One Brewers Relief Ace's Out Pitch Has Not Made it Back from the Injured List, Yet

It's always been a challenge to keep Trevor Megill healthy. His sheer stuff is incredible, and his control has come a long way in a short time since arriving in Milwaukee. Being an effective reliever, however, requires the ability to consistently execute pitches--usually, more than one pitch within an arsenal. That can be very difficult for pitchers who frequently deal with injuries, even when they are well enough to take the mound.

Megill spent about four weeks on the injured list with a lower back strain, from late July to late August. Since returning, his velocity is intact, and so is the movement on his fastball, which can still touch triple digits. However, his results have been lousy, for a simple and important reason: his curveball is not as healthy as the rest of him.

With exceptionally tight spin and great velocity, Megill's knuckle-curve was devastating late last season, and for the first chunk of this year. It powered his dominance over the first half, during which he helped make up for the absence of Devin Williams by taking over as the closer. More than five of every eight swings by opposing batters against Megill's curve through Jul. 23 came up empty.

Since coming back from the IL on Aug. 21, though, Megill hasn't been quite the same. His ERA is ugly, but that alone tells us little. Here's something that tells us more: key movement data on his curveball, before and after the stint on the injured list.

Losing 1.6 miles per hour on a breaking pitch isn't good, but it isn't automatically as bad as losing the same amount of speed on a fastball. What's going wrong for Megill, since his return, is the fact that that lost velocity falls right in line with the rest of the trends for the pitch since his return. It's actually spinning as much as ever, but it's not the same kind of overwhelming power breaking ball it was before. There's more vertical depth, more sweep, and the ball isn't coming out of his hand as sharply as it was before the back trouble that shelved him just after the All-Star break.

As a result, you see the big, glaring number: zero whiffs. Not once, in four outings since his return from the injured list, has Megill induced a swing and miss with his curveball. Part of that is that he's thrown many fewer of them.

That only underscores the problem, though. If Megill isn't able to trust and execute his curveball, he's a very limited pitcher. He has a great fastball, but his command of it isn't strong enough to make him a shutdown reliever without the curve to complement it. The hope was that, once Williams returned, the Brewers could confidently get the final six outs in any game in which they had a late lead, just by turning to Megill and WIlliams. Right now, that's just not the case.

If Megill can rediscover the feel for his breaking ball without hurting himself again, it could be a huge difference-maker for the Brewers heading into the postseason. If not, they still have ways to survive. They've gotten surprisingly superb work from Aaron Ashby since he joined the big-league bullpen, for instance. Still, it's hard not to wonder whether Megill's struggles will prompt the team to reconsider their choice not to call up Jacob Misiorowski this month. It's Misiorowski who boasts the same combination of elite velocity and a lethal breaking ball that the Crew hoped they would have in Megill.

This is one of those times when it's lovely to have a nine-game lead in the division. The Brewers can wait a fortnight or more, giving Megill regular work, and monitor his progress carefully. They don't need him to be an ace again right away. They just need to know, by the end of this month, whether they can trust him to be that guy going into October. The answer to that question depends mostly on his vicious curveball, which is still missing, for the moment. With the luxury of time, though, that could change before the stakes rise.