How Should the Brewers Align the Starting Rotation in 2024?

[Matthew Trueblood]

In the wake of losing one starting pitcher to injury (and then non-tender) and another to trade, it's hard to think beyond filling out a five-man rotation for the 2024 Brewers. Still, it might be wise to do so, for several reasons.

Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports

Only one team every five years or so makes it through an entire season with five starting pitchers. Even those teams will give one or two spot starts to an extra guy, but there is a team about twice each decade who only needs their top five to do any very important work. Still, that's rare enough to ensure that no team really plans its season around five starters. You need six. In fact, you need 10.

Happily, the Brewers just might have 10, at least at this moment. Even after losing Brandon Woodruff to the vagaries of pitching and trading Adrian Houser to clear some salary from their prospective payroll, they have the following hurlers slotted into their projected rotation for 2024:

• Corbin Burnes
• Freddy Peralta
• Wade Miley
• Colin Rea
• Joe Ross

Behind that group is a much less reliable group, of course, but also an unusually talented and interesting one. Certainly, this constitutes the best "second line" of any rotation in the NL Central:

• Robert Gasser
• Aaron Ashby
• Janson Junk
• Carlos F. Rodríguez
• Jacob Misiorowski

It's unlikely that Misiorowski will be ready for the big leagues as a starter in 2024, but even without him, that's a nice depth corps--almost enough so to make one overlook the relatively unimpressive back end of the group above it. After all, if Rea or Ross needs to be replaced midstream in order to give the team a legitimate chance to reach the postseason, Gasser and Ashby are awfully encouraging options. Nor does the above account for the availability of 2023 long relief ace Bryse Wilson to move back to the rotation, if a dire need arises.

In fact, Gasser and Ashby, especially, are good enough to make it worth entertaining the notion of a six-man rotation for a moment. That wouldn't be totally novel in Milwaukee, after all, and there are multiple reasons why the 2024 team could be as good a fit for it as the 2021 club was. That year, using six starters and lengthening the time between starts for everyone was a response to the shortened pandemic season of 2020. This time around, it would be more about roster construction, but health would be part of the calculation, too.

Miley, Rea, and Ross have such extensive injury histories--and Miley, who turned 37 last month, is showing the signs of his age so clearly--that lengthening their recovery timeline between each outing makes ample sense. Rea is a good example, too, of how the extra rest can make a difference in sheer performance. He allowed a .778 OPS when starting on four days' rest last year; a .767 when starting on five days; and a .596 when working on six or more days of rest. The samples there are too small to draw too much from them, but note, too, that Rea's average velocity on each of his two fastballs was about half a tick higher when starting on five days than on four.

Of course, those guys aren't the reason why you don't use a six-man staff, anyway. It's not a great revelation to say that back-end starters might benefit from extra rest, especially because Gasser and Ashby are (by consensus) not much worse than Rea and Ross, if they're worse at all. It's the front end of the rotation, with prime-aged Burnes and Peralta, that makes this idea tough to embrace, so let's turn our attention there.

Firstly, if we're going to talk about these two, we have to acknowledge that it might well be just Peralta in the mix, come Opening Day. It's impossible to predict whether the Brewers will trade Burnes, at this stage, but they certainly haven't ruled that out, and if he were gone, the whole picture would change. In most formulations of a deal, I would expect the team to get back a starter who could be inserted into the rotation some time in 2024, but that pitcher would be very unlikely to be anywhere near as good as Burnes. If they didn't get a rotation piece back, I think the team would go sign another free-agent starter, but again, we're talking something closer to Miley than to Burnes at that point.

In any scenario in which the team trades Burnes, then, they're likely to have the same number of credible starters, but one fewer hurler who stands out from the rest of the mélange. That would only make a six-man staff more viable. Let's consider the situation as-is, though. I think a strong case can be made for using the longer rotation even with both Burnes and Peralta in place.

Both of those pitchers enjoyed their best seasons in 2021. Moreover, they've quietly been used mostly on six-day rotations even in the seasons since. Of his 97 career starts, Peralta has made only 22 on four or fewer days. He's been best (.618 opponent OPS) on five days, and better (.651) on six or more than on four (.678). Burnes has made just 31 of his 106 career starts on four days. He's been slightly better (.583 opponent OPS) on regular rest than on longer rest (.599), but the difference is pretty small. 

Moving to a six-man rotation would increase the likelihood of both aces staying healthy throughout 2024, so it's unlikely the team would face much pushback from either. This is the last guaranteed year of Peralta's very team-friendly contract extension, and Burnes is due to hit free agency after the campaign, so each has plenty to gain by minimizing injury risk. The only real question is whether trading anywhere from five to 10 starts by those two for the same number by Gasser or Ashby would hurt more than it would help.

To be sure, there's a wide gap between the expected performances of the Crew's top two starters and their sixth and seventh guys. Baseball Prospectus has already published the early version of their PECOTA projections for 2024; here are the key numbers for the four pitchers in question. (DRA- is the rate version of their Deserved Run Average. It's scaled to 100, where that number is average and lower is better.)

