The Brewer Chronicles

Right handed pitching prospect Mark Rogers, the Brewers first round pick in 2004,  may miss the entire 2007 season after having shoulder surgery earlier this month.  Rogers spent most of his time last year at High A and had mixed results.  He struck out a ton of guys (96 in 71 innings) but he also walked a ton as well (53).  In John Sickels’ Baseball Prospect Book, he says some very nice things about Rogers but also says he could flame out just as easily as he could be a stud.

Here’s a little more on Rogers.  He was the fifth best Brewers prospect on Kevin Goldstein’s top ten list. 

The Brewers signed right handed starting pitcher Claudio Vargas to a one year, $2.5 million deal and in the process, both sides will avoid arbitration.  Pegged as a fourth or fifth starter, Vargas had a solid season for the Diamondbacks in 2006.  He struck out 123 in 16 2/3 and he has a 4.83 ERA.  He came over from the Diamondbacks in the trade that also brought Johnny Estrada to town.

The $2.5 million pretty much split the difference between the Brewers and Vargas.  $2.5 million is pretty cheap for even a back end starter, now it’d just be nice if Vargas had some breakthroughs in 2007.

While one of my favorite publications, the Baseball Prospectus Annual, hasn’t yet come out, the website has released their PECOTA projections.  PECOTA cards to fun to look at so I thought it’d be worthwhile checking out first basemen Prince Fielder’s PECOTA card to see what we find.

The first thing you have to like is the weighted mean average line.  There you find Fielder hitting 28 homeruns with a very nice .292/.373/.531 line.  Even more optimistic are his breakout rate (40%) and improve rate (77%) which makes his 75th percentile line a little more probable.  There you have Fielder hitting 31 homeruns with a line of .305/.388/.562.  Not too shabby for a kid who’s going turn 23 in May.

Boog Powell and Kent Hrbek are Fielder’s two most comporable players at this point in his career.  David Ortiz is third and he’s the only other guy with a similarity factor at or aboe 40. 

Even cooler is the five year forecast.  It’s 30 homerun seasons and WARPs above 5.0 across the board after 2007.  And while BP and PECOTA are never perfect, they seem to do a pretty good job.  They predicted Ryan Howard’s breakout season for one so when the book comes out, I’m interested in seeing what they have to say about Fielder.

Welcome.  My name is Dylan Bolling and I’ll be covering the Milwaukee Brewers for the Baseball Historians network of baseball websites.  I really think when you combine a weak NL Central with a solid Brewers team, that this might be the season for Milwaukee fans.  Not only do I think the Brewers will have their first winning season since 1992, but I also think the Brewers will win the NL Central and make the playoffs for the first time since, gulp, 1982.  And I’ll be there to hopefully provide you every last detail on their way to that playoff spot.

My favorite player on the Brewers is Prince Fielder.  I think he’s the slugger that the Brewers can build around and, along with Bill Hall, as he goes, so does the offense. 

In addition to monitoring the present day Brewers, I’ll also be taking a look at the team’s past.  I’ll be starting with a season by season retrospective of probably the greatest Brewer ever to lace up a pair of spikes, and that’s Robin Yount.   He played in a Brewers uniform for 20 years and while you can definitely make a case for Paul Molitor, he spent a lot of his better seasons playing for a different team.

So I hope you make The Brewer Chronicles a regular stop if you’re a Brewer fan.  I know there’s some quality Brewer blogs out there (which you can check out in my Brewers site section) and I hope I can live up to the path they’ve paved.