Yesterday, Prince Fielder signed a nine-year, $214 million contract with the Detroit Tigers.

If Fielder had been traded before last offseason, maybe it wouldn’t have been so tough. The offseason of 2011 was set up to be the transition period for the franchise. The team would go young with a bevy of prospects who could potentially bring the Brewers back to the playoffs along with Ryan Braun and Yovani Gallardo. We understood Prince was gone — the standing ovation he received in Milwaukee’s last game at Miller Park was the beginning of the grieving process.

But first the Brewers traded for Shaun Marcum, and then the Brewers traded for Zack Greinke. The Prince Fielder grieving process stopped dead in its tracks and pulled a 180 on a dime. All of a sudden, there were thoughts of playoffs, championships, and all with Prince as a Brewer. The window, somehow, remained open.

The Brewers fell short, but the ride was wonderful. The new NL Central championship banner hanging at Miller Park represents the accomplishments of Fielder and the Brewers in 2011. The regular season was so great it was difficult to stave off thoughts of a potential Prince return to Milwaukee — after all, Prince always cared about winning, and if teams like Seattle and Washington were the teams willing to pay Fielder the most, maybe Milwaukee could convince him to return on a deal the Brewers could afford.

Hope springs eternal, right?

For Prince Fielder, it must have felt as if winter was eternal. First the Winter Meetings passed, and Albert Pujols signed his megadeal. But Fielder was left hanging as the Marlins decided to go with Mark Buehrle as their second impact player behind Jose Reyes. December plodded on, and the markets cleared. But Washington and Seattle loomed, as did Texas buttressed by their new billion-dollar television deal. The Brewers continued to spend in other places — K-Rod accepted arbitration, and the Brewers added a left side of the infield with Aramis Ramirez and Alex Gonzalez. But who knows — maybe Mark Attanasio, a man who has proved his willingness to spend, would splurge for another chance at a title behind Prince Fielder.

Then came January, and the Rangers blew $51 million on Yu Darvish’s posting fee and another $60 million on a six-year contract. All indications from the beat writers and the business types said they were out of the Prince Fielder sweepstakes. Then came the rumors the Nationals had put the finishing touches on a Fielder contract. Then those rumors proved to be false — the Nationals were out too.

With every cold January day that passed, that tiny hope grew. Maybe he’ll have nowhere else to go. Maybe the team that made Beast Mode a Wisconsin phenomenon was just the right landing spot.

But things rarely work out so cleanly, especially when it comes to the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club. We could cite economics. We could cite Scott Boras’s infuriating yet surgical skill as an agent. But realistically, there was no way Prince Fielder was ever coming back to Milwaukee.

For three months, we avoided reality and flirted with fantasy. Prince Fielder is gone now, and $214 million says there was no chance he was ever coming back. Personally, I’m happy for Fielder, and I’m happy he won’t be plying his trade against the Brewers in the National League for the next nine years. We’ve known for at least the last three years Fielder would eventually wear a different jersey. The Brewers may even compete in 2012 without him.

Still, watching Brewers baseball will not be the same without Fielder the hitter and without Fielder the teammate on the field. But the memories are plentiful, and I am just grateful we had the chance to call him ours for those six awesome years.

The best chance for Braun to extricate something good from his situation would be to stand up on the dais Saturday, hold the NL MVP trophy in his hands — and offer to give it back to the Baseball Writers’ Association of America at its annual New York dinner, even while maintaining his innocence. This gesture would elevate Braun and separate him from the legions of athletes who have issued denials in the face of accusations of performance-enhancing drug use.

Suffice to say, I disagree. But more important than my disagreement is the mindset I think Olney is portraying here. What sort of person would think more highly of Braun if he did something like this? I believe it would be someone who views Braun’s positive test as a potential hero’s tragic downfall, which can only be overcome through some act of noble sacrifice. In other words, I think giving back the MVP would only elevate Braun in the eyes of a sportswriter. The average fan would see it as an admission of guilt, so from a PR perspective it really makes no sense. But the Buster Olneys of the world would love it, as it would fulfill their desire to see sports as a world of mythological heroes making grand gestures and struggling with mortal temptation in their quest for honor and valor. Unfortunately for them, that’s just not accurate. Entertaining and enjoyable as they may be, these are games, mere games, played by men, not gods.

Suppose Ryan Braun gives back his MVP award tonight. When he hits a go-ahead home run at Wrigley Field next season, will the legions of Cubs fans prepared to scream “CHEATER!” bite their tongues as they think of the selfless sacrifice he made for the sanctity of the game? No, they will merely shout it with all the more conviction that they’re correct, because it was never about the sanctity of the game—it was all about the sanctimony of the sportswriter.

