Posts Tagged ‘Josh Hader’
Freddy Peralta Got Traded from the Brewers, and I Have Thoughts…
Folks, last week one of my favorite Milwaukee Brewers pitchers, Freddy Peralta, got traded to the New York Mets.
Why is this important to me? Well, he was the de facto ace of the staff, was fifth in the Cy Young Award voting for best pitcher, and had proven to be durable and dependable in his career with the Brewers.
I can hear you now, though. “If he’s so good, Barb, why was he traded to another team?”
The Brewers are a small-market franchise, meaning they do not get as much advertising money as bigger-market teams like New York (either the Yankees or the Mets) or, God forbid, the Los Angeles Dodgers, they who have wrecked competitive balance and have been allowed to do so by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred. (Don’t get me started on the Dodgers bloated payroll, or I’ll be here all day.) Because of that, they can’t afford to pay many players what they’re worth. They usually choose one or two players to pay, and try to lock others up early with better-than-average contracts for their youth or lack of time in grade as a MLB player, which will buy out their arbitration years (that’s where if they don’t like the contract they’re offered, they can go in front of an arbitrator; the player’s representative gives the figure he wants, MLB team gives the figure they want, and the arbitrator decides).
Also, Peralta was a beneficiary of this, to a degree. They signed him to a long-term contract extension early in his career that, at the time, was worth more than his stats would indicate as they felt he had huge upside. They were right (as the Brewers front office staff often is). Peralta, the last few years, was still making excellent money for a non-sports star, but far, far less than most of his pitching contemporaries.
But this is his “walk year.” Meaning, he has only one year until free agency, where he can negotiate with any team (including the dreaded Dodgers). The Mets may be able to sign Peralta to a long-term contract extension before the end of this year, but the Brewers never would’ve been able to do so. That’s why the Mets made an offer (two prospects, Jett Williams and Brandon Sproat, for Peralta and fellow right-handed pitcher Tobias Myers), and it’s why the Brewers accepted that offer.
I have nothing against either Williams or Sproat, mind you. I hope they’ll do well for the Brewers, as Williams is a utility player with great speed who makes contact, and Sproat is a pitcher with big upside. But the Brewers traded a known quantity in Peralta, a semi-known quantity in Myers (who had a good year in 2024, and split time in 2025 between AAA and the big-league club), to get the two prospects. And while Sproat has pitched a little in the big leagues, the jury is out as to whether or not he’ll eventually be a good replacement for Peralta, as durable starters are rare these days in MLB.
The thing is, as a long-time fan of a small-market team, I know how hard it is for them to compete, year after year, with deeper pocketed clubs (especially the Dodgers; I like some of what the Dodgers do from the front office, they have a great staff, and I like their manager Dave Roberts. But the amount of money they spend on personnel is insane). That’s why it hurts to see good player after good player leaving the team, whether it’s Prince Fielder years ago or Freddy Peralta now.
We’re fortunate, in a way, that we have had some long-term stars to look at, like Hall of Famer Robin Yount (only played for the Brewers), former MVP and Rookie of the Year Ryan Braun (only played for the Brewers), and former MVP Christian Yelich (still active, and who’s only played for two teams in his career, the Miami Marlins where he started and the Brewers ever since he got traded to them). The Brewers have been canny in some of their moves, such as signing stars like Peralta and emerging superstar Jackson Chourio to long-term extensions early, which keeps them in Milwaukee years longer than might’ve been possible otherwise. (Every time they do this, they’re gambling that the player will develop well and won’t get hurt. So far, their gambles have mostly been very good to extremely good.)
That said, it hurts when former Brewers stars like Willy Adames bolt for other teams in free agency, even though as fans we know that players have to go wherever they can get the best deal as their careers are so blessedly short. It hurts when former Cy Young Award winner Corbin Burnes gets traded during his “walk year,” as he was a few years ago, no matter how good the folks are who come back in that trade. (The jury’s still out on pitcher DL Hall, but Joey Ortiz has proven himself a capable and reliable defensive infielder. He does not hit for contact, though, and strikes out way too much for a guy who is not a slugger. I’d grade that trade as something like a C-plus for the Brewers, but it could still go up if Ortiz ever figures out where the strike zone is and learns to stop waving at pitches far outside of it and if Hall ever gets healthy.) It hurts when world-class closers Josh Hader and Devin Williams get traded, and it hurts when someone who didn’t really get much of a chance this last year but proved himself to be a standup guy — Rhys Hoskins — is not re-signed.
