It was a disappointing tenure from a narrative standpoint, from the frightening injury to the anti-climactic end. Liriano had been a compelling prospect, offering an intriguing blend of power, speed, and defense, and ranking among the game’s best 100 prospects before the 2012 and 2013 seasons. He missed the entire 2013 season after Tommy John surgery, did not impress during a 2014 cup of coffee in San Diego, and found himself out of options and suffering from prospect fatigue. The Brewers saw his strong .290 True Average (TAv) at Triple-A El Paso the season before, and thought he could enjoy a breakout season with a patient-enough big league club. Liriano could have become the kind of low-key acquisition that plays through a rebuild and emerges a few years as a valuable piece on a contending roster.

Baseball has a way of creating its own storylines, though: The Brewers are suddenly fighting for a division title with an overstuffed outfield, and Liriano is back in the organization and trying to rewrite history. Prior to his free agent signing, he had authored a respectable .268/.343/.523 line for the Salt Lake Bees, the Triple-A affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels. No longer a prospect, and robbed of valuable developmental time by his injury history, Liriano is more under-the-radar now than he has been for most of his playing career. Below the surface, his changing numbers and approach reveal a player who is struggling to find his path forward.

Scouting reports on Liriano have long made note of his athleticism and raw power. But throughout much of his career, his game power played more as an average tool. Throughout his time in the Padres organization, Liriano never tallied more than 14 home runs in a season (2014, 2015), and his Isolated Slugging Percentage (ISO) only ever ran up over .200 during an insane 71-plate-appearance stretch in AAA in 2014, wherein he hit .452/.521/.661 and was promptly called up to San Diego for his major league debut (whereupon his ISO plummeted to .046). For reference, the National League average ISO was .134 that season.

Since missing out on the 2016 season, though, Liriano has refashioned his swing to generate more loft, perhaps inspired by the late-career successes of Josh Donaldson, Daniel Murphy, and others. Here he is in 2015, lining a thigh-high middle-inside pitch to his pull side for a double:

And here he is earlier this season, turning on a waist-high pitch for a long home run:

The differences aren’t hard to spot. In 2015, Liriano crouched at the plate and held his hands up behind his ears. As the pitcher delivers, he times his swing with a small step, really more of a tap. He sees that the ball is down in the zone, so he deepens his crouch, reaches down, and uses a level swing to rip a shot down the third-base line.

In 2018, the stance is a little more open, and Liriano has ditched the crouch for a straighter pose. His hands are noticeably lower, and he’s changed to a more exaggerated leg kick. He plants his front foot firmly in the dirt, then turns on the pitch with everything he’s got, showcasing a swing clearly designed with loft in mind.

The resulting power gains are significant. Liriano whacked a career-high 17 home runs in 500 plate appearances last season, and (entering this week) was already up to 19 home runs in 316 plate appearances in 2018. His ISO is almost equal to his batting average, at .254, and he’s hitting the ball in the air at a 43.8 percent clip, up considerably from the mid-30s figures he posted earlier in his career. Part of this is attributable to his offensive environment, but it’s clear that this surge is fueled by more than thin air.

For one thing, there has been a clear and inevitable tradeoff in Liriano’s profile: contact. And unfortunately for Liriano, he didn’t have much of that to trade in the first place. Between 2012 and 2015, Liriano’s minor league strikeout rates hovered around 24 percent, high enough to be concerning, but low enough to be chalked up to youth and inexperience. When he got back onto the field with the White Sox organization in 2017, that number spiked to 26.6 percent. This year, it’s even higher: 31.2 percent at Salt Lake, and 36.2 percent in a limited sample with the Sky Sox. He’s taking his walks (9.5 percent walk rate), but not quite enough of them to compensate for all the whiffs. And with the new feast-or-famine approach, Liriano has connected for only eight doubles on the season.

There’s evidence that other aspects of his game are eroding, too. This year, Liriano has stolen only seven bases, and been caught eight times. Never the best at getting jumps, he used to be able to rely on sheer speed to generate value on the basepaths. But he’s been worth -2.6 baserunning runs on the year, which is hardly the contribution one would want from a fast player with a fringy hit tool.

Liriano’s journey has been rockier than most, and he’s seen his perceived ceiling fall from above-average regular to useful fourth outfielder along the way. He still possesses good athleticism and strong defense, but is no longer a great option to man center field. The newfound power would play in a corner, but Liriano was only able to get there by forsaking a hit tool that never projected to above-average in the first place. The Brewers already possess Keon Broxton in the dingers-and-defense category, and Keon offers a lot more value with the glove and on the bases. If Liriano converts some of the fly balls into line drives and is able to shorten his swing and make more contact, he could carve out a nice role on a major league bench. Of course, that particular profile is largely what Tyrone Taylor has to offer, and Taylor is three years younger. This leaves Liriano in a somewhat precarious position: He’s running out of time to make his mark before he’s slapped with the “org filler” label, and his new contact profile is extreme even in the dawning three-true-outcomes era. Liriano has adjusted once before; ironically, he might have a better chance of reaching the majors again if he’s able to adjust back.

(1) Grading Thames
Several sources of projection have outlined expectations for Eric Thames in Milwaukee, so I’m not going to attempt to project Thames’s statistical performance in Milwaukee. Instead, I want to look at the opportunity cost of Thames, as well as the potential value from his scouting profile. Really, my analysis of both Thames and Thornburg will depend on your feelings of WARP; whether or not you believe that WARP adequately captured Chris Carter’s value to the Brewers is going to be a factor that impacts how you view the slugger’s surplus value, for instance (a similar issue will arise with Thornburg below).

In my last analysis, I estimated that in terms of contractual value and production, Carter was worth between $18 million and $25 million to the Brewers (the main focal point here is not to consider the fact that he may have cost between $8 million and $10 million in salary arbitration, but that the Brewers could release Carter without spending a dime [and they did just that], which frames his contractual value). The most interesting note on Thames is that the slugger has changed his approach and mechanics while working in the KBO, which places a different lens on his outburst in that league, and also changes his scouting outlook in the USA. Beyond the Box Score features a detailed look at Thames’s swing in the KBO, which shows some development from his MLB swing.

If one attempts to balance Thames’s winding career path with his recent KBO superstardom, a “punt” scouting grade of 45-50 may be in order for the age 30-33 first baseman’s contract. Yet, visions of Jose Bautista come to mind whenever someone says “late 20s mechanical adjustment,” as the Blue Jays’ iconic slugger was little more than a .239 / .324 / .398 slasher through 2008 when Toronto acquired him. The idea that a player can unleash his power after his prime development years is not implausible, and indeed some of those players become superstars (Edwin Encarnacion, Bautista’s teammate, is another example).

In 1,000 scenarios, imagine that Thames reaches 40 OFP 900 times ($1,800M), 50 OFP 80 times ($2,976M), 60 OFP 19 times ($1,452M), and Jose Bautista once ($218M): the Brewers still come out ahead, even if in 90 percent of scenarios Thames effectively busts (0.93 WARP over four seasons). Their total surplus, in this scenario, would be approximately $2.8M. So, the Thames contract is a wash at worst, and at best a fantastic opportunity to sign a foreign league superstar that was simply a late bloomer. Now the only question is if Thames ends up closer to the 0.1 percent odds of breaking out as an MLB superstar on the strength of his KBO adjustments.
Surplus Value: Approximately $2.8M if assumed 40 OFP in 90 percent of outcomes.

(2) Trading Thornburg
How does one grade the Thornburg trade? In my previous grading of current assets, Thornburg’s three-year performance weighed down his significant gains as a reliever. Boston obviously traded for Thornburg with the idea of building on his season as an excellent high leverage relief option, and whether or not Thornburg is a closer, there is a chance that he will provide excellent value to their roster if given the chance to prove himself in the late innings over another season. The best aspect for the big market Red Sox is that they now reserve arbitration rights for Thornburg for three seasons, meaning that there is plenty of time for Thornburg to move within different high leverage roles, struggle, iron out any issues, even weather an injury. In this case, a study of the McCann trade, which caused me to reconsider using depreciation-models to assess trade value, one would do well to assess Thornburg in the most robust manner, certainly weighing his 2016 improvements much more heavily than his previous struggles.

