One of the longest held beliefs of the Sabermetric community is that the vast majority of major league managers are not using the assets they have in their bullpen to the greatest possible effectiveness. The major argument is that most teams use their best reliever as a "closer" save specialist, meaning they will be used to for 3 outs with a lead of 3 or fewer runs for the majority of their appearances. Some may get in for 4 or 5 outs from time to time and most will be used in "non-save" situations occasionally when they have been idle for a while and need to stay sharp. Most of the time, though, they get three outs in the 9th.

The problem with that usage is, of course, that very often those are not the key outs in a game. How many times has an inferior reliever been brought in to face the oppositions best hitter in the 7th or 7th inning representing the tying or fall behind run? How many times has the "closer" been asked to face the 7, 8 & 9 hitters in a weak lineup with a 3 run lead just to get a save? Shouldn't a teams best reliever be used to get the hardest and most important outs in games and not used in easier situations simply for the sake of adding a save to the total?

The arguments for the closer are not without some merit, especially the ones about guys wanting to know their roles and have a general idea of when they might be used. These are not machines being asked to perform a computation, after all. It is also true that very often the 9th inning does turn out to be the toughest situation in the game and that giving up a run in the 7th inning in a one run game isn't the same as giving up a run in the 9th inning of a one run game. Managers deserve some credit for coming up with this current bullpen useage system, they just haven't been flexible enough in it's employment.

With that in mind, how can the Brewers best build their bullpen for 2009 now that their 9th inning specialist from last year, Salomon Torres has decided to call it a career?

• Assuming that Carlos Villanueva and Seth McClung are both headed to the pen (and Melvin is on the record saying that Villanueva will be and McClung might be) the team would be well advised to keep in mind that both of those guys are capable of going more than one inning at a time and that using them as a classic save specialist is probably not the best way to go.

• The Brewers are going to need a LHP for the pen and would probably be best served with twol. The question is whether or not it's worth it to bring back Brain Shouse. At this point in his career, he's great against lefties and terrible against righties, which means that his uses are pretty limited in tight situations. Mitch Stetter is waiting in the wings, but his walk happy nature makes him less than a sure thing.
  

• David Riske's ability to come back from his trouble filled 2008 will go a long way towards determining how the middle relief will shake out. The Brewers need him to step up and earn his paycheck this season.
  

• There are veteran closers on the market this winter, like Trevor Hoffman and Jason Isringhausen, but they are also well past their primes and will probably command a premium for their names alone. If one of them could be had at a bargain price, however, it would allow the Brewers to go into spring training with an established situation in the pen, at least until the players prove their worth early on.

• Besides Mitch Stetter, the Brewers will head to Arizona with several options from the farm system to take a look at. Tim Dillard has the stuff to be long term big league reliever, though he has yet to show that he is ready to pitch in key situations. Mark DiFelice is a long time minor leaguer who strikes out a lot of batters and walks very few, but his lack of velocity leaves him vulnerable to the long ball. Luis Pena is coming off of a disappointing campaign in AAA, but still has the electric stuff to pitch late in games if he can harness it. Omar Aguilar has top notch stuff and he's been groomed as a closer in the minors. If he can build on his impressive 2008 and cut down on the walks, he could find himself closing in Milwaukee before the end of the year.
  

In the biggest little hire of the week, the Brewers surprised no one when they went in house and hired Bruce Seid to replace the departing Jack Zduriencik as scouting director. Those are big shoes to fill. Judging by lack of responses to the story on the JSonline blog (the story has so far generated three, compared to the fifty-five that a post about Ned Yost and Willie Randolph not being considered for the Mariners manager job generated since then) this is flying almost totally under the radar amongst Brewer fans. This is understandable, because very few fans have ever heard of Bruce Seid and there really isn't much to say about the hire other than he was hired by a good scouting director and hopefully he's ready to take over the reigns.

Still, it's not an understatement to say that the job that Seid does hiring and evaluating the recommendations of his staff will probably have a much greater impact over the franchise's fortunes for the next decade than any other move that's been made or will be made this off season. The Brewers, like just about any team not playing in New York, Boston, Chicago or LA, are only going to be able to consistently contend when they have a steady stream of talent coming up through the farm system ready to contribute at the major league level. This all starts with scouting, drafting and signing the right players, and that is largely the province of the scouting director.