And it hurts when Peralta, who, like Adames, was a great clubhouse guy who everyone seemed to love and appreciate (and never called out anyone else for poor play other than his own self, a rarity with contemporary ballplayers in some respects), gets traded during his walk year also.
It doesn’t matter that my head understands the logic. My heart is still kind of bruised, as a fan of these players. (Also, Adames and Peralta, like current Brewers star Christian Yelich, were known for their philanthropy over time and overall unselfish attitudes.)
I know that when Peralta’s career ends, he’ll be inducted first to the Walk of Fame (as all past All-Stars representing the Brewers tend to be) and then later the Wall of Honor. He’ll always be a Brewers player in my heart, except when he plays the Brewers (in which case I will hope he gets a no-decision). He’ll always be loved in Milwaukee.
Unfortunately, that’s cold comfort to me right now as a fan. And I do wonder how general managers or front office staff, those who know these players personally far better than I ever could, manage to do this without throwing up and having night sweats.
My Take on the Josh Hader Trade (One Week Later)
Last week, the Milwaukee Brewers traded their best player, relief pitcher/closer Josh Hader, to the San Diego Padres for four other players: pitcher Dinelson Lamet, relief pitcher/closer Taylor Rogers, OF prospect Esteury Ruiz, and pitching prospect Robert Gasser. This was an extremely surprising thing to do, because the Brewers were atop the National League Central division.
In other words, teams make trades like that — trades of their best player — when they don’t think they can make the playoffs.
That, of course, is not what the Brewers front office has said about it. Their take is, “We’re a small-market team, and we need to plan for the future, not just now.”
But the thing is, the players know this is wrong, for the reason I gave above.
Now, what do I think about the players the Brewers got in return? Well, Rogers is a good pitcher, but we’ll only have him until the end of the year, when he’ll be a free agent. (Rogers is not as good as Hader, mind. But he is good.) Lamet has already been waived; the Colorado Rockies picked him up. The other two, well, time will tell, as they’re both in the minor leagues.
But that’s not the entirety of what I think.
See, I view this as a slap in the face to the fans, as well as to the team as a whole. The fans want the team to do well; more to the point, they want to root for people they recognize. (A major trade like this, of a team’s best player, usually happens in the off-season, not in the middle of the season like this one.)
Josh Hader pitched for the Brewers for several years. In that span, he won three NL Reliever of the Year awards. He’s also a four-time All Star (meaning he’s been selected to go to the All Star Game), and as I said above, he’s arguably their best player.
So, the fans hate this move.
The players also hate this move, probably because it shows them that the Brewers will trade anyone — doesn’t matter how good they are — if the price is right.
Two players, pitcher Brandon Woodruff, and relief pitcher Devin Williams, said things like this a day after the Hader trade (best paraphrase from watching two Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel videos):
Williams: “Some things just don’t make any sense.”
Woodruff: “The first thing I thought, when I heard about the trade, was this: ‘Is this a joke?'”
That speaks volumes, doesn’t it?
Also, during last night’s edition of Brewers Extra-Innings (a radio talk show that happens after every Brewers game on WTMJ-AM 620 in Milwaukee), sportscaster Greg Matzek said that the entire team was still unhappy regarding the Hader trade.
(Considering the Brewers have now lost five of the last six games since the trade of Hader, that seems to be a reasonable assumption.)
So, my view boils down to this:
Ruiz had best be the second coming of Hank Aaron, for this trade to ultimately pan out. Otherwise, there is no point to this trade beyond a salary dump (as Hader was making the most of any pitcher on the staff at about $11 million dollars).
And if that’s the case, that’s flat-out disgraceful.
Friday Oddities…and a Brewers Playoff Series Starts
Folks, it’s Friday. And as this week has been full of odd things, I figured I’d mention a few of ’em before getting to the main event (that being the Milwaukee Brewers playoff series, starting today).
A few days ago, I got an “urgent alert” warning me to stay in my home due to heavy police presence in the area. It turned out that I was on the far edge of this, and the police presence was due to a federal agent getting shot while serving a warrant. I didn’t see any extra police, but followed the updates on my computer once I figured out what was going on.
Anyway, these things do not happen often in my neck of the woods. I did find it strange, and I hope the federal agent will recover promptly. (Last I read, the agent was in stable condition. The person being served the warrant apparently committed suicide.)
