Patrick Corbin Could Be a Worthwhile Rotation Flier for Brewers

The 2024 season saw the Brewers piece together innings from several unlikely sources, some of them buy-low reclamation projects. The club dipped into that well again last week by signing former New York Yankees prospect Deivi García to a minor-league deal. It’s unknown whether he’ll remain in a relief role or attempt a conversion back to starting, but in either case, the Brewers should continue stockpiling rotation depth.

There’s another free agent who has struggled for several years, but falls on the other end of the stuff and age spectrums: 35-year-old Patrick Corbin. The veteran left-hander just concluded a six-year deal with the Washington Nationals. In year one, he was a key part of an elite starting rotation that carried the club to a World Series championship, but things quickly took a turn for the worse. Corbin declined in 2020, and the wheels fell off thereafter. Over the contract’s last four seasons, he pitched to a 5.71 ERA, the worst of any qualified starting pitcher.

He did, however, eat innings for rebuilding Nationals teams during that time. Corbin’s 679 innings pitched from 2021 through 2024 were the 15th-most in baseball. Excluding the shortened 2020 season, he’s the only pitcher who has started at least 31 games in every campaign going back to 2017. With that kind of durability, remotely competitive results would make him a useful back-end starting pitcher. The Brewers are as capable as any organization of coaxing solid innings from unassuming pitchers. Corbin fits that mold, and could fit nicely into the now-vacant Colin Rea role at the back of the rotation.

It’s often tricky to say with certainty whether Milwaukee’s elite defense will elevate a pitcher’s results, but the effect would be tangible for Corbin. Since 2020, he’s allowed a .331 BABIP while pitching in front of Nationals defenses that combined to rank last in baseball in Fielding Run Value (-142) and fifth-worst in Defensive Runs Saved (-122). Meanwhile, the Brewers finished within the top five in both metrics in each of the last two seasons.

The real key to unlocking a productive version of Corbin, though, is furthering the development of the cutter he introduced in 2024.

Corbin added the pitch to keep right-handed hitters off his signature slider, which had fallen from an elite pitch in his prime to a below-average one in recent years. As opponents became more familiar with the slider over time, they chased less and did more damage against it in the strike zone.

During this time, Corbin threw fewer sliders and more sinkers, presumably in an attempt to keep hitters off the breaking ball.

The problem is that Corbin’s sinker has never been an intrinsically good pitch. Opponents have slugged .467 against it for his career and .512 since the start of the 2020 season. According to Statcast, the pitch has yielded a positive run value twice in Corbin’s 12-year career, the last time being in 2019.

Enter the cutter. In theory, having a pitch with characteristics residing between Corbin’s slider and sinker should help him keep hitters off the former without overexposing the latter. He turned to the pitch 19.2% of the time, including 23.2% against right-handed batters, who were the primary instigators of his struggles.

It worked, to an extent. Opponents slugged just .335 with a .267 wOBA against Corbin’s slider in 2024, and it accumulated a favorable run value for the first time since 2020. The average exit velocity against it fell to 83.1 mph. His sinker, meanwhile, remained batting practice for hitters, who slugged .567 against it.

There’s room for Corbin’s cutter to better complement his main two offerings, and he took steps in the right direction later in the year. That’s what makes him an intriguing possibility for a Brewers team that has helped several veteran hurlers get the most out of their suspect fastballs in recent years.

For much of the season, Corbin’s cutter was not a fastball variant that filled the gap between his sinker and slider. Instead, it behaved like a harder version of his slider, with very similar movement.

That changed in the final two months of the year. Corbin gained a few ticks of velocity and added a couple of inches of lift to his cutter, while slashing the same amount of horizontal break. This created a little more separation from the slider.

For a visual representation, notice how much more the cutter (orange) and slider (green) overlap on the left graphic compared to the one on the right.

As a result, the pitch gained far more separation from his slider down the stretch. Coincidentally (or not), opponents fared worse against his slider in August and September than they had at any point in the year: a .235 slugging percentage and 39.6% whiff rate. The chase rate against it did not meaningfully improve.

Corbin’s cutter needs more development, as it still resembles a breaking ball more than a cutting fastball. Further refining it would give him the three-fastball triangle the Brewers have repeatedly maximized, plus a breaking ball that has still flashed the capacity to be effective. Corbin has next-to no upside at this stage of his career, but plucking him off the scrap heap could potentially give the Brewers a durable arm at the back end of a rotation that is once again in flux.