Piggy Back Rotation

[DonBarclay]

Given the recent moves and pitching depth (especially guys that can be stretched out), could the Brewers pilot a full piggy-back style rotation? 
 

Keep 3 “bullpen” guys - Uribe, Megill, Koenig. 
 

Create 5 teams of 2, that can cover 8-9 innings a game. Strategically pair them based on L/R, pitch mix, etc. Select the starter vs the 2nd pitcher based on the opponents lineup handedness strength. 

Zerpa/Priester
Harrison/Henderson
Hall/Woodruff
Ashby/Patrick
Gasser/Miz

Force the other team into tough L/R lineup decisions, keep guys fresh, get everyone innings. 
 

IL stints can be covered by adding another bullpen arm, or calling up someone like Sproat, Crow, Rodriguez as righties or Drohan or Peralta as lefties. 
 

It would be extremely unorthodox obviously, but could be a new way of creating advantageous matchups throughout a series. There’s almost zero chance it happens, but would be an interesting concept to see play out. 

[long ball]

I’m not going to lie, this thought also crossed my mind this morning. It’s crossed my mind several times over the course of the last few years. This roster construction with a bunch of swingman lefties and 5/dive righties made the thought creep in again. 
 

I’d be interested it seeing them try it, but I just don’t think it is sustainable over the course of a full season. 
 

it also doesn’t really align with the “win today” approach. if you have a 1 run lead after getting 3 from Gasser and 4 from Misiorowski … how hard is it to stay away from Megill and Uribe? 
 

I think it’s more of a strategic deployment like we saw last year a handful of times.

 

 

 

[Jim French Stepstool]

50 minutes ago, long ball said:

I’m not going to lie, this thought also crossed my mind this morning. It’s crossed my mind several times over the course of the last few years. This roster construction with a bunch of swingman lefties and 5/dive righties made the thought creep in again. 
 

I’d be interested it seeing them try it, but I just don’t think it is sustainable over the course of a full season. 
 

it also doesn’t really align with the “win today” approach. if you have a 1 run lead after getting 3 from Gasser and 4 from Misiorowski … how hard is it to stay away from Megill and Uribe? 
 

I think it’s more of a strategic deployment like we saw last year a handful of times.

 

 

 

Yeah, I think it's entered the thinking of a lot of fans---and a lot of front-office people in MLB. For the bulk of a season I think it's workable if maintained, but the 'win today' approach you alluded to would probably creep in way too often. When it's the 2nd guy of the piggyback, the tendency would lean heavily into going with matchups once you get into the last 3 innings or so, and when that happens regularly you need more than three late-inning arms. Nowadays the key is finding as many starts of 6 innings or more as you can. If that happens with some regularity, a quality BP with depth can be managed pretty easily.

The day a manager can comfortably go to a guy in the 5th or 6th inning & say "it's your game to win or lose" and stick with that more often than not is the 1st step towards seeing something like this tried.

[wiguy94]

If you were running an actual piggy back rotation, I think it would be much more likely to have 4 pairs and 5 relievers than 5 pairs and 3 relievers.

[Mr Southpaw]

13 hours ago, wiguy94 said:

If you were running an actual piggy back rotation, I think it would be much more likely to have 4 pairs and 5 relievers than 5 pairs and 3 relievers.

Maybe four pair of piggys and one old fashions starter (my choice would be Woodruff) to try to go 6.  That leave 4 in the pen.

[Ron Robinsons Beard]

I don't think you will ever see it happen. Teams like having bullpen depth too much. That's why piggybacking rotations has always been just the theoretical concept.

[Tedaldtada]

I certainly can vibe with the naysayers but this is an organization and 40-man roster built for this. It’s not just 13 pitchers. It’s probably more like 20 primary arms supported by another 10-15 fringe arms that create the infrastructure for this to work. I believe this is what the Brewers are working towards. Position-less pitching staffs. Everyone capable of getting at least 6 outs each outing they pitch. And most are able to approach 12-15 outs effectively and safely every 3-4 days.

It takes a village to survive the regular season AND to be positioning well for the playoffs. You want our most talented arms peaking late in the year. Long outings (even north of 60 pitches) are too risky in April and May. Warm them up less. Ramp them up slowly. Allow for the cream to rise and enter playoffs with fresh arms. 

[Lathund]

I think piggyback rotations will struggle with either covering enough innings over a whole season, or not having enough flexibility with their high leverage relievers. They'll also run into real trouble if one of their piggyback starters leaves early after injury or poor performance. If your bullpen (i.e not including the "follower") has to cover 5 innings, that will have knock-on effects. 

