The Brewers Do the Most Beautiful Thing in Baseball Better Than Anyone Else

Baseball is a competitive sport, but for those of us watching (rather than playing), it's also art. There is, and ought to be, an aesthetic aspect to the enjoyment of the game, so when I argue that two Brewers pitchers are among the very best in the sport at its most beautiful skill, it matters. It does help the team win games, but that's not all it does; it also makes it more fun for us to watch them.

The joy in watching a great pitcher can come in many forms, but for most guys, there has to be a combination of things happening. The craft requires deception, command and variability, and that makes it most fun to see someone who blends those things well. Nothing better captures all that, in my opinion, than when a pitcher with good velocity has a batter sitting on their formidable fastball but catches them looking with a curveball for a strike.

This is all a matter of taste, of course. You can love to see the sheer athletic oomph of a really good heater thrown right by an opponent, or the foolish lunge and tumble of a hitter way out in front on a dancing changeup. For me, though, the grace of a strike stolen with the long arc of a curveball that still finds the zone is the highest form of baseball art. The Brewers do that as well as any team in baseball—or at least, a couple of their notable lefties do it as well as any individuals do.

In 2024, some 244 pitchers threw at least 50 curveballs. Among them, only Shota Imanaga got called strikes on a higher percentage of his curves than did Aaron Ashby, who did so 38.7% of the time. DL Hall is not far down the list at all, nestling in at 13th with 29.5% of his hooks stealing strikes without a swing. That's two hurlers on the Crew within roughly the top 6 percent of the league in called strikes with curves; they thrive in this regard.

The classic way to steal a strike with the curve, of course, is to throw one on the first pitch of an at-bat, when a hitter is sitting on a fastball almost every time and it's easy to lock them up and get an easy called strike by throwing them something slow and bendy. When you do it to a same-handed batter, we even get the funny little bonus of a flinch on a pitch that was nowhere near buzzing the tower. Here's Ashby doing that to Lars Nootbaar.

If you can spot the curve on the outer edge of the dish to an opposite-handed batter on 0-0, you're also golden, because the hitter is almost certain to give up on the backdoor break. Here's Ashby pulling that trick on Shea Langeliers.

The Brewers (who ultimately don't use the curve all that much, by the standards of the league) led MLB by getting called strikes on 39.3% of their first-pitch curves in 2024, with Ashby leading the way when he was healthy and on the bump. That's far from the only way to deploy this weapon, though. For instance, what if you could also spot the curve on the other side of the plate, and you had that poor hitter thinking about the lateral break after seeing it on 0-0, and you just changed lanes but not pitch types? Wouldn't that be a hilarious way to troll them? What do you think, Shea?

It takes a little bit of guts to throw the curve for a strike, because if a hitter has seen your curve before and is expecting it, that pitch often works a bit like a batting-practice fastball. It takes a lot of guts, therefore, to double up with that pitch in the zone to start an at-bat. That only makes it more fun when it works, though. 

The pitch can be clever in deeper even counts, too. This requires you to know the opposing hitter. If it's 1-1, are they already thinking a bit more defensively (in which case the curve for a strike is a bad idea, because he's likely to stay back and hit the pitch cleanly to center or the opposite field), or are they still loading up to get the head out on a fastball? Randal Grichuk is the second kind of guy, which is why this worked gorgeously.

That's a nasty pitch in a clutch situation. Needing a strikeout, knowing Grichuk would just be wanting to lift the ball and bring home a run, Ashby froze him with a pitch that could have been conducive to that very goal—except, it wasn't the one Grichuk was looking for, and Ashby knew that. After that pitch, Grichuk fouled off two sinkers and a slider at the bottom of the zone, then swung right over a 1-2 curveball dipping out of the zone, showing the versatility of Ashby's breaker when he has command of his arsenal.

The ball-to-strike curve can also get you back into a count from behind. Many hitters refuse to get aggressive on anything with a wrinkle in it when they have a 3-0 or 3-1 edge in the count. That's understandable, but probably unwise, because it lets pitchers who can throw the curve in the zone get back into the count relatively easily. Paul Goldschmidt found out the hard way that DL Hall can do that.

The most fun, though, of course, is when a hitter has to be thinking defensively—when they know the curve is coming, and are aware of their need to attack it when it does—and you still catch them unready. The secret vulnerability of the hitter looking for a curve is that they're anticipating the break, so if you start the curve well within the zone but have it skidding toward an edge thereof, some hitters will identify the pitch and think they've wisely laid off—only to be rung up because the sizzling spinner nipped the corner after all. Jonathan India's patient approach and good recognition only hurt him here.

The slider can't do a lot of these things. The changeup can't. They don't have the same velocity differential from the fastball, or the same depth of movement, but also, they just aren't as pretty. The little dopamine hit I get from seeing the curve slant home against a flummoxed hitter is qualitatively but importantly different, and one of the joys of baseball. Hopefully, Ashby and Hall are healthy enough to show us even more such things of beauty in 2025.