Amid Flurry of Reliever Trades Throughout MLB, Brewers Wait to See if Prices Fall

It's a seller's market, and the Brewers are buyers. For some teams, that's just the way things go, and they accept that the cost of doing business will be a bit of irrationality. For the Brewers, though, rational decision-making and roster-building are fundamental parts of thriving on a sustainable basis in the league's smallest media market. That precludes irrational, splashy deadline moves in most cases, and with no pressing needs on one of the game's most well-rounded rosters, the combination of the front office's proclivities and the market dynamics at play are keeping them very quiet as the trade deadline looms.

If Milwaukee does choose to add anything, it's likely to be a reliever—but the team values and trusts its existing bullpen. An addition to that group would have to be a hurler with options remaining, so that the team can hold onto all of the talented pitchers already featured in that relief unit. The tricky thing about any such target, though, is that any pitcher with options remaining also (by definition) has at least one more year of team control remaining. Often, they have three or four. When teams who have such pitchers to deal set a price, they tend to bake in the fact that they could plausibly keep them for that long—conveniently forgetting, in the moment, that it's unlikely even most good middle relievers get all the way to free agency without being traded or non-tendered, especially once those optionable seasons are used or voided.

Three pitchers stand out as high-leverage arms with the right mix of moderate team control, dwindling controllability through options, and the roster flexibility to be sent down at least this year: Anthony Bender and Calvin Faucher, of the Marlins, and Hunter Gaddis of the Guardians. Right now, the Brewers aren't interested in trading packages of young talent commensurate with the asking price on those guys, especially considering what it cost the Mets to acquire impending free agent Tyler Rogers Wednesday. However, as the final day of trade season ticks away and names fly off the board (filling, at the same time, many of the vacancies on contenders that drive demand in the market), the Brewers might circle back to Miami or Cleveland to discuss one of these arms.

Bender, 30, has been discussed most as a league-wide trade target. He has two years of team control remaining after 2025. He's spent the whole year in the Miami bullpen, racking up 45 appearances and 44 1/3 innings as a right-handed middle reliever and setup man. His ERA is sparkling (1.83) and he keeps the ball in the park well, but he doesn't have excellent control or swing-and-miss stuff. As a result, the sense is that his asking price should be fairly reasonable. If he's not sent down this year, he'd have one more year of optionability next season—but only until he accrues about three weeks of big-league service for next year. He offers some flexibility and a valuable skill set, but not such dominance or so much flexibility that Marlins baseball chief Peter Bendix is in a position to extract a king's ransom for him.

Faucher is a similar but slightly more complicated case. A late bloomer, he's already 30 years old, so although he has four theoretical seasons of team control left after 2025, there's no way he'll make it that far without being made available to all 30 teams in some fashion. He hasn't been optioned this year, and if that remains true through October, he can be optioned in 2026, but the Brewers might end up utilizing their option on him just getting through the balance of 2025. Like Bender, he walks more batters than you'd like to see—something Milwaukee staffers feel they could fix, but which has to be priced in to make a trade sensible. It's not yet clear how available Faucher is, but he should be far from untouchable.

Perhaps the toughest to acquire would be Gaddis, who has slid up the hierarchy in the Cleveland bullpen after Emmanuel Clase was sidelined by an MLB sports betting investigation. Gaddis, 27, is probably too good to need to be optioned at any point; it's just nice to know that the team would have that in their back pocket in case of regression. In the meantime, he's showed the ability to miss bats and induce weak contact throughout his brief big-league career, and already has high-leverage postseason experience. Like Faucher, he's under team control through 2029, and the Guardians would want something good for him—perhaps a starting pitching prospect nearing big-league readiness, as was the shape of the 2022 trade in which the Cubs sent similarly solid reliever Scott Effross to the Yankees for fringy starter-in-waiting Hayden Wesneski.

The Brewers know they're dealing from a position of strength. The market is moving, but not (yet) in their direction, so they won't push the envelope. However, Matt Arnold is always opportunistic. If the right reliever—especially an optionable one—comes down into their price range, Milwaukee will still make a meaningful addition before the bell rings Thursday.