The Milwaukee Brewers currently hold a three-game lead in the NL Central and are well on their way to another playoff appearance. But you wouldn’t have been able to guess that just by judging their latest move ahead of the MLB trade deadline.
The Brewers traded All-Star closer Josh Hader to the San Diego Padres on Monday in exchange for closer Taylor Rogers, Dinelson Lamet, Esteury Ruiz and pitching prospect Robert Gasser (a cool name for a pitcher).
Still, you’re not going to see many Brewers fans get excited about the deal. Hader’s 2022 struggles and the Brewers’ strong bullpen aside, you don’t normally see contending teams make this kind of move — especially when Hader still has another year of team control. The Brewers must have known the trade wouldn’t go over well because the team issued a statement explaining themselves on Monday.
— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) August 1, 2022
The statement from David Stearns didn’t help matters either, and the part about biting apples really took the whole explanation off the rails. If you have to publicly explain a trade to a fanbase, it probably wasn’t a trade that should have been made.
Brewers fans responded by mocking the team’s weird statement for what it was — a transparently cheap move that didn’t better position them into serious contention with the top NL teams.