There's more too it than just that because keeping the talent flowing to the majors involves some other people too. Most important, the overall emphasis within the organization needs to stay strongly on player development. That means efforts have to be made to develop and keep healthy the prized talent so that it can contribute some day. The general manager needs to know who to keep, who can be traded away and when the right time to break someone in is. Most important, the team needs to commit the money to sign the talent found by Seid and his staff and they need to commit to allowing many of these players come up and contribute, even if that means they have to take some time to "rebuild" every once in a while.

There is an understandable temptation for those running a franchise to, having rebuilt from the ground up in a long an laborious process, put everything they have into squeezing out a few extra wins when they feel they have a contender, because those wins can make all the difference in making the playoffs and winning in them. The vaunted Oakland A's under the watch of Billy Beane fell into the trap of allowing their farm system to dry up while pushing for contention every season. Everyone thinks that the famous Moneyball draft in 2002 was an exercise in trying to be the smartest guy in the room. In reality, it was trying to squeeze as much talent out of a shoestring budget as possible. It would be a shame if the Brewers allowed the same thing to happen.

Everyone knows that the Brewers of 2008-09 will not have one of the top few picks in the draft, which is how they aquired some of the key talent that makes up the major league sqaud now. That makes it tougher to find true superstars, because more often than not those guys have talent that stands out to everyone. What the Brewers of 2008-09 have that the Brewers of 2002-05 didn't have was a lot of extra picks in the top end of the draft. If used correctly, those can help fill out a roster and build a contender. The Brewers just need to make sure they keep developing talent as a top priority and fight the urge to allow it to become an afterthought. Money may not be able to gaurantee success for the big market teams, but failure to develop talent in house will gaurantee failure for those not in the big markets.

Alright, it's been a while and there is lots to cover so I'll fly through some of this stuff quicker than it deserves.

• Ken Macha was hired to be the new manager of the Brewers. On the plus side, he has an impeccable record of winning as a manager in his time in Oakland. He shepherded young pitching staffs while keeping them relatively healthy and isn't a fan of giving up outs, which give me hope. On the downside, his departure in Oakland raised a lot of questions about his ability to connect with players. Oh, and if you're a fan of "Fire X" sites, here is Macha's from his time in Oakland. It's not flattering, obviously, and even gets a little "blue" at times. Interestingly, Macha only received a two year deal, which means that Melvin is hedging his bets and possibly trying to give Macha an incentive to get along with players. The next few years are big ones for the franchise, because they represent the culmination of the tenure for a lot of the homegrown "core" before many will have to leave to seek greener pastures. If Macha can push the team for a few years of big success before wearing out his welcome, then this will be good. If, however, the problems getting along with players surfaces in that time, a very valuable and possibly rare opportunity could be squandered. Cross your fingers.
  

• Former interim manager, bench and third base coach Dale Sveum will be the new hitting coach for manager Ken Macha. The job of hitting coach is generally overlooked until the team slumps offensively, so it's not an easy gig. Fortunately for Sveum, he built up some good will helping the team make the playoffs in the waning days of the 2008 season, so maybe he'll get a little pass from the fans for a while.

• Unfortunately, pitching coach Mike Maddux will not be back for a seventh season and will instead be taking the same job with the Rangers. On balance, his tenure with Milwaukee has to be considered a success. He rarely had a lot of depth or high priced talent, but he managed to squeeze many useful seasons out of modest and/or unrefined talents. Good luck to him, because he is going to need it working with that staff in that park. In related news, longtime bullpen coach Bill Castro will take over in that position. His 17 years in the pen saw far more good years than bad and he's earned the shot to see what he can do with the whole staff. The success of his tenure will almost certainly rest on how well he is able to develop the young talents at the big league level and currently in the minor leagues. 

• The final piece of coaching news just hit today, with the job of bench coach going to former Mets manager Willie Randolph. So manager Ken Macha will have two men passed over for his position (Randolph and hitting coach Dale Sveum) on his staff, though if that were likely to present a problem they probably wouldn't have been hired. Randolph had quite a bit of success as the Yankees bench coach under Joe Torre and almost certainly wasn't as bad a manager as Mets fans believe. He should be a valuable asset for Macha to draw on.

