Most Brewers fans would scoff at the notion that Milwaukee could rebuild their club under similar ideologies or structures as one of baseball’s largest television markets, for the common note would be that the Dodgers always have larger margins of error given the fact that they can simply sign any player they please to overcome any failed acquisitions. The Dodgers do have an embarrassment of riches, but focusing too much on that fact will miss that their most valuable batter was originally signed as a minor league free agent (Justin Turner); their third most valuable batter was another minor league free agent (Max Muncy); their best homegrown batter in 2018 was drafted in the fourth round (Cody Bellinger); and Chris Taylor and Enrique Hernandez were both acquired via relatively lateral trades (the former involving a stalled Top 100 prospect, the latter thrown-in with the payroll clearing Dee Gordon / Dan Haren trade). The pitching side of things for the Dodgers is less scrappy, but Walker Buehler (24th overall pick); Alex Wood (three-team salary-clearing, counterbuilding deal); Ross Stripling (5th round); and Kenley Jansen (amateur free agent, converted catcher) each serve as extremely valuable (2.0 WARP+) arms that were “off-market” acquisitions. Like the Brewers, the Dodgers have received ample value from players preceding their current front office reign, which also shows the importance of integrating talent, independently assessing talent, and avoiding a “my guys” approach.

In short, the Dodgers are effectively doing the things that small market front offices should do well, and then mastering the big market move as well. That they were able to rebuild their front office without faltering at the big league level should be a model for MLB teams regardless of market size (for example, designing the types of decision trees and strategic models that were praised during Friedman and Zaidi’s first offseason need not be restricted to large markets).

Luckily, if teams working in television markets smaller than Los Angeles were eyeing the Dodgers’ rebuilding efforts but balking at their feasibility, that Behemoth’s League Championship Series foe happens to have designed another blueprint for rebuilding while remaining relatively competitive. Certainly, no one would call a 73-win 2016 Brewers campaign a “tank” effort, as that win total is typically within one standard deviation of a .500 record. As former BPMilwaukee Editor J.P. Breen puts so well, to the Brewers’ credit, they began rebuilding before the cupboards were bare; as one will recall, Milwaukee revamped their draft approach for the late Bruce Seid’s final draft in 2014, and was experiencing something of a system resurgence in 2015 prior to any open rebuilding efforts (as many diehard Brewers fans will debate, some believe a “soft” rebuild can be dated back to the Yovani Gallardo trade, which netted current high leverage reliever Corey Knebel and Top 10 prospect contender (and 40-man roster member) Marcos Diplan).

Brewers: just 1.4 fWAR from pre-FA homegrown players this year. Subtract them entirely, they’d still be a playoff-caliber team. Despite bottom-third payroll. Competitors: Cardinals 18.9, Cubs 17.1, Pirates 13.3, Reds 4.3. David Stearns is the best GM in the game.

— NEIFI Analytics (@NEIFIco) September 18, 2018

Recently, NEIFI Analytics recognized David Stearns for assembling a roster with very little “true homegrown talent,” a point that was picked up by Curt Hogg and J.R. Radcliffe at JSOnline. First, one will be tempted to simply emphasize that the Brewers have been “lucky,” so yes, let’s get that out of the way and agree that good circumstances are key for a contending run (especially for a small market). Now, let’s revel in the extremely simple way that David Stearns assembled the Brewers without tanking: Stearns (and his able Front Office team) recognized that cheap talent need not solely originate from the draft, which categorically allowed him to toss aside the idea that the Brewers needed to assemble multiple high draft picks (and their relatively long development cycles) in order to rebuild the organization. (This is such a crucial point that it should be consistently parsed and analyzed throughout the offseason!) Instead, Stearns recognized that there is much freely available talent in the MLB, and many of those players simply need places to play.

In case you’re hoping to point out that the rebuild afforded Milwaukee the luxury to allow a gang of “flyer”, longshot future value plays to develop on the diamond, it is worth emphasizing that Stearns did not throw aside this strategy even while the Brewers were contending. Witness the 2017-2018 offseason, when the Brewers were following a missed postseason bid with minor league free agency deals (and subsequent roster spots) to players like Wade Miley; reliever J.J. Hoover; first baseman Ji-Man Choi; utilityman Nick Franklin; and later, waiver, Player To Be Named Later, or cash transactions involving Erik Kratz, Dan Jennings, Tyler Saladino, and Brad Miller. It’s easy to cite the major success stories in Milwaukee, such as Junior Guerra, Jesus Aguilar, Hernan Perez, and even Oliver Drake (yes, Oliver Drake), but digging into the everyday moves by Stearns and company reveals that this group wins from the top-down simply by not leaving any stone unturned, and constantly seeking to add value at the margins of the roster. With moves like this, it’s not difficult to dream up a 2019 season-opening rotation that features RHP Jake Thompson and Jordan Lyles; Milwaukee’s front office designed a system for recognizing talent through any means of acquisition, and then consistently and constantly implemented, refined, and revised that approach. (To understand how special this is, imagine how easy it would have been for the Brewers to rush out and beat one-year deals to Lance Lynn, or spend their available revenue on Jake Arrieta, as opposed to Wade Miley, to sell a contending team to a fanbase.) One can expect that Stearns and company have learned their lessons, and hopefully for Brewers faithful, they are also refining those lessons into an aggressive and smart 2018-2019 offseason strategy.

