Rock Bottom. 56-106. Still a half game better than the Tigers that year, but yuck. The Milwaukee Brewers did do one thing right that year, though. They picked Doug Melvin up off the scrap heap after the Texas Rangers sent him away. Melvin had gotten the Rangers to the postseason 3 times from 1994-2001, but apparently that wasn't enough. Two losing seasons, and Tom Hicks was thinking of bigger things. Didn't quite work out for them, since they've had only one winning season since, but points for the effort.
Top of the mountain? The Brewers made the playoffs in 2008, one of the best seasons in team history, ending a 25 year drought. From bottom to the top (or maybe the top comes this year? Next year?), Melvin's been the big mover behind it all.
Wikipedia says Melvin was hired in October 2002, so I'll start in November 2002, just to be safe. Just the important stuff, because a lot of the little line-items didn't make any impact whatsoever. This is the first in a series, and will cover 2003.
Melvin has a talent for finding gems among the freely-available talent around the league. To start, he picked up Brady Clark for the waiver price in January of 2003. Clark played 4 years in the Milwaukee outfield, giving the team a cheap solution at a time when the team didn't have a lot of money to invest in talent.
In April, he picked up Dan Kolb off the scrap heap from Texas. Kolb was a Melvin draft pick in 1995, and got another chance to be a big league pitcher from him. He'd pick up the closer's job in 2003, and keep it through 2004, when the Brewers sold high on him, and Kolb would end up back as a Brewer in 2006, but would be on his way out of the bigs by the end of 2007.
Dave Burba falls under the same umbrella, although he wouldn't give as much performance or any return, besides taking up a roster spot and making the team look major league. Still, that has its advantages in luring people to come and stay.
The June draft of 2003 was a bountiful one, as the Brewers picked up Rickie Weeks, Tony Gwynn Jr. Mitch Stetter, and Ty Taubenheim. The first three contributed in the majors in some way, and Taubenheim was trade bait for a later deal of Melvin's which has worked out pretty well.
Cutting links to a terrible past helps too. Jeffrey Hammonds got shipped out on June 4th, a bust if there ever was one. His 3 year, 21 million dollar deal was just what the Brewers didn't need to be doing at the time.
Alcides Escobar was picked up a few days later, and he's one of the Brewers' best prospects.
Doug Davis was let loose by not one but two teams in 2003, but became a Brewers asset, one that came in very handy during trading time. He also gave the Brewers three and a half years of nearly .500 pitching.
On December 1st, Melvin made what may still be his masterpiece deal. Richie Sexson was sent to Arizona for Chris Capuano, Craig Counsell, Chad Moeller, Lyle Overbay, Jorge de la Rosa, and Junior Spivey. Sexson played all of 23 games for Arizona before injuries started taking a toll on his career. On the other hand, Capuano gave the Brewers a few years of quality starting pitching, plus the potential for more to come if he ever recovers from injury, Counsell has been a steadying influence on the Brewers' clubhouse and an important jack-of-all-trades, Moeller, well, he did hit for the cycle, does that count? Overbay gave the Brewers two years of quality first base work, and then became a key cog in a trade when the Brewers had some guy named Prince ready to go, and de la Rosa and Spivey didn't exactly pan out the way we had hoped. We did get Tomo Okha and Tony Graffanino from the latter two later on, though.
The Brewers got 4 years of relief work from Matt Wise, a freely available talent who hadn't pitched in the bigs in 2003. The Brewers also got Carlos Villanueva, a quality reliever for us at this point, for Leo Estrella and Wayne Franklin, both of whom never did anything outside of 2003 in Milwaukee.
2003 had been a bounceback year, although the bounce didn't get the team to 70 wins. 2004 promised to be more of the same, but the rain seemed to be slowing down a bit, and the day just got a little bit brighter for those who had some patience.
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