Pitcher	GS	Inn.	DRA-	ERA
Burnes	29	177.2	77	3.29
Peralta	29	160.1	79	3.39
Gasser	16	64.2	105	4.75
Ashby	13	93.2	93	4.26

It would have been rather shocking to find that there would be no performance tradeoff in lengthening the rotation. We have no such shock from which to recover. The likes of Gasser and Ashby are not going to neatly mimic Burnes and Peralta every time through. If they were expected to do so, they'd already be written into the rotation. Note, though, that the system only pegs Burnes and Peralta for 29 starts apiece, anyway. Coincidentally (or not), BP's depth charts also project Gasser and Ashby to combined for 29 starts. 

Some of that is just the natural conservatism of projection systems, but not all of it can be explained that way. To take one example, Burnesian workhorse Gerrit Cole is projected for 31 starts. The system is nodding toward both the risk of injury and the team's recent tendency to lengthen the rotation whenever it can. Given that, maybe it makes sense to accept a fistful of starts from the two lesser (but certainly adequate) starters above, rather than trying to change recent patterns of usage for Burnes and Peralta to make up for the absence of Woodruff.

Add to all of this the fact that, as the game evolves, more and more starts are made on what is still nominally considered "extra" rest, anyway. More starts were made on at least five days of rest in 2023, league-wide, than ever before. In the minors, the new schedule (six-game series each week, with a regular Monday travel day) has led to most starts being made on five or six days of rest. As pitchers from Japan's NPB (where starters pitch once a week) filter into MLB in greater numbers, teams are trying to accommodate them to various degrees. It's possible that using a five-man rotation, in 2024, constitutes clinging to an essentially extinct concept.

On balance, it makes a lot of sense for the Brewers to think of themselves as building a six-man rotation for 2024, if they want to defend their NL Central title. We'll see to what extent the team agrees, over the first six weeks of the new year.

What's your stance on the question of five starters or six? How would you line up the rotation for the coming season? Let's discuss it in the comments.

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[ARobsBrewCrew]

If I had my way-

Peralta

Miley

Gasser

Rea

Ashby if healthy / Junk otherwise

I need to see Joe Ross in the spring before handing him 5th spot, although, if Ashby IS healthy, I would rather have AA anyways.  I would like C-Rod to get at least half of a season at AAA before he could move into the big league rotation.  I am also quite high on Evan McKendry and wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up in there somewhere.  I don’t see Misiorowski starting for Milwaukee in ‘24, but he might get some meaningful innings out of the bullpen late in the season.

[Michael Trzinski]

Gone are the days of 'ironman' starters like Pud Galvin, Old Hoss Radbourn, Toad Ramsey, Silver King, Ice Box Chamberlain, Pretzels Getzien, and Egyptian Healy. The cool names are long gone, too.

Fast forward 75 years and you will see that a pitcher had to start at least 40 games to make the Top-10 leaderboard in 1973. The last pitcher to start 40 games was Charlie Hough back in 1987.

Besides the trip down memory lane, my point is that the game has changed (duh!) and to go from a five-man to a six-man should cause no more anguish than the change from a four-man to a five-man.

Your 2024 rotation should have (at least) Peralta and Miley and then a mix-and-match of whoever steps up to cover the remaining spots. O'course, a 'somewhat happy' Burnes would make things easier for sure. And, will the Brewers make a trade for or sign a FA pitcher? Add that to the mix.

I think the best guess is gonna be: I don't know. Let's see what happens and go from there.

Happy New Year!!
 

[JohnBriggs12]

If they're lucky, they might get 20 starts total out of Miley who's missed a ton of starts the last two seasons.  Hopefully, Peralta can hold up physically and make 30 starts again but he's only done that once in his career.  Unless one or two young starters steps up and can get major league hitters out, this will be a long season.  Keeping Burnes until the deadline might keep things together but even that's not a guarantee and a lot of other things would have to go right.

[rolafaive]

Your going to be playing with fire if you think a unhappy Burnes is going to show his best stuff until trade deadline to which Milwaukee will try to recoup at least something for him, Burnes is pitching for his free agency, I am not as high on Ashby, was very inconsistent as starter before injury, I think they will pick up another back end starter on the cheap and finally start mixing in the youngster to start the run all over again before the next crop is ready.

[TURBO]

Trading Burnes at the deadline if we are in the hunt for a playoff spot is going to be a PR disaster (as well as team chemistry suicide).  The only way it makes sense to deal him then is if we are out of it.

Since we don't have a crystal ball, we don't know which it will be.

It makes sense to me to deal him in this off season if for no other reason than to avoid making the call at the deadline, especially if we are in 1st or within close striking distance.

If we are a game up or a game back, and we trade Burnes at the deadline, the fans will revolt!  The players will cry, and we will have anarchy!  You think what happened with Hader was bad, imagine trading Burnes, Adames and or Williams with the playoffs on the line again...  Won't be pretty.

Surely everyone can see his, right?