Coming off a shortened Major League Baseball season that saw the Brewers hit a franchise record-low as a team at .223, Milwaukee’s front office has a lot of questions to answer.
For now, general manager David Stearns is mostly working on deciding whether to exercise the options for some of his players — like Ryan Braun, Jedd Gyorko, Eric Sogard, and Ben Gamel.
The challenge is to improve the offense at a time the team is likely looking at a tighter budget.
Add payouts to Justin Smoak and Brock Holt to the cost of not exercising options for Braun, Gyorko, and Sogard – that’s a cost of more than $7 million before Stearns does anything about fixing the soft offense.