If anything, this comparison should show that it’s extremely difficult to simply assess a trade based on one single model, or one assumption. The Brewers could assume that Thornburg’s troubles would weigh heavier, and they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong; the Red Sox could buy high and have a robust model for Thornburg, and be equally correct. I dare say there will be no equilibrium found for this deal, between either club. The deal is an immediate victory for the contending Red Sox, who bolster their bullpen with a hard throwing up-and-coming reliever that offers three years of arbitration reserve; the deal is an immediate victory for the Brewers, who turned a struggling swingman-at-best into a lights-out reliever and then sold at the best possible moment (it can be argued that even waiting to see if Thornburg could close for the first half of 2017 is too risky for the Brewers, since any issues in that regard would tank the value built during 2016).

Considering both conservative and aggressive estimates for the trade as currently constructed, it should not be outlandish to say that the Red Sox properly gambled that they can retain value with Thornburg’s contract (which can be non-tendered without cost prior to 2018 and 2019). If the PTBNL turns out to be a player with a pedigree other than organizational depth, that might push Thornburg into 2.0 WARP/year territory to regain value. Yet, given that the Red Sox are gambling for playoff spots, overpaying in a trade for a high leverage player is not necessarily a bad deal if the payoff is somewhere between $10 million and $30 million of playoff revenue. Adding together playoff revenue, playoff prestige, and potential flags flying is well worth a PTBNL. There is plenty of evidence to argue the trade a success for either team, which is a good sign that Milwaukee maximized their short-term closer’s value.

(3) Miguel Diaz’s Value
I previously called GM David Stearns’s refusal to protect top RHP prospect Miguel Diaz from the Rule 5 draft a “dreadful, terrible” move, but I think I emphasized the wrong reasons. As the Brewers potentially lost Diaz to the Padres (via the Twins), depending on how he fares early in the season and whether he sticks with San Diego, it is worth recasting the move as a failure even if Diaz does not reach the MLB or his gaudiest 60 OFP from summer 2016.

Imagine that Diaz follows the odds of reaching the MLB at approximately 20 percent; among those potential MLB futures, consider a 40 OFP / roster filler status as the vast majority (95 percent of potential MLB futures, maybe reaching 1.0 WARP over three seasons), a 50 OFP (4.5 percent of potential MLB futures, maybe reaching 4.0 WARP over three seasons), and 60 OFP in 0.5 percent of MLB futures (maybe reaching 7.0 WARP over three seasons). Spread over 1,000 potential futures, Miguel Diaz averages out to approximately 0.23 WARP, or someone worth between $0.500 million league minimum contract (replacement contract) and $1.61 million using the standard $7 million / WARP “market estimation.” This is the biggest problem with failing to protect Diaz: in the first place, he’s one of only a few true 50+ / 60 OFP prospects in the Brewers system. There are many 50 prospects in the system, and several 50+ prospects, even, but not many reached a 60 OFP grade in 2016. Diaz reached that level, and is therefore one of the best prospects even adding in all the risk one can find.
Value Lost: $1.6 million.

(4) Roster Summary
Here is a summary of notables trades, Rule 5 transactions (MLB and AAA), and free agency signings. Moves with 40-man roster impact are highlighted.

Thus far, the Brewers have added approximately $23.7 million in total surplus through 40-man roster transactions (this figure does not factor in full reserve control for minor leaguers, but instead focuses on OFP value). That is basically worth 1.7 WARP from a league minimum contract, or 2.75 WARP from Eric Thames (2.75 WARP is worth approximately $19.3 million, minus $15 million guaranteed). In total surplus value, Stearns has acquired approximately $63 million for the organization, which can be translated as approximately 4.5 total WARP from a league minimum salary, or acquiring approximately three 50 OFP prospects via trade.

Over the past year, the Milwaukee Brewers’ front office has been plenty good–but they’ve gotten awfully lucky, too.

The quickest way to jump-start a rebuilding process is finding value in players cast off by other teams. In taking something you got, essentially, for free and turning it into something useful. Over the past year, the Brewers have tried to do this repeatedly. Not all of their efforts have worked out–Ramon Flores, Keon Broxton, and Alex Presley have combined for negative one WARP, Will Middlebrooks is whiffing at a 40 percent clip since finally making the big club, and Garin Cecchini hasn’t even looked good by AAA ballplayer standards, and with the artificial stat inflation for hitters inherent in Colorado Springs. But for each of these failures, which cost nothing, the front office has made a number of great calls.

Honorable Mention: Sean Nolin, RP and Rymer Liriano, OF

Once one of Toronto’s top prospects, Nolin is probably best-known as one of the pieces who was sent to Oakland in the ill-fated Josh Donaldson trade. When the A’s traded for Khris Davis this winter, they waived Nolin from their 40-man roster to make room for him–and the Brewers pounced, effectively adding him to the return package.

In Spring Training, Nolin suffered a partially torn UCL, and seemed doomed to Tommy John surgery. But with a partial tear, sometimes the ligament can heal naturally. The Brewers had him reevaluated in May, and decided that things were progressing enough to where surgery wasn’t necessary. If things continue progressing, he could see a couple of September innings. But Nolin’s medical past is far from spotless–a groin injury in 2014 ended his season and caused him to miss part of 2015 as well–and the franchise doesn’t need his immediate contributions, so the prudent course of action might just be to wait for 2017.

Rymer Liriano was struck in the face with a pitch in Spring Training, fracturing several bones, and is expected to miss the entire season. If that hadn’t happened, there’s an outside shot that he’s close to the top of this list thanks to the opportunity created by Domingo Santana’s injury-riddled first half. But on the bright side, he’s working his way back from the traumatic injury.

Update on #Brewers OF Rymer Liriano, hit in face by pitch in spring training: Still working toward getting back on field for baseball work.

— Tom (@Haudricourt) June 25, 2016

For both Nolin and Liriano, the best way to describe this season is “to be continued.” They’ve both got the talent to contribute to the big-league club, and could do so as soon as 2017.

T-5. Jhan Marinez (.4 WARP)

“Jhan Marinez struggled through another Triple-A season plagued by injury, ineffectiveness, gopher balls and the same lack of command that keeps him from leveraging his upper-90s heat and wipeout slider into a major-league bullpen gig; if he ever learns how to pitch, look out.”

That’s the BP Annual, on Marinez, back in 2014. Since then, he has gone unmentioned twice. But a funny thing happened in those two years–Marinez learned how to pitch. During his prospect days, Marinez was known just as much for his live arm–his heat touches 98 on the radar gun–as his complete inability to control it. He regularly posted walk rates north of 6.0, culminating in a 10.3 walks per nine nightmare at AAA Toledo in 2014 that won him a demotion to AA. There, he cut his walks to 4.5 per nine, and that ratio has continued trickling downward ever since.

Still, the Tampa Bay Rays designated the out-of-options Marinez for assignment in May, and the Brewers acquired him for nothing more than cash as a result. And since then, Marinez has been an undeniably effective part of the bullpen. He’s walking just 3.9 batters per inning, striking out 10.08, and posting a 2.60 ERA. All in all, Marinez has been worth four-tenths of a win–and that’s despite the fact that opponents are hitting .380 off of him on balls in play.

As a prospect, Marinez featured two pitches–a high-octane fastball and an inconsistent slider. Today, both of those pitches are complementary to his sinker, which he throws over half the time:

Clearly, Jhan Marinez learned how to pitch–and the Brewers are the beneficiaries. Marinez also qualifies as a sneaky name to watch for fantasy baseball purposes, too–if Milwaukee goes sell-happy and unloads both Jeremy Jeffress and Will Smith in the next few days, Marinez has classic closer stuff.

T-5. Carlos Torres (.4 WARP)

The Mets signed Torres to a minor-league contract in 2013, and turned the cutter into his primary pitch. That year, he was worth 1.2 wins. In 2014, that number fell to .5. Last year, he was .2 wins worse than replacement level, as his strikeout and hit rates each hit a career high. The Brewers gambled that last year was a fluke, and that he could be a cheap way to make the bullpen a touch better. They’ve been rewarded with .4 wins, Torres’s highest K-rate in the Majors, and a 2.90 ERA. Jeremy Jeffress and Will Smith get all the press, and Jhan Marinez has the electric stuff, but Torres has evolved into the steady, reliable piece who ensures that the former two can be traded and the bullpen will still be pretty good.

