Brewers Spring Training Notebook, Feb. 27: Aaron Ashby on His Sinker and Slider

For Aaron Ashby, the goal is to get back into a competitive setting and ramp up quickly, to allow himself to compete for a place at the back end of the Brewers' starting rotation. Monday's outing provided an important mile marker in that journey.

"It was good to get out there for two innings and just pitch," Ashby said Tuesday, in the Brewers' clubhouse at American Family Fields of Phoenix. "Everything's coming back how we expected it to, and all the strikes were there, so it felt good."

Ashby did throw over the winter, including getting up and down to simulate a multi-inning outing, but backed off earlier in camp as part of the team's preparation for the season.

"I had done it in a bullpen before we got here, so I had built up that pitch count, and then we come in here, de-load, and build back up with more intensity," he said.

Manager Pat Murphy noted the difficult balance guys have to strike when they're in a position like Ashby's (or that of Janson Junk, who will start for the Brewers in Cactus League action Tuesday in Tempe), needing to prove themselves fast but hold up over the months ahead.

"They train so hard, they get to spring, and then they get to the season, and either they don't have it left, or..." Murphy turned his hands to the sky. Enough said. It's a fine line to walk, in an era of careful management of workloads but increasing rates of injury league-wide.

"I think we're close. A lot of the shapes are there," Ashby said, as he gets back up to speed. "So it's just about making everything more consistent."

Ashby's specific approach is an interesting one, reliant in part on his unusual release point and in part on his sheer stuff. He uses sinkers and sliders most of the time, despite being a lefty hurler who knows he will face many right-handed batters. While much of the league has leaned into an approach whereby sinkers are thrown more up in the zone, Ashby envisions sticking to the low, then lower approach he employed at his best in 2022.

"The main goal [of the sinker] is to induce early contact that's on the ground," said the southpaw. "That might happen up in the zone every once in a while, but to change eye levels, if we need to do that we'll go just straight four-seam."

That resistance to an evolving league consensus extends to his preference for the harder, more horizontal breaking ball, rather than the curve when facing opposite-handed batters. Monday's game found him working on setting hitters up with the sinker and a ball-to-strike backdoor slider, then striving to put them away with the strike-to-ball, backfoot version.

"I've always thrown sliders to right-handers," Ashby said. "It's just something I've always been comfortable with. It does have to be located correctly, but the visual of it has never bothered me."

Jacob Misiorowski is Keeping Things Simple
Pitching opposite Ashby in Monday's exercises, Misiorowski makes an especially neat contrast to his teammate. Ashby is the two-seam lefty, outgoing and quick-talking, more comfortable in the clubhouse than his roster status would lead you to expect. Misiorowski, the younger, bigger, flamethrowing righthander, is friendly and open but laconic. His approach to the work Monday was similarly understated.

"No," said Misiorowski, when asked if he was working on anything new to attack advanced left-handed batters. "Same old, same old. Throw the fastball, throw the slider. Nothing changing."

Misiorowski, too, went through a short de-load early in camp, but feels ramped up to "pretty close" to full speed. He's not yet throwing 102 miles per hour, as he occasionally did last summer, but expects to find "one or two more ticks" before the end of camp. He also felt good about the progress of his curveball and changeup, but it's clear in his actions and in his words that he's thinking the way a hurler with his raw stuff should: fastball, slider. Fastball, slider.

Everything about Misiorowski seems well-suited to the bullpen. He doesn't yet have the surface-level mean streak a relief ace might traditionally have, but there's an almost sheepish confidence there that works just as well. if the Brewers end up having a need for him at the big-league level in 2024, he says he's ready to step into that role. With the two pitches that dominate his arsenal and overwhelm opposing hitters, that seems like a sound assessment.