Next, my Malwarebytes software decided that my own blog was spam. I had a Hell of a time getting in, to the point I seriously thought about uninstalling Malwarebytes. (It had the nerve to say “lightly trafficked websites run the risk of blah blah blah, blah blah blah.” I felt like pitching my computer out the window.) I had to tell it five times that I wanted to continue to the site before I could get in here, and every time it did the same, damned thing.
Anyway, the good oddity — if you can call it that, considering they’ve been to the playoffs now four years running — is that the Milwaukee Brewers are playing the Atlanta Braves today in the National League playoffs. This Brewers team is known for its pitching far more than its hitting, as it has the NL’s ERA leader (for lowest amount of earned runs per nine innings pitched) in Corbin Burnes along with two other starting pitchers who’d probably be aces for most of the other teams in Brandon Woodruff and Freddy Peralta. They also have an outstanding closer in Josh Hader, and many other good relievers, besides. The Braves team is more traditionally balanced, and definitely has more hitters with playoff experience than do the Brewers.
I’m hoping the Brewers will play very well, that they’ll hit surprisingly well, and that their pitching will perform up to standard. If so, it should be an exciting series, and fun to watch for this fan.
Anyway, what’s going on for you on this Friday? (I hope you haven’t been having to deal with the same crap as I have with regards to getting Malwarebytes to recognize my own blog as a safe and protected site, mind you.) Let me know in the comments!
When Life Is Like Baseball
Folks, if you’ve read my blog for a while, you may have noticed that I am a baseball fan. (My Milwaukee Brewers jersey, worn in the picture I put in the “About” section, kind of gives it away.) And while I haven’t written much about baseball in recent years, that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped watching it.
Or learning from it, either.
Yesterday evening, the Brewers played the Washington Nationals in the National League Wild-Card play-in game. This is a one-game playoff, and whichever team wins the game advances.
My Brewers did not advance.
Now, they were ahead until the bottom of the 8th inning. (One inning away from winning the game, if you’re not a baseball fan.) But at that time, three pivotal events happened:
- Home plate ump called a hit-by-pitch instead of a batted ball when the ball clearly hit the knob of the bat of the hitter rather than any part of the hitter’s hand. And when the Brewers complained, and asked for a replay, the umps doing replay didn’t fix the call.
Had that call been a batted ball (inadvertent, but still), that runner would’ve been out. Instead, the runner was awarded first base, and that ultimately mattered because…
2. Josh Hader, the Brewers bullpen ace (and “closer,” meaning he finishes games and usually shuts down opposing hitters cold), did not have his best stuff. He was missing the locations catcher Yasmani Grandal was asking for that Hader normally would’ve hit…and Hader was clearly rattled by the ump’s bad call, too. And that led to the bases being loaded, which led to…
3. Hader gives up a single to Juan Soto of the Nationals. Soto’s ball went to right field, where Brewers OF Trent Grisham waited. However, the ball got past Grisham (somehow), meaning three runs scored rather than one, or two. (Probably two runs would’ve scored there no matter what, but for the sake of argument, you could say it was possible that had Grisham fielded the ball properly, he could’ve thrown out the second runner at home.)
This error was costly.
Check that. Beyond costly.
And after all that happened, instead of the Brewers leading, 3-1, as they had at the beginning of the inning, they now trailed, 4-3. And they weren’t able to muster a rally in the ninth and climactic inning, though OF Lorenzo Cain singled with one out. (This meant the tying run was aboard, but was unable to score.)
Game over.
But that doesn’t mean the season was a waste. Far, far from it.
The Brewers season was good this year. They had ups and downs. They could be streaky. They lost their best player, NL MVP Christian Yelich, at the beginning of September. Several of their other best players, such as former NL MVP Ryan Braun, Lo Cain, Keston Hiura, and Mike Moustakas, were battling through injuries. And they still kept going, and made an improbable run in September (going 20-7) to get to the Wild-Card Game at all.
Persistence, grit, and heart in action. It was fun to watch them overcome so much adversity in September.
That said, this was a disappointing loss. It hurt, as a fan, to watch it. And I’m sure the players didn’t enjoy it either, most especially not Grisham and Hader.
Now, the title of this blog is, “When Life Is Like Baseball.” So you might be wondering, “Barb, what on Earth are you going on about, nattering about the Brewers game? They lost. So what?”