The Brewers deadline to negotiate with Norichika Aoki was no different. The Brewers had until 4:00 PM Tuesday afternoon to sign the Japanese outfielder to a contract after winning the rights for a $2.5 million posting fee one month ago. At 4:39 PM, MLB.com beat writer Adam McCalvy (among others) reported that Aoki and the Brewers have agreed to a two-year contract with a club option for a third year.

No more details are available as of yet.

As with any player coming over from Japan, projections for Aoki’s production in the states will be murky. Aoki appears to be stellar at making contact, as evidenced by his .336 career batting average in the NPB. Although he showed some power in Japan, with 84 career home runs, scouts seem to universally agree his power won’t translate in the MLB, much as it didn’t in the 2011 NPB season (in which the league moved to a different kind of baseball and power dropped leaguewide). His upside basically appears to be a similar kind of player to Nyjer Morgan — high contact, good speed, and some doubles down the line but little else in terms of power numbers.

The Brewers roster appears to be set now in terms of outfielders, and GM Doug Melvin has confirmed that notion:

With signing of Aoki, #Brewers GM Doug Melvin said he’s done shopping for outfielders

— Tom (@Haudricourt) January 17, 2012

The Brewers have stockpiled an excellent amount of outfield depth now, perhaps a necessity given the state of flux Ryan Braun’s 2012 campaign finds itself in. However, between Braun, Corey Hart, Morgan, Carlos Gomez and Aoki, the Brewers potentially have five above-average outfielders including one elite defender and one elite hitter. With Logan Schafer, Caleb Gindl and Brendan Katin waiting in the minors and utility man Brooks Conrad potentially able to man the corners as a right-handed bat, the Brewers should be able to handle almost any situation in the outfield.

It’s entirely possible the Aoki experiment is a failure on the level of the Twins’ signing of Tsuyoshi Nishioka or, going back a little further, the Tsuyoshi Shinjo experience in New York and San Francisco. However, with how little the Brewers are asking from Aoki — merely fill a fourth outfielder role, not become a key, starting contributor — the environment should be right for him to thrive as a Milwaukee Brewer.

Today, reports has surfaced that Starlin Castro may have sexually assaulted a woman at his apartment in Chicago during the fall. I will not hear about it from my roommates. SportsCenter is talking about the new head football coach at Penn State, and the “What’s Next” box shows nothing about Starlin Castro upcoming for discussion.

Where is the widespread moral outrage against the Cubs’ star? Sexual assault is one of the worst crimes a human being can commit, and yet the sports world seems perfectly content to move on as if nothing has happened.

True, Castro is innocent until proven guilty. True, there are times when we see these things blow over as the alleged victim recants the story. But from either a rash of ignorance — for some reason, this story really isn’t getting out there among the big baseball reporters (Jon Heyman is tweeting about Brandon Webb, whose major league career is probably over) — or a rash of apathy, this story just seems like any other headline for another day on the cold stove.

Obviously this was not the case with Ryan Braun. Nearly every national writer offered some opinion on the case within a few days, many of them harshly judging him for his actions. Comments sections for articles involving him are typically met with comments of “CHEATER!” early and often. Many around baseball have already renounced him; in their eyes, his career will always be tainted by PEDs. And while it’s true that he did test positive, we still don’t know what the cause of the positive test is. The most recent report said that the test was for a personal medication, something that would still draw a 50-game suspension but seems hardly worthy of our moral outrage.

The mental and emotional impacts of sexual assault — rape — can be and often are lifelong for the victim. An actual person greatly impacted by the behavior of the player, not some abstract cause like “sanctity of the game” or other such platitudes. It is a crime on a magnitude so much greater than cheating at baseball — a game, something we watch as a distraction, an escape, pure entertainment. Our moral axis when it comes to sports has been shifted and scrambled to a point where we only care about things that impact the play on the field, so shifted that we can lose sight of things that actually matter. Like other real, living and breathing human beings.

Unfortunately for Braun and the Brewers, Major League Baseball tends not to care what triggers the positive test. The sport generally has a zero-tolerance policy with these tests, and even if it comes out that Braun’s test was for a perfectly legitimate medical issue, the fact that he did not have an exemption (and he doesn’t for anything, as far as any reports so far indicate) will likely result in a 25-game suspension (for a “stimulant,” as was the case with Mike Cameron) or a 50-game suspension (as is the norm for PED-related cases, or the Manny Ramirez case, which involved fertility drugs).