• Nearly as soon as the Brewers made the call to pick up Mike Cameron's 10 million dollar club option (a smart move) rumors started to swirl about a possible trade with the Yankees involving Cameron. It seems like a legitimate sort of rumor and clearly there have been talks between the teams. Cameron is someone that the Brewers should definitely consider trading if the offer is right, but that "right offer" almost certainly needs to include some young pitching. There isn't much to get excited about in Melky Cabrera or Wilson Betemit, both would be useful as role or platoon players but neither is likely to ever be a plus starter and that is what the Brewers would be giving up in Cameron at this point. If the Yankees are serious about getting Cameron, it should cost them a guy like Ian Kennedy. Granted, he hasn't been good thus far in the major leagues, but he is not yet 24 and has been mostly impressive in the minor leagues. He could probably benefit from a lower pressure atmosphere than New York to break into the major leagues and the Brewers could use a young potential mid rotation starter.

• The Brewers have apparently offered CC Sabathia something in the neighborhood of 100 million dollars for 5 years. This is probably no where near enough to actually get a deal done, which is fortunate because it is also probably too big a risk for the Brewers to take on one player, especially an overworked starting pitcher. Such is the life of a small market team.
  

A while back, I took a rudimentary look at the Brewers payroll structure in terms of the implications of contracts that take up a large percentage of the total payroll. There is recent news that the Brewers may be looking to offer CC Sabathia something in the range of 4 years and 100 million dollars. Given the rising cost of the young hitting core and the few multi-year contracts on the books at the moment, that means that the Brewers would almost certainly be committed to having to support a 90+ million dollar a year payroll in the next 4 years if they plan on competing. They have talent in the minors, but not so much that they could afford to go all Florida Marlins and start dumping most players the minute they hit arbitration and aren't working for slave wages.

The Brewers, as an organization, are particularly tied to their ability to draw people to the park to sustain payroll. Like every other team, the Brewers do get money from MLB from it's overall TV contract, MLB.com and, like all small market teams, they get some revenue sharing. Where they fall very short of many (all, in fact) other teams, is they have the worst TV contract in baseball through 2012. That's right, the worst. Without a big fat cushion of guaranteed TV money to fall back on, the team has to draw fans to the seats to sustain payroll. What's more, the fact that they play in a small market means that even when they are drawing fans, they cannot squeeze as much revenue out of the fans as their competitors. The fact that they had the 21st most expensive ticket prices in 2008 (and 28th most expensive overall park experience) is great news for fans trying to take a family to the park, but limits the amount of money the team can raise.

One thing about attendance is that fans are fickle when it comes to supporting their team. People who are interested enough to be reading this will probably get out to the park much more than most of their neighbors anyway. We all know, however, that when a team is doing well, a lot of people who wouldn't be there otherwise start showing up. Those people go away when the wins start going away.

So what does this mean for the Brewers? In short, it means they would not be able to afford any bad luck what-so-ever without feeling a major budget crunch should they decide to give CC that money. As talked about in part I, signing CC would mean that the Brewers would have a lot less room to do other things. They would have to cut the budget significantly in areas like the bullpen and the bench to make ends meet, which means a lot of "ready or not" guys from the middle levels of the farm system filling in key roles because there wouldn't be money to pay much more than major league minimum. Basically, they would have to get a big number of wins over replacement (different than the traditional "win-loss" record for pitchers) from CC Sabathia because they're going to have a hard time finding money to buy them elsewhere.

If that works out, then the Brewers will almost certainly be a perennial contender in the NL Central for the life of the contract. If, however, Sabathia begins to feel the effects of being pitched very heavily the last two years and having pitched a large number of innings at a tender age overall, then the Brewers will have a very big problem because they will almost certainly have trouble competing.

This brings us back to the consequences of not being able to compete in a given year. If the team is counting on needing to compete to remain financially solvent (as would almost certainly be the case should they take on CC's contract) then they cannot afford to not compete. That means that if a situation calls for taking a step back in say 2011 or 2012 and reloading for 2013 and 2014, they will almost certainly not be able to make that decision and instead probably be forced to do things like trade prospects for marginal players to try to eek out every extra win possible to contend or even just maintain the illusion of "trying to win now." A situation like that would almost certainly not only fail to produce wins in the short term, but also limit the ability to win for several years down the road as a result of giving up prospects out of necessity.

Most Brewer fans rightly seem to realize that giving a contract to Sabathia would represent a big risk. It's important to realize just how large a risk that really is, especially when you consider that the current state of the economy makes any large commitment of money particualrly risky. Of course, it is probably no more than an extreme long shot that CC comes back at anything close to those terms anyway. Still, the organization's willingness to at least consider the possiblity says that they have a good amount of gamble in them. Hopefully they are going into this with their eyes completely open.