So the tank is dead. Rebuilding is dead. Let us simply return to player development cycles, which are long, long, full of variance, and subject to pricing errors.

Long live competitive baseball, now exemplified by the television behemoth Dodgers, strong market Cardinals, and the tiny Milwaukee Brewers. What is crucial to takeaway here is that both of these organizations designed a specific system for success, and carefully implemented that system with transactions that fit their specification and systemic goals. This is not simply to say that every team must follow these molds, but rather that the molds for contending in the MLB are plentiful. In the absence of those molds, the Brewers and Dodgers have at the very least demonstrated the embarrassment of riches that is freely available in the murky depths of MLB transaction wires, should one choose to look. At the very least, the Brewers and Dodgers give an opportunity to every MLB club to evaluate their player development and strategy supply chain systems, for every team has deep draft picks, every team has a chance at the waiver wires, and every team has a chance at minor league free agents. This message might be loudly received in San Francisco and New York (Mets), where rebuilding efforts could justifiably be underway given new front office searches; but one can also hope that clubs like Cincinnati, Miami, and San Diego pay attention as well.

This post was edited to remove a duplicate table entry.

Related Reading:
The New Professional Orthodoxy
Counterbuilding: Drafting & Trading
When Should the Brewers Be Competitive?
Jonathan Villar and Orlando Arcia Delay the Rebuild
The Continuing Costs of Miller Park

While you consider this fact, think about those $28 million taxpayer dollars weighed against the $40 million or more in private revenue that the Brewers are sitting on in 2016 (thus far). The Brewers are “building for the future,” which in blunt economic terms means that they are getting rid of expensive labor (i.e., MLB Players Association veterans) in favor of dirt cheap, unrepresented labor (i.e., minor league prospects). This is one of the shortcomings of the current MLB “analysis” movement entrenched in its second generation (the second generation being those who are now raised into “analysis” as orthodoxy, as compared to those who actually fought the battle in favor of “analysis”). One of the old drums of that movement is the “market inefficiency,” which on the surface argues in favor of cost-controlled players or acquiring cheap players with production that far outpaces their contract. Beneath the surface, market inefficiencies allow MLB clubs an opportunity to allocate revenue elsewhere: sometimes International markets, sometimes infrastructure, and sometimes pocketbooks.

The last option is quite acceptable in any business, let alone one that features extremely lucrative revenue streams that consistently bolster franchise value. The benefit of rebuilding is that an ownership group need not await a sale of their franchise to reap the benefits of that revenue: when the MLB club does not need to win or compete “now,” payroll can be sliced, and the cut revenue need not go anywhere. Rebuilding cashes in on a lesson well-known at least since Donald Sterling’s 1980s Los Angeles Clippers: sports franchises need not put a winner on the field to return handsome profits. In fact, losing can be even more profitable in the right circumstances.

For the Brewers, GM David Stearns’s much-praised offseason effectively started this great transfer of revenue, saving the club approximately $40 (to $60) million (compared to recent payroll levels, or costs that were sunk into labor instead of ownership) for this season. Common fan rebuttals note that Stearns and the Brewers could sink that revenue into a huge International bonus period, organizational infrastructure, or actual analysts or player development personnel (but really probably not). Hopefully, these “non-MLBPA” expenses include improving minor league pay, which would be a welcome and just correction of one of this game’s ugliest features (just pay them more! Just do it!). Unfortunately, these organizational costs need not be disclosed, so barring a huge $30 million spending spree that is hailed in the industry press on July 2, Brewers fans will be left guessing about how their beloved Milwaukee Nine are spending their revenue.

Brewers fans ought to seriously consider the implications of the economics of rebuilding. By the kindest interpretation, the club is transferring revenue away from MLB labor toward much cheaper minor league talent, in favor of a longview that hopefully sees the club contending by 2020. Even this reality has somewhat unsightly consequences (which is why BPMilwaukee will pair prospect coverage with consistent and ongoing coverage favoring increases in minor league pay). The most brutal interpretation of rebuilding economics sees Five County taxpayers sending at least $28 million to service debt on Miller Park during each season in which the Brewers will not spend money to contend. While a standard corporate governance argument would tell those disgruntled Brewers fans to go fly a kite — and courts of law would probably agree, Brewers fans ought to take seriously their position as financial stakeholders in the organization (especially if they reside in the Five Counties).

