Make Or Break Players On The 2025 Brewers: Nestor Cortes

What Went Wrong in 2024?
All things considered, 2024 wasn’t too bad for Nestor Cortes. 2023 was a year marred by a left rotator cuff strain that limited him to just 63 ⅓ innings over 12 starts. He pitched well throughout last season, even getting the Opening Day nod (since Gerrit Cole was sidelined with injury) and accumulating a 3.77 ERA over 174 ⅓ innings. He ran into more injuries during the postseason, this time a left elbow flexor strain, but recovered quickly enough to be a part of one of the most memorable playoff moments of all time... which unfortunately came at his expense.

If you were to take a brief peek at his Savant page, you might be wholly unimpressed with what you see. He was league-average or below in every Statcast measurement other than walk rate, and was in the bottom quartile for hard-hit rate, something that’s generally not a very good sign of success. He didn’t throw very hard, didn’t miss a lot of bats, didn’t get a lot of balls on the ground, and didn’t have a particularly effective breaking ball or offspeed offering. Of the six different pitches he threw last season, only two had a total run value above zero: his four-seam fastball and cutter.

What Can Go Right in 2025?
What makes Cortes an interesting acquisition for the Brewers specifically is waiting to see what the organization can do with his unorthodox skillset. Despite the apparent lack of “stuff,” he’s a cunning player with a lot of non-obvious value. There’s a reason that even with underwhelming Statcast percentiles, his xERA was still just 3.62 last year. 

While most pitch-to-contact arms aim to induce soft contact through ground balls, he goes the other way, baiting batters to get under his pitches rather than on top. This creates loud and often hard contact but a steep enough launch angle to limit the actual damage of the batted ball. This can be shown through his 2024 fly ball rate of 32.1%, nearly nine percent higher than the MLB average. Another way to look at this is by using Statcast’s batted ball categories which seek to characterize batted balls based on launch angle. Cortes boasts an “Under %”, meaning batted balls with >40 degree launch angles, of 34.7%, nearly 12% higher than the MLB average. 

This batted ball by known slugger Jhonkensy “Big Christmas” Noel was 102.3 mph off the bat but required barely any movement from Aaron Judge to land safely as an out:

Similarly, this ball left Jo Adell’s bat at 102.1 mph but traveled just 199 feet because of the steep 64 degree launch angle:

Unfortunately, this strategy is risky. If opposing hitters do manage to square up balls, they typically end up going for extra bases or in the seats. Much of the damage is done against his four-seam fastball and sweeper, against which batters are slugging .443 and .511, respectively.

Here's where the Brewers and their notorious pitching development comes in. They’ll likely make some tweaks to his pitch mix and one big change that could come around is the refinement of a non-fastball pitch. In 2024, 73.6% of the pitches he threw were some form of fastball (four-seam, cutter, sinker). This has been the case over the past few years and is likely due to a perceived lack of effectiveness in the rest of his arsenal. I say perceived, because Stuff+ measurements actually rate his breaking balls pretty highly, particularly his slider. The Yankees may not have bothered to wean him off his fastball addiction, but Milwaukee will want to maximize his craftiness by fleshing out his other offerings which will keep opposing hitters on their toes, in turn likely improving the results on his fastball.

How Will This Impact The 2025 Brewers?
It should go without saying that having a great starter in the rotation has obvious value. This is even more important in the context of Milwaukee given much of the uncertainty surrounding their pitching staff. Will we see an injury-diminished version of Brandon Woodruff? Will Tobias Myers see a sophomore slump? Did Aaron Civale really fix whatever was hindering him while in Tampa? Can DL Hall live up to his potential? Nestor Cortes is one of these question marks as well, but to me, he has a higher floor than some of the other names in the rotation.

With few investments made this offseason to meaningfully improve the offensive output of the lineup, it seems that the front office will, once again, lean on the team’s run prevention abilities to get their wins. With plenty of other options to choose from, there must have been a reason Milwaukee chose to select Nestor Cortes as the return for their prized closer. We’ll just have to wait and see what that reason was.