Rough Draft
The Milwaukee Brewers recognized and addressed areas of need in Sunday's opening session of the MLB Draft. Whether or not those areas of need are addressed in time depends on the Brewers organization.
It looked like a great pick. A big Florida-based prep catcher-turned-corner infielder in college, considered amongst the top power hitters in the country.
But Matt LaPorta isn’t remembered for his major league career. He’s remembered as a headliner-turned-footnote in the near-mythic-’round-these-parts trade for C.C. Sabathia in 2008.
There was another big catcher the Brewers took in the first round, also with that tantalizing raw power analysts loved: Clint Coulter. Still kicking around pro ball at 29 with the Giants’ Triple-A club in Sacramento, he has never played in a major league game.
Alongside the Brewers latest first-round draft pick, undoubtedly, questions abound. Friends, Brock Wilken is far from a sure bet. And that isn’t as much of an indictment on him as it is on the organization, one that hasn’t produced an all-star homegrown corner position player since Ryan Braun in 2005.
The MLB Draft was more of a guessing game in those days and days long past. Well-resourced prep players now receive top-shelf skill and physical development and are placed on leading-edge nutrition programs. Colleges across America engage in an arms race, spending on athletics programs and complexes — on the public side, often built into academic facilities so as to keep state government watchdogs placated; on the private side, often underwritten by boosters’ blank checks. Draftees of all backgrounds are more able than ever to shorten their runway to The Show.
It’s safe to say the Brewers have not enjoyed much in the way of sustainable success through the draft. Baseball scribe and scumbag domestic abuser Jonah Keri wrote about the Brewers’ woes in identifying, drafting and developing talent way back in 2013 at Grantland.
There isn’t much to indicate much has changed, despite millions invested in renovations and expansions at Maryvale and into the baseball ops infrastructure, numerous changes throughout the front office, and changes in location and personnel throughout the Brewers farm system. Take the names and years out of that Grantland piece and you have evergreen Mad Libs. Brewer-drafted players’ success is more bug than feature.
The up-the-middle approach that governed the Brewers’ development philosophy for so many years was savvy in numerous ways — amongst those skill players and pitchers drafted or signed into the bigs: Alcides Escobar, Orlando Arcia, Rickie Weeks, Jonathan Lucroy, Lorenzo Cain, Scooter Gennett, Trent Grisham, Jeremy Jeffress, Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, et al. It helped them identify and net Jean Segura, Mauricio Dubon, Carlos Gomez, Martin Maldonado and others: guys who have played meaningful baseball and/or earned credibility as legitimate if not everyday major leaguers.
Only Weeks and Lucroy made a sustained offensive impact for the Brewers. Weeks was rushed to the majors and never fully developed into the promise of being Gary Sheffield-lite. Lucroy remains the best homegrown — and best — catcher in Brewers franchise history, at the cost of the organization believing itself to be backstop alchemists to mixed results.
The rest of these players took flight elsewhere: Escobar and Cain (and Nori Aoki) helped the Royals win two pennants and a World Series. Arcia, never thought to be much at the plate, is unexpectedly enjoying his finest offensive major league season in Atlanta. Gennett took advantage of his environs and hit 50 home runs in two seasons with the Cincinnati Reds. (He hit a total of 39 in three full-ish seasons in Milwaukee.) Segura enjoyed a seven-season stretch after leaving Milwaukee where he hit over .280 four times and only a pandemic kept him from double-digit home run totals every year. Maldonado has been a key cog on the Houston Astros roster since 2018 and boasts three pennants and a World Series ring on his resume. Grisham — who needed to leave after that fateful 2019 Wild Card Game — won two Gold Gloves in San Diego and, in true Padres fashion, has been left to languish while A.J. Preller lights Peter Seidler’s money on fire and empties the farm system of its talent en route to another season of high-priced big league disappointment.
Granted, not all these ex-Brewers exploded onto the scene, but other organizations regularly found ways to figure out what the Brewers apparently could not.
The Brewers? They drafted Keston Hiura and, after some major league noise, promptly broke his swing. The Grisham-Zach Davies trade for Eric Lauer and Luis Urias left such a hole at shortstop (Arcia was dreadful at the plate and traded for spare parts, while heir apparent Urias got the yips in the field and struggled at the plate) that they had to deplete their bullpen to go get Willy Adames. That may be lemonade from lemons, but only as a result of the Brewers’ apparent overvaluing of Urias. In 2023, Adames had been showing severe signs of regression until last week. He did go 30-30 in 2022, but struck out a ghastly 166 times and, like the roster as a whole, struggled against left-handed pitching. Tyrone Taylor is a nice story, but realistically remains a fourth outfielder with no plate discipline.
Christian Yelich, after a knee injury, a pandemic and constant futzing with his swing, is only now returning to something close to his tentpole, MVP-grade self. He is doing so by looking more like Christian Yelich, Miami Marlin.
Garrett Mitchell showed promise until he exploded his shoulder sliding into third base. To that point, he still was inconsistent lifting and driving the ball. Joey Wiemer is a work in progress: every at-bat is high-risk, high-reward. Sal Frelick appeared to be a lock for the Brewers clubhouse until he suffered a wrist injury and then hit a plateau at Triple-A. Brice Turang is a defensive phenom but is still finding his way at the plate. We don’t know if he’ll reach the destination.
Jackson Chourio has yet to make the leap needed for Brewers fans to turn hope into belief. Corey Ray never did. Eric Brown might, but he’s still across town here in Appleton. And while this list of names may seem all over the place, the prevailing notion is undeniable: when the Brewers give you notes on your swing, you should probably take them—and burn them.
Given the Brewers’ overemphasis on athletic, versatile, up-the-middle players at the cost of having any impact corner players in the pipeline, this might result in a double whammy of inexperience developing said corners combined with a well-established incapability of developing hitters.
Even the Oakland Athletics developed Matts Olson and Chapman, and owner John Fisher actively hates both baseball and his team’s fanbase. (They also took defensively-challenged former Brewer Khris Davis and managed to turn him into a 40+ home run-hitting monster in one of the most offensive and least-offensive ballparks in Major League Baseball.)
It’s one thing to be deficient in identifying talent; it’s another to be bad at cultivating talent. The former isn’t necessarily the problem. A franchise with persistent, perennial struggles at the plate (and dares call it ‘run prevention’) and is unable to draw from an effective pool of reinforcements at Triple-A ends up spending from the farm to patch up the parent club. This is not just foolhardy, but fundamentally unsustainable for a small-market, resource-poor organization. This absence of effective development is in no small part what prompted Keri to write in Grantland 10 years ago. A decade on and nothing has changed.
None of this is a guarantee that the latest Brewers first-round draft pick will flame out—frankly, I hope Brock Wilken succeeds. I’d love for him to channel that raw power into an Austin Riley-type profile and then some. But there’s simply nothing about what the Brewers have done over the last 18 years that gives me much hope for it coming to pass. At some point, you have to look beyond the individual prospects and take a hard, clear-eyed look at the team responsible for developing them.
And after that, you can’t help but feel bad for the position in which Brock Wilken finds himself. There’s a nice signing bonus, and then, if history is any indicator, a not-unrealistic likelihood of a career stuck in neutral.