In the midst of their most depressing off-season (ever?) the Brewers are not only losing players… they’re losing sponsors, and they’re far from alone as the big market teams run circles in free agency around the small market ones.  Just when will it end?

SCOTT JACOBS

The Brewers are having an atrocious off-season.  Unless you live in Ethiopia you know by now that the Yankees laughed at Milwaukee’s $100 million offer to C.C. Sabathia and then trumped it by $61 million and two additional years.  Bye bye to the ace of the staff, who the Brewers gave up so much for just to give themselves a shot to get into the post-season (which they did).  Ben Sheets appears to be next, as the Brewers will not be bringing back the injury riddled pitcher, who when healthy has great stuff, but isn’t hardly ever healthy.  Mike Cameron is reportedly getting shipped out of town, and there are people who even think the Brewers may deal superstar Prince Fielder because they can’t afford the growing price tag he is soon going to command (did we mention his agent is Scott Boras?  Cause he is).

And after their first playoff trip since 1982, the Brewers are watching everything fall back to reality.  Hard!  Such is the nature of being a small market club in Major League Baseball.  The Brewers had their moment last year, while capturing the masses love and attention in Milwaukee.  But that dream was derailed when the Phillies took out Milwaukee in the first round, and now the window is not only closed on a World Series dream for the Brewers, it’s locked, and the key is buried somewhere in the Northeast.

And on top of that, the Brewers recently lost a sponsor, when Mercedes said it is not going to renew it’s naming rights to the picnic area in right field of Miller Park.  Nothing Brewer related we’re told, but man, when it rains it pours.  Yeah, it probably has more to do with the sagging economy more so than the crappy team Milwaukee will be putting on the field next year, but still, it certainly doesn’t help.

Such is the nature that the Brewers are used to. They are a small market team that can only pick it’s spots, not take over them, when they see a manageable opportunity to compete.  While the Yanks blow their offer (and just about everybody else’s) out of the water the Brewers watch their playoff aspirations sink a little deeper.

And ya know what?  I’m sick of this!  Buster Olney wrote this about the Brewers’ iminnent demise from relevence:

There’s no one to blame, unless you care to find the places where the founding fathers of Major League Baseball are buried and lecture their headstones for the way the sport is structured financially, with built-in advantages for the most popular big-city teams. The Yankees are working within their much greater means to compete for a title, as they should, and so are the Cubs, who figure to soon get Jake Peavy, and so are the Mets and the Red Sox. The Brewers, Twins, Athletics, Indians and other clubs have to operate almost flawlessly, and have some good luck along the way, in order to compete.

Even if that’s true, which it is, it’s messed up.  The Rays will be very good most likely for a few years, and then their talent will head north or far west, because that’s where the financially powered franchises are.  The issue is that while the Yankees wipe their behinds with 100 dollar bills, teams like the Brewers are left to scrap together the cash they save from cheaper gas.

There was a report that the Brewers didn’t have money to spend right now, and this came after they lost C.C.  There is something seriously wrong with that.  It’s the type of reason that I openly root for fine oiled machines built off of the best money can buy to fail (such as the Yankees).  Yes, they’re fun to hate.  But they’re also like that only child who doesn’t know how to share, and hogs everything to himself, offering a scrap of his stuff every now and then.  And while the Yankees pick from the best of the best, most of baseball’s teams are left to pick at the scraps.

The sports’ salaries are out of control.  Mark Teixiera doesn’t deserve $200 million, but I’d be shocked at this point if he didn’t get it.  C.C. didn’t get $160 million like I originally thought.  No, he got $161 million.  Why you ask?  Because it makes him the highest paid pitcher per year by $100,000.  No, he couldn’t be tied with Johan Santana, he had to eclipse him.  While you go out and look for a second job so that the bank doesn’t forclose your house, C.C. and other high profile names on the free agency market suck up every last penny that’s on the table.

Once upon the time it wasn’t about just money.  There was loyalty, there was the desire to help your team.

Now, it’s a joke.  Guys say they want to be team players, and they want to win.  But they just want the money.  Because yeah, small market teams like the Marlins won’t pay much, but if guys were that determined to make their small market teams winners they would take major pay cuts from what they could get on the open market.  But that hardly ever happens.

Because baseball players live in a surreal world.  For the rest of us reality couldn’t be more different.

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