When news broke that the Milwaukee Brewers were trading Caleb Durbin to the Boston Red Sox, it drew all sorts of reactions in Wisconsin and beyond.

Some questioned why arguably the best regular season team in baseball last year would continue to sell on promising players when they seemingly want to be competitive again in 2026. And others, well, they like the idea of adding more interesting young players to the farm so Milwaukee can brew up a contender for years to come.

Unsurprisingly, general manager Matt Arnold falls firmly in the second category as he feels “good” about the players the Brewers have added to their roster over the winter break.

“Look, I mean, you talk about a lot of the infield depth that we have here. It's, you know, the, on top of, of Jet Williams and, uh, and Hamilton here, you also have Bryce Turing and, and Joey Ortiz, uh, in the mix, you know, we, we really liked the defense, uh, here for sure on our infield. Uh, but you also started looking at the future here with guys like Jesus my day and, um, you know, Cooper Pratt and Luke Adams and, um, Luis Pena and Andrew Fisher,” Arnold said.

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“I mean, there's just a lot of these types of guys coming. We feel like in our system that can absolutely handle the left side of the diamond, uh, that have really high upsides. And so we feel like we have the ingredients now, um, you know, to, to weather the loss of, of somebody like Caleb Durbin, who obviously meant a lot to our franchise, uh, but we feel really good about the infield depth, uh, both now and in the future as well.”

Making his MLB debut in 2025 for the Brewers, Durbin played very well for a 25-year-old rookie, hitting 11 home runs plus 53 RBIs to go with 18 stolen bases and a .256/.334/.387 line. While he did have elbow surgery back in October, Durbin is the kind of player most teams want to build around, instead of packaging him with multuple others players in a six-player deal.

Do the Brewers have the depth needed to overcome losing Durbin? For Arnold's sake, hopefully the answer is yes; otherwise, he will have more questions to answer in the future.