Hoby Milner Gets Technical About His Evolution on the Mound

Brewers manager Pat Murphy was asked on Tuesday morning if he needed to see results from Hoby Milner in his remaining spring training outings.

“No,” Murphy responded firmly. “A guy like Hoby, we know what we’re getting.”

Milner has earned his manager’s full trust with his performance over the past two seasons. Since the start of 2022, he’s appeared in 140 games, posting a 2.79 ERA, 3.14 FIP, and 3.25 SIERA.

That makes Milner one of the Brewers’ most valuable hurlers and one of the more reliable bullpen arms in baseball over that two-year run. Among 150 qualified relievers, he ranks fifth in appearances and 34th in RA9-WAR (wins above replacement, based on runs allowed per nine innings) during that span.

Milner began his career with the Brewers as a shuttle arm, bounced between Triple A and the big leagues, and was the last man in the bullpen. His 2021 numbers were unimpressive: a 5.40 ERA and 5.89 FIP in 21 2/3 innings. However, some promising changes to Milner’s profile were reasons for optimism moving forward.

Milner’s control improved dramatically. Prior to the 2021 season, he struggled with free passes, issuing walks at an 11.1% rate. Once he joined the Brewers, he all but eliminated the walks, limiting them to a 3% rate in the big leagues and just 1.7% in the minor leagues.

Milner also transformed from a pitch-to-contact specialist to a strikeout machine. He ran a 30.3% strikeout rate with the Brewers and fanned a jaw-dropping 40% of hitters in Triple A.

An improved breaking ball was the biggest driving force behind the newfound swing and miss. By changing how he oriented the ball in his hand, Milner added four inches of sweep to the pitch from 2018 to 2020.

When asked on Wednesday in the clubhouse how he tweaked his breaker, Milner immediately began digging through his locker for a baseball. When he turned around, he held a ball marked up with Sharpie to remind him where his index and middle fingers should be positioned.

“When I was with the Phillies, I spiked it with a four-seam orientation like a curveball,” he explained. “Almost like Aaron Nola’s grip.”

When Milner decided he wanted to generate more sweep on his breaking ball, he maintained the grip but changed the positioning of the seams.

“I wasn’t creating any seam-shifted [wake],” he said, referring to the physics term for the interaction of a baseball’s seams with the air around it, creating much of the lateral movement on two-seamers and sliders. “So I moved over to a two-seam orientation, whereas I spin it off, it would come off like a two-seam if I were to throw a curveball with it.”

The change enabled Milner to maximize the seam-shifted wake on his breaking ball, creating more sweep. The opponent whiff rate against the pitch increased to 35.1% in 2021.

Statcast labels the breaking ball as a curveball. Milner calls it a slider but acknowledges that its unique movement profile falls between a sweeper and a curve.

“On the vert line, curveballs are negative,” he explained. “My slider is negative. Everyone else that throws a slider is way up in the positives.”

When Milner talks about the “vert line,” he’s referring to a pitch movement graph like the one below. Notice how many of his breaking balls have negative induced vertical break, a trait more common for topspin curveballs than sidespin sliders.

For anyone unfamiliar with pitch shape measurements, here’s a crash course. Pitches with a higher induced vertical break resist gravity as the ball approaches home plate, creating a rising effect for hitters. Pitches with lower vertical breaks tend to have sinking or diving action.

Milner doesn’t consider his slider a finished product. He wants to fashion it into a true sweeper, with a minimal vertical break or even a deceptive rising effect.

“My goal is for it to look like a Frisbee going across. I don’t get that, but I would love to get something that has actual vert so that it defies gravity,” he says, citing San Francisco Giants pitcher Tyler Rogers’ famous “UFO slider” as an example.

Milner also made another arsenal change in 2021 to increase his strikeouts, replacing his sinker with a four-seam fastball.

“I was throwing all four-seams trying to get swing and miss because I didn’t feel like my two-seam was good enough to get soft contact.”

The problem was that Milner's release of the ball didn’t generate the riding action that good swing-and-miss four-seamers possess. He naturally generates sink and run, so switching to a four-seamer was essentially switching to a worse sinker.

“I only get like 8 to 10 [inches of vertical break],” he said of his four-seamer. “Most guys are trying to get 20.”

The lack of vertical break produced a hittable pitch that opponents frequently barreled. Milner’s four-seamer generated whiffs at a 17.5% rate, and opponents slugged .642 against it. He allowed a 34.9% line drive rate and 3.3 home runs per nine innings.

“I gave up so many homers, we were like, ‘Okay, I got to do something different.,’” Milner reflected.

He shelved the four-seamer and brought back the sinker in 2022, en route to a breakout season.

“I started throwing two-seams to lefties a lot and getting underneath their barrel. That worked out, and I started figuring out ways to use it against righties.”

Milner reintroduced the four-seamer last year, but this time, it held opponents to a .233 slugging percentage with an excellent 26.7%. The four-seamer is finally doing what Milner wanted it to a year ago, but nothing about the pitch itself improved. Instead, it’s become effective because it differs enough from Milner’s sinker.

He explained what this effect looks like from the hitter’s perspective.

“They’re just like, ‘I’m going to swing at this down and away, and oh, it’s two inches higher than I expected it to be.’ So now it’s a pop-out instead of squaring it up.”

The interplay of Milner’s two fastballs has become a key part of his game and enabled him to generate a fruitful mix of weak contact and strikeouts. Last season, he held opponents to a 35.4% hard-hit rate and sported a slightly above-average 23.4% strikeout rate. Our own Matthew Trueblood talked to Milner about his grip on the heaters and why he found it fairly easy to incorporate both pitches, last month.

The adjustment has also helped Milner curtail the extreme platoon splits that plagued him early in his career. He can keep opposite-handed hitters off balance by learning how to spot the sinker to righties and changing looks with elevated four-seamers.

“I used to try and strike righties out all the time with four-seams up, and they would catch them and hit a homer. Now, if I’m throwing a four-seam up to a righty, it’s like a sneaky, “He was not expecting that” kind of situation.”

At this point in the conversation, Milner became a spokesperson for the value of having multiple fastball shapes in an arsenal.

“I firmly believe most pitchers should have a four- and a two-seam.”

“They can be this much different,” he adds, gesturing to indicate a difference of a few inches of movement, “or they can be like a foot [different].”

It seems the Brewers agree. Milner’s teammates, including Brandon Woodruff, Colin Rea, Bryse Wilson, and Joel Payamps, throw two and four-seamers.

While it took Milner some time into his Brewers tenure to find the best mix of fastballs, another change he made before landing in Milwaukee has largely stuck since.

Milner began his career pitching from the first-base side of the rubber but veered toward the third-base side for a couple of years. After joining the Brewers, he returned to the first-base side and has inched even farther that way in the last two seasons.

“If my release point was releasing right over the rubber, and everything started straight and then broke this way or this way, I have a feeling that stuff would be easier to see than four feet off the rubber like I am right now,” he said.

Milner revealed that he moved to the third-base side early last year only to move back when left-handed opponents started hitting him harder.

“I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I just need to be back on this side.’”

While Milner admitted he’s not entirely sure what makes him more effective on the first-base side, the horizontal angle of his pitches likely plays up to lefties when it looks like he’s releasing the ball behind him from his sidearm slot.

Whatever the explanation, identifying that release point as his most effective was part of the years-long evolution that shaped Milner into the reliable middle reliever he’s been for the past two seasons. The Brewers’ lack of proven starting pitchers and Devin Williams’s prolonged absence in the bullpen make Milner’s presence on the staff even more vital. He knows his craft to continue getting valuable outs for Milwaukee in 2024.