Brewers Make Their Remaining Regular-Season Pitching Decisions With October in Mind

Tuesday night’s series opener in Philadelphia was winnable for the Brewers, but their pitching was shaky, and the offense couldn’t break through with enough timely hits against Zack Wheeler and the Phillies bullpen. Even so, it was a productive night, as Milwaukee secured a first-round playoff bye to the NLDS thanks to Atlanta's loss to Cincinnati.

Even though that clinch was pending at first pitch, it explains how the Brewers handled their pitching last night. They’re still playing for baseball’s best record to secure home-field advantage for the entire postseason, but now that they’re guaranteed to play in the NLDS, managing for that series is the focus. Maximizing wins each night isn’t the priority in the final week of the regular season—even if Pat Murphy stopped short of saying as much.

“These are games to win,” Murphy said on Tuesday afternoon. “I don’t see any other way to do it. It just doesn’t feel right inside if you’re not playing to win.”

In practice, though, the Brewers are clearly striking a balance. After making a few decisions here and there geared toward October, they’ve shifted further into planning mode on this road trip, using what’s left of the schedule to line up their pitching staff for the NLDS.

Jacob Misiorowski made a purposely shortened start on Sunday. That means he can start ramping back up with a more normal-length start on Saturday, allowing for a no-restrictions outing in Game 1. After that, the Brewers pushed Logan Henderson back to Wednesday so they could give Dustin May a truncated outing as another opportunity to get him on track.

“It's simple. We want to give him as many outings as we can,” Murphy said pregame. “Probably won't be an extended outing, but it's still a chance to go out back out there and pitch, and just kind of solidify how he wants to do things. He keeps adjusting to his new environment, and we all got to get on the same page. And he wants to jump back out there, and it works out perfect for us.”

One area May and the Brewers must still solidify, Murphy said, is his pitch mix. Since coming to Milwaukee at the trade deadline, May has predictably upped his fastball usage from 66.7% to 73.4%, including in two-strike counts. That makes more sense for him than for other pitchers, since May’s fastballs are his strength, but it could be making it harder to put hitters away. Since the trade, hitters own a .939 OPS against him with two strikes.

“I think he's starting to see, like, ‘Well, I got to slow these right-handers down a little bit. I can't just go fastball-cutter, fastball-cutter.’ You know what I mean?” Murphy said. “I'm starting to see that. And he's going through what pitchers go through.”

The hurdle is finding a put-away breaking ball, particularly to right-handed hitters. May’s sweeper hasn’t done the job. It’s been great against left-handers this season, but righties have slugged .467 against it with just an 18.1% whiff rate. Since the trade, it’s induced zero whiffs from a righty. The Brewers want him to throw his curveball to righties instead, which May started doing in his last two outings.

“It's been a good pitch for him, the sweeper to lefties, and the sweeper to righties has not been a good pitch,” Murphy said. “The [cutter] has been more of a swing-and-miss pitch to righties, but you got to have more than everything's hard. You just got to come up with that slower pitch.”

May threw just two curveballs in his 36 pitches Tuesday night, and neither was competitive. The first was a ball low and outside to Trea Turner, and the second bounced in the dirt and nearly hit Brandon Marsh on an 0-2 count. After that, May came back with a front-hip sinker, and Marsh turned on it for a two-run home run.

“Maybe I could have executed a little higher, but we were trying to go front-hip, so I feel like I executed it pretty well,” a frustrated May said afterward. “But obviously, it wasn’t the right pitch call or pitch execution, whatever it was.”

May’s velocity and movement have been just as good in Milwaukee as they were in St. Louis, his hard-hit rate is lower, and his strikeout rate is only one percentage point lower. Yet, the frustrating sequences continue, and May sounded (after another disappointing outing) like a pitcher lost for answers.

“I’m just going to do what I’m told at this point,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’ve pitched my way into having a say in anything, so I’m just going to do whatever they tell me.”

All indications are that the Brewers still plan to use May as one of their three postseason starters, although they could use an opener in front of him. Given his stuff and veteran experience, that’s probably the correct call. That means they’ll keep giving him opportunities to get right before the NLDS.

“When you’re fighting through all of this, you’re trying to be perfect, and he got two innings to do it,” Murphy said. “I still have great confidence in him.”

It’s a similar story for Kyle Harrison, who fittingly followed May out of the bullpen on Tuesday. Unlike May, Harrison is hardly a guarantee to make a playoff roster at this point, but he has slowly progressed in the right direction. For the second straight outing, his fastball behaved like its effective self, averaging 95.1 MPH with 16 inches of induced vertical break. However, Harrison’s location was still problematic, and he gave up a run on three hits.

“The properties of the fastball seemed like they were better,” Murphy said. “Now you got to command it. And then the secondary stuff wasn’t as sharp again.”

After Harrison’s inning, Colton Gordon pitched the final five in long relief. After the Brewers tied things at 3-3 in the sixth, Murphy stuck with Gordon instead of using his high-leverage relievers. It nearly worked out, but Gordon allowed three two-out runs in the eighth on four straight hits. His real job was to eat innings, though.

“He can pitch,” Murphy said. “Very impressed.”

It was a departure from Murphy’s usual aggressive “Win Tonight” approach, but it was the responsible decision. Before Monday’s day off, five relievers had pitched in three of the last five days, and the Brewers recalled Gordon specifically for this kind of outing. They can still take the next two games of the series and push for the top seed while keeping the rest of their relievers to more manageable workloads the rest of the week. That’s a luxury they’ve earned, just like the luxury of trying to help May and Harrison right the ship in games.

“We’re going to keep running those guys out there and see if we can’t get them on track,” Murphy said.

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