We Should Talk About Colin Rea's Outlook in the Brewers Rotation

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Brewers could not have won the NL Central as handily or as impressively in 2023 without the help of a couple of journeymen who stepped up to fill holes in their starting rotation. Since they elected to bring one back on a permanent basis, let's take a moment to analyze him.

Image courtesy of © Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports

Now out of minor-league options and with a guaranteed contract worth $4.5 million, Colin Rea looks likely to be the 2024 equivalent of 2023 Wade Miley. Rea is likely to begin the season as the fifth starter in the rotation, though at the moment, he's fourth on the depth chart. After a season in which he gave the Brewers 125 innings of league-average work on the mound, that's a well-earned opportunity, but it's worth studying how Rea effected that success and to what extent he can sustain it.

Rea will turn 34 next July, but he threw as hard in 2023 as he ever has, at least at the big-league level. That was one in a series of improvements he brought back with him after a year with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks of Nippon Professional Baseball, but each of them was quite small. He didn't transform into a different pitcher. He just made some incremental improvements.

For one thing, Rea got a bit more vertical depth on both his curveball and his splitter. Those are his least-used pitches, but they're important complementary pieces in what remains a kitchen-sink approach. The most important change he made, however, was adding a sweeper, which gave him a bit more of a weapon against right-handed batters than he'd had before. Lefties crushed him, to the tune of a .251/.314/.502 batting line, with 15 home runs in fewer than 247 batters faced. Against righties, though, he was quite good. They batted just .220/.279/.371 against him. The sweeper missed bats, and his cutter was much more effective running away from righties (playing off both his sinker and his sweeper) than it was against lefties.

One obvious adjustment option presents itself. Rea really didn't use the cutter effectively against lefties last year. It was the pitch he used most against them, but he didn't seem comfortable doing so, except in an effort (often an unsuccessful one) to steal called strikes by throwing it through the back door--from off the outside edge of the plate onto it.

That's not a very physically natural way to use a cutter, though, and as you can see, Rea just found too much of the plate with the pitch too often. Instead of throwing it there over and over, he might consider throwing the pitch to lefties more like he did to righties.

It's likely that left-handed hitters' eyes will still light up when they see Rea's cutter, if he throws it starting in the middle of the plate and moving in on them. Given his generally fine command, though, he can probably find a way to get them hitting the ball weakly against it, off the handle of the bat. It could require a mental tweak, or a mechanical one, or both. It might even be that Rea and William Contreras need to communicate better about how to use the cutter to lefties. Whatever the case, this seems like a fixable problem, and if he does fix it, Rea can be an average or better big-league starter--even without dominant stuff, and even if his luck regresses a bit in 2024.

How comfortable are you with Rea at the back end of the Brewers' rotation? What's your level of urgency to push him further down the depth chart? Drop a comment and let us know whether you buy into the feasibility of these small changes.

View full article

[Michael Trzinski]

I'd be good with him at #4 or #5...the Brewers just need to find #3 and #4 to back up Burnes and Peralta.

[Matthew Trueblood]

13 hours ago, Michael Trzinski said:

I'd be good with him at #4 or #5...the Brewers just need to find #3 and #4 to back up Burnes and Peralta.

I'm comfortable with him, too, but if they trade Burnes, they really need to add two more starters to compensate. Peralta-X-Houser-Gasser-Rea just isn't good enough, in my opinion. It's gotta be Peralta-X-X-Houser-Gasser-Rea, with the option to either use a six-man rotation or flex each of the back three into the bullpen when needed. You've gotta have depth.