With Ángel Zerpa and Jared Koenig Gone, Brewers Need a Lefty Reliever to Start Throwing Strikes

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-Imagn Images

In a perfect world, the Brewers would suddenly start asking DL Hall to do an easier version of his job, and he would simply do it. Hall, 27, is in his third season with the Brewers, and he's enjoying the longest uninterrupted period of health and availability he's had during that span. Injury disruptions slowly took him out of the team's starting rotation plans, and he's become a versatile piece of their bullpen picture this spring. The Brewers have asked him to do everything from bridging gaps between short starts and the high-leverage arms in close midgame situations to sponging up innings in blowouts, and ultimately, he's succeeded in that work. He's even been used for one-batter matchup work a time or two. Now, all the team needs is for him to get three outs at a time, in the seventh or eighth inning.

What Hall hasn't yet done, though, is consistently throw strikes with enough of his offerings to be reliable in that role. That was unfortunate when he was working as a roving long man, but now, it's starting to look more like a fatal flaw. Fellow left-handed reliever Ángel Zerpa will undergo Tommy John surgery next week, the Brewers announced Tuesday, making him the second southpaw reliever facing elbow woes. Jared Koenig is trying to rehab his own damaged ulnar collateral ligament, but it's not clear that he'll be back with the team this season, either. The Brewers don't need Hall just to keep them in games and lighten the load of other, better relievers anymore; they need him to be a sturdy setup man.

Alternatively, of course, Shane Drohan could step up and claim the same mantle. Drohan, also 27, arrived this offseason in a way similar to the one in which Hall arrived before 2024, and might have a smoother path to a rotation spot—but so far, he's been needed mostly in relief. The two have sufficiently similar arsenals to make either a candidate to complement Aaron Ashby at the back end of the Brewers pen, but each also has the same issue: finding the zone.

Hall's sinker and changeup can fill up the zone tolerably well, but his four-seamer, slider and cutter now seem entirely beyond his command. He's not around the zone with his sweeper, either, though he can at least induce some chases from lefties with it when he sets them up for that pitch with well-located sinkers. Drohan, by contrast, throws a four-seamer as his primary fastball, and his changeup is one of the pitches he simply can't command at a big-league level. But he can find the zone with his cutter and slider consistently enough to get by, if he can just pare down to those two pitches and the four-seamer.

Right now, the Brewers should be asking both Hall (sinker, changeup, sweeper) and Drohan (fastball, cutter, slider) to streamline their arsenals and prepare for a shorter-burst, standard-issue high-leverage relief role. One of the two is likely to take well to it; the other can be reassigned to the longish, flexible role each has filled at times this year. One way or another, the team needs to replace the work it won't get from Zerpa the rest of the year, and it's not likely that either Koenig or the also-injured Rob Zastryzny is up to the task.

Hall and Drohan have the stuff to be above-average one-inning relievers in the big leagues, especially if deployed against left-leaning pockets of opposing lineups. They haven't yet shown they can throw enough strikes to thrive, but that's partially because each has been developed and has prepared each day with one eye on an eventual return to the rotation or the knowledge that they might see a batter a second time or throw 50 pitches on a given day. In this hour of need, the team should see which of them can improve by getting rid of the extra arrows in their quiver and firing the ones with which they can hit the target most consistently.

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The WBC sucks.