Very shortly, the Milwaukee Brewers will have to make a decision on whether or not to pick up Mike Cameron's option for the 2009 season. The option itself is for 10 million dollars, but because there is a 750,000 buyout, the Brewers decision on the option is really whether or not to take on 9.25 million in additional salary.

A good place to start when trying to figure what to do would be to figure out whether or not it would have been worth it to have had Mike Cameron last year at 10 million. Cameron is not a high batting average player as anyone who has seen him play can attest. He also racks up a good number of strikeouts. Those things, however, are what he doesn't do and it is a mistake to focus solely on what players do not do at the expense of what they do well.

Mike Cameron, despite having trouble keeping the batting average up, does draw enough walks that he posted a .331 OBP, which is exactly what the average OBP was in the National League last year. The fact that he is so good at drawing walks lead to his finishing 5th in the NL in pitches seen per plate appearance at 4.21. That pays off by getting into opponent bullpens faster and seeing more middle and long relievers, generally the worst pitchers on a pitching staff. Where Cameron really excels, though, is in slugging the ball. In 444 AB's, he racked up 212 total bases (25 HR, 25 2B, 2 3B). Cameron finished 14th in the NL in ISOP (a measure of power) and 24th in the NL in BB/PA, which perfectly sums up where is value actually lies on offense.

Defensively, Cameron is no longer the player he once was and a few late season gaffes have left an impression with many that he really wasn't that good. A look at some of the advanced metrics developed by people at places like Baseball Think Factory (Cameron Defensive Runs Saved +2.8) and Baseball Prospectus (RAA +1) show that he is slightly above average in terms of getting to balls and making plays at this point in his career.

All in all, Mike Cameron gets on base enough to basically break even, and then derives his considerable value from his ability to hit the ball very hard when he makes contact. He does this playing a defense-first position at about a league average level. Going back to that Baseball Think Factory evaluation, he was 43rd in the national league in their "Offense Plus Defense" ranking at a +12.9. Going forward, the people at Baseball Think Factory who do the ZiPS projections see his numbers holding pretty steady next year in most areas, especially his hitting line which they have pegged at .246/.333/.446/.779 (compared to the .243/.331/.477/.808 he actually hit in 2008). It's just a projection, but it's based on the historical record of similar players and how they did at this point in their careers, so take it for what it's worth.

It's very hard to argue that Mike Cameron didn't add good value to the Brewers in 2008 when all the facts are on the table. The question remains, is that value worth the cost of spending another 9.25 million to keep him for 2009? Well, the people at fan graphs seem to think so:

....When you combine average to above average center field defense with a bat that’s worth 1.5 wins over an average hitter, you have a +4 win player. Based on Cameron’s 2008 performance, he was worth between $15 and $20 million on the free market, or more than twice what he actually made. Toss in the team option that now looks like a no-brainer, and Cameron was truly one of the best signings of the winter.

Just take a look at his nearest comparable, Torri Hunter of the Angels.

Hunter: (.278/.344/.466/.800) 257 TB in 551 AB

Cameron:  (.243/.331/.477/.808) 212 TB in 444 AB

Hunter gets a big advantage in BA, a small advantage in OBP and falls short in SLG (and is even further behind in ISOP). Then consider that Hunter is in the first year of a 5 year, 90 million dollar contract that payed him 16 million last year and it becomes very difficult to argue that 10 million for Cameron is anything but below market level for his abilities.

While the Brewers do have some underlying OBP issues on the team, and would benefit from getting a high OBP leadoff hitter to take over in CF, the problem is that those guys just aren't on the free agent market this winter. Mark Kotsay, Jay Payton and Jim Edmonds certainly wouldn't fill that need. So if the Brewers are going to get that sort of player, they're going to have to trade for him. If they count on doing that, they'll have to turn down Cameron's option and leave themselves open to the possibility that they may not get that guy for a reasonable cost. They may well end up giving away more than they get back just to break even in CF next year.

In the end, the Brewer have the ability to pick up a player who was well above average in terms of production last year for something below true market value. If they turn that down, they are going to have an uphill battle to find someone who brings as much to the table as Cameron does. In spite of his flaws and the fact that he is "more of the same" on the Brewers team, it is going to be difficult for the Brewers to do better than him and for that reason it makes sense to pick up his 2009 option.

(Thanks to Badger80 and FunDmentals for posting some of these links on the Brewer Message Board)