I think a more likely scenario is that based on bullpen usage, matchups etc, we will see some multi-inning openers and things of that nature. There might be scenarios where a multi-inning reliever is rested and the bullpen in general isn't, that's where we might see a piggyback start. But I think we should expect that much of the season will be a conventional rotation, but one where they will very often pitch only every 6th day, via the aid of off days and spot starts, but not an actual 6-man rotation. 

[Playing Catch]

22 hours ago, Tedaldtada said:

It’s probably more like 20 primary arms supported by another 10-15 fringe arms that create the infrastructure for this to work. I believe this is what the Brewers are working towards. Position-less pitching staffs.

This is exactly my thought. Position-less pitching allows the team so much flexibility game-to-game, and week-to-week, in terms of monitoring workloads.

21 hours ago, Lathund said:

They'll also run into real trouble if one of their piggyback starters leaves early after injury or poor performance.

IMHO, this is actually the advantage of having flexible roles. Having a blow-up outing is a threat, no matter the style of rotation. It is never a good thing for a pitcher to be unable to finish their assignment, and will always burden a pitching staff.

[snoogans8056]

On 2/10/2026 at 7:49 AM, Ron Robinsons Beard said:

I don't think you will ever see it happen. Teams like having bullpen depth too much. That's why piggybacking rotations has always been just the theoretical concept.

What if the bullpen depth is created by bussing guys back and forth from AAA?

Heck, could one of your piggy back tandems also move back and forth?

[MilwaukeeBeers]

I am curious where do we think Zerpa fits into the equation now. Earlier in the offseason there was talk about stretching him out into a starter. 

[Ron Robinsons Beard]

7 minutes ago, snoogans8056 said:

What if the bullpen depth is created by bussing guys back and forth from AAA?

Heck, could one of your piggy back tandems also move back and forth?

Not sure that will work with pitchers required to stay down for 15 days.

[wallus]

5 minutes ago, MilwaukeeBeers said:

I am curious where do we think Zerpa fits into the equation now. Earlier in the offseason there was talk about stretching him out into a starter. 

I think they plan on using him a lot like Hall/Ashby where he comes in for 2-3 innings per appearance. 

[jay87shot]

I have been a huge fan of the idea. We so many multi inning option guys that all need innings to be watched having 2 guys go 60-70 pitches each should get at least an average of 7 innings a game. Yes, there will be some day that 2 guys cover 5+ or 6 but for those days there should be some complete games where a guy like Preister goes 6 in 70 pitches. I think the matchup possibilities are great as well. Say we play the Phillies and want a lefty for Schwarber and Harper early. We cold have a lefty go 4 innings and cover those 2 guys twice. Than either shift to the other starter or use a reliever for an inning depending on the matchups. We wouldn't need to use relief at the end of the game. With our depth it would be very easy to give a guy an extra day off or callup up a quality AAA starter for a game to keep arm fresh if there are a few shorter combined starts in a week. If there are some injuries it would be easy to transition to a 5 or 6 man because at like 60-70 pitches a guy can be fully stretched out in a start or two. 

I don't think you even need to do L/R pairings if you can put hard throwers like Misi or Sproat with a softer thrower like Henderson, CarRod, Crow who would be different enough. I will say that this wouldn't work for an entire year but for the 1st couple months could be a great way to get everyone off to a good start.

I worry more about wasting guys in AAA who are ready for the mlb challenge more than injuries destroying the pitching staff like early next year.

Misi/Woody, Priester/Hall, Gasser, or Drohan, Henderson/Harrison, Patrick/Ashby with Sproat to take a spot after a month. Hall, Gasser, Anderson, Drohan, Megee, Crow as multi-inning 5th relievers going back and forth between AAA and the bigs. Zerpa, Koenig, Abner, Megill as short relief 7/8/9 innings with Yoho or Ashby as depth.

There are like 10-12 guys who would start on a majority of big league club and then 3-5 other guys who would still serve as potential quality starting depth. That is also not counting our quality starters who were in AA last year and should be logging innings in AAA. You could probably almost piggyback a few guys (not all 5 or 6 days. in AAA to get everyone innings there as well.

On paper at least it seems like it would work.

 

[Lathund]

16 hours ago, Playing Catch said:

IMHO, this is actually the advantage of having flexible roles. Having a blow-up outing is a threat, no matter the style of rotation. It is never a good thing for a pitcher to be unable to finish their assignment, and will always burden a pitching staff.

