New Changeup, Continued Feel for Cutter Fuel an Optimistic Bryse Wilson for 2024

Brewers manager Pat Murphy knows he's facing a bit of an innings problem this year, without the services of Corbin Burnes or Brandon Woodruff. Bryse Wilson will be one important piece of the puzzle he tries to put together to bridge the resulting gaps.

"Yeah, yeah. Yes," Murphy said Monday, before sending Wilson to the mound for his first outing of the spring. "We'd love Bryse to stretch out, and see what he can do there. Obviously, we're in a situation with our front-end pitchers where we don't have a lot of length there."

Murphy was referring to Freddy Peralta, who has never exceeded the 165 2/3 innings he pitched last season, but also to veteran arms with spotty records of either durability or capacity to work deep into games, like Wade Miley, Jakob Junis, and Colin Rea, and to younger arms who are unlikely to step in and deliver traditional workhorse innings totals, like Robert Gasser, DL Hall, and Aaron Ashby. He could as easily have meant Devin Williams, though, after the team's relief ace pitched only 61 times and had just under 59 innings of total work for the season. Williams is not a high-volume closer, any more than Peralta or Miley are high-volume top-tier starters.

Could Wilson himself figure into the rotation picture, either right away or later in the season?

"I think he's all in on helping the Brewers win," Murphy said. "So it could be either one [starting or relieving]."

Although Wilson had a great first season with the Crew in 2023, lefties still hit him to the tune of .236/.325/.459, with 14 extra-base hits in 124 plate appearances. Whether he eventually makes any kind of return to his roots as a starter or just needs to get more than three outs at a time out of the pen, Wilson knows he needs to better neutralize those batters--and he has a new weapon with which to do so.

"Incorporating a changeup a little bit this spring," Wilson said Tuesday in Maryvale. "I threw it three times [Monday], got a swing and miss with it, and the last ground ball of the inning was a changeup as well, off the end of the bat. So it's been good so far, I've liked the results I've gotten in lives and a little bit in the game."

Wilson had a changeup (though never an especially effective one) in his previous stops in Atlanta and Pittsburgh, but shelved the pitch entirely in 2023. He's bringing it back, with (he hopes) a bit better "seam-shift incorporation" from a circle change grip, perhaps giving the pitch greater movement and deception, because that movement won't fit as neatly with the spin the hitter sees out of his hand.

The running action of a circle change could be especially valuable if Wilson is able to set it up with the cutter up and in to lefties, which he said he's increasingly comfortable doing.

"It depends a lot on what I'm trying to with it," Wilson said, in answer to whether he conceptualizes the cutter as a fastball or a breaking ball. "If I'm throwing it up and in to a lefty, I'm gonna throw it more like a fastball, cut it loose. If I'm going down and glove side, either low and away to a righty or it would be back foot to a lefty, then I'll manipulate it a little more."

The cutter, of course, was the revolutionary adjustment for Wilson upon joining the Brewers in 2023. It's a pitch he still mostly used as a breaking ball last year, but he's right that when he got in on lefties with it, it could overpower them up high or fool them like a slider down low.

Wilson credits Brewers pitching coach Chris Hook with giving him that weapon, with which he had only lightly experimented previously.

"That was all Hooky's idea," Wilson recalled. "I had an 84, 85 mile per hour slider, and then my slower curveball, or slider, whatever you want to call it. He said, 'Let's try to throw that harder, give it a bit of a different shape,' and that's what we did."

As I wrote late last season, that new pitch--and a fairly heavy reliance on it--made Wilson the most rare kind of successful modern pitcher: a merchant of the lazy fly ball.

"I can give them three looks: cut, ride, and sink," Wilson explained. "It just kind of keeps the hitters off their toes. They don't know what's coming until they start their swing, So it allows for a lot of weak contact. The cutter does have some lift to it, so you would expect--especially if I throw it up in the zone--to get some fly balls with it."

As unorthodox as that way of doing things is, it worked far too well to abandon. With ever-improving feel for his money pitch and a fledgling offering to slow down lefty batters, Wilson is looking forward to an even better 2024.

Research assistance provided by TruMedia.