The most specific action fans can take is to gain awareness of revenue allocation within an MLB organization, and demand to know how excess revenue beyond a basic 50-50 labor split is spent. This is the first reasonable step to addressing the economic implications of rebuilding. If a club is not spending money on the field, or in easily verified signing bonuses, how is that revenue aimed to help a team compete or contend? A more audacious fan action would be to demand that revenue diverted from the playing field be applied directly to the debt service of Miller Park. This is a fantasy, but it pushes corporate governance arguments to the other logical extreme: After all, even if the Brewers are no longer using their publicly financed asset to try to contend, taxpayers must continue investing in the tricky business of sports real estate; in order to moderate the risk of investing in such a venture, diverting unused MLB revenue to Miller Park’s costs would compensate fans for the lack of a contending team.

The most straightforward tax payer argument is that the venue was built under some assumption that Milwaukee would remain competitive; in this regard, standard tax burdens are traded as a public investment for a good baseball team. As that baseball team fades on the MLB level and pushes competitive goals down the road, the team renegotiates one good faith assumption of the public debt without assuming any additional risk. (The risk of the MLB team, of course, was visible from roughly 2006-2015, where Milwaukee built out of a terrible series of performances and relatively large amounts of money into the big league team, only to see many contending efforts thwarted in heartbreaking fashion. The risk of the public is maintaining and improving an elite sports venue, right down to the front office furniture).

Fans and residents from the five counties are stakeholders in the Brewers’ financial performance. Since residents pay to service a significant portion of the Brewers’ operating costs (namely, Miller Park), they are personally vested in the success of the franchise to some degree. The Brewers franchise ultimately has responsibility to maintain its financial value and return the greatest possible revenue share to ownership; the operation of MLB owners across the board has proven this fact over recent seasons. The fans, on the other hand, get stuck with the warm and gooey “civic pride” claim, which shortchanges their actual investment in the club (especially as taxpayers). By analyzing the costs, depreciation, maintenance schedules, and improvement plans, residents and fans can reorient an aspect of the Brewers’ traditional profit-oriented responsibilities into behavior that more evenly balances the risks of fielding MLB labor and the risks of operating a ballpark. The public cannot be reasonably expected to burden one aspect of this equation without the club shouldering their burden to compete.

One might be tempted to return to the mid-1990s arguments for Miller Park in order to clearly define the role of the taxpayer in this matter. In 1995, Hank Aaron made the gushy civic pride argument that ironically serves as some recognition that taxpayers serve as stakeholders in the Brewers’ future. “When the Brewers go anywhere — no matter where it is — when they say … ‘Milwaukee Brewers,’ … that means that team is yours. It belongs to you.” In the case of previous owner Bud Selig, the lines between competing and creating revenue were blurred. Selig said, “There is no professional sports franchise that has made the commitment to work with a governmental entity the way we have. In most cases, it’s ‘Look, you either do this or we’re gone.’ We’re doing more to stay in our area than any other team by far. We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t think we could make it, but we need the new stadium to be competitive.”

Competitive sounds like a great word for the field, but a surprisingly honest comment by Selig suggests that the matter was financial competition, rather than fielding a competitive baseball team: “We need a new stadium to maximize revenue. There’s no other place to look [for revenue] in this market. We can be competitive if we get it, but not if we don’t.” While new dwellings for MLB teams were frequently adorned with the spirit of winning, or competing on the field, there is no way around the economic reality that clubs were simply looking to publicly subsidize their operating expenses. That economic reality could not be clearer in 2016, which is why it will be crucial for fans to track additional revenue spending by the Milwaukee front office.

Under the basic tenets of corporate governance, or the legal-moral theory that considers a business’s obligations, one would not expect the Brewers to have any responsibility to disclose organizational spending. First and foremost, from a competitive standpoint, MLB clubs would be placed at a considerable disadvantage if they had to release their spending habits to the public. One would expect MLB clubs to embellish or mislabel such figures, leading any public disclosure to be vague (in order to protect proprietary information). Second, the most vulgar interpretation of ownership’s responsibility would find no issue whatsoever with an MLB club failing to invest their revenue in labor. While it is fun to think about sports teams as civic enterprises, any MLB club is simply a private entertainment enterprise that receives allocations of media revenue thanks to their lucrative monopoly over baseball. In this sense, the actual sport of baseball is about as far removed from the purposes of an MLB organization as one can imagine; as the Braves ownership group recently summarized in surprisingly frank moment, the Braves are now “a fairly major real estate business.” Milwaukee has not yet reached that point, but one should understand that the longer an industry basks in the language of market inefficiencies, the more likely they will be to shift their focus to investing in as many inefficiencies as possible (if one such market inefficiency is publicly funded sports venues, so be it, taxpayers be damned).

