How Can Free Agent Wade Miley Become A Brewer One More Time?

Wade Miley has been a big-league journeyman. Over the 14 years he has spent in the majors, he has been on eight different teams. His longest stint was with the Diamondbacks, who picked him in the first round of the 2008 MLB Draft, but since leaving Arizona in 2015, he’s never managed to set down roots. 

The organization with which he has spent the second-most time is actually the Milwaukee Brewers. Sadly, his two stints with the club were both marred by injuries. He signed a minor-league deal with the Crew in 2018, and as quickly as he was called up, he hit the 60-day injured list with an oblique strain. After returning to action in July, he went on to post a 2.57 ERA over 80 ⅔ innings. More importantly, he made four postseason starts, with outstanding results.

After bouncing around the league for a few years, Miley returned to Milwaukee in 2023 on another one-year deal and put up excellent numbers again, pitching to a 3.14 ERA over 120 ⅓ innings. His K/9 rate of just 5.9 was the lowest for a single season with more than 90 innings pitched, but who cares about the details? 

He still missed time in 2023, due to a strain of his serratus posterior, an uncommon baseball injury that affects a group of back muscles. His poor injury luck only got worse in 2024, as he was limited to just seven innings before undergoing Tommy John surgery to address left elbow inflammation.

Now it’s 2025. Miley's option was declined; he's been relegated to free agency for the offseason. Despite the recurring health issues, he expressed his burning desire to return to professional baseball in a phone interview with Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More importantly, he’s got his sights set on one team, specifically. 

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I’m not going to just sign anywhere, I’m not doing that to my family. If I could draw it up, I would sign back in the Central (Division), preferably wearing blue. Dark blue.

But if he does come back to the Brewers, how would that realistically work? Is there any way that the team could spare a roster spot for him and have him suit up for the fourth year?

Like a diamond purchased at your local mall kiosk, Miley has many flaws. He has never thrown particularly hard, relative to other big leaguers. His cutter sits in the high 80s, and his four-seam fastball just barely gets across the 90-mph mark on average. We’ve already talked about his recurring injury problems (one more trip to the 60-day IL and he’ll have enough stamps on his card for a free drink from Starbucks). Even when he’s healthy, he’s often limited to shorter outings and has thrown more than 125 innings just once in the past five seasons.

But no one sticks around the bigs for 14 years without a few tricks up their sleeve. Without the firepower of the Gen-Z pitchers in today’s league, he makes his bones by minimizing hard contact. If we take a closer look at his 2023, we can see that his strikeout (16.1%) and whiff (19.1%) rates were in the bottom decile of qualified pitchers. However, his hard-hit rate (31.3%) and average exit velocity (87.3 mph) were excellent. In fact, Miley has never had an average EV greater than 90 mph in any season since 2015 (when Statcast was first introduced). When paired with the Crew's elite defense, he has the potential to outperform expectations every time he takes the mound. 

So what we have is a pitcher who can’t throw hard, can’t throw very many pitches, can’t miss bats, and can’t punch guys out. Maybe that ultimately disqualifies him from the rotation. But what about a bullpen role? 

The Brewers have had success in the past with deploying long relievers, something rarely seen in today’s game, and the last man to fill that spot was Bryse Wilson. Now that he’s gone, it wouldn’t be totally out of the question for Miley to fill that now-vacant spot. In fact, the club already picked up someone in the Rule 5 Draft who profiles similarly.

It's a tough situation, though, because one of the challenges of being a reliever is the unpredictability of the schedule—which can disproportionately affect anyone already vulnerable to certain injuries. Miley probably needs the routine of being part of a rotation, but his days of taking the ball every five days and delivering five-plus innings at the major-league level are over.

His days of pitching in the big leagues at all might also be done, but there’s a slim chance we’ll see him again. There aren’t many teams that would take the risk of signing him and seeing what he's still capable of, but Milwaukee could be the perfect place for this pitching nomad to settle down and finish with some stability. It would have to be a minor-league deal, to give the team more roster flexibility for the balance of the offseason and the first part of spring training, but an incentive-laden deal that still gives Miley a chance to earn a few million dollars if things pan out would make sense on both sides.