The Pitchers Who Sealed Brewers' Division-Clinching Victory Perfectly Capture Their Brilliance

A great executive who never worked for the Brewers, named Pat Gillick, was fond of saying that a good team must fish in many rivers to collect enough talent to sustain success. There are lots of ways to find good players, and just as importantly, there are an increasing number of reliable ways--more, better ones than there were in Gillick's day--to develop merely viable players into robustly productive ones. If a team wants to win not just in cyclical phases, but over periods of several years, they have to acquire players through all of those means, and pursue all those paths to maximizing the value they extract from the talent they acquire. It's what great organizations do.

Never has this been more important, because the game is more efficient, more competitive, and faster-changing than ever. Diversifying the ways you target and then instruct players keeps you nimble and ahead of the curve, to the extent that anyone can do so. Wednesday night was a delightful illustration of how the Brewers go about that task. They won in walkoff fashion, thanks to a leadoff triple in the bottom of the ninth by a player they signed as an amateur out of Venezuela, and whom they then signed to a bold, risky long-term contract before he first played in the majors. Before that, though, they got 27 outs and allowed only one run to one of the most fearsome lineups in baseball, and the five hurlers who combined to do it came from many different rivers.

Freddy Peralta's roster-building backstory is too rarely discussed. Brewers fans have so internalized it that we tend to smooth over the remarkable nature of it. In a trade that could easily have ended up extremely forgettable, the Crew traded plodding lefty bat Adam Lind to the Mariners with just one year of team control remaining. Lind's value was low, and the three lottery-ticket minor-leaguers the team got for him could easily have come to nothing. Instead, Peralta, who was 19 at the time, blossomed into one of the best starters in the National League.

It hasn't been a perfectly smooth process. The Brewers had to nail the development of Peralta from a live-armed, athletic, very raw youngster into a four-pitch starter with adaptability and command, as well as electric stuff. They did it, though, by understanding the specialness of his fastball shape and gradually tweaking his breaking ball shapes until they found a mix that worked. Wednesday, Peralta struck out nine in five innings, allowing just a solo home run to Alec Bohm before departing. The team now has the luxury of managing his workload for the final 10 days of the season and lining him up to start their first postseason game. He cost them almost nothing to acquire, and they long ago signed him to a wildly team-friendly extension, just as Jackson Chourio's has turned out to be.

The first hurler in relief of Peralta was Joe Ross, who could not be less sexy a counterpoint to the exhilarating success story of the starter's emergence. The Brewers just scooped Ross up for $1.75 million in early December, because he wanted to sign early, he had a very limited market, and they wanted to set a floor for their back-end starting pitching depth. It sounds preposterous in a broader real-world context, but $1.75 million really is a paltry sum in the modern game. Almost no veteran with any big-league bona fides will work for that rate. Getting Ross, and getting him early in the run of the offseason, and getting him at that price was a tiny little coup, albeit one with almost no major upside.

Ross has been so beset by injuries that he was available at as deep a discount as the market realistically allows. He hasn't stayed all that healthy this season, either, and after the team made midseason upgrades to its starting rotation, he finds himself in the bullpen. But lo, he's now thrown 68 innings, with a stout 3.57 ERA supported neatly by his peripheral numbers. Early on, he made 10 starts and helped them survive a spate of other injuries to their pitching staff. Lately, he's been a valuable multi-inning reliever. All along, he's hummed in his mid-90s fastball and sharp slider, not overwhelming hitters or racking up strikeouts but not allowing home runs or issuing a crazy number of walks, either. He's been a consummate professional, and he's given them a more versatile version of an average middle reliever's workload, with better results than any more standard middle reliever available at that price could be expected to provide. He's a tiny cog in the machine, but he turns when other gears press on him and he never jams things up.

After Ross came Jared Koenig, who was on the verge of not being in affiliated baseball at all a year ago. He not only didn't pitch in the majors in 2023, but allowed 7.60 runs per nine innings while he was in Triple-A for the Padres and ended up in Double-A to finish that campaign. That was his age-29 season. For most guys, if that's what you are at 29, what you are at 30 is a coach or a youth instructor or a substitute teacher. But the Brewers made him a priority target last November, signed him early to a minor-league deal, and welcomed his improved stuff and tinkerings when he showed up to spring training. He's averaging 96 miles per hour with his sinker this month, and that number just keeps rising. After getting four outs with two strikeouts and no baserunners allowed, Koenig now has a 2.47 ERA as a lefty setup man, in almost 60 innings.

They got Peralta in a traditional trade, and Ross via big-league free agency, and Koenig via minor-league free agency. They landed Trevor Megill, who pitched the eighth inning, in a minor, roster-crunch trade with the Twins in April 2023. Since he joined the big-league roster for Milwaukee last spring, he's pitched 78 innings, striking out over 31% of opposing batters and walking just 7.5% of them. The Brewers helped him consistently access his top-end velocity and embrace the steepness of his curveball, and the results have been sensational. He's a lockdown setup man, acquired for almost nothing and under team control for three more seasons. He set the Phillies down tidily, with another strikeout added to the pile.

That just left Devin Williams, the only truly homegrown arm in the set. Yet, he had as circuitous a route to this roster as some of the others. Remember, the Brewers first took him in the second round way back in 2013. It took him more than half a decade to scale the minor-league ladder and reach the big leagues, surviving major injury trouble and a very belated move to the bullpen because he and the team found this special, otherworldly pitch, something only he could do. Once they found that weapon, they worked together to make it something life-changing for Williams and franchise-altering for the team. The Airbender was working gorgeously Wednesday night. Williams struck out the side in order.

The position players who got the Brewers here represent the same diversity of avenues explored and the same assiduous player development, but the pitchers really distill the thing down to its core. On a night that was going to end in a celebration of this team either way, five hurlers put on a show and reminded everyone just how much of a team they really are. There might not be an org better at working tirelessly to augment depth and creatively solving the problems posed by various stages of player development. They fish in all the available rivers, and thus, they keep reeling in the big ones.