The Brewers may not be a fairly major real estate business yet, but they are a fairly major television entertainment enterprise (even as a small marketMLB team), and that outlook defines their profit structure moreso than baseball. So, on some level, why would they ever contend? The Brewers are in the business of selling cable television subscriptions and collecting revenue; that will always be more profitable than winning. Rebuilding simply reifies that logic.

As an analytically inclined baseball fan, it is almost impossible to dislike the implications of finding a “valuable” player. A valuable player, in most instances, will be one that returns production at a greater rate than their cost. Given the scarcity of resources in baseball (i.e., consistently good performances), finding value from players is important on some level. However, as those ideals become further entrenched in the game, sunk into organizational infrastructure, hiring practices, and even training practices (such as hiring economists, businesspeople, and mathematicians with elite backgrounds to run baseball operations), they can become distorted as they become orthodoxy. Finding the greatest possible value in amateur talent, for instance, can result in some anti-competitive behavior to gain draft picks.

In general, the ideal of “stockpiling controllable talent for the future” becomes synonymous with periods of time in which it is acceptable for an MLB team to field a less-than-stellar ballclub. “Rebuilding” and analytical approaches in baseball employ sound statistical arguments and mechanical methodology to shave revenue toward ownership, and away from labor. From an ownership standpoint, both the stunning availability of rebuilding cycles and the recalibration of salaries and production through analysis are arguably the most effective anti-labor tools since collusion. This industry standpoint is problematic where it is anti-competitive, and it is doubly problematic where rebuilding plotlines are played on publicly-funded stages.

Brewers fans will rightfully support rebuilding for several reasons, not the least of which is the most valid reason of hoping to see a Championship banner at Miller Park. But fans should take the unspent $40 million seriously, especially when they are within the geographical area that still faces the annual $28 million tax bill. Residents should also not shy away from their own stake in the organization’s financial and baseball success: if it sounds ridiculous to demand greater financial transparency from the club now, just remember how ridiculous it sounded to most ears to cite VORP or Pitcher Abuse Points a decade ago. The institutional obsession with rebuilding, and all of its logical points, must be redesigned in a manner that squares residents’ investment risks in team infrastructure with the performance goals of the ballclub. Rebuilding as a substitute for just economic arrangements is neither desirable in terms of MLB labor, nor feasible for the public’s interest in maintaining Miller Park as a ground for competitive baseball.

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 was, I think, the allure of Moneyball for many people. Sociologists like Bronislaw Malinowski found that people tend to believe in magic in situations where there is a marked discrepancy between efforts and results. Moneyball or analytics, or whatever you want to call it, offers the reassuring idea that through some sort of magic — numbers, intelligence, a Process — results can finally be brought in line with efforts and the team will be victorious.

Back when I was in college, I found an old book at a book fair for 50 cents called The Theory And Practice of Gamesmanship, Or The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating. Written by an Englishman named Stephen Potter, it’s a hilarious satire that reveals in all its glory the absurdity of the Victorian ideals of sportsmanship. While it doesn’t sound like it’s related to Moneyball at all, I think Potter’s ideas of gamesmanship have some fascinating similarities to the analytical approach to solving the problem of rebuilding a baseball team.

Chapter III, “The Game Itself,” begins brilliantly: “‘How to win Games Without Actually Being Able to Play Them.’ Reduced to the simplest terms, that is the formula, and the student must not at first try flights too far from this basic thought.” This is the core of gamesmanship. “The assiduous student of gamesmanship has little time for the minutiae of the game itself — little opportunity for learning how to play the shots, for instance,” Potter writes. “His skill in strokemaking may indeed be almost non-existent.”

This is the question I felt like I was trying to answer on the podcast, and the problem it sometimes feels like we’re asking GMs with a Process — whether a stats-type like David Stearns or an old-school scout like Dayton Moore — to actually solve. How can a team win games without actually being good? Now that would truly be magic.

Analytics aren’t going to do that. At one point in baseball’s history, some executives were able to use statistics as a tool to manipulate the predictability of the old guard. Those days are gone. Knowledge of analytics simply isn’t going to allow teams to bridge big gaps in talent, whether acquired through financial resources or assembled through excellent drafting and development.

Gamesmanship works by exploiting the predictability of the opponent’s play style and mindset. That’s the way Billy Beane’s Athletics and other early teams to employ analytics won. But the league adapted quickly, and analytics are no longer magic, they’re simply part of the game. And that’s why I think Stearns and the Brewers — or any other team that sets out on a rebuilding mission — will have to display more than just gamesmanship, more than just an ability to make the right choices and the right calculations.

The real trick for Potter’s gamesman isn’t that he has found a way to magically change the outcome of games. It’s that it never truly matters whether he wins or loses the game itself. “The true gamesman knows that the game is never at an end,” Potter writes. “Game-set-match is not enough. The winner must win the winning. And the good gamesman is never known to lose, even if he has lost.”