Still, we don’t really know exactly what happens in the typical appeal for these cases because MLB has been able to prevent leaks in the past. Publically, no player has ever won an appeal, but we have reports that Brewers minor-leaguer Brendan Katin had a test overturned as well as a mysterious tweet from Jimmy Rollins indicating he knows of another similar case.

So, even with this new information, there is still a haze over the full details of the case. What was Braun’s medical condition? What does TMZ mean by “directly connected to Major League Baseball?” Could this case have developed differently without the leak? It still seems like there is a long ways to go before we even approach resolution.

But given the rather low posting fee — for example, the posting fee on Daisuke Matsuzaka was over $50 million — the Brewers should be able to negotiate a reasonable and relatively cheap contact with Aoki. The 30-year-old lefty has been compared to Ichiro as the “best pure hitter in Japan” since the all-star came over in 2001, but chances are this comparison is more lazy race-based analysis than anything substantial. Still, Aoki’s career NPB stats are very encouraging. In 697 games prior to 2011, Aoki owned a .336/.411/.472 line before stumbling a bit to a .292/.358/.360 season in 2011 — although I don’t have the full statistics on hand, that line screams poor luck on balls in play, as he still showed excellent on-base skills.

But it’s difficult to tell whether statistics from Japan will translate. For every Ichiro, there’s a Tsuyohsi Shinjo, and for every Hideo Nomo there’s a Hideki Irabu. Aoki, whose arm will likely limit him to left field, seems like a good bet to be a fourth outfielder type but likely lacks the power to become more — he only hit 84 home runs in his roughly 800 games in Japan, a pace of 17 per 162 game season. With Japanese parks typically easier to hit home runs in and the drop-off in pitching talent across the Pacific, one can certainly question if Aoki would manage even a double digit total with regularity in the majors, something that simply won’t cut it as a full-time corner outfielder. If he could cut it in center field, however, his chances of being a productive starting major leaguer increase significantly.

Of course, it’s impossible to address any Brewers situation involving an outfielder without addressing Ryan Braun. If the Brewers do indeed sign Aoki, he would be a clear option to replace Braun in the lineup should he receive the 50-game suspension he is facing for a positive test for a banned substance (potentially performance enhancing drugs). Although Aoki (as with almost any other player) could not completely replace Braun, he could give the Brewers much-needed outfield depth in his absence.

If the Brewers indeed add Aoki, here’s a video taste of what he can do:

http://t.co/j4iEG8DW

But, on the other hand:

Enjoy.

In today’s column on players who just missed out on rookie eligibility for 2010, Keith Law brings up Brett Wallace, a former hot prospect who has been shuffled around more often than a deck of cards at the Bellagio. Wallace finally ended up in Houston last season after stops with St. Louis, Oakland, and Toronto, coming over in the aftermath of the Roy Oswalt deal. The Astros immediately plugged Wallace into the MLB team, and he struggled mightily, hitting .222/.296/.319 in 159 plate appearances. Here’s what Law had to say about Wallace (insider only).

The way Wallace’s rise to the majors has stalled out has been a hot topic among scouts this winter, since at the time he was drafted the debate was over whether he could play any position well enough to keep him off DH, not whether he’d hit. But the new consensus is that Wallace can’t cover the inner half because he doesn’t fully rotate his back side through his swing, ceding the inside part of the plate to the pitcher, and that it’s not fixable. If anyone can help him, it’s new hitting coach Mike Barnett, who was hitting coach in Toronto while I was in the front office … but the industry has officially jumped off the Wallace bandwagon.

Although the stories aren’t completely analogous, I can’t help but think of Brewers 3B/LF/RF/1B/whatever else Mat Gamel can be considered at this point. Wallace looked like a monster at AAA, but the Major League level has been pure disappointment. We’ve seen something similar with Gamel, although he hasn’t been quite as bad as Wallace. In 167 PAs, Gamel has a .241/.335/.414 line, which could play at some positions but not with the complete lack of defensive ability that Gamel has shown at every level to date. And, unfortunately, their minor league numbers are eerily similar. Take a look:

The two 2009 seasons for Wallace are his stints with Oakland and St. Louis respectively. Wallace doesn’t have the on-base ability that Gamel showed, but he makes up for that, for the most part, by making contact at a much higher rate. However, the similarities are difficult to ignore. Both players have nearly equivalent power numbers and their offensive numbers are buttressed by high batting averages on balls in play, which usually just don’t translate to the majors. Oddly enough, BABIP hasn’t been the problem for either of these players. Wallace’s sits at .326 and Gamel’s at an eye-popping .385, but their other peripheral skills just haven’t showed up yet.

