth, wild cards, and even another MLB level “second chance” prospect).

Comparing the Ninth Pick to the First Pick above, one might complain that the Brewers failed during their 2016 campaign, since they left at least than $40 million in talent acquisition value on the table (by failing to reach a top pick). Even failing to reach the Fourth Pick arguably costs the organization millions. However, one must weigh that gamble against the cost of failing to discover roles for Villar or Guerra, to say nothing of Zach Davies solidifying a rotational role, Barnes coming on in a depth role, and even Perez and Broxton making excellent cases for good bench roles or organizational depth roles (at the very least). Another 10 WARP from these players, at minimum, roughly breaks the club even with a First Pick value, and the Brewers will still likely draft within the Top Ten, while also reserving the players acquired in midseason trades.

Even accounting for discrepancies in valuing established MLB roles versus prospect value versus draft value, the Milwaukee front office came away with a veritable haul in 2016. Together, the six players above, along with Lewis Brinson, Luis Ortiz, Andrew Susac, Phil Bickford, Wendell Rijo, and Aaron Wilkerson are worth significantly more than $50 million in future value. This scenario does not even need rosy predictions; some of these players may indeed fluctuate in value, or even see a trade result from their 2016 performance. These scenarios do not categorically reduce the future values of their established 2016 roles.

With this in mind, it is worth comparing the Brewers 2016 future value discoveries to the teams that are likely to draft ahead of Milwaukee next June. For, one can find that in many cases, these clubs produced brutal 2016 campaigns without necessarily discovering new future roles throughout their rosters (or without making grand asset-shedding trades, as the Brewers did). The Twins and Diamondbacks arguably had the best campaigns in recovering or developing future values in 2016, while the Braves, Angels, Athletics, and Rays did not necessarily uncover new future roles at the MLB level. That scenario may not be problematic for a club like Atlanta, which has the inside track on the First Pick in June 2017, but it could be extremely disappointing for a team like the Angels or Athletics, who basically have the pressure of extracting their full future values from the 2017 draft to account for their 2016 campaign.

This is quite a gamble for these clubs, and one must bet that if Brewers fans are watching the “Tank Standings,” fans in Tampa or Anaheim are watching their respective team’s draft positions even more carefully. For example, the Rays could reasonably draft anywhere from Third to Sixth, depending on how August and September plays for the bottom of the league. That fall could be worth more than $9 million in talent acquisition for Tampa Bay, which they may not have recouped in their deadline deals and 2016 future value discoveries.

Hindsight is 20 / 20, but even heading into 2016, one could have reasonably argued against a tank effort for Milwaukee. First and foremost, given the rebuilding efforts in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Cincinnati, the Brewers front office would have to have been fairly certain that their bottom feeding roster would be more futile than four other clubs (before considering injuries and ineffectiveness that define other failed 2016 clubs, such as the Twins or the Angels). Tanking is an incredibly risky strategy, arguably more risky than making organizational depth trades for “second chance” players like Jonathan Villar, or providing roster space to waiver claims like Junior Guerra. Judged against the First Pick, the Brewers need to return more than $40 million in future value for their failed tank, but judged against the Fourth Pick, they only need to recoup $6 million. In this light, Milwaukee’s gamble for second chances and counterbuilding appears to be markedly successful.

The Astros were a hot pick entering the season. Sports Illustrated, playing off the mockery that surrounded their Astros 2017 World Series Champions cover back in 2014, declared the Astros their 2016 World Series pick. A majority of pundits picked the Astros to win a weak American League West. The logic isn’t hard to follow: the Astros were good and young last year, and good young teams just keep getting better, right?

Unfortunately for the Astros, there’s another inexorable principle of sports that comes into play, the pull to average. When a player has a career year, his next season likely won’t be as good — it will rather fall closer to the average. Thus far, the Astros have felt this pull in a big way in the struggles of Dallas Keuchel (4.70 ERA, 83 ERA+), Collin McHugh (6.59 ERA), Evan Gattis (.203/.257/.313, 60 OPS+) and Luis Valbuena (.178/.294/.274, 62 OPS+). Even though their young studs Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa and George Springer have all been excellent, they haven’t had the support around them to be competitive.

I would think this might be a bit hard to stomach as an Astros fan considering the ridiculous amount of losing there was in Houston from 2012-2015, and that there would be some urgency not to waste years of these brilliant young players at their peaks. After all, the Killer Bs only made one World Series, in 2005, and they were swept out of it. Brewers fans should understand this sense of urgency well ourselves: we only got one playoff series win out of the Prince Fielder years, and then it was back to losing ways once again.

The Astros had an Opening Day payroll this year of just $96.8 million. They had a higher payroll in 2009, seven years ago, at $103 million. They have all of $19.5 million committed to 2017 before arbitration awards. Correa and Lance McCullers don’t hit arbitration for two more years; Altuve’s contract locks him in at $4.7 million in 2017 already; Springer and McHugh will only be in their first arbitration seasons in 2017. The Astros are not a small market team by any means. If I was an Astros fan, I would be pretty disappointed the team didn’t do more to shore itself up either at third base, catcher, or starting pitcher before 2016.

Of course, it’s easy to say that now, but the free agent market this offseason admittedly wasn’t great. The top line starting market was fairly barren past the $200 million men in David Price and Zack Greinke. The best available third baseman may have been Juan Uribe, and the best catcher may have been Tyler Flowers. It’s not an inspiring market, and just looking at the 2015-16 offseason, the Astros can be forgiven for holding their cards. But it still feels like the Astros are leaving cards on the table by keeping their payroll this low in a year where they have this much cheap, top-level talent on their roster.

This, to me, is the problem with wholly eschewing the free agent market in a rebuilding phase, particularly in the current climate, where teams are routinely locking up more and more of their best players to team-friendly deals during their arbitration years. Fewer and fewer good players are actually reaching free agency, and that means teams that wait until their prospect waves arrive to start filling the holes around them might find themselves out of luck when their window finally comes. Maybe a guy like Brian McCann or Bartolo Colon or Masahiro Tanaka or Francisco Liriano or James Shields — all free agents in 2013 or 2014 — would have been useful to have around Altuve and Springer and Correa and the gang, and not even for the typical “veteran presence” reason that always gets thrown around in the tanking argument.

It’s not like adding one or even two of these guys would have ruined the tanking plan. Even with one or two quality players, the dumpster fires that were the 2012 and 2013 Astros, teams that combined to lose 218 games in two years, still would have been in the running for the first overall picks those seasons. The only thing it would have hurt was owner Jim Crane’s pocketbook.

There’s no problem with taking a long view, and there’s no point in handing out big-time long-term contracts to players that are never going to play for a competitive team. But the Astros as well as the Cubs and the Rays before them have shown that turnarounds can be much quicker than expected. But that doesn’t mean that rebuilding teams need to do the full gutting the Astros did, nor does it mean that they should treat free agent contracts like poison pills until they’re ready to make a playoff run. In fact, such an approach might leave them scrambling when the prospects are ready quicker than expected.

The Brewers under former Astros executive David Stearns have the lowest payroll in baseball this season. Their approach was understandable this year, as they evaluate what they have on hand and prepare for the prospect wave that should be coming in over the next three years. But hopefully Stearns is seeing what has happened to his former team. The free agent market is a resource worth using just as the trade market and draft are, and if the right deal makes itself available, I hope they will pounce rather than save money because that’s what the prudent rebuilding template says. As the Astros are showing, rebuilding arcs don’t always progress the way simple logic says they should. When the next wave of Brewers prospects hits Milwaukee, I hope they aren’t stuck waiting for free agent help that winds up too little, too late in the end.