I’m excited and hopeful to see what David Stearns and his philosophy can do. But I doubt he will be the one to answer that holy grail of a question to which Potter devoted his book, that question of how to win games without actually being good. Because that’s what I see now when I see somebody peddling a Process. I see somebody selling the idea that no matter what happens, they have still played the game correctly. I see somebody selling the idea that even when they have lost it should not be seen as losing. And that isn’t the work of a magician, just the work of a plain old gamesman.

It is, of course, possible (and maybe even likely) that the A’s also know all of this. Nolin was a part of the return for their best player for a reason, and a half dozen poor starts with the big-league club probably would not have influenced their ultimate evaluation of him. However, as this MLB Trade Rumors article mentions, Nolin is out of options. The A’s also have a completely full 40-man roster, so they simply had no room to keep the 26-year-old southpaw.

Nolin’s profile hasn’t changed a ton since the Donaldson trade. Last offseason, BP’s prospect staff described him as a low-risk, back-of-the-rotation starter, and he probably still is. He was competent in the minor leagues, with his 2.66 ERA looking even more impressive once we consider that it came in the hitter-friendly PCL. At Brew Crew Ball, our former colleague Derek Harvey speculated that Nolin’s preseason sports hernia may have contributed to his struggles, and he missed some time at other points during the season with other injuries as well.

On that point, there is some convincing evidence that Nolin was hurt last year. His fastball velocity during his stint in the majors was about 3.5 mph slower in 2015 than it was in 2014. Even though that 2014 number is based on just 41 fastballs, velocity stabilizes much quicker than outcome-based statistics and we can get a better sense of Nolin’s true velocity than one might initially expect. Therefore, given that we have reason to expect the left-hander may very well have been hurt last year, his velocity decline and poor performance in the major leagues seems to be somewhat explainable.

Nolin is not a safe bet to make the roster, and he is most assuredly unlikely to make the rotation, as the organization has admitted. Matt Garza, Chase Anderson, Taylor Jungmann, Wily Peralta, and Jimmy Nelson are likely to get the five rotation spots, which means that if Nolin sticks with the Brewers it will be as a reliever. His aforementioned roster status — being out of options — makes this complicated, as if he does not break camp with the Brewers, he will go back on waivers.

Ultimately, taking a chance on Nolin may or may not work out, but its importance is that it further symbolized David Stearns’ approach to rebuilding. The Brewers know that, barring a miracle, they are not going to make the playoffs this season, so they have spent the year taking flyers on players with impressive pedigrees who had become freely- or cheaply-available for one reason or another. It is this philosophy that has led to the acquisitions of Chris Carter, Garin Cecchini, Rymer Liriano, and Will Middlebrooks, among others. Players of this ilk are unlikely to be stars, but each was a relatively highly-touted prospect at one point, and the Brewers are gambling that some of these players will turn into usable big-leaguers in the future.

Nolin is a similar bet. He was the Blue Jays’ fifth-ranked prospect after 2013 and the A’s third-ranked prospect after 2014. His disappointing 2015 season makes him a reasonable rebound candidate — a post-hype sleeper, if you will, even if this is the least exciting type of post-hype sleeper.

He may not work out, though! His being out of options makes keeping him on the roster difficult. If he struggles greatly in spring training, the Brewers may decide he is not worth the hassle and that his performance issues in 2015 were legitimate.

If this happens, the world has not ended. Nolin is another one of a series of gambles that the Brewers are taking this year. And if only one or two of these players works out, the experiment will have been a success. David Stearns has taken advantage of a lost year by giving opportunities to players who would not currently deserve major-league playing time. Sean Nolin is a prime example of this. Whether or not he works out, this is a bet that is well worth making and indicative of the thought processes that Stearns is utilizing.

This is a credit to the Royals’ players — while it’s tempting to think it might be easier to construct a team like this considering the exhorbitant sums top starters and sluggers fetch in free agency, there just aren’t that many players that have the all-around skillsets necessary to power a team like the Royals. Good luck finding too many quality two-way players like Lorenzo Cain, Alex Gordon and Salvador Perez or shutdown relievers like Greg Holland and Wade Davis. Usually by the time players like these reach free agency, either the league has caught on to the fact that their skillset is worthwhile, or they’ve already started their decline phase — particularly since pitcher velocity and position-player defense are usually the first skills to decline for each group.

But that doesn’t mean teams aren’t going to try to copy the way the Royals won, by losing for years, racking up tons of high draft picks, waiting for a wave of prospects to come around, and carefully spending to fill the few holes that remain. Of the Royals’ core players, Mike Moustakas (pick 1.2 in 2007), Eric Hosmer (pick 1.3 in 2008) and Alex Gordon (pick 1.2 in 2005) were all the fruits of selecting high in the draft after terrible seasons. Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar were acquired in exchange for Zack Greinke, pick 1.6 in 2002.