This year, Torres has taken his “cutter as the primary pitch” approach to a whole other level. It’s actually interesting to watch the evolution–as time progresses, Torres goes from throwing the cutter as a second pitch, to a first offering with a plurality in the high-40 percent range, to a first offering used just north of 50 percent of the time. This year, Torres’ arsenal has evolved even further, and he’s thrown the cutter over 75 percent of the time since May:

T-5. Chris Carter (.4 WARP)

On August 7, 2012, I made a simple transaction in one of my dynasty leagues. I don’t even remember who I dropped, to tell you the truth–but I called up Chris Carter from my protected minor leaguers. I tell you this because that was four years ago, and Carter is still on that team’s roster–which is quite remarkable in a high-activity 14-team league. Chris Carter threads the needle of a very specific kind of ballplayer: he’s valuable enough to employ, but not valuable enough to sell.

I can’t pretend that I don’t get it. At times, Carter can be a very, very frustrating player to root for. I’d say the most accurate way to summarize his game would be “extreme risk and reward.” When Carter is locked in, he can carry your team–this April, he put up an OPS of .922 to nicely acclimate himself to his new hometown fans. But when he can’t find his stroke, he turns into a black hole in the middle of your lineup–like this July, when he’s struck out 39 percent of the time and his OPS has cratered to .688. He’s a part-time superstar, but he’s not the type who has outrageous platoon splits so you can’t really tell which Carter is coming to the ballpark on any given night.

At ten million a year, or more, Carter would be a disappointment. But the Brewers are paying him between $2.5 and $3 million this year, depending on performance-based incentives. The value of one Win Above Replacement varies somewhere between $5 million and $8 million, depending on who you ask, and Carter put up .4 WARP in his worst season as a full-time regular, 2015. It was a no-lose proposition, especially since the team had jettisoned both ends of their first-base platoon in the prior month.

Having put up .4 WARP to this point in 2016, Carter has already provided value commensurate with his contract. But it’s worth noting that a year ago, Carter swooned hard in July with a slash line of .109/.176/.304–then neutralized that with a .333/.400/.822 September. More than any player on this list, Carter’s position is far from locked in.

Three years ago, John Sickels of MinorLeagueBall made an absurd prediction that Carter would make an All-Star Team and be an MVP candidate. In fairness, he admitted in the title of the piece that it was an absurd prediction and, like most insane predictions, it didn’t come true. But it speaks to the level of raw talent that Carter has, even if he’s incapable of harnessing it for more than a month or two at a time. In his mid-20s, it was easy to see him putting it all together for a whole year–now, I’d say that’s wishful thinking. But for the cost of less than half a win, he’s been a good value at first base for a team in transition. And if you’re going to take a long-shot gamble on someone, you always want to bet on someone with at least one elite skill.

4. Kirk Nieuwenhuis (.7 WARP)

The Brewers have gotten exactly what they expected from Nieuwenhuis: a smattering of home runs and steals, good plate patience, acceptable defense, and an average that flirts with the Mendoza line. Last year, Nieuwenhuis accumulated .6 wins in 117 plate appearances. This year, he’s been worth .7 in 266. He’s not a black hole, but he’s not all that helpful, either. On the bright side: it’s not like Keon Broxton, Ramon Flores, or Shane Peterson would have done anything more useful. By the time the Brewers are a contender, Brett Phillips will be roaming center field, and Nieuwenhuis will be pinch-hitting and making the occasional spot start, which seems like a good eventual role for him.

For the low-low cost of a waiver claim, the Brewers acquired a player who brings some things to the table, and whose biggest weaknesses can be mitigated in an eventual part-time role. He combines power and speed, and he’s posted better FRAA marks while playing the corner positions than in center–even though he’s capable of playing all three positions. And his struggles to make contact have a pretty easy explanation, too:

The 2015 BP Annual noted that “Nieuwenhuis’ approach is basically to attack any fastball in the zone, take all breaking pitches, and occasionally look stupid on changeups he thought were fastballs.” The pitch-type breakdown of his career supports this. Against overmatched rookies still refining their secondary and tertiary offerings, he can rake–and these are the players he should get his at-bats against in the long run. But pitchers who are pitchers, rather than just throwers, effortlessly turn Nieuwenhuis to pudding.

Still, it remains to be said that a player who can put fastballs over the fence, steal bases, and play three outfield positions is a valuable commodity in the big leagues. Nieuwenhuis might not be too impressive as an everyday centerfielder, but he’s still a worthwhile piece that cost nothing to acquire.

3. Aaron Hill

Aaron Wilkerson and Wendell Rijo are hardly a king’s ransom in prospects, but they’re both intriguing young players–and all the Brewers had to do was take on some salary for about three months to make it happen.

For what it matters, before the Red Sox traded for him, Hill was worth 1.8 wins to the 2016 Brewers. The Brewers’ $6.5 million of his salary is roughly what a single win would be worth in free agency. So for those keeping score at home, the deal was a win on four different fronts–Hill provided value beyond what the team paid him, the team got a better minor-league asset by taking on Hill, he provided value to the rebuilding effort beyond even what the WAR column can quantify, and then Hill was successfully flipped for something that will have value beyond this off-season. Making scrappy moves like that is how you turn a bottom-feeder into a dynasty.

2. Junior Guerra

Look, if you were skeptical of Guerra at first, I don’t blame you. But we’re fifteen games in, and Guerra has been worth 2.1 PWARP thus far. That’s half a season’s worth of starts–if you stretch it out to a full 30, the 4.2 PWARP would have been the 19th-best mark in all of baseball last season. Brewers fans calling him an “ace” might not be all that far off–the 19th-best pitcher in baseball would qualify as a “fringe ace,” the type of guy who could be the #1 on a middle-of-the-pack team, or the #2 on a championship contender, or the #3 on the best pitching staff in the league.

I wrote earlier this season about why pitchF/X data shows that Guerra is not a flash in the pan. But since then, two further developments have solidified my belief that Guerra will have a successful career in his thirties.

The first development happened in late June. Guerra took the mound against the Los Angeles Dodgers on the 16th and turned in his worst start of 2016: the Dodgers chased him in the sixth inning with five runs to his name and just four strikeouts under his belt. Since Scott Kazmir was similarly off point, the Brewers won an 8-6 slugfest, but that was owed more to the offensive fireworks of Chris Carter and Jonathan Villar than Guerra’s work. Less than two weeks later, Guerra drew the Dodgers as his assignment once again–and he altered his game plan in the gutsiest way imaginable. He all but cut his best pitch out of rotation. Guerra threw 109 pitches in shutting out the Dodgers over eight masterful innings, and only two of those pitches were splitters. It was a true pitching gem–Guerra’s 18-pitch first inning was the most laborious frame he suffered through, and he carved apart the Dodgers like a hot knife through butter. I have no idea what Guerra saw in the Dodgers during that first game, but I’m beyond impressed with the adjustment he made. Eliminating your “out” pitch against a team that just hit you hard is the kind of crazy tactic that you only use when you’re dead sure you spotted a weakness. That Guerra is capable of this kind of gamesmanship is encouraging, to say the least.

Guerra’s second adjustment came at the All-Star Break. In the first half, he threw a four-seam fastball and slider in addition to his signature splitter. But in the nine days between his last first-half start against St. Louis, and his first second-half start in Pittsburgh, Guerra had the time to add a secret weapon to his arsenal:

Ironically, it was adding a sinker to the mix that inevitably doomed the career of Wily Peralta, but we have to remember here–every ballplayer is different. And thus far, the sinker experiment has worked. Guerra fanned six in six innings against the Pirates in his first start of the half, then outdueled the far-more-expensive Jon Lester in his second try before the bullpen blew the game.

The sinker is an ideal pitch for Guerra to add to his arsenal, as it serves as a perfect blend of his best two incumbent options–the fastball and the splitter. Guerra’s sinker is indistinguishable from his fastball until it drops:

Guerra has a new weapon in his arsenal, but more importantly, he’s shown that he can adapt on the fly at the big-league level. That’s very big, and it’s very good if you’re a Brewers fan.

1. Jonathan Villar

Okay, maybe we’re cheating here by some people’s definitions. Villar wasn’t technically “free”–to pry him from the Astros cost Milwaukee a minor-league pitcher named Cy Sneed. But I would counter that Sneed was not, nor did he ever show any indication that he would turn into, an “asset.” He might not have been “nothing,” but he also held no tangible value.

The 25-year-old Villar hadn’t put up great numbers in three partial seasons with Houston, but his power/speed combination at a position of scarcity made him a valuable asset. Still, with names like Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa entrenched into the lineup, and even Luis Valbuena and Marwin Gonzalez winning favor over Villar, there was no real place for him in Houston. Last year, at this point in time, Villar was playing minor-league ball.

