A Piece of the Brewers' Pitching Identity Goes with Corbin Burnes to Baltimore

It wasn't with Corbin Burnes that the Brewers first found success reviving the career of a struggling starting pitcher by giving him a cutter. You can comb back into the archives and find plenty of examples, but an especially visible one came in 2018, when Burnes was just breaking into the league. Milwaukee helped flagging journeyman lefty Wade Miley find the feel for a cutter, and his career turned around. Obviously, he's still going, and still slinging cutters for the Brewers niw.

Working with Miley and their smattering of other cutter success stories didn't immediately transform the Brewers into a cutter factory, though. In 2019, they still finished 25th in MLB in cutter usage as a team. That summer was the winter of Burnes's discontent, as he posted an ERA north of 8.00 and seemed on the verge of crashing out of the league, despite the liveliness of his fastball.

Burnes embraced the cutter in the immediate aftermath of 2019, and in 2020, he began to lead a change in the Brewers' level of commitment to the pitch. They finished ninth in usage of that pitch that year, 10th in 2021, and sixth in 2022. Slowly, and thanks in no small part to the leadership by example of Burnes, the Crew became the preeminent artisans of the cutter.

In 2023, no team threw as many cutters as the Crew. More tellingly, though, consider this: Burnes himself threw 896 cutters to left-handed batters, more than exactly half the teams in baseball threw when the batter had the platoon advantage. He threw 810 cutters to righties, more than 18 of the other 29 teams threw when the pitcher had that advantage.

Hardly anyone can replicate what Burnes did during his emergence as one of the best pitchers in baseball. The cutter can be a tough pitch to throw hard, a tough pitch to command, and a tough one with which to miss bats. Burnes is special; everyone is aware of that. However, the Brewers have learned as much from Burnes as he's learned from them. This year, for instance, Miley, Bryse Wilson, and Colin Rea each threw at least 400 cutters, and it was a key part of each of their impressive seasons.

The Brewers were one of the best teams in baseball at managing opponents' contact last year, and the cutter was a staple of that endeavor. Burnes uses the cutter as much and as well as half the league combined, but it's not Burnes who brought it to the Brewers, and the Brewers use it extensively, even beyond Burnes.

When trying to build a successful, sustainable repertoire, a cutter can be helpful in multiple ways. Depending on what particular shape and style of cutter it is, it can be the right way for a pitcher battling command issues with the slider to start dominating with a more manageable cousin; a means of getting in on the hands of opposite-handed hitters, to neutralize power; or a means of stealing strikes and setting up a sinker or changeup. It's a chameleon of a pitch, and no one hurler owns it.

Nonetheless, for the Brewers, trading Burnes meant more than parting with the ace of their rotation for the last few years. It meant surrendering their primacy in the deployment of this particular pitch, and with that, a bit of their identity as a pitching staff. They were the team who used the cutter most in 2023. They might well fall back into the middle of the pack in 2024, which means changing tack in an effort to sustain the extraordinary success they had last year.

Part of this is symbolic, and in the grand scheme of things, that part doesn't matter very much. No team gets bonus points for leading the league in the deployment of a particular pitch. It's not because the Brewers threw cutters that they had such a good season pitching-wise. They threw those cutters because the guys throwing them were able to make them part of an effective broader arsenal. 

There's another part of this, though, that runs deeper and has more far-reaching consequences. Burnes was a major developmental victory for the team. The cutter was the key they used to unlock him. It's part of the paradigm they've constructed since his breakthrough, wherein they can avoid lavish spending on external pitching options by building good pitching staffs through player development and pitch design. Rea is another example, although a much lower-grade one. Wilson is an especially compelling one, since you could see him as a candidate for a cutter even when he was acquired, and he then implemented one.

The visible validity of that approach is diminished by the departure of a guy like Burnes. Dealing him reminds us all how difficult turning him from a relatively non-premium draft pick and low-graded prospect into a superstar really was, and that assuming it to be a repeatable skill is facile. That kind of development is possible, even on a long-term basis and across several individuals, but letting Burnes go brings us to a moment of reckoning. Between that trade and the injury that severed ties between the organization and Brandon Woodruff, the pressure (and the urgency thereof) on the Brewers' development programs just got ratcheted way, way up.