Don't Look Now, but the Brewers Have a Very Rays-Like Bullpen

The Brewers made three big trades this winter. In two of them, they acquired a relief pitcher as a secondary piece in their side of the transaction. When they landed William Contreras, they also got Joel Payamps from the Athletics. When they sent Hunter Renfroe to the Angels, they not only got some promising potential starters, but reeled in Elvis Peguero as a throw-in. Now, in mid-June, Payamps and Peguero are the chief setup men to Devin Williams. 

Merely by getting those two at such low cost and then seeing them perform so well, the Brewers merit some praise. They're emulating the model the Rays use to assemble an elite bullpen virtually every season. The particular ways in which they've done it, though, make that comparison more compelling. As I wrote late last month, Payamps has reconfigured his pitch mix, and he's also throwing harder than ever. 

Peguero has not seen a similar velocity change, and the tweaks to his pitch mix have been quite subtle. He's only made one meaningful adjustment, gaining more consistency and a more lateral shape on his slider. Here's his spin direction chart for 2022:

And here's the same chart for 2023:

The movement on Peguero's bowling ball of a sinker is a hair more consistent this year, too. It's a small change, but it's been sufficient to make Peguero a good middle reliever. 

Credit has to go to the Brewers front office for grabbing these guys, based on traits they'd identified and on analyses of the rosters of potential trade partners. That allowed them to hone in on hurlers who might be viewed as expendable elsewhere, but who would be valuable here. That can't be a purely precision-based operation, because the reason those kinds of players become available precisely because of the risks associated with them. It has to be something you try with more players than you need, so that you can latch onto the successes and jettison the failures.

To that end, we saw the Crew bring in not just those two as right-handed relievers, but also Javy Guerra, Gus Varland, Bryse Wilson, and (after the season began) Trevor Megill. This is where the coaching staff and the lower-level front office members who engage with the team on a day-to-day basis come in for their laurels. Personnel decisions ultimately need to be made by the likes of Matt Arnold and his closest advisors, but it's the coaching and support staff who gather and process the most important information about players. Their work allows quick decisions to be correct ones. The Brewers cut the right guys, because they were able to get all of these hurlers in front of their best player development thinkers and their best technology. 

It's not a simple test of talent or skills. It's not even about whether the player is receptive and responsive to good coaching and tech-driven optimization. Sometimes, things take, and a new weapon is created. Sometimes, they don't, and the trick lies in recognizing those cases and moving on quickly enough to land another player with some real upside.

Megill is the latest such player. The Brewers scooped him up after things didn't work out in San Diego, Chicago, or Minnesota. There's no guarantee that things will be different in Milwaukee, but he's throwing harder than ever--touching 101 miles per hour and frequently lighting it up at 100--and generating tighter movement with his curveball. Sometimes there's an extra tick for a player to find, while at others, there's a new pitch to unlock--as with the cutter that Wilson has made a centerpiece of his arsenal.

The new fireballers fit in among the team's existing core of relievers, which was designed primarily to give hitters radical and unexpected looks. Devin Williams's screwball. Hoby Milner's funky left-handed delivery and east-west attack from the port side. Peter Strzelecki's equally idiosyncratic mechanics from the right. As the Rays famously do, the Brewers have different arm angles and pitch shapes throughout their pen. There's no hitter for whom they won't be ready, and there's no shortage of ways Craig Counsell can chase outs when he needs to hold onto a lead.