Trying to Make the Innings Math Work for the 2024 Milwaukee Brewers

Early in camp, Pat Murphy's favorite theme around starting pitchers was the fluidity of the group he would utilize that way. He's talked a great deal (without using these labels) about piggyback starts and openers, among other ways of balancing the needs and limitations of his starting pitcher pool with the imperative to cover the 1,450 innings that make up a 162-game season. The more he muses, though, the less truly tenable the plan sounds.

Let's take stock, yet again. We know that Freddy Peralta will be the Opening Day starter and staff ace for the rotation. We know that, when healthy and barring total performance collapse, Wade Miley and Colin Rea will be mostly traditional starters. It's much harder to say, though, how often each of them will be able to go, or how deep into each start Murphy will take them. Already, the skipper has tipped his hand about an intention to use a six-man rotation when the team undertakes two 13-game stretches between off days within the first month. 

That's sensible, on its face. We live in the era of the six-man rotation, even if many fans haven't yet awakened to that fact. The Brewers very publicly utilized a six-man staff throughout 2021, as a way of mitigating and managing the difficulty of the full season coming right after the pandemic-ruined one of 2020. This time, though, it's tough to say who would make six starts in a row without a repeat, based on the articulated plans Murphy has offered on the usage of each of his non-veteran options.

Let's say Peralta, Rea, and Miley each take essentially normal turns throughout April, pitching every sixth day and averaging somewhere between five and six innings per start. They'd account for over half the starts for the month, under that arrangement, but they'd still be shy of starting 60 percent of them. The Brewers actually have three 13-game stretches separated by off days over the first month and a half, and at the end of that stretch, they'll have played 44 total contests. Peralta, Miley, and Rea can take the ball 23 or 24 times. That still leaves 20 or 21 starts and something like 270 innings to cover through May 15.

DL Hall will be a starter, but his control and health track record are bound to hold him below five innings per start in the early going. You can loosely count him for 35 innings over this span. I explored the constraints on Joe Ross's use and value last week, but suffice it to say, he's not going to throw more than 40 innings in this window, either. Account for those two, and you've filled another 12-14 of the needed starts, but you have to find 200 to 210 more innings over the month-and-a-half span, and you've already accounted for five of your best bulk arms.

Jakob Junis, Robert Gasser, Aaron Ashby, Janson Junk, and Bryse Wilson are going to have to bear the majority of that load. With Devin Williams sidelined, the Crew still have plenty of short relievers who will get outs at an excellent rate on a per-batter basis. Elvis Peguero, Abner Uribe, Trevor Megill, Joel Payamps, Hoby Milner, Bryan Hudson, J.B. Bukauskas, Thyago Vieira and Taylor Clarke will probably all appear even in what is only a small slice of the season, but that also means the team is likely to lose one or two of them (either to injury or to inevitable roster crunch). Together, they'll only throw perhaps 65 or 70 innings during this stretch into mid-May.

That means that Junis, Junk, Gasser, Ashby, and Wilson have to throw about 140 innings in a month and a half, and make anywhere from nine to 12 starts. That doesn't sound imposing, but when you stop to consider the way Murphy has expressed his plan to use them--in tandem, with Gasser and Junis as a bait-and-switch for the opposing lineup or Ashby and Junk splitting up a start's worth of innings--it gets tough to picture.

"You have only 13 pitchers, so the guys with options become crucial—and being able to bounce back, and be in the type of shape that you want to be in," Murphy said back in March. "There’s all sorts of stuff at stake here."

That flies if what we're talking about is being able to use a pitcher like Peguero three times in four days, or getting multiple innings from Wilson as a middle reliever twice in one week. If it's part of a plan that amounts to a seven- or eight-man rotation, though--with six guys taking turns and one or two of them having a designated partner to get the team through the sixth inning that day--it gets tenuous.

Wilson pitched a robust (by modern standards) 76 2/3 innings of relief last year, but never got more than 21 2/3 innings of work in a timeframe similar to this one. Junis worked 27 innings in flexible roles from mid-July through the end of August last year, but no more than that across any similar span. Gasser and Junk have primarily been starters throughout their pro careers. Ashby's health and availability will be in doubt until he earns his way out of that status.

It's possible for any of these guys to pitch as much as five innings in a single game, and plausible for any of them to work 30 or 35 innings over this span, just as it is for Hall and Ross. As with each of those two, though, extending any of these five out to that much work in such a tight window will be a leap of faith. The risk of one or more of them breaking or simply failing in a role expanded under duress feels very high.

Later in the season, the schedule opens up a bit. The Brewers get three days off in May, three in June, seven in July (although that includes a rare five-day All-Star break), four in August, and three in September. To enjoy the benefits of that, though, they have to get to the middle of May in good health, without having lost key depth pieces like Vieira or Wilson to roster math. The innings math is worrisome.