But a full piggyback rotation is the opposite of flexible roles, it's setting 10 (or 8 if you go shorter stints on shorter rest) pitchers to a fixed, inflexible role. And when you have 10 pitchers locked in like that, you only have three guys who can cover. The same pitchers you'd normally want for the 8th-9th in the close games. If you have someone pitching 4-5 innings at a time, you have to more or less keep them on their rotation schedule. Maybe you can use them one day earlier, but that's it. 

With having something more akin to a traditional rotation as a base, you then have 8 pitchers instead of 3 to use flexibly. So flexible usage would be things like if, say, DL Hall hadn't pitched for 5+ days but the rest of the 'pen has worked hard, then a "piggyback" with the starter and DL would make sense. Same thing if your 4 best single inning types hadn't pitched for a week, you'd be better served with a game where they follow the starter as opposed to having a piggyback "follower" do it. 

Flexibility is good, but what the OP proposes isn't flexible at all. 

Something more flexible would be something like having the kind of 5½ man rotation they've mostly used (i.e a 5-man rotation but where they usually pitch on 5 days rest), but where you have multiple 2-3 inning relievers. They can pitch more often than every 5th day, meaning you can use them much more flexibly, pick more desirable matchups. As opposed to being stuck with whichever piggyback guy was scheduled that day. 

The reason the 5 (or now 5½) man rotation has stuck around is that there are a lot of innings to cover in a season. The built-in rest of a rotation like that is how you get to cover it. It also means giving a larger share of your innings to your best pitchers, in addition to allowing you a bigger bullpen to leverage wisely. A consequence of which is that you maximize the chances of having your best relievers available when you most need them. 

The main point is that you don't want 10 guys locked into a schedule. The way to improve on the OPs suggestion would be to make it 4 "piggyback" guys on a 4-game rotation in addition to your 5-man rotation. So looking to get 5+3 innings instead of 4+4 every day. That gives more innings to your best starters, and another arm to use flexibly. Covering the 7-8 innings a day with 9 pitchers instead of 10. 

But then you could be even more flexible by having 3 guys in that multi-inning role. Because sometimes your original starter is efficient and goes 7, 8 or 9 innings. And sometimes they'd go 5-6 but you only use Koenig/Uribe/Megill to close it out. So you don't really need even the 4 "piggyback" guys to cover all the innings. 

This is getting long, but essentially my point is that you get the right kind of flexibility by using as few pitchers as possible to cover the bulk pitching roles, i.e the inflexible ones that require more fixed, bult-in rest (i.e a rotational schedule). And on the opposite side of the spectrum, by keeping the overall innings load as low as possible for your Megills and Uribes, so that they can be available when you need them most. Even if that is 3 days in a row, or 5 out of 7 days or whatever. 

Then there is finding the right balance of in-between roles. Like you want some bulk coverage for shorter starts, but you also want to be able to play matchups or use the better guys for high-leverage middle inning spots etc. 

If I was to form a pitching staff I imagine it'd be something along these lines:

5 starters, who pitch every 6th day a lot of the time. 

1 spot starter/long reliever. Allow the rotation 5 days rest when needed, and save the bullpen when that's needed. You'd look to get a starters workload ouf of all 6 of these guys. 

3 multi-inning (2-3 innings) pitchers. Can act as piggyback "bulk pitching" when needed, or more flexibly when that's called for. Would pitch every 3rd-4th day. Would look to get 80-100 innings out of these roles. This'd be Ashby, Hall and probably Zerpa as the roster stands.

4 leverage/matchup 1-2 inning pitchers. So Koenig, Uribe, Megill and ?? (Anderson, Rob Z, Yoho, Drohan). 

[igor67]

The 8 man model works out pretty well. Assume a typical appearance is 4 innings to get through the order twice. It leaves just 1 inning to cover per day and 4-5 5 bullpen arms to do it, so there is certainly some chances to play match ups in there, and a cushion to absorb one of the 2 'starters' struggling. You have 41 starts to cover, so the innings total ends up around 150-160 for the season. I would think only typically going more like 60-70 pitches means the one day less recovery is reasonable.

[Jopal78]

21 hours ago, wallus said:

I think they plan on using him a lot like Hall/Ashby where he comes in for 2-3 innings per appearance. 

The minor leagues?

I would say they have 10 pitchers (barring injury) who are locks for the 26 man roster: Anderson, Ashby, Hall, Koenig, Uribe, Priester, Patrick. Woodruff, Misiorowski, Megill.  
 

If they carry the max of 13, tha leaves just 3 spots for Zerpa, Logan Henderson, Sproat, Harrison, Yoho, Carlos Rodriguez, Zastryzny, Gasser. 
 