Well, life is like this, too. You try, and try, and try again, and sometimes you make errors. Sometimes you get bad calls, where you did everything right, but the person in charge feels you still did it wrong…and sometimes, your best play (or player) is going to let you down, because that’s what the law of averages is all about.
No one wants to make a critical error in a one-and-done situation like Grisham did, mind. And no one wants to blow a save at the worst possible time, as Hader did.
Sometimes, you are going to make your best effort, and still lose. This doesn’t mean that you should stop trying, but it does mean you have to learn from your mistakes.
You have to keep going, though. Despite disappointment. Despite adversity. Despite setbacks.
You have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off, and sometimes you have to wait a long time to “get a bit of your own back.” (Or better yet, just live well and let that be the best revenge. Or in the Brewers case, play well.)
But you can do it. No matter what the adversity, setback, or disappointment, you can do it if you learn from your mistakes, you keep on trying, and you make your best effort every day.
I firmly believe that. And I hope you do, too.
Why I Don’t Care About Josh Hader’s Teenage Tweets
As most of you know, I am a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers. I love baseball, enjoy the Brewers, watch their games, sometimes write blogs about them, and have been happy to keep the faith over many years of mostly non-winning, non-viable teams.
This year, the Brewers have a better team than they’ve had in years. After last year’s shockingly good season (where they missed the playoffs by only one game), they remain in the playoff hunt. And they placed five players, a team record, in the All-Star Game: Jeremy Jeffress, Lorenzo Cain, Christian Yelich, Jesus Aguilar, and Josh Hader. Two of them, Hader and Jeffress, are relief pitchers; two, Cain and Yelich, are outfielders; the last one, Aguilar, is a first baseman.
But rather than being happy the Brewers placed five players on the All-Star team (a nice accolade to have), Brewers fans woke up yesterday to a very sour story, that of Josh Hader’s teenage Tweets. Hader’s Twitter account (now locked down to “private” mode) was public, and went all the way back to 2010 or 2011…and some of the Tweets from that time period were pretty raw. Hader bragged about the size of his, er, male anatomy; he quoted raunchy song lyrics without attribution; he said he couldn’t stand gay people; he even made an odd KKK Tweet. (This latter made no sense, but Hader has been an elite-level pitcher since high school. I want to believe he maybe meant this as a reference to three strikeouts in a game he’d pitched, though who knows?) Worst of all, to my mind, was the disregard he showed, whether it was to women, LGBT people, minorities, or anyone else nonwhite and not an elite athlete like himself.
(Note that I am not linking to the screen-capped Tweets, mostly because this is a family blog. (I also believe you can find them elsewhere without too much difficulty.) They aren’t pleasant reading. I felt like washing my mind out with soap after reading them. But back to the blog.)
The thing is, Hader was seventeen at the time of these Tweets. I do not condone what he said; I, myself, would not have said anything remotely like that at seventeen, and I was considered an elite-level musician at the time, with multiple scholarship offers. (Not exactly the same thing as Hader, and certainly without the earning potential. But close enough.)
Still. He was seventeen. And one would hope he’s learned better by now, as he’s now twenty-four.
His teammates have said what’s expected. (Jesus Aguilar in particular came out and said Hader’s not racist, and that everyone should know it.) They know Hader better than anyone else. They do not believe he’s a bigot. Nor do they believe he’s misogynistic.
Look. We all have said something we shouldn’t, that hurts us. (I know I have.) It may not be as bad as this, no. But it is something we do because we haven’t fully matured yet, or maybe we just don’t realize the impact our words have on others yet.
Or, perhaps, we all make mistakes, so we can learn from them? Or try to learn from them?
In this day and age, when mistakes can linger for years and years–as Hader’s did, waiting to bite him on the butt in 2018–shouldn’t we learn how to forgive and forget? Or at least forgive?
Also, keep this in mind: Hader is not making public policy. He is not in charge of the federal government, or the state government, or even the local government…he is a baseball player. A pitcher.
In other words, Hader’s words have only as much effect on us as we allow. And if his teammates are all right with him, and providing he continues to work on himself and mature and become a better person (as we all must, if we want to get something good out of this life at all), why should we care about his teenage Tweets?
So, that’s my position. I do not care about Hader’s Tweets from 2011. But I do care about how he acts right now. And my hope is that he will be able to become a force for good, and use his celebrity and money to good effect.
In that way, he can transform this obnoxious episode from his past into something better. And then, maybe, his old Tweets can become a blessing…that is the best-case scenario.
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