Brewers Need to Wean Themselves Off the Soft Cutter in 2025

[Matthew Trueblood]

Though it was an important part of their plan to neutralize hard contact and overcome their pitchers' collective lack of overpowering stuff, Milwaukee needs to alter an essential tenet of their hurlers' approach over the offseason.

Image courtesy of © Robert Edwards-Imagn Images

Late last week at Baseball Prospectus, I wrote about an interesting trend throughout MLB over the last several seasons: the league keeps throwing more cutters to opposite-handed batters, even though those pitches keep getting less effective. In short, while everyone has gotten used to the idea of throwing the cutter to crowd and jam a batter, it's not working for most pitchers. Some cutters--those thrown hardest, and with more of a fastball-like shape, like Corbin Burnes's and Justin Steele's--are still doing fine, but the ones that are basically a harder, shorter version of a pitcher's slider are getting tagged.

Some of this is, in a sense, by design. As I wrote about Bryan Hudson back in June, a cutter is sometimes the sacrificial lamb within a pitcher's arsenal. The idea is to let hitters get occasional hits against that offering, while using it to set up pitches the hurler throws better and more often. Even if it's giving up hits, a cutter can force batters not to sit on other pitches, and thus make them less aggressive or dangerous overall.

There's undoubtedly an upper bound to the value of that effect, though, and a lot of pitchers and teams are operating on the wrong side of it. Only the Red Sox, Rays, and White Sox threw more breaking ball-like cutters this year than did the Brewers, and of the top 25 users of that offering, the Crew could count Aaron Civale, Colin Rea, Bryse Wilson, and Tobias Myers as part of their fold. Few pitchers use all three fastball shapes--the four-seamer, the sinker, and the cutter--but the Brewers do it much more than most, and they do draw a benefit from that flexibility. As Jack Stern wrote at the beginning of May, many of these pitchers have struggled to find any effective changeup, so they use the mix of three different hard pitches as an alternative solution to the problem of predictability or a single plane onto which the hitter can lock. Some of the team's hurlers just need to back off on it a bit.

Rea is an exemplar. After lefties beat him up in 2023, he adjusted his approach and kept them a bit better in check this past season, by leaning into his sweeper and getting more out of his splitter. He even upped his sinker usage to them. However, lefties slugged .558 off his cutter, in large part because he didn't get inside on them with it at all.

Throwing that outside cutter occasionally does make it slightly harder to identify the sweeper, but Rea's usage of the pitch far exceeds the value of that advantage. He's not willing or able to jam lefties with his cutter, so he should throw it considerably less often to them. The story is similar for the likes of Myers and Civale. In all likelihood, the team will be best-served by simply moving on from Wilson this winter.

Milwaukee can't afford to simply stockpile pitchers with elite raw stuff, so they'll continue to try creative ways to claw back the edge they give up when they send out pitchers who only throw in the low 90s or who lack a true putaway pitch. As the league gains familiarity both with cutters in general and with the way pitchers try to deploy breaking cutters in the modern game, though, Chris Hook and company need to throttle back that tactic and find some other gambit that will confound opponents, instead.

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