A Season of Hope
MILWAUKEE IS A CITY that’s good at being excited. And the air inside Miller Park is crackling with optimism tied to an unmistakable fact: The franchise’s rebuild has turned the corner, and this year, the Brewers are going for it.
Fans of small-market teams such as the Brewers are accustomed to, even comfortable with, the process of exchanging good players for younger ones who will hopefully achieve greatness in the future.
It has meant saying goodbye to onetime faces of the franchise such as Jonathan Lucroy and Carlos Gomez – sacrifices for the greater good. Trades such as these made Brewers out of Travis “Mayor of Ding Dong City” Shaw, Zach Davies, Domingo Santana, Chase Anderson and Josh Hader – young talents who are already in major big-league roles and may be headed for stardom. Most of them arrived at the hand of general manager David Stearns, who was just 30 when he replaced Doug Melvin in 2015.
This young core jelled last season, sooner than many fans expected, and the Crew led the NL Central for 69 days before falling behind the already-rebuilt Chicago Cubs in late July. Look no further than there if you need hope that what Stearns is doing can work. Before the Cubs won the 2016 World Series, their fans endured particularly miserable seasons in 2012 and 2013. Last year’s world champion Houston Astros had god-awful seasons in the same span. Both franchises’ bottoming-out seasons came in the first two years of a new GM’s tenure.
The Brewers’ offseason indicated they’re done rebuilding, flipping the script to add significant big-league talent to make a near-term push for a title. On Jan. 25, Stearns traded four promising prospects for Miami Marlins outfielder Christian Yelich, a 26-year-old outfielder who projects as the 40th-best major leaguer this season, according to fangraphs.com. Later that afternoon, more news: The Brewers had signed free agent outfielder Lorenzo Cain to a lucrative five-year contract. At 31 years old, Cain has ranked as the game’s fourth-best outfielder since 2015.
When the Brewers hit spring training in February, the buzz continued, with rumors the team could yet add a high-end starting pitcher via free agency or trade. Talk of a Brewers World Series in 2018 is probably premature, but one thing seems certain: We’ll no longer be looking for flashes of potential at Miller Park, butwins.