From 2003 through 2008, the Royals had a payroll between $36 million and $67 million, ranking between 24th and 27th in Major League Baseball in all six seasons. This is when they drafted most of the core talent from their 2014 and 2015 playoff runs, or the players who were traded to improve the team around them. The Royals slightly increased their payroll in the latter part of the decade with ill-advised deals for Jose Guillen and Gil Meche, but in 2011, the Royals entered full Process mode and whittled their payroll down to a league-low $38 million. They then slowly built the payroll up as their young players moved up the salary scale, up to $64 million (26th) in 2012, $82 million (22nd) in 2013, $92 million (19th) in 2014, and fueled by their AL Pennant, $113 million in 2015 (13th).

You can’t deny the effectiveness of the Process. Everything that was supposed to happen for a small-market team to win happened. The prospects showed up, they grew together, the front office filled in the gaps, an exciting and improbable first playoff run then gave them the experience and confidence to bring the championship home a year later.

But this is part of the problem I’ve been writing about here for the past couple of months. The reason small-market teams are going to copy the Royals is because every other route to contention has been closed off. And this isn’t just about money — it’s about rules like the qualifying-offer system, revenue sharing, and caps on draft and international amateur spending that have made it impossible to take other routes to contention. Having to surrender draft picks for mid-level free agents makes it difficult to slowly build year-by-year, and the spending caps in the amateur market make it impossible to go above slot to keep top-tier talent coming in if a team improved (and improved its draft slot) slowly but steadily.

So, sure, teams probably aren’t going to “copy the Royals” in the sense Crasnick discusses. It’s going to be near impossible to cobble together a group of uniquely defensively talented contact hitters like the Royals had in 2014 and 2015. That’s what their scouts and system were good at identifying and developing, so that’s what came out, much like how the Brewers rose to contention in the late 2000s behind a roster filled with Jack Z Specials — young sluggers who could win despite their defensive deficiencies. But you can bet teams are going to copy Kansas City’s process — and they already have, in Houston, and to a lesser extent, on Chicago’s north side.

However, it can’t be forgotten that a critical part of this process is years and years — maybe a decade, maybe more — of losing. That would be just fine with most fans, I think, if it always worked out as cleanly as it did for the Royals. But it won’t, as we saw with the Brewers in 2008 and 2011. Next year isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be, and a talented core can disintegrate quickly. So to all the teams getting ready to copy the Royals and look to the future: Best of luck when your window finally comes, and don’t blink or you might miss it. Hopefully all the losses are worth it.

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.

As always, I’ve included the opening excerpt to read, but please follow the link at the bottom for the article in its entirety.)

*****

To think Billy Beane entered the 2012 season in an unenviable position. His Athletics had won 70-something games for the third time in four years, spurring the ever-active general manager to retool his roster for the umpteenth time. Beane removed the veterans; he traded Gio Gonzalez, Trevor Cahill, and Andrew Bailey for prospects, and wished David DeJesus and Josh Willingham all the best as they departed through free agency. Beane would later balance the subtractions by adding Coco Crisp and Bartolo Colon—moves that (seemingly) doubled as peace offerings to the union—but the net result was a payroll trimmed of about $15 million.

All the departures caused the A’s to abandon their short-term aspirations in pursuit of the future. Beane, who has worked with a bottom-six payroll since 2011, was left to improve his roster using one of the game’s best farm systems. Built mostly through trades—the A’s have picked in the top-10 just once since selecting Barry Zito in 1999—Oakland’s farm system entered that pivotal 2012 season ranked fourth in the league; however harmful those aforementioned trades were to fan morale, the returns had nourished a once-weak prospect stable. It’s been said that in baseball you’re either selling hope or selling wins.

In the past half-decade, money-strapped teams like the Rays and Pirates have validated the tried-and-true methods for building good teams with young talent. The process goes something like this: collect prospects by the wagon-full, develop them, keep them as long as the cost is low, and trade the aging and expensive to fill the holes in the system. This practice can be slow and painful, but it has become known as the “Right Way” to rebuild.

Given the A’s aforementioned collection of prospects and their recent success—no team has won more games since the start of 2012—you would think they had authored the all-American rebuild story. But they didn’t; the A’s actually built a winner by ignoring that construct.

Beane has disassembled his farm over the past two years at nearly the same pace he had used to build it. Seven of the 11 top prospects ranked by Kevin Goldstein in January 2012 have been traded, including three of the top five. In fact, Goldstein’s current employer, the Astros, employ as many of those 11 players on their active roster (two) as the A’s do—though Jarrod Parker would give the A’s the lead if he weren’t disabled. Beane’s aggressive prospect trading extends beyond those 11: he moved two players from the bottom nine, pushing the total to nine of the 20 players listed. The A’s didn’t just trade the spare parts. They traded half their farm.

Please read the remainder of the article at baseballprospectus.com for FREE by clicking HERE.

Baseball Prospectus published its trademark Transaction Analysis on the main site, featuring our own Ryan Romano and others. Be sure to read the entire TA to get analysis from multiple angles. In my opinion, those types of articles are worth the monthly subscription price on their own, so it’s quality stuff.