Now, obviously we have to remember that both players MLB lines are in tiny sample sizes. However, both players have to be able to maintain a solidly above-average offensive profile due to their defensive problems. Even if their BB%, K%, and ISO can surge to somewhere near where they sat in the minors, both players need moderately high BABIPs to remain productive in the Major Leagues. So far, I haven’t seen any negative scouting reports with Gamel like the one above on Wallace, but the comparison certainly worries me, as both players seem very, very similar.

Veras lives off a hard fastball, averaging over 94 MPH on the pitch. His repertoire also includes a curveball and a much lesser used splitfinger.

Fastball:

Curveball:

Veras’s power combo drew a career high 79 strikeouts in 2011; over 71 innings, that produced his second straight season with a strikeouts per nine innings above 10. As with many power relievers, he also struggles to find the strike zone at times, and his 4.3 walks per nine innings was his lowest in a full season. His 3.80 ERA was effectively league average, and his career ERA- (the reverse of OPS+ and wRC+ for pitchers; 100 is average, lower is better) of 98 suggests average is just what the Brewers should expect in 2012, with some upside if he can maintain the low walk numbers. At the same time, there is worry that Veras’s low ground ball rate (38.2% career, 37.3% last season) could lead to home run problems at the less-friendly Miller Park, even though it hasn’t been an issue in his career so far.

As far as McGehee goes, there were signs at times that he could turn it around — his three homer game against Edwin Jackson chief among them. From July 6th through August 28th, McGehee almost looked his old self — he hit .276/.331/.462 over that time period, not coincidentally a period in which the Brewers went 34-12. However, he would fall off sharply over the last month of the season; including August 28th to the end of the season, McGehee was right back to incompetence: .225/.288/.398.

McGehee offers a cautionary tale of believing sharp bursts of Major League effectiveness after mediocrity (or worse) in the minor leagues. As good as a player can look over a season or a season and a half, it takes any numbers involving contact — power numbers, BABIP numbers — at least a full season, if not longer, to even begin to stabilize. There were warning signs even as McGehee looked to come into his own in 2010 — 15 of McGehee’s 23 home runs were classified as “Just Enoughs” by ESPN HitTracker, a stunningly high ratio. Only Adrian Gonzalez had more “Just Enoughs” with 16, and Gonzalez hit eight more home runs than McGehee and did so with half his games at Petco Park.

The Brewers could have gambled on McGehee next season, but the debacle of 2011 made it difficult for the Brewers to consider competing with him manning the hot corner. His bat would have struggled to play at first even in 2010, much less now. Milwaukee and Doug Melvin have moved on, and in getting Jose Veras, they did so while acquiring a useful piece for the 2012 bullpen as well.

Ramirez provides production from the plate the Brewers sorely missed at premium positions (other than second base) last season. The Brewers finished with a below-average position-adjusted OPS+ (sOPS+) at shortstop, center field, catcher and of course third base last season. Third base was the disaster — the other positions at least finished above 90. Thanks largely to McGehee, Brewers third basemen only produced 70% of the offense the rest of the league managed from the position.

Ramirez promises to plug this offensive hole quite well. Even in his down year in 2010, when he limped to a .245 BABIP, he still finished with a 92 wRC+. Every other season since 2004, Ramirez has managed at least a 120 wRC+, making him one of the best hitters at the position over that period. Only Alex Rodriguez, Chipper Jones, David Wright, Evan Longoria, and Kevin Youkilis have better bats over the past eight seasons as measured by wRC+.

There’s more — thoughts on his defense and a snazzy table from Baseball-Reference — so I highly suggest you go read the blog over at FanGraphs.

However, lost in a sea of replies was this odd tweet from free agent shortstop Jimmy Rollins:

@stlcards314 never been overturned is”technically” correct. I know of a case that no one will hear about.

— Jimmy Rollins (@JimmyRollins11) December 11, 2011

The tweet is cryptic, as many of the details emerging about the case have been. It seems to suggest that there have indeed been times in which players have had their cases overturned, but the details aren’t available to the public — and understandably so, as these allegations would follow players regardless of their validity. Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus offered some confirmation later:

@JeffPassan Legit, as in people in front office I trust have told me that cases that never got leaked were turned over.

— Kevin Goldstein (@Kevin_Goldstein) December 11, 2011

Now, news has come out from the New York Daily News that the testosterone levels in the test were by far the highest in any sample MLB has ever received. The report also mentions “chain of custody issues” surrounding the handling of the sample.

Basically, if we’ve learned anything from the developments over the past 24 hours, it’s that we really know nothing about this situation. News continues to trickle out, but at this point we scarcely know more solid facts about whether or not Ryan Braun used PEDs than we did before the news of the test came out.

Stay tuned.