With His Glove-Side Pitches Fine-Tuned, Connor Thomas Makes His Pitch for Brewers' Opening Day Roster

Connor Thomas has quietly been one of the Brewers’ better performers this spring. Perhaps that’s a fitting beginning to his stint with a new team.

Listed