With Brandon Woodruff Ailing, Brewers Will See What They Have in Janson Junk

While Brandon Woodruff nurses shoulder inflammation that he insists is minor, it will be Janson Junk who comes up from Triple-A Nashville to take a couple of crucial starts. In a bit of serendipity, he was lined up for this anyway based on when he pitched in Nashville, but it also seems likely that he was first in line for a promotion like this.

The Brewers got Junk as the headliner of a package of pitchers when they traded Hunter Renfroe to the Angels in the fall. The right-hander was a 22nd-round pick by the Yankees in 2017 out of Seattle University, and he made a fistful of big-league appearances with the Angels over the course of the last two seasons. In those looks, he showed a fastball with average velocity, but above-average carry; a naturally sweepy slider; a middling curveball; and a couple versions of a changeup, neither of which showed much refinement.

The Brewers haven’t overhauled Junk’s mechanics or helped him totally reinvent himself. They have made a few adjustments, though, and his results in two appearances for Nashville so far (10 innings, one run, five hits, three walks, seven strikeouts) speak to the promise those tweaks hold. For one thing, Junk has added some vertical movement to that slider. The trend throughout baseball this year, of course, is toward the “sweeper,” a version of the slider that emphasizes lateral movement, but Junk already had that dimension. Getting more depth on the pitch should increase the rate at which he gets whiffs on it, if he can locate it appropriately. 

Funnily enough, though, Junk got a bunch of non-contact strikes--some in the form of whiffs, and others on called strikes--even when hitting the top of the zone with the slider during his stint in Nashville. Because his fastball has so much explosive, rising action up there, hitters were fooled even when he put a slider up in that same area. That's unlikely to be a recipe for success in the majors, but it bears watching.

Janson Junk made his organizational debut today:
5 IP
5 K’s
3 hits
1 ER

Most likely will see him in Milwaukee sometime this year.pic.twitter.com/V9IPI3zZ0B

— Ryan (@BrewPackOnYT) April 3, 2023

Beyond that, it seems (though the pitch-classification data now available to the public via Baseball Savant for Triple-A games is quite messy in the early going) that Junk has, ahem, junked his traditional changeup, and is now throwing solely a splitter as his offspeed pitch. He's getting a bit more depth on that, too, though again, we're battling some uncertainty based on obvious errors in pitch typing. He's also busted out a sinker with significant arm-side run, which would pair nicely with the slider against righties if he can get both pitches working on the same plane consistently. His curveball has good spin mirroring with the four-seamer, and might continue to be a weapon against lefties, although between the changed shape of his slider and the development of the splitter, the curve is becoming a bit redundant in his evolving repertoire.

That Junk has seven games and roughly 25 innings of MLB experience already has to be of some comfort to the Brewers, too. He's not going to freak out upon taking the mound. Still, he's filling big shoes, at a pivotal time on the schedule. As Í detailed before the season began, the Brewers start this season with 19 crucial games, and so far, they've only played 11 of them. Junk will start the rubber game against a Diamondbacks team that looks poised to compete (perhaps directly with the Brewers) for a Wild Card berth, then (in all likelihood) in the opener of the team's series in Seattle next Monday, before making his Miller Park Brewers debut against the Red Sox the following Sunday. Those are three tough lineups and tough opponents, and the stakes are high.

Meanwhile, Woodruff's status is of enormous concern, no matter what Junk is able to deliver. Without him, the Brewers are far more dependent upon not only Corbin Burnes and Freddy Peralta (which would be fine), but Eric Lauer and Wade Miley. They've dipped into their farm depth for starting help sooner than they would have liked. This injury, which is ostensibly unrelated to the Reynaud's Disease that sidetracked Woodruff for part of 2022, also muddies the water for his long-term outlook. It has to be harder today for the Brewers to talk themselves into a long-term commitment to the most promising extension candidate of their Big Three, even if this does turn out to be a minimum stay on the injured list. There's no good news, except to whatever extent one accepts that they really are just being abundantly cautious and now downplaying the fact that their co-ace has a barking shoulder--well, that, plus the fact that Junk is representative of an organization stocked with better high-level pitching depth than most clubs, and that the team might therefore weather a couple of short absences (or a sustained one) better than their rivals.