Survive and Advance: How Joel Payamps is Rising Up Brewers' Bullpen Ladder, By Design

The Brewers were able to acquire Joel Payamps in the William Contreras trade because Payamps is the very model of the modern replacement-level relief pitcher. He played for four teams over his first three MLB seasons, and changed teams during both the 2021 and the 2022 campaigns. He slotted into a battle with several other relievers for the last few spots in the Brewers pen as spring training opened, and part of the reason why he made the team was simply that he had no remaining minor-league options. If he hadn't made the club, he would have had to be placed on waivers, and he might well have been claimed.

Since the season began, however, he has both rewarded the small investment the Brewers made in him, and demonstrated the value of prioritizing roster flexibility when making decisions about who should make the Opening Day roster. In 11 appearances, Payamps has 12 innings pitched and a Win Probability Added of 0.7, making him a valuable middle reliever. He's the fringe reliever who has survived the early-season roster churn: Gus Varland is on the injured list after being hit by a comebacker, and Javy Guerra was designated for assignment last week. 

With Payamps, Varland, Guerra, and Bryse Wilson filling out the back half of the bullpen depth chart, the Brewers had four guys without minor-league options to start the year. That makes for a lack of flexibility in roster decisions, superficially, because taking any of those four off the 26-man roster would risk losing them. The season is long, however, and guys like these reach the points in their careers where they can only be retained on the big-league roster by being risky, anyway. The Brewers front office played a numbers game by carrying the four, knowing that injuries (be it to those players themselves or to someone further up the hierarchy) or underperformance would force changes soon, but that those changes would slowly increase the flexibility of the roster.

Varland and Matt Bush have now hit the injured list, creating opportunities aplenty. Payamps has been the big beneficiary. Wisely, Craig Counsell tested him and sought to learn how much he can trust him right away, giving him the ball in the sixth inning of a close game, with a runner on, in the Cardinals series at Miller Park in early April. Payamps escaped that jam, and gained a little bit of his manager's trust. He acted as the emergency closer at the end of a crazy extra-inning game in San Diego, and gained a little bit more. Since then, he's been called upon to close out a game with a four-run lead and to make two seventh-inning appearances in tied games. These are jobs you give to your fourth-best reliever, which is right where Payamps slots in right now. He was seventh on that hierarchy just a month ago. 

How is he doing it? Well, he's not missing bats. That's the bad news. Payamps has never piled up whiffs the way teams want their late-inning bullpen arms to do, which is part of why he's been left on the scrap heap a time or two. Over the last two years, though, he has shored up his control enough to at least partially make up for that deficiency, and he's thrown tons of strikes for the Brewers so far. He's only issued three free passes to the 51 batters he's faced. 

As a good middle reliever must be able to, Payamps is now also able to handle both left- and right-handed batters. He's tweaked his pitch mix this year, featuring completely different weapons against the two types of opponent. Against righties, he's now throwing almost exclusively sinkers and sliders.

Against lefties, meanwhile, he's increasingly comfortable throwing his changeup for strikes, and it plays best off his four-seam fastball.

With that pair of strong pairs of pitches, Payamps can attack the zone and still minimize hard contact against all batters. To wit, he's running a career-best ground-ball rate of 59 percent, and his average exit velocity is sixth-lowest of 340 qualifying pitchers. That doesn't mean he'll continue to be as good as he's been, but it's reassuring. He hasn't been succeeding purely through smoke and mirrors. 

The Brewers have replaced Guerra, Varland, and Bush with (for the moment) Jake Cousins, Elvis Peguero, and Tyson Miller. All three of them have minor-league options, meaning that the team can now rotate arms pretty freely through the back of the bullpen. For that strategy to work, they just needed one or two of the guys in the original quartet of locked-in arms to emerge as reliable medium- to high-leverage hurlers. In Payamps and Wilson, they now have that. The roster is taking a less fluid shape, as it should, and the wins keep accumulating.