 

[Ron Robinsons Beard]

1 hour ago, Jopal78 said:

The minor leagues?

I would say they have 10 pitchers (barring injury) who are locks for the 26 man roster: Anderson, Ashby, Hall, Koenig, Uribe, Priester, Patrick. Woodruff, Misiorowski, Megill.  
 

If they carry the max of 13, tha leaves just 3 spots for Zerpa, Logan Henderson, Sproat, Harrison, Yoho, Carlos Rodriguez, Zastryzny, Gasser. 
 

 

That's a great problem to have. My hope is that they are never in the situation this season of having to sign a scrap-heap guy like Fedde and immediately throw him to the wolves.

[wallus]

1 hour ago, Jopal78 said:

The minor leagues?

I would say they have 10 pitchers (barring injury) who are locks for the 26 man roster: Anderson, Ashby, Hall, Koenig, Uribe, Priester, Patrick. Woodruff, Misiorowski, Megill.  
 

If they carry the max of 13, tha leaves just 3 spots for Zerpa, Logan Henderson, Sproat, Harrison, Yoho, Carlos Rodriguez, Zastryzny, Gasser. 
 

 

Zerpa is a lock for the roster

[jay87shot]

What if we did it more of a 5 man rotation and then had 2 floating piggyback starters who are planned to pitch every 4 games? So say the starting 5 would be Woody, Misi, Preister, Patrick, Henderson with Hall/Gasser and Harrison as piggyback/planned long relief guys. So week 1 the piggybacks would go with like Misi and Henderson say go 3 innings at 50 pitches and then the next time you would have them slide up a day and piggyback Woody and Patrick. That way each starter can have a slightly shorter start almost every other outing. We would have 7 guys getting more innings and always have 2 guys close to stretched out for starting and make it easy to do a bullpen game. It would still allow for 6 relievers and give space for guys to move up anddown from AAA easily. 

That would put the starting spots at like a planned 30 starts each with 150-170 innings (split between 6-8 guys) and then the piggybacks get 40 appearances with like 120 innings (maybe split between 3-4 guys). That probably leaves around 400-450 innings for the bullpen which would be doable when you figure guys moving between AAA and the bigs helping out.

[Ron Robinsons Beard]

It did cross my mind that the players union itself may object to the idea of piggybacking. Considering arbitration raises, not to mention free agency contracts, still largely depend on old school counting stats like wins, Ks, innings pitched and so on, it would stand to reason that pitchers in a piggyback rotation are simply not going to accumulate those stats at the same rate a pitcher participating in a traditional rotation would. 

Not that the Brewers dip into the starting pitching free agent market often, but it wouldn't surprise me if a starter they were after had concerns knowing that he wasn't going to get the opportunity to go 5+ innings every five-six days.

[Playing Catch]

7 hours ago, Lathund said:

The main point is that you don't want 10 guys locked into a schedule. The way to improve on the OPs suggestion would be to make it 4 "piggyback" guys on a 4-game rotation in addition to your 5-man rotation.

I think we agree.

I was supporting the outside-of-the-box thinking the OP suggested, rather than any sort of formulae a team may use.

I think that as individual pitchers, it would be a benefit to have designed shorter stints. For example, Ashby could open, and go, say, 4 innings/75 pitches. Say three or four days later, he goes 1.2 IP or something.

It's pretty obvious that the pitchers are already designated. The third time through the order, the meat of the order will get a new pitcher. But with all of the lefties that can go multiple innings, you can alternate between opening and relieving. 

7 hours ago, Lathund said:

you get the right kind of flexibility by using as few pitchers as possible to cover the bulk pitching roles, i.e the inflexible ones that require more fixed, bult-in rest (i.e a rotational schedule).

But why is "fixed, built-in rest," the best way to keep a pitcher healthy? That way of thinking is merely an old convention that was designed out of a different era. I think that these days, the training staff and pitching coaches have different ways of measuring workloads/high stress pitches, and letting a guy air it out in some situations, or conserve in others is made available by game-by-game pitching plans. If Chad Patrick only goes 3 or 4 innings on Tuesday, why does he need to wait 5 days for his next opportunity? After all, his cutter/sinker game is going to work awesome against so-and-so in Friday's game, whether he gets to start a clean inning, or come in as a fireman with guys on base, because he has such good control, and he's used to flexing into different situations.

I think we mostly agree. I want Woody going out every 5 days, for example, (even though he'd probably work great as a fireman, too). But having 2 or 3 classic 6+ IP starters, and then a collection of guys that can get through the entire order one time or more, is a great way to save innings on the rest of the staff, including the bullpen.