I have my own thoughts on the trade, though, and I want to utilize this space to pull apart multiple aspects of this trade from the Milwaukee Brewers’ perspective. This isn’t a simplistic trade. It’s quite clear that general manager David Stearns and his staff agreed to this move for a few reasons: (1) they believe Chase Anderson has some sneaky value over the next few years; (2) they adored 19-year-old Isan Diaz and were willing to pay $5.5 million of Aaron Hill’s salary to acquire the young middle infielder; and (3) hope.

RHP CHASE ANDERSON

Anderson posted a pedestrian 4.30 ERA for the Arizona Diamondbacks last year with a 4.16 FIP and was a 1.4-win player. That’s a decent back-end starter, all things considered, but it’s unclear that the Brewers should really be trading someone like Segura for a 28-year-old fifth starter. Even though the club has to like that Anderson has five years of team control remaining, two of which are at the league minimum, the move has to be something more than that. The Brewers must believe the right-hander brings something legitimate to the table — either so they can profit via the trade market or so Anderson can provide value in the win-loss column going forward.

The former Oklahoma Sooner enjoyed a solid first half in 2015. He compiled a 3.91 ERA before the All-Star Break, but that’s only part of the story. Anderson landed on the DL with triceps inflammation and missed the better part of a month. In the five starts prior to his stint on the disabled list, he gave up a total of 27 runs in 25.2 innings (9.12 ERA). It’s dangerous to dismiss a handful of starts as non-representative, I know, but it is notable that Anderson’s 2015 ERA was 3.26 without the five starts running up to his time on the DL.

It should also be noted that Chase Anderson saw his velocity jump after he returned from his arm injury. And not by a small amount, either. The right-hander started to throw harder than he has in the past two years:

It’s no surprise that Anderson saw his strikeout rate jump from 15.4 percent during his pre-DL starts to 21.1 percent afterward. Of course, he did also struggle in September, posting a 4.91 ERA in four starts; however, that was mostly soured by a single bad outing on September 8. His final two starts saw him surrender only two earned runs in 10.1 innings while striking out 14.

All of this isn’t to suggest that Chase Anderson is about to breakout with the Brewers. Changeup specialists with mediocre fastballs aren’t world-beaters. We know this too well in Milwaukee. What all of this does suggest, though, is that Anderson is interesting and there are reasons to believe his 4.30 ERA from 2015 isn’t completely representative of his talent. If he can carry over his velocity gains to 2016, perhaps we’re looking at a different pitcher. If much of his season was masked by triceps inflammation that torpedoed the middle part of his campaign, we should see better overall results in the future.

And those question marks are what Milwaukee is searching for during their rebuild. The club is desperately searching for cheap/inexpensive options who have opportunities for improvement. Anderson will make the league minimum for the next two years and will not be eligible for free agency until the 2022 season. If he cobbles together a useful — it doesn’t have to be great — 2016 season, one can easily imagine him fetching an interesting prospect or two on the trade market. Or maybe he’s a competent back-end starter for the Brewers as they start to creep toward contention in 2018, as he’ll only be 30 years old.

We’re asking questions and we’re seeing signs hinting that Anderson could be something more than his overall stat line suggests. And, yes, we’re being optimists and ignoring the potential downside. During a rebuild, though, I’m not convinced that downside represents any risk whatsoever, so I’m not sure that matters too much.

SS/2B ISAN DIAZ

Most baseball fans hadn’t heard of 19-year-old Isan Diaz before the Brewers traded for him on Saturday. The Diamondbacks drafted him in the second round of the 2014 draft — and many scouts raved about his upside — but he only hit .187/.289/.330 in his professional debut. People quickly forget about guys who can’t eclipse the Mendoza Line in the AZL.

All of that changed in 2015. The 5-foot-10 infielder demolished the Pioneer League, posting a herculean .360/.436/.640 slash line with 13 homers and 12 stolen bases in just 312 plate appearances. He won the Pioneer League MVP, and many scouts returned to their pre-draft notes and started salivating over what he could become in the future. In fact, FOX Sports’ Ken Rosenthal reported this week that the Atlanta Braves also coveted Diaz and were actively working on a deal to acquire the youngster. Fortunately for the Brewers, though, the Diamondbacks needed help at shortstop and valued Jean Segura over anything the Braves could offer (likely Erick Aybar).

I reached out to a few non-Brewers industry contacts, and the response was almost universally positive. One person opined that we’ll look back at this deal in a few years and think that Milwaukee “fleeced” Arizona. The same individual said that his organization loves Diaz and that he personally believes the young man to have “elite ceiling,” even if he makes the assumed defensive move to second base. Another scout dropped the seemingly omnipresent comp to a young Robinson Cano and raved about Diaz’s “fantastic bat speed.” A third person in the industry suggested that Diaz is one of the unheralded gems in the game and praised Stearns and his staff for acquiring him.

