Trevor Megill's Curveball is Harder, Shorter, and Nastier Than Ever

The Brewers lost closer Devin Williams in spring training to stress fractures in his back, but the bullpen has hardly missed a beat as its star reliever recovers. Milwaukee’s relief corps enters Tuesday with a 79 ERA-, the second-best league-adjusted ERA in baseball.

Trevor Megill has contributed to the stability by taking hold of the ninth inning in Williams’s absence. Megill has converted 13 of 14 save chances, posting a sterling 2.14 ERA, 2.29 FIP, and 2.98 SIERA with a 29.9% strikeout rate.

That constitutes a continuation of a breakout that began late last season. After the Brewers recalled him from Triple-A on Aug. 15, Megill transformed into a late-inning monster. He worked 17 innings the rest of the 2023 season, allowing just four runs while fanning a whopping 40.6% of batters faced.

Megill continued to attack opponents with the same triple-digit fastball he possessed in his previous big-league stints, but also ravaged them with a harder and shorter version of his spike curveball.

During his time with the Minnesota Twins, Megill’s curveball averaged 83.4 mph with -16.4 inches of induced vertical break. It dropped an average of 56 inches from when it left his hand to when it crossed the plate, making it one of the steepest breaking balls in baseball. 

Halfway through the 2023 campaign, Megill worked in Nashville to add more velocity to the pitch while slashing some of that movement. After he returned to the big leagues for the stretch run, his curveball averaged 86.7 mph with -8.9 inches of induced vertical break the rest of the year.

The evolution has continued to new heights this season. Megill is averaging 87.9 mph with his breaking ball, and its induced vertical break is down to just -5.1 inches.

Not only is Megill’s hook now one of baseball’s shorter curveballs, but it’s also migrated to more ambiguous territory on the breaking ball spectrum. It’s effectively become a hard slurve that occasionally takes on more of a slider-like shape.

To Megill, however, it’s still a curveball.

“Sometimes it just gets a little sideways, but no, it’s still an 88-mile-per-hour curveball,” he said, when asked if he’s made any deliberate changes to the pitch. “Nothing’s changed, just mechanics get different.”

In addition to those unintentional alterations to the curveball’s typical movement, its shape has varied more from pitch to pitch. Compare the movement spread of the curveballs Megill threw in his last stint with the Brewers in 2023 (left) to that of 2024.

Megill indicated that while he still sees the breaking ball as the same pitch from late last year, the broader array of shapes is sometimes by design.

“Sometimes I’ll throw it more slider-y,” he said, “but it’s still a curveball. Same grip, same everything, just different hand placement.

“I do manipulate it. Like I said, it’s all the same grip, it’s all the same. Pretty much everything besides the hand placement, whether it’s up and down, it’s 45-degree angle, flat sometimes. It just kind of depends on hitters and what I see.”

Megill noted that most of the time, the vertical break of his breaking ball is still much closer to a curveball than a slider. The vertical variation in movement on the pitch (as defined by our own Matthew Trueblood in this piece on Freddy Peralta, taking the difference between the 10th and 90th percentile movement from the sample of all pitches of that type) is unchanged from 2023, at 3.2 inches, but the horizontal variation is up from 3.8 to 4.9 inches.

“A slider would probably be more between the minus two, plus two line, and [the curveball is] still minus five, minus six.”

However, Megill has thrown a handful of breakers this year that would fall into that slider designation. Prior to 2024, he had never thrown a breaking ball with between -2 and 2 inches of induced vertical break. He’s thrown eight such pitches this year. Most of them look like sliders according to the eye test, too.

However one prefers to classify it, Megill’s even harder and tighter breaking ball has been his most effective iteration yet.

According to the Stuff+ pitch modeling metric available at FanGraphs, Megill’s curveball is the best in baseball, grading out as 79% better than a league-average pitch. By the same model, it was 23% better than average in 2023. Opponents have recorded just three singles in 17 at-bats ending with Megill’s breaking ball, and it has induced whiffs on an eye-popping 63.6% of swings.

Megill is throwing fewer curveballs in the zone (41% in 2023, 37.6% in 2024) and is generating more chases with the pitch (38.8% to 43.1%). Its swinging strike rate has leaped from 22.9% to 30.1%.

Intentionally or not, Megill has unlocked the maxed-out version of his curveball. Combined with his electric fastball, it’s a lethal weapon for a late-blooming reliever who will remain near the top of Milwaukee’s bullpen hierarchy even after Williams returns.