‘In Stearns We Trust’ motto takes a hit at deflating trade deadline

If you closely follow the Milwaukee Brewers, you probably saw some clickbait headlines or some Twitter posts about Josh Hader trade rumors in July. And if you’re like most fans, you probably shook them off as just stuff national writers throw out there to get page views.

Then, during the lunch hour on Monday, it happened. Hader actually did get traded to the San Diego Padres in exchange for four players. On Tuesday, the Padres made an even bigger splash, acquiring from the Washington Nationals quite possibly one of the game’s top players for years to come in Juan Soto and a veteran slugger who could’ve helped a lot of teams right now in Josh Bell.

Those moves along with their mega free agent signing of Manny Machado a couple years back and some more recent pickups of solid starting pitchers show San Diego isn’t messing around. That organization wants to win and win now.

Which brings us back to our beloved Brewers (at least for most of us in this part of the world).

I was in a car for about five minutes Tuesday morning as the Soto deal was unfolding, but it was long enough to hear an interesting thought from popular Wisconsin sports radio personality Bill Michaels.

He pointed out that as of Tuesday morning, the Brewers sat at 57-45 with a .559 winning percentage and the Padres were 58-46, a .558 winning percentage. Virtually the same. The Brewers had a three-game lead in the National League’s Central Division. The Padres were 12 games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the West and can realistically only compete for a wild card berth to get into the post-season. Not that there’s anything wrong with getting into the tournament as a wild card.

But here was one wild card team going all-in at the trading deadline and here was a division leader trading away one of the most dominant and established relievers in baseball.

If you weren’t fully agreeing with Milwaukee’s general manager David Stearns regarding the trade to begin with, thinking about that difference between two basically even teams has to bother you even more.

Sure the Brewers did make two more under-the-radar moves, acquiring an aging but hard-throwing reliever from Texas, Matt Bush, who was having a career year for the Rangers and has a controllable contract situation for a couple years, and Trevor Rosenthal from the Giants who is better known as a one-time, hardthrowing closer for St. Louis. However, he hasn’t pitched since 2020. The Brewers are hoping for lightning in a bottle there.

They did get Taylor Rogers from the Padres, a left-hander who has 28 saves and was having a career year until the wheels kinda fell off in the last month and he was actually pulled from the closer’s role. One of his losses actually came against Milwaukee on June 2.

Pitcher Dinelson Lamet was terrific for San Diego two years ago and the minor leaguers in the deal, outfielder Esteury Ruiz and pitcher Robert Gasser, are highly-regarded by scouts. Ruiz appears to have a unique skill set with home-run power, he was hitting .333 in his minor league stops this season and he has great speed on the base paths.

You can’t grade a trade the day after it’s made. You need to give it time to play out. But, as in just about any case like this, it feels like the team that just traded away one of the faces of the franchise didn’t get enough in return.

And, as any long-time fan of the Brewers will tell you, we’ve seen these kinds of trades enough where the incoming talent never quite pans out. Think Gary Sheffield in 1992 or Greg Vaughn in 1996. Both, coincidentally, went to the Padres. Think about Carlos Lee and Nelson Cruz both going to Texas in 2006. That was a big oops. I don’t even remember what the Brewers got for catcher and fan favorite Jonathan Lucroy in 2016 though Lucroy faded fast once he left Milwaukee nullifying the sting of that trade.

Ironically, one of the deadline trades where the Brewers actually did fleece the other side was the one that included -- you guessed it –– Josh Hader. That came in 2015 when the Brewers unloaded eccentric outfielder Carlos Gomez just before he went into his end-of-career decline. Hader, current Brewers starter Adrian Houser and one-time slugger Domingo Santana were all part of the Brewers’ haul in that trade, which was one of previous GM Doug Melvin’s last deals.

The Brewers’ last trade with San Diego, which came before the 2020 season, was viewed as a win for the Padres at the time but has turned into a win for the Brewers, who acquired infielder Luis Urias and pitcher Eric Lauer while parting with outfielder Trent Grisham and pitcher Zach Davies. Grisham is currently hitting .193 for San Diego though he does have 11 home runs while Davies is 2-4 with the Arizona Diamondbacks and just got off the injured list.

The other familiar theme of the Hader trade is money. Hader is just over a year away from hitting free agency and Milwaukee knew if Hader stayed healthy and stayed dominant, there was no way they were going to stop him from going to the highest bidders from New York, Los Angeles, Boston, etc. If now was the time Stearns was going to get was what he perceived to be the highest return, he felt it was time to pull the trigger.

It’s understandable, small-market general manager strategy. Plus, it’s hard to argue Milwaukee’s success in taking other teams’ perceived spare parts and turning them into viable ball players since Stearns and manager Craig Counsell took over their leadership roles.

But it also hurts because having guys like Hader on your team are what makes being a fan of your team fun. You know what you’re going to get with face-of-thefranchise studs. You knew CC Sabathia would be a great addition in 2008. No one knows if Esteury Ruiz and Robert Gasser will ever pan out or if Taylor Rogers will straighten out this year before probably leaving as a free agent this off-season. That’s what’s so tough about Monday’s trade.

Maybe the silver lining is Milwaukee is clearing future salary space while starting to think about how they’re going to pay pitching aces Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff before they hit free agency after the 2024 season. More likely over the next two years, we’ll be lamenting their departures via salary-dump trades. That’s what sucks about the lack of a salary cap in Major League Baseball and teams suddenly willing to dish out $400 million long-term contracts.

For some reason, MLB’s business model of having about four really rich teams that everybody hates but can only try to outspend for a brief period before they crash works despite crushing the dreams of fans from the other 26 teams.

Fans expected the Brewers to go for it at the deadline to give themselves a chance in 2022. They were going to get some offensive punch that could help them bury the stupid Cardinals, win the division and at least give them a better shot in the post-season than last year. Instead, you can sense a statewide deflated feeling of “well, we’ll still be competitive in the weak NL Central, but, sorry Jake Taylor fans, we ain’t winning the whole (bleeping) thing.”

Matt Frey is the Sports Editor at The Star News.

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