Of course, it wasn’t all positive. Another individual said that he likes the bat speed, but wants to see it at the full-season level before he forgets about the struggles he witnessed in the Arizona League. That same person says his lack of foot speed will make him a liability defensively and that his bat will have to carry a lot of the value. At 19 years old, the ceiling is tantalizing, but it’s disingenuous to ignore the holes in his long-term profile just because he lit up a offensive-friendly league, like the Pioneer League.

It’s clear the Milwaukee Brewers fall on the optimistic side of the spectrum, though, and built this entire deal around acquiring him.

2B AARON HILL

This is the “hope” I mentioned above. The Milwaukee Brewers took on $5.5 million of Hill’s contract in order to get Isan Diaz in this trade, as the Diamondbacks are still desperate to clear payroll space for some unknown reason. But it’s not difficult to understand why the D-Backs don’t have room for Hill on the roster. He’s about to turn 34 years old and hasn’t been productive for over two years. In fact, he hasn’t even been worth +1.0 WARP in the past two seasons combined.

And there’s not much to statistically suggest that Hill will turn it around, either. His power numbers have fallen. His BABIP has plummeted as his batted-ball velocity has gotten weaker. Hell, even Madison Bumgarner hit the baseball as hard, on average, than Hill in 2015 (88.86 mph). He’s responded by trying to become more selective at the plate, but that success has been uneven.

The Brewers acquired Hill so they could get Diaz. They also are hoping that he can dip his bat into the fountain of youth, so they can recoup some value on him in the summer. But that’s all it is. Hope. There isn’t much to indicate that Hill is a useful major-league player at this point in his career. But the Milwaukee Brewers are in a perfect situation to play him without too many repercussions. If he can turn back the clock, the move seems utterly brilliant. If not, the Brewers have other options at third base and second base, and the trade wasn’t even about him in the first place.

But, losing doesn’t have to be all bad — especially when you know you’re prone to defeat, when you know your team is going to suck. This is what it’s come to for the Brewers. We know they’re going to suck. They know and we know that they’re going to suck. In fact, we know that they know that we know that they’re going to suck. And in some ways, there’s a quiet contentment in that fact. Sure, watching the L’s pile up won’t be fun, but there are other ways of enjoying the season — such as a great pitching performance or a beautiful diving catch. Maybe it’ll be a majestic home run or a splendid game.

You might find joy in prospects. In the ever improving farm system. Or a cornerstone player advancing in his development.

Perhaps that will be Jimmy Nelson, who this past year made a few adjustments to his pitching arsenal. The main one being, introducing a knucle-curveball for the first time, which he used at a 21.11 percent clip in 2015. But, as Ryan Romano has noted, his slider also took a significant jump last season — mainly improving the horizontal movement of the pitch, which has yielded better results. In fact, according to FanGraphs PITCHfx pitch values, Nelson’s slider went from being below average at -2.3 wSL in 2014 to being above average at 8.9 wSL in 2015. On top of that, these adjustments have allowed Nelson to get batters to swing at more pitches outside the strike zone, coupled with their whiffing on more pitches outside the strike zone. These adjustments are important for young pitchers and will allow them to garner more success in the future.

Nelson is still relatively young at 26, and his improvements as a pitcher will help in a couple of ways. He will either become one of the franchise’s building blocks or Nelson will end up being a valuable trade chip. In all probability, trading Nelson might make a ton of sense, considering his age, but that is a topic for another time and another day.

In any case, maybe it won’t be Nelson, maybe it’ll be Domingo Santana or Taylor Jungmann who will take the next step. The key for Brewers fans will be finding joy in these moments, not caring about the win-loss record. The record will now become background noise, just like an annoying announcer who you’ve decided to tune out. The same attitude needs to be taken with the win-loss record. It’s time to tune it out. At this point it’s just noise. It’s irrelevant. It’s meaningless because it is no longer the goal.

The goal now is finding talent and finding joy in discovering that talent. And, if the new Ivy League GM is anything like his former boss, boy oh boy are they going to find talent. Pitching talent, hitting talent, coaching talent, and whatever else this new front office can think of.

But, the biggest key, the essential fundamental factor in finding joy in the following season is knowing the Brewers have a plan coupled with the low expectations. Being angry from a season is in so many ways dependent on the expectations of the season. If you’re a Pirates fan, the only way to satiate the prospect of success will be to make it past the wild card. Losing in another wild card game or not making the playoffs will end up being a disappointment. If you’re a Dodgers or Yankees fan, well, you pretty much already know what the goal is every season and not meeting that goal will probably end up with a lot of people being disappointed.

It’s the same principle with the Brewers season. The expectations are low, and therefore, one should find joy in the finer and smaller elements of the game. In many ways, these upcoming seasons might bring some fans closer to the game.