The Brewers Also Add Lorenzo Cain

It’s a big day in Milwaukee, it turns out. Not long after news of their acquisition of Christian Yelich broke, Ken Rosenthal tweeted that they have also added Lorenzo Cain to their outfield.

Jerry Crasnick has the terms — and they’re probably higher than those who’ve followed the league’s soft market saga all winter would have expected:

That’s just a shade below what Dexter Fowler got from the Cardinals last winter, and with incentives might get almost as high, despite the fact that Fowler was a year younger at the time.

So… so much for that dream, eh? I think the Jays’ acquisition of Randal Grichuk probably signalled that the Jays had moved on from Cain anyway — though I suppose the Yelich deal means that all kinds of things may yet be in play.

But OK, the idea that Cain might fall into the Jays’ laps was a pretty appealing one, and sure would have made this offseason feel instantly like a real winner, I think. There are definitely going to be cranks who don’t really follow the details and will rage about the Jays coming second on Yelich and not landing Cain, and honestly… I get it a bit.

Both of those moves would have been real nice. It must be a great day to be a Brewers fan. And you can only cheer so hard for value. But in both cases you have a Brewers team that just has more incentive right now than the Jays do to blow that hole in their farm system, and to commit all those dollars to an almost-32-year-old — and as much as it pains us to see good players slip away to other teams in a better position to be aggressive, if you stick your neck out too much too often you only end up creating bigger problems than you started with.

So… here we are. As usual.

Hey, but at least we still have Vlad. We still have Bo. We still have some money to spend and some prospect pieces the club is more willing to move than maybe it’s often thought. We’ll see where it goes.