What Are the Brewers Getting in Left-Handed Pitcher DL Hall?

In normal conversation, answering any question with the one-word answer of  “stuff” might cause some annoyance on the receiving end of that answer. If that conversation happened with your parents, you might have even found yourself in trouble. For the Brewers, that one-word answer pretty much sums up what they see in Hall and what they hope to build upon. Stuff.

Prospect followers have likely heard DL Hall’s name before. At one point, he was seen as one of the fastest-rising pitching prospects in baseball. Some struggles in 2022 caused him to slip back off of many of the mainstream top 100 lists, but he rebounded nicely this past season, including a successful 19.1 innings out of the bullpen at the major league level.

No longer qualifying as a prospect by service time standards, Baseball America (who only consider a prospect graduated when they reach the required 130 at-bats or 50 innings pitched plateau) still ranks Hall inside their top 100, as he checks in at 93. He likely would have re-appeared on other lists if he was still eligible. Hall’s “stuff” is one of a myriad of reasons that he was able to bounce back in 2023.

Hall is equipped with an elite fastball that averaged 95.6 MPH in MLB in 2023 but has been a tick or two higher throughout his minor league career. Any left-handed pitcher who throws mid-upper 90’s with his fastball will raise some eyebrows. When it comes to Hall, the fastball has characteristics that could make it pretty interesting, even if he only threw it at 91 MPH. One of the most interesting characteristics is his release extension, which comes in at seven feet on average (92nd percentile in MLB during the 2023 season). This means the fastball appears to be a couple of miles per hour higher than the radar gun tells us. It also has a flat Vertical Approach Angle, allowing it to play extremely well at the zone's top. Eno Sarris’s “Stuff+” metric grades the fastball out as 121.5, which ranked 40th amongst pitchers to throw at least 50 fastballs last season. As Nick Pollack of Pitcher List showed in the Tweet below, he doesn’t throw it up in the zone often to right-handed hitters, which is likely something the Brewers will work to adjust. He generated whiffs on 30.2% of his fastballs at the MLB level in 2023, and it’s a pitch that could carry the repertoire even if his secondaries were lagging.

The secondaries, however, are not lagging despite, as Curt Hogg pointed out, the fact that the slider did not generate the best results at the MLB level; Stuff+ and scouting grades across the board view Hall's slider as a plus pitch. Baseball America grades it as a 70-grade pitch, a technical "plus-plus." As Lance Brozdowski pointed out in the tweet below, Hall made a major change to the pitch throughout the season. Around June, Hall completely changed the shape of the slider. He added nine inches of drop to the pitch without losing any of its horizontal movement. This took the pitch from a solid offering to the type that gets a 70 grade. The poor results are certainly noteworthy, but it feels safe to say that they likely boiled down to the command of the pitch and it simply being a tiny sample size more than anything else. 

It doesn't stop with the slider, though. Hall also has a changeup, which grades out quite well by Baseball America, checking in with a 60 grade. Their notes state that the changeup “has developed later in his career into a plus pitch and represents his best offering to right-handed hitters.” While the slider has been primarily used against left-handed hitters, the changeup has been used exclusively against right-handed hitters at the major league level. Throughout Hall’s two stints in MLB, he has thrown 111 changeups, and 110 of them have come against righties. It’s a pitch that he appears to have had some pretty rough luck within MLB so far. In 2023, hitters batted .294 with a .550 slugging against it. The expected stats are much more in line with the Baseball America grade, though, with an xBA of .189 and an xSLG of .368. 

Hall also brings what Baseball America classifies as a 60-grade curveball. He had scrapped this pitch early in his minor league career but re-surfaced in 2022, and it appears to have been a good call to do so. There’s a separation between the slider and the curveball, not only in the velocity but also in the movement profile. Stuff+ is a bit lower on the curve than Baseball America, but it still has it as 106, meaning it’s above average. 

His repertoire grades out as having 3-4 plus pitches, or better, by almost every measure, and as Josh Norris points out with this Tweet, he joins Jacob Misiorowski in rarified prospect air with the quality of pitches Hall brings to the table. He hasn’t yet reached the ceiling he is capable of reaching because of a distinct lack of command, which Baseball America placed a 30 grade on. While Hall only walked hitters at a 6.2% rate out of the major league bullpen, that number was quite a bit higher in Triple-A, coming in at 13.8%. The positive is that Eno Sarris’s Location+ backs up the results he was getting in MLB, giving him an overall score of 106, which is above average. If Hall can carry over that level of command to the rotation and over a larger sample, reaching that ceiling starts to look more realistic. 

It’s easy to see why the Brewers targeted Hall in this return, with his tremendous upside that he mixes with a relatively safe floor.  Hall is the type of pitcher that the Brewers have had a lot of success with in recent history. They may have a guy who can be a legitimate top-of-the-rotation arm if he can stick in the rotation. If the command never comes around enough to hold up as a starter, and assuming he remains healthy, the floor should be close to a high-leverage reliever. Perhaps even in the early-career Josh Hader type of role. 

What are your thoughts on Hall? Do you think he will reach his ceiling?

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