[Playing Catch]

6 minutes ago, Ron Robinsons Beard said:

It did cross my mind that the players union itself may object to the idea of piggybacking.

Or the league. They want to make sure that SPs can be marketable stars.

But IF the conventional wisdom says that piggybacking is a way to maintain pitchers' health?

I have no data on this, so it's mere speculation, but if it's bad for a starter to throw 110 pitches and needs 5 days to recover, and it's bad for a reliever to go 3 days in a row, I don't see how having a guy throw 75 pitches with 3 days of rest is anything but a moderating condition for pitchers' health.

[StearnsFTW]

42 minutes ago, wallus said:

Zerpa is a lock for the roster

For sure.  And Harrison is close.

[Lathund]

6 minutes ago, Playing Catch said:

I think we mostly agree. I want Woody going out every 5 days, for example, (even though he'd probably work great as a fireman, too). But having 2 or 3 classic 6+ IP starters, and then a collection of guys that can get through the entire order one time or more, is a great way to save innings on the rest of the staff, including the bullpen.

The issue is that it doesn't save innings for the rest of the staff, it adds to them. A traditional starter can throw 160-200 innings because they regularly have 4-5 days rest inbetween starts. Someone who pitches shorter stints with fewer days of rest will have their arm fall off if they cover 160+ innings in a season. So if you replace 2-3 starters with 2-3 pitchers who cover 3 innings at a time, the rest of the 'pen will have to cover more innings. So you'd have to have more of those 3 inning relievers there to compensate. Which also means you'd have less room for pitchers who can maximize their effort in shorter stints. 

You mentioned fixed rest as an old convention. But consider that in a game which over the last couple of decades has changed tremendously with the analytics revolution, that the basic concept of the rotation hasn't changed to the same degree. Nor has the other end of the pitching spectrum changed greatly either, i.e the use of 1-inning relievers. There was the trend with guys like Hader and Andrew Miller which seemed to portend change, but we went back to more traditional usage. Less about chasing saves, and teams have started using their closer more in tied games and such, but fundamentally it's still mostly 1-inning stints. Because whether they knew it at the time or not, some of the old ways turned out to be pretty good ways of doing things. Sabermetrics challenged old conventions with data and analysis; many didn't hold up to scrutiny, but some did. 

The usage of the traditional rotation and the traditional closer are good for very different reasons though. For starters I'm mostly of the opinion that it's physiological. Going out and pitching at max effort will result in lots of minor damage to muscles and ligaments and such, which causes inflammation, which weakens these structures while it's ongoing, increasing injury risk. So fundamentally you can handle that differently. You can wait out these processes, i.e keeping a longer amount of time between outings to allow for more healing. Or if you're going to pitch despite it (i.e more often), you have to limit the damage done each time. Which isn't to say that pitching exactly every 5th/6th day is the optimal way, and there will be plenty of individual variation. Just that the structure has remained somewhat similar despite all the new data for a reason, 

The usage of closers has remained similar to the traditional use, but by very analytical means. Basically using Hader like 2017-2019 Hader (i.e 2-3 inning stints) gives you a better chance of winning any game he pitches in, than if he went for mostly 1-inning stints. But the effect of having him in (1) fewer games, (2) in games where he wouldn't have been needed (i.e Brewers score 5 runs after Hader has pitched the 7th), and as a consequence, (3) more frequently not having him available when you need him, eventually cancels that out over the regular season. Postseason is different, and teams do use relievers very differently there. 

What I'm getting at is kind of the same thing as in my last post. That in terms of the average length of outing for your pitching staff, you want basically an inverted bell curve. As in you want to have your pitchers at around 5 innings per outing or 1 inning per outing, as opposed to 3 per outing. 

Now another aspect is also what pitchers you have at your disposal. If you somehow were to have Josh Hader and 12 clones of Josh Hader on your pitching staff, then simply having everyone go 2-3 innings all the time might be the way to go. Or if your entire pitching staff is guys who are really really bad third time through the order, but who also don't benefit much from going all out for one inning. But generally, you don't. 

So taking the relationship between how much rest you get inbetween starts and how many innings can be covered, as well as the benefits of being able to utilize matchups and high leverage etc, the traditional usage acutally makes sense. It gets the most innings out of your best pitchers (your starters), and it allows you to use your "closer" types as often as possible in the situations you want them in. It could see some more flexibility, sure. And I feel like the Brewers already do that a fair bit. 

I would argue that the benefits of a flexible pitching staff lies not in changing much in what your rotation does or what your closer and two setup men do, but in the usage of the pitchers inbetween those two groups.