I see it's gone, and I'm too late to let it out from the city

What made me walk you famous has made a loser out of it

What made me walk you famous has made a loser out of it

What made me walk you famous has made a loser out of it

Hello, and welcome to episode 1168 or 1168 of the fact that while they fan ref's baseball podcast brought to you by our many Patreon supporters who are wonderful each and every one of them they are all different they are all the same

I am Jeff Sullivan the fan graphs joined as always by Ben Lindbergh of the ringer I guess hello again

Yes, hello, I'm still here. How are you?

Doing well we have actual baseball to talk about

Yeah, we do and we we booked a guest before we do that was gonna happen so in the the latter bit of this podcast we will talk to baseball prospectus is Patrick Dubuque about how caring about winning sucks but at the first half of this podcast we'll talk about a team that's trying to win

Which is exciting so let's talk about the Milwaukee Brewers who all of a sudden on Thursday decided I'm not gonna say let's go for it but let's at least begin the process of going for it

There was of course traded a lot of prospects for them specifically for Christianielle and then almost immediately thereafter news broke that they were signing Lorenzo Cain which means I was looking at the last three years of wins above replacement on fan graphs among outfielders

Lorenzo Cain ranks fourth Christianielle ranks 11th these are two top 10 top 15 outfielders probably the two best players on the brewers now when they got them on the same day

Yeah, it is yeah, I've been doing these top 10 rankings for each position for MLB network over the last couple weeks and over the next couple weeks and I had let's see yellow and Cain were both eligible at centerfield so I had yellow

Yellow checked fourth and Cain at six I think maybe going from memory among all centerfielders and baseball so obviously they're not both going to be playing centerfield regularly now but that is maybe part of the appeal here but yeah these are really good players

And as you had pointed out in a recent post about the brewers they didn't really have any star players like one of the reasons why they were successful last year was they didn't have a whole lot of bad players or bad positions

They had a lot of guys who were providing some sort of minimum level of competence so that they were avoiding just purely sub replacement play and they had a bunch of guys kind of come out of nowhere and be productive despite not having big names and so now they have pretty big names

These are legitimately good players and you've got to mingo centenna in the mix too so this is immediately at the top of the list of best outfills in baseball or very close to the top of that list and just exciting A to see a team do something period but B to see the brewers be that team because we're so conditioned to seeing a fairly small number of teams make the major moves and to see the brewers be the one to do this to go for it is really great

And of course they're not probably finished so they could still use them help in their rotation they have about 13 different major league outfielders on the roster at present so there's there are

There are moves to be made they've been linked to jk area out in Udarvish at this point they probably won't sign either one but I think it seems pretty obvious that they're lined up to trade outfield depth for starting pitching maybe a second basement I don't know what the brewers are going to do clearly not done but clearly they think that they're ready to go and it was last season right that you wrote about David's

Stirons in the front office and the brewers rebuild not bottoming out and look at risk of saying hey the brewers have won the off season let's skip that stuff but I don't know how good the brewers are going to be in 2018 and and henceforth but they were 82 and 80 in 2014 if I recall

That was a year they were kind of in the hunt to win the division for a while then they bottomed out later on and then 2015 and 2016 they took deliberate steps back they began the rebuild and then last year they won 86 games and and this year clearly they think they're good enough to do this

finish above 500 and when this is all said and done the brewers might have handled the rebuild in a far less painful way than even the Astros and the Cubs who granted they won their world series so they got the cherry on top but we could have a new example of a model rebuild right here

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