Two pieces of information from before the Villar trade are worth noting. First, he got back to the big leagues when rosters expanded in September and went 8-for-25 with three steals in limited action, while striking out just twice. Second, Brewers’ GM David Stearns was working in Houston’s front office while Villar was playing for Houston’s farm system last year. Publicly-available advanced analytics for minor-league players are still pretty spotty, but there’s no doubt that Houston’s modern-thinking front office is tracking everything on every player in that system. Stearns was one of the few people in baseball with the ability to accurately tell if Villar had made the kinds of structural changes that could turn him into an offensive weapon.

Villar wasted no time making his presence felt in Milwaukee. Though the Brewers pitched Wily Peralta on opening day, and therefore got beaten into a pulp, he took Madison Bumgarner deep in his second at-bat:

And since then, he hasn’t slowed down. Villar’s .297/.379/.437 slash line, paired with a league-leading 36 stolen bases, makes him the prototypical leadoff hitter, and the peripherals back it up, too. Villar’s 2015 and 2016 contact rates are significantly higher than the two years prior. The implication we can take from this is that, sometime during his minor-league exodus, he made some type of mechanical tweak that resulted in not just more contact:

but better quality contact, too:

Detractors will point to Villar’s .400 BABIP as an unsustainable mark. But just how unsustainable is it? Villar’s 57 percent groundball rate should, in theory, be killing his BABIP–only he’s also put up a silly 11.3 percent infield hit rate. Coming up through the minors, Billy Hamilton’s track-star speed was supposed to revolutionize the leadoff position–today, as it turns out, Villar is doing it instead. The Brewers gambled that, at just 25 years old, the rough edges of his game could be refined down, and it’s a gamble that has paid off with a genuine star–Villar’s 3.0 WARP places him snugly between Jonathan Lucroy (3.1) and Ryan Braun (2.9). It goes to show you that, even in the age of advanced analytics, one team’s trash can be another team’s cornerstone.

Very few people if any saw this coming. Before this season, very few people had ever heard of Guerra. That’s because from 2008-2014 Guerra was out of affiliated baseball. Usually, if this happens the player is never heard from again. But, in 2014 the White Sox signed Guerra to a minor league contract and Guerra got a cup of coffee in 2015. The Brewers then claimed the 31-year-old right-hander off waivers. It was David Stearns’s first move as a general manager.

It’ll henceforth become easy to credit Stearns and the Brewers for this pickup. Especially if this performance continues. But, do the Brewers deserve credit for Guerra?

On a simple level, yes the Brewers do deserve credit, but they don’t deserve credit for Guerra. The Brewers deserve credit for their process and Guerra is merely a by-product of that process.

Rebuilding can be a complicated process. A number of people associate rebuilding with the draft or the demise of the current roster.  We so often think of rebuilding as the process of trading the remaining valuable pieces of a bad and flawed team in order to acquire younger talent. The plan is to form the new core of the team through these moves.

But rebuilding can have many layers especially if it’s done properly. One of the advantages of rebuilding is that it affords the team the opportunity to give players a chance. If Guerra was on a winning team, with heavy expectations, he may have never gotten his chance. Fortunately for Guerra, the Brewers had little plan of being competitive this season. This allowed Stearns to make a number of low risk and potentially high rewarding acquisitions. These acquisitions include players such as Ramon Flores, Rymer Liriano, Will Middlebrooks, Jonathan Villar, Chris Carter, and more. (The full list of Brewers acquisitions can be found here).

These are all flawed players. If they weren’t then the Brewers wouldn’t have been able to simply snag them for almost no cost. But, they were flawed players with some potential, which is why the Brewers decided to snag them in the first place.

The Brewers were going to have a lot of open spots in spring training, and throughout the season which allowed them to give these players a longer look. This gave them time to develop and see if they actually have any worthwhile talent. The Brewers, for example aren’t like the current Red Sox, who need players to perform if they want to make the playoffs. The Brewers had the ability to let players struggle and fail at the major league level. That’s a “luxury” contending teams don’t have.

Many of these moves obviously didn’t pan out, but some are already starting to show fruition. Basically, if you throw enough dirt at the wall, some of it is bound to stick.

That’s what the Brewers did. They threw, and threw, and kept throwing dirt, and some of it is sticking. Some of it is sticking better than any of us could have ever imagined.

If the Brewers, for example, didn’t think it would be worthwhile to invest in players such as Jonathan Villar, Chris Carter, Aaron Hill, and Junior Guerra, then those players would have never been found. These players are now all producing good value at the major league level, and if nothing else, they can become good trade pieces for this coming trade deadline, or if the Brewers are high enough on them, they could become part of the rebuilding core. These are the type of moves that speed up the rebuild.

The only person who truly deserves credit for Junior Guerra is Junior Guerra. You don’t go from washed up, out of the league nobody to a dominant major league pitcher by being dogmatic. Guerra had to work hard to get where he is today. Sure, there might have been a scout that was high on him, but to think that he would become one of the more productive pitchers in baseball, for any stretch, would have been a stretch.

At the end of the day, Guerra deserves all the credit in the world for his performance. The Brewers deserve credit for having the mindset that would allow Guerra to have an opportunity.

The club decided this past week that they had seen enough of Broxton in the early going after he had gone hitless in his first 16 at-bats while striking out 11 times. To replace him, Slingin’ David Stearns purchased the contract of spring non-roster invitee Alex Presley from AAA. Stearns is familiar with the left-handed swinging Presley from his days in Houston, and the outfielder was off to a fine start with the Sky Sox. Presley is already 30, though, and owns just a .260/.299/.394 batting line in 330 career big league games; not at all someone who provides much upside or is likely to be with the team for the long-term; not to mention the fact that now all three center field options bat left-handed.

In selecting Presley the Brewers passed over a much more obvious candidate to take reps in center field in Michael Reed. The club’s fifth round pick back in 2011 was already on the 40 man roster (where Presley needed to be added after Zack Jones was shifted to the 60-day DL), he bats right-handed, and the homegrown prospect appears ready for an extended big-league trial.

BP ranked the 23 year old was ranked as Milwaukee’s 19th-best prospect coming into this season. Reed’s most outstanding tool is his eye-popping on base ability, as evidenced by his career .377 OBP and 14% walk rate in six minor league seasons. He’s a threat on the basepaths as well, having swiped at least 25 bags in each of the last three seasons, and already with five steals to his credit through 10 games in Colorado Springs.

Reed’s not without his warts, of course. He’s had a bit of a problem with strikeouts coming up through the farm system, though he has been able to at least cut his K rate down to around the 19-20 percent range in recent seasons. This will likely result in middling batting averages for Reed at the big league level, though his high walk total helps mitigate that.

Reed doesn’t offer much power, either, with just 12 home runs to his career ledger. He’s got an ISO of just .027 so far in Colorado Springs this season, though his career mark of .114 is a bit more palatable. He made some strides in that area last season, slugging a career-best 45 extra base hits between AA and AAA last season while hitting .269/.371/.410.

There’s also the matter of defense. Reed has only appeared in center field 77 time over six seasons and just once so far in 2016. However this may have more to do with the fact that he was often a teammate of the defensively gifted Tyrone Taylor than anything else. Reed has above-average speed and a 60 grade arm that plays well in right, so he should certainly have the tools to play a capable center field at the big league level.

I've been arguing for reed for a while now. He's their best option for CF. https://t.co/OjleneotQa

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) April 19, 2016

Reed is off to an excellent .378/.452/.405 start with five steals in 10 games for the Sky Sox so far this season. While some think that his ceiling will ultimately be that of a fourth outfielder due to his lack of power, there’s no better time to see if fringy prospects can grab a bigger role than projected than in year one of a rebuild.

Of the current slate center field options, it’s arguable that Reed possesses the highest potential upside, minus perhaps the injured Rymer Liriano (who at this point remains without a timetable for his return from facial fractures). Reed should therefore get a legitimate audition to cement his role in The Show before the next crop of outfielder prospects, lead by Brett Phillips, starts pushing for big league playing time. We’ll most definitely be seeing Reed in Milwaukee this season, but the Brewers should give him a his chance sooner rather than later.

For the most part, we don’t often think of baseball as a contact sport, but as my colleague Jack Moore wrote yesterday, it doesn’t mean there aren’t risks associated with the game.

Being hit in the face with a 90 mph fastball is definitely one of the games biggest risks. Not only do hitters have little time to react, but they aren’t wearing a cage in front of their face, and do to the events rarity, players aren’t constantly looking out for a pitch that might hit them in the face. It’s hard enough to hit a baseball, especially nowadays when pitchers are throwing gaze and all have some kind of breaking pitch. This makes it intuitively even more difficult for hitters to get out of the way.

Thus far, we only know that Liriano suffered multiple fractures to the head. This is one of the possible consequences from being struck by one of these pitches. The other is the concussion.

Concussions in baseball are definitely not as rampant as football or hockey, but they still happen and they can still be devastating injuries. Just look at Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer. Both players were stars and former league MVP’s, but their careers were hampered by concussions.

In statistics causality is a very hard thing to find. But, if a player gets struck in the face by a baseball and then suffers a concussion, then we have a pretty good idea of the cause and effect. Finding the causes of concussions can yield a few incites. It can tell us where and when players are at the most risk. By knowing this we can then start coming up with plans and stipulations to reduce the chances of a player getting a concussion from a certain event.

In order to find the cause of concussions, I used my concussions database, which I created back in my Banished to the Pen days. In that article, I explained my methodology as to how I gathered the data. Again to find the cause of the concussion I looked at baseball prospectus profile pages (which are no longer being updated) and most importantly I looked through Rotoworld player news. At Rotoworld, they detail how the injury occurs which allows me to link the injury type to the cause. This is a very, very manual process and takes up a lot of time, as I have to find, in the player’s profile page, the specific date as to when the injury occurred. Sometimes, though, the information simply isn’t there, so I don’t have the cause of injury for every player in my database. In total, my database has 259 total concussions and dates back to 1908. Unfortunately, only 34 of those are before 2000. Since 2000, the data is much more accessible through sites such as Pro Sports Transactions (my primary source) and other helpful sites. Therefore, because the data is so scarce for the years before 2000 I’m only including information from 2000-2015 in my analysis, leaving me with only 203 values to work with.

Back in November, I found that foul balls to the mask were the biggest cause for catcher concussions, and it wasn’t even close. The data, though, was only looking at catchers. Looking at all players, getting hit by a pitch slightly edges out foul tips to the mask.

With that said, both data points are awfully close to each other and far outweigh any other cause for concussions. It’s hard to think of a way in which MLB can reduce players from getting hit in the face. Maybe, more players should wear the Jason Heyward protective face guard. Heyward has continued to where the head gear and it doesn’t seem as though it’s affected his performance. Making that a rule, however, would probably result in a lot of pushback from players, who think it may affect their performance. This is reasonable, therefore, I think more awareness of the risks of concussions and the probability of the injury happening should be provided for the players, but whether they want to actually where the face guard should be up to them.

I think the same principle should be put in place for the pitcher’s protective caps. “Batted Balls”, are balls hit by the hitter, who strike the pitcher in the head. They are the third biggest cause of concussions. Last year’s protective headgear wasn’t very popular. It was quite large and looked ridiculous. Major League Baseball the MLB Players Association, is now introducing a new protective headgear, which 20 big league pitchers are trying out this spring training, according to this article, “Pitchers to debut new protective headwear in spring training”, by William Weinbaum.

“The new headgear doesn’t provide facial protection, as the stated objective was preventing life-threatening injuries considered most likely to occur as Brandon McCarthy’s Sept. 5, 2012, episode did when he was hit on the side of the head.” With that said, Alex Cobb who was struck in the head gave it his endorsement, “It felt great and looks good, similar to a helmet with the top cut off”.

Dan Jennings of the Miami Marlins said in the same article, “I don’t think many guys will wear anything unless it is mandatory”.

Comebackers can at times be even more devastating than a hitter getting hit in the head by a pitch.

While hitters suffer more concussions from a hit by pitch, pitchers who get hit by comebackers miss more days. Batted balls have caused players to miss the second most amount of time due to concussions. The only reason foul balls are ahead of batted balls is because they occur way more often. On average “Batted Balls” cause pitchers to miss 39 days while catchers hit with foul balls miss 24.2 days and getting hit by pitches only cause players to miss 12.8 days.

This information also signals that players with a more aggressive play style are more likely to suffer concussions. This makes sense as diving for baseballs and running into walls aren’t exactly safe plays, and are both big causes of concussions. If a player suffered a lot of concussions, it’s probably best for him to play more conservatively.

At third in the “days missed” graph, is symptoms. I put players in this category when the player had come back to action but then had to be removed again because of lingering concussion symptoms. This is essentially, teams who throw players back too early. The fact that it’s caused the third most days missed is a huge black mark on teams handling of concussions. It shows that they either didn’t properly evaluate how bad the concussion was, didn’t properly diagnose the concussion, sent the player back onto the field even though he had a concussion, OR sent the player back into the game even though they hadn’t done any tests.

This spring training, Johnny Cueto was hit with a line drive in the head, and then stayed in to finish the game. This shouldn’t happen EVEN in a regular season OR playoff games. The worst part is this statement by Bruce Bochy “‘He was treated for a contusion,’ Giants manager Bruce Bochy said after Monday’s game. ‘We are going to monitor him tonight and tomorrow for any concussion symptoms.’”

Basically, the Giants let Cueto finish the game, even though they didn’t know for sure whether or not he suffered a concussion. This is extremely careless behavior and reoccurring symptoms have caused players to miss 522 days because they were put back into the game before they were fully healed, since 2000. Whether Cueto suffered a concussion or not is irrelevant. The problem was with the process and clearly the train of thought.

Major League Baseball has also implemented a new rule called Rule 6.01(j) which will require runners to make a “bona fide” attempt to reach second base. Rule 6.01 preventing collisions at home plate, if the catcher isn’t blocking the plate, has done wonders for concussions from collisions at home plate. Since 2012, I have not been able to find a single incident where a player suffered a concussion from a home plate collision. Collisions at second base are the biggest cause for concussions on the base paths. Reducing these will once again make players safer, and will allow us to enjoy watching the best players play the game we love. Only time will tell whether this rule will have the same effect as Rule 6.01, but it’s a good sign that baseball has put a rule in place to further protect their players.

There is still room to grow in terms of concussion prevention. With that said, it’s good to see baseball react being more open to change even if that change is unconventional, in order to make players safer. Unfortunately, though, concussions will never be completely out of the game, but the better we can isolate where and how these concussions are happening the better we can start trying to find solutions to reduce the injury.

Is Ryan Braun headed back to left field? https://t.co/ui0Ii9HEZr pic.twitter.com/0VyQerfLeJ

— Journal Sentinel (@journalsentinel) February 15, 2016

The move would make sense on two fronts. First off, there’s the fact that Domingo Santana — the team’s projected starting center fielder prior to the trade — came through the minor leagues as a right fielder, and his arm fits that position far better. On top of that, Ryan Braun is a very good left fielder and a pretty mediocre right fielder.

@1057FMTheFan per @fangraphs, Braun has 26 Defensive Runs Saved in 6 seasons in LF and -8 runs saved in 2 seasons in RF. A no brainer.

— Kyle L. (@brewerfan28) February 16, 2016

These two shifts leave the middle of the outfield uncovered, but thanks to a hyper-productive offseason, the Brewers are not hurting for options when it comes to the final starting job. Counting the previously-mentioned Santana, there are a total of five players reporting to camp who could see the lion’s share of playing centerfield. Their games all look different and the paths they all took to get here are just as variable, but in the end, one of them will be Milwaukee’s new starting center fielder.

(Unless otherwise noted, I used the BP Similarity Index — found on each Player Card — for the comparisons.)

Alex Presley – The Longshot Journeyman

How he was acquired: The Brewers signed him to a minor-league deal in December. For him to win the job, he basically has to outplay everybody else by a notable margin this spring. There’s no room for error.

What he did last year: The former Pirates’ left fielder served as organizational depth for the Astros, making a 3-for-12 cameo for the big-league club in July. Over the Triple-A season, he slashed .292/.345/.367 with fifteen stolen bases. Presley’s career is trending in the wrong direction, and he’s not on the side of thirty years old where players usually rebound.

Strengths: Presley is the only player in this discussion with more than 1,000 Major League at-bats to his name. Five years ago, he came within two points of hitting .300 for the year. Uhh, he won’t hit too many home runs, but when he does, his name lends itself to an underrated “Elvis has left the building!” pun. I’m fully aware that I’m reaching like crazy here, thank you.

Weaknesses: Presley’s power and speed are minimal. You could call his contact “plus,” but you wouldn’t really mean it. It’s just that he’s such a hard worker, a nice guy, he’s got no real plus tools, and you wanted to be polite. Defensively, the writing is on the wall. Presley has cost his teams more than ten runs over the years. He can only hit lefties, and most pitchers are righties. One-win Triple-A players past the growth ages don’t all of a sudden turn into serviceable major leaguers. His walk-up music isn’t “Jailhouse Rock.”

Optimistic Major-League Comparison: Presley’s lefty-lambasting ways and featherweight tools are reminiscent of a slower Craig Gentry, or a less dynamic Rajai Davis. With his power/speed contribution probably limited to 10/10 in optimal circumstances, he’s sort of like Chris Denorfia with the opposite platoon split. Look, Presley is thirty years old and just spent a full season blending in at the Triple-A level. If he makes any impact at the major-league level whatsoever, it’ll be a bonus for the team.

Outlook: Once upon a time, Presley stole Pittsburgh’s left-field job once upon a time through a combination of luck, contact hitting, and the overall crumminess of Jose Tabata. Those days are behind him, but Presley is a steady piece of organizational depth who can hold down the fort for a week or two without humiliating the team if desperation strikes.

Shane Peterson – The Discarded Incumbent

How he was acquired: The Brewers plucked Peterson off of waivers from the Cubs in  December of 2014, less than a month after the Cubs claimed him from the Oakland A’s. That year-plus in the organization makes him the most tenured option for the centerfield job by a wide margin.

What he did last year: Peterson’s rookie year wasn’t a disaster. He slashed .259/.324/.353 in 201 at-bats — certainly not exciting numbers, but no worse than replacement level. Defensively it was the same story; he saved approximately one run per month in the field. The whole package was worth a fifth of a win, total. Cue the Monty-Python-style sarcastic cheering. It’s tough to get excited about such a beige ballplayer, but I’ve got a trick: try to remember the dark days of “Alex Sanchez, Starting CF/Leadoff Hitter.” Now, before you reflexively reach for the liquor bottle, think about Peterson again. He’s still not exciting, but don’t you like him a lot more?

Strengths: He has no real weaknesses.

Weaknesses: He has no real strengths.

Optimistic Major- League Comparison: Peterson has a BP Similarity Score of 94 relative to former Red Sox outfielder Daniel Nava. Like Peterson, Nava was a non-prospect who finally made the big leagues at age 27. Like Peterson, Nava was an accomplished minor-league hitter whose skills always said “bench bat” or “role player,” rather than “star.” But the 2013 World Champion Sox team would never have won that hardware without a monster .303/.385/.445 season out of Nava, who collected over 400 at-bats and seamlessly filled short-term vacancies at all three outfield spots, plus first base and designated hitter, as the need arose throughout the year. Between 2013 and 2014, he was worth a total of five wins. That’s more than Ryan Braun’s value over the 2014-15 stretch.

Outlook: Being the incumbent in the race usually gives you an advantage. This time, that’s not the case. Peterson was designated for assignment over the winter and, if all goes according to plan, he’s headed back to Triple-A until necessity arises. It’s easy to look at Peterson’s performance down the stretch of 2015 and lament the fact that he probably didn’t deserve to lose his job, but the reality is, “starting centerfielder” was never really his job in the first place. Peterson was a backup plan forced into placeholder duty and, admirable though his 2015 performance may have been, he’s still nothing more than that. With a successful spring and either a stumble or an injury from one of the other candidates, Peterson could very well find himself back in a Milwaukee uniform. But he’s just as likely to spend his year in Colorado Springs.

Rymer Liriano – The Potential Post-Hype Steal

How he was acquired: On January 28, Milwaukee sent minor-league reliever Trevor Seidelberger to the San Diego Padres in exchange for Liriano. At this point in time, Seidelberger is the definition of a non-entity. He’s a 23-year-old bullpen prospect who struggled in his first exposure to Double-A hitters last year. Liriano, on the other hand, is a two-time former BP Top-100 Prospect who has struggled with injuries and seen the Padres pile a roadblock in front of him on the organizational depth chart over the past several years.

What he did last year: He straight-up owned Triple-A pitching. Liriano’s .383 on-base percentage screams “top of the order,” and his 18-steal, 14-homer combination makes him an ideal new-school two-hitter for the Stearns regime. He was one of the toughest outs in professional baseball, yet the Padres were unable to carve out even a single major-league at-bat for Liriano. When he put up bad numbers in the Dominican Winter League and the Padres signed Alexei Ramirez, he was unceremoniously designated for assignment. In swept the Brewers, eager to pick him up at a steep discount.

Strengths: Liriano’s speed has been considered his most valuable asset since he stole 65 bases at Class-A Fort Wayne in 2011. He’s never projected as a slugger, but he’s always been the type of guy whose quick swing and aggressive approach lead to hard contact and a better than expected power profile. Don’t be fooled by that “aggressive,” though. Liriano has an attacking swing but he’s a master at working the count, and he walked at a clip north of 11 percent the past two years at Triple-A. Defensively, he can cover all three outfield positions competently.

Weaknesses: A long swing paired with a patient approach usually leads to a ton of strikeouts, and Liriano is no exception. His whiff rates still more than doubled his walk rates at Triple-A these past two seasons, and at the major-league level in 2014 he struck out almost a third of the time. In the field, Liriano is best deployed as a right fielder, not a center fielder. Overall, that’s not a knock, but in the context of “who will play center field for the Brewers this season,” it totally is.

Optimistic Major-League Comparison: Liriano matches up favorably with Tampa outfielder Steven Souza, a player in relation to whom he owns a 90 Similarity Index score. Both are dynamic speed/power threats who can play anywhere in the outfield, both have missed developmental time due to injury, and both strike out too much to ever post a decent batting average. Last offseason, Souza was traded into a situation where he had the opportunity to win playing time. This offseason, Liriano followed suit. Souza’s 2015 season saw him post nearly a full win above replacement level in spite of a .225 batting average and slightly below-replacement defensive contribution. Liriano has the skill set to do the exact same thing this year, and keep getting better.

Outlook: Smart engineers build with redundancies, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer with each move that David Stearns is engineering an exciting baseball team. It’s easy to look at the Liriano acquisition and think “Why? This guy has the exact same profile as Domingo Santana!” And while that’s 100 percent true, it’s also the answer to the “why.” In exchange for the most marginal of pitching prospects, the Brewers were able to double the odds that they develop an impact outfield talent while slashing the odds that nobody works out for that role. And if both players live up to their potential, well, that’s a great problem for a team to have.

Domingo Santana – The Reassigned(?) One-Time Favorite

How he was acquired: Santana was the most big-league ready piece acquired at the deadline last year for Carlos Gomez. After the trade, he provided over half the value that Gomez did (0.5 WARP to 0.9 WARP).

What he did last year: For one thing, he proved he was done with the minor leagues. Between Fresno and Colorado Springs, Santana slashed .333/.426/.573 with 18 home runs in just 354 at-bats at the Triple-A level. When the Brewers kept him in Triple-A immediately following the trade, he hit .380 over the next twenty games, forcing a promotion. Once in the big leagues, Santana flashed the power that makes him such an exciting young player. He hit six home runs in 121 at-bats for the Brewers, but he was less than stellar in the field and prone to inconsistency. His Dominican League stat line — no home runs in 83 at-bats, and a putrid .181/.244/.217 slash — serves as a reminder that Santana is an exciting, but volatile, young player.

Strengths: Santana is a big dude — 6-foot-5, 225 pounds — and he gets his whole profile into his swing. So, when he makes contact, he absolutely tattoos the ball.

This shows itself both in his isolated power numbers and, additionally, in a higher-than-average expected BABIP. Coming up, he regularly posted BABIP marks in the upper .300s or .400s. After six years, it’s hard to call that a fluke. In the field, Santana’s Howitzer of an arm is a perfect fit for right field, but he’s big and quick enough to reasonably imitate a centerfielder when the need arises, too.

Weaknesses: Domingo’s high-BABIP tendencies would be so much cooler if they weren’t caused by a swing that can be practically compared to a wind tunnel. His minor-league track record suggested the 33 percent whiff rate that Santana posted as a rookie in 2015 was quite likely, and at this point to suggest that he’ll completely overcome the swing-and-miss in his game is nothing but wishful thinking. You can also duplicate the Liriano notes on being a better right fielder. They’re just as applicable for Santana.

Optimistic Major-League Comparison: I’ve always thought of Santana as a poor man’s George Springer — that the Astros traded away Santana because they already had Springer didn’t help this — but the BP Similarity Index doesn’t quite agree with me. Not only is Santana’s overall score of 74 considerably lower than usual, suggesting that he’s a far more one-of-a-kind player than I had anticipated, his top comparison by a four-point margin is San Diego outfielder Wil Myers. If that’s not the Baseball Gods sending a coded “don’t play this guy in centerfield” message, I don’t know what is.

Outlook: The Brewers have said they will not be using Santana in center this year, and that was even before the Davis trade. In light of the move, that is all but a certainty. He has the most professional experience, by far, in right field, and he fits that position best. But Rymer Liriano is also a rightfielder who can sort of play center, and Ramon Flores is considered a “tweener” precisely because he has a centerfielder’s offensive profile but can’t play the position. If either of them breaks through and emerges as the third-best outfielder on the roster, playing Santana in center just might make an awkward sort of sense once again. Still, he’s likely a right fielder for good now.

Keon Broxton – The Untapped Tools

How he was acquired: Many of us loved Jason Rogers here at BP Milwaukee, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t excited by the trade that sent him to Pittsburgh. Back on December 17th, the free-agent market was flooded with first basemen so that the Pirates saw fit to give up Broxton and pitching prospect Trey Supak was, and remains, curious to say the least. Two weeks later, the Pirates signed John Jaso for a mere $4 million a year. He mashes righties, just like Rogers, only he’s better at it and has been at it for longer. Maybe the Pirates were just sending Milwaukee a gift because they knew it was my birthday that day. Thanks, guys, you shouldn’t have!

(No, for real. You shouldn’t have.)

What he did last year: For the second-straight year, Broxton looked like a ballplayer again. His mediocre 2013 season bumped him off of the prospect landscape and inspired Arizona to dump him to the Pirates for cash considerations, but since then he’s posted respective 15-25 and 10-40 seasons in the minors. He’s also turned things around defensively, saving his team runs in each of the past two seasons. He had one bad year at Double-A versus one and a half good ones, plus a highly competent stretch for Triple-A Indianapolis this past season. The former third-round pick even got himself a September cup of coffee, and the Pirates used him down the stretch as a pinch runner and defensive replacement.

Strengths: Broxton broke out and stole 40 bases across the top-three levels of professional baseball in 2015, and he’s got enough power to hit double-digit totals in home runs most seasons. Defensively, he was worth nearly seven runs in 2015 while playing all three positions. Broxton is a veritable four-tool player, and his walk rate has reached the double digits each of the past two seasons to boot. I love guys who can walk and steal bases; that’s a skill combination which can mitigate even the gnarliest of slumps.

Weaknesses: Broxton’s bats are sick with an advanced case of Pedro Cerrano’s Disease. They cannot hit the curveball. Straight ball, they hit it very much. Curveball, bats are afraid. Unfortunately, Broxton is clearly not offering appropriate sacrifices to Jobu — throughout his minor-league career, Keon has never been able to produce a whiff rate better than 25 percent. Those problems are only going to be magnified against the best pitchers on the planet. With only two major-league at-bats to his name — one strikeout — it’s impossible to say that Broxton’s contact issues will not condemn him to the life of “Triple-A Superstar Who Gets Eaten Alive By Top-Flight Pitching.” I hope Milwaukee’s spring training clubhouse has plenty of rum.

Optimistic Major-League Comparison: Yipes. Suffice to say that the Similarity Index does not have kind opinions on the Major League futures of toolsy, contact-averse outfielders. His most highly-rated comparison is a career minor leaguer named Melky Mesa who got 15 at-bats for the Yankees between 2012 and 2013. The top results are a lot of guys with careers like that, and a lot of guys who probably would have had careers like that save for the sorry state of the organization employing them. If you’re arguing in favor of Broxton as a career minor leaguer, this is where you nod smugly. Current San Francisco fifth outfielder Justin Maxwell is next up after Mesa — though it should be noted that Broxton is faster and more patient, while Maxwell has more power. While the algorithm doesn’t point in that direction, I liken Broxton to a poor man’s Milwaukee-era Scott Podsednik. Cast off by multiple other teams, double-digit homers, an absurd amount of steals … only with a batting average way closer to the Mendoza line. For what it’s worth, Maxwell posted a half-time 2.3-win season in 2012 despite hitting .229. As frustrating as his strikeouts will be, he can deliver value working around them.

Outlook: Folks, I want you to properly prepare yourselves. Should he win the center field job, Keon Broxton is going to be a goddamn roller coaster. He’s going to turn doubles into outs, and he’s going to turn walks into doubles. He’s going to remind everybody why, once upon a time, Kevin Goldstein wrote that Broxton “had the best tools in the Midwest League after Mike Trout.” He’s going to face pitchers who rely on their fastball and turn them into burger. Then, he’s going to run into a junkballer and go 0-5 with five ugly strikeouts. He’ll probably have an oh-fer-the-week performance at one point or another. The odds that he hits below .200 for a full season are chillingly short. Just relax, you have to take the good with the bad when it comes to Broxton. The best situation for him might be as a fourth or fifth outfielder off the bench. His defensive versatility and skill can facilitate late double switches, his wheels make him a dangerous pinch runner, and his bat can be maximized by using him as a pinch hitter against hard-throwing relievers.

Kirk Nieuwenhuis – The Low-Key Competent Big-Leaguer

How he was acquired: The New York Mets waived him two days before Christmas, effectively giving up on him for the second time in the 2015 calendar year. How does that happen? He was designated for assignment by the Mets in May, and they sold him to the Angels rather than waive him. Less than a month later, the Angels waived him — he hit .136 in Anaheim — and he was claimed by… you guessed it, the Mets. Who, of course, decided to give him walking papers for Christmas. Since the Brewers had no clear-cut center fielder and an open spot on the 40-man roster, it was a match made in heaven. The whole thing is eerily reminiscent of the events that led to Santa’s Little Helper joining the Simpson family.

What he did last year: He added half a win to his team’s chances, in about half as many plate appearances as Shane Peterson was given. This is a guy who was waived by two different teams. Ladies and gentlemen, your 2015 Milwaukee Brewers!

If you took a flier on Nieuwenhuis in a DraftKings lineup on July 12th, you probably won hundreds of dollars for your foresight.

That breakout performance spearheaded a pretty nice month of July for Nieuwenhuis, who posted a 1.038 OPS as he ascended from “double waiver wire retread” to “starting center fielder, more or less” in the wake of a concurrent slump from Juan Lagares. But even after two teams gave up on him and he still bounced back, the guy still couldn’t catch a break. The Mets traded for Yoenis Cespedes, Formula Juan got the knocks out of his motor, and Nieuwenhuis wouldn’t start another game until the last weekend of the season. During the month of August, the Mets rewarded Nieuwenhuis for his big July by shackling him to the bench for an entire month.

Strengths: Nieuwenhuis has been a steady defender and a streaky hitter throughout parts of four big-league seasons. That July stretch was a great example of how, when he’s on his game, Kirk can play like a borderline star. His defense is always good; Nieuwenhuis has been a net positive in the field to every team he’s played for at every level since the 2010 season, and he can play all three positions well. When he gets his bat going, he can hit for power and average, and he looks like the complete package. And I mean that literally, as well.

Weaknesses: Eventually, Dr. Jekyll turns into Mr. Hyde, and you remember why Nieuwenhuis has yet to hold onto a starting job for more than a month or two here and there. Usually, this transformation can be triggered by something as simple as facing a left-handed pitcher. Nieuwenhuis is a career .149 hitter against southpaws. And when he cools, Nieuwenhuis turns into a frozen offensive vortex. In 2013, he slashed just .189/.278/.337, so it’s a recorded fact that his slumps can last for an entire season or more.

Optimistic Major-League Comparison: Nieuwenhuis’ first page of Similarity Index comparisons are a depressing hodgepodge of Quad-A-type outfielders and benchwarmers, but one name stands out among them — Curtis Granderson, the former Silver Slugger who slid over to take his place in centerfield following the Cespedes acquisition. Maybe the Similarity Index knows about a body-snatching incident that the general public is still in the dark on? Nevertheless, Nieuwenhuis would need to develop into a little more powerful, and a lot more consistent, player in order to hit that plateau. But considering Granderson costs $15 million a year, while Nieuwenhuis was picked off of waivers, the Brewers will surely take those odds and smile if he turns into even 75 percent of the player Granderson is.

Outlook: Quick, what does the following stat line look like to you? 693 plate appearances, 617 at-bats, 17 home runs, 12 stolen bases, four defensive runs saved, a .232/.306/.389 slash line, and 2.4 wins above replacement? If you answered “a full season from a sneaky-good starting centerfielder,” you’re absolutely correct. If you answered “Kirk Nieuwenhuis’ career stat line in the Major Leagues,” you are also correct. It’s easy to assume that he’s a failure of a ballplayer because of his extensive experience with the waiver claims process, but the truth is, he never got a full shot to show what he can do. Nieuwenhuis is probably the favorite to win the job coming into Spring Training, and if that happens, we already know that he’s got the skills to excel.

Chris Carter, Garin Cecchini, and Rymer Liriano all typify of this type of move. And if that were the whole list, we could comfortably call this a positive offseason. However, it is not, and that is mostly a good thing; accumulating assets and options increases on-field flexibility and front-office possibilities. However, when so many of the players at similar positions are at similar levels, problems can arise.

We have seen forms of this story play out over and over again. Fans often worry about their team’s top prospect in High-A being blocked by someone in Double-A, and that is almost always ultimately a moot point. By the time those two players reach the same level (usually the major leagues), one—or both—has flamed out or been forced to switch positions and move down the defensive spectrum. Every so often, though, specific circumstances means that the story has some viability.

Such an example was a possibility this summer, when Houston had the second and fifth picks in the draft, and college shortstops Dansby Swanson and Alex Bregman were both possibilities. There was some discussion of what the Astros would do with both of them because, as top five picks who projected as shortstops, each would likely be destined for the same development track. In this situation, one could reasonably argue that consciously deciding to only take one of those two would make sense.

And there are some similarities between that choice that Houston had to be prepared to make and the ones that David Stearns will be facing come the end of spring training. It is obviously not the same—for one, choosing between Garin Cecchini and Will Middlebrooks is not quite the same as Swanson and Bregman—but the game theory is similar, and it is why more moves coming soon would make sense.

A non-exhaustive list of the players the Brewers have acquired that are currently fringe big-leaguers or Triple-A players is as follows: Rymer Liriano, Chris Carter, Eric Young Jr, Kirk Nieuwenheis, Alex Presley, Will Middlebrooks, Garin Cecchini, Keon Broxton, Domingo Santana (although he was brought in by the previous regime).

Some players of this caliber, such as Young and Nieuwenheis from the above list, are stopgaps. They will be swapped between organizations depending on which bottom-feeder needs a body to man an outfield spot during an irrelevant game. But Liriano and Santana will be in direct competition with each other, as will Cecchini and Middlebrooks, and the simple fact is that there are not enough proper at-bats to go around for all these players.

Liriano and Santana both require major-league playing time at this stage of their development. Santana was mildly impressive in a short stint in the big leagues in 2015 (.766 OPS), but Liriano was a top-50 prospect (39 in 2013) not too long ago. Both still obviously require development and improvement, but neither has that much left to prove in the minor leagues. Both finished in the top 20 in OPS in the PCL last year, and more time in the minors does not appear as if it would provide the necessary challenges for legitimate improvement and development.

The problem, though, is that both cannot play. Both are corner outfielders, and Ryan Braun will get one of the corners as long as he is healthy, which means only one (at most, as Khris Davis remains on the roster) can get the consistent playing time he will crave. This means that, realistically and unfortunately, the Brewers can only develop one at a time.

A similar dilemma will emerge between Middlebrooks and Cecchini. Both are minor league performers with pedigrees (Middlebrooks was 55 in 2012 and Cecchini was 51 in 2014, but only one can play at a time. Platooning them would be a good way to get the most immediate value out of them, but it would come at the long-term cost of their abilities to hit same-side pitching. There simply are not enough at bats to go around if the plan is to allow the two to develop.

The obvious follow-up question is to ask for a solution, and I don’t really have one. The easy answer is simply to stash one of each group in the minors and hope for a breakout to make the decision easier, but such a breakout is unlikely to happen. They are all flawed players, so simply hoping for the best seems like a poor development plan. Additionally, as was mentioned above, each has already proven he can hit minor-league pitching, so big-league playing time is what is required.

Additionally, the Brewers won’t really have sufficient time to make a judgment on these players. Spring training is a strange environment to judge performances, and Stearns has been too forward-thinking and too smart to truly evaluate players based on a month’s worth of skewed games in Arizona.

There isn’t really a great solution here, except to say that without more moves to free up roster space, the Brewers are unlikely to get full value out of all of their new additions. The “loser” of the position battles in spring training will either be sent to the minors and lose valuable development time or simply be cut loose at the end of March and the Brewers will have nothing to show for their shrewd gamble. None of this is to say that these moves were a mistake; in a vacuum, each was smart and calculated. However, the current state of the Brewers’ major-league roster simply does not allow for the organization to give each of those players a shot at the most challenging level.

Let’s roll it and pick up some talking points to share with the folks around you while you wait in line for your Ryan Braun autograph:

FanGraphs || Tanking: Does MLB Really Have a Problem? (Jan. 25, 2016)

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in the past week or so over the concept of “tanking” in baseball, particularly in the National League, which is projected to have the six worst teams in the majors, including the Milwaukee Brewers. David Cameron (@DCameronFG) dispels the notion, mostly based on the fact that the practice isn’t likely to provide much payoff. While teams like Milwaukee, Colorado and San Diego have underwhelming rosters, they’re certainly not actively trying to lose, as each has signed free agents to bolster their 2016 rosters in addition to their rebuilding efforts. Tanking in the NBA works because an elite rookie can come in and make an impact right away, and a single player can alter the fortunes of a franchise. Neither of those is true in Major League Baseball.

The Hardball Times || The Art of the Tank (Jan. 26, 2016)

But dadgumit, if you’re going to tank, you may as well do it right. The Astros pulled off what was likely the first and only truly successful “tank” in Major League Baseball. They’re coming out of a period in which they sold off every conceivable asset — aside from a few players, such as Jose Altuve — in order to stockpile assets and gain higher draft picks to make the postseason in 2015. Chris Gigley (@cgigley) takes us through the steps to a proper Astros-style rebuild, which starts with really going for it wholesale and being honest, both with yourself and with your fans.

Beyond the Box Score || The rise and fall of catcher framing (Jan 27, 2016)

Henry Druschel (@henrydruschel) digs into some of the numbers regarding pitch framing, which have received a significant upgrade very recently from the folks at the Baseball Prospectus main site. Druschel notes that after a spike in the relative importance of framing in the early part of the decade, the gap between the best and worst framers has shrunk, and the rate at which it’s shrinking is growing. Michael Bradburn covered the steady decline of Jonathan Lucroy’s pitch framing in recent years, which has plummeted from otherworldly to just league average. As teams begin to understand the true impact pitch framing has — and as our ability to understand and quantify it grows — it may serve to nullify its effects for the elite framers as the rest of the league catches up.

FanGraphs || Projecting the DFA’d Rymer Liriano (Jan. 25, 2016)

Unbeknownst to them, FanGraphs was devoting a big chunk their coverage to the Brewers on Monday. Three days before the Brewers swung a trade for outfielder Rymer Liriano, the recently-DFA’d-former-Top-100 prospect from San Diego, Chris Mitchell (@_chris_mitchell) took a crack at projecting him out with his KATOH system. While it projects just 1.9 fWAR over the next six years, Mitchell leans on Dan Farnsworth to get another perspective, and he provided a glowing report. While Liriano’s contact issues are a red flag, it appears that the Brewers have acquired, at worst, a solid fourth outfielder with a chance to become something more.

The Sports Post || Chris Capuano, Milwaukee, and a familiar feeling (Jan. 27, 2016)

The Brewers took us on a trip down memory lane this week, bringing back former fan-favorite Chris Capuano, now 37 years old, on a minor-league deal. Shaun Ranft (@Shaun_TSP) followed and found himself back in the early part of the century and in the middle of the last major rebuilding phase Milwaukee undertook. Cappy is back and while he may be a long shot for the major-league rotation, he represents a bit of nostalgia and, therefore, looks like an astute pickup for struggling team who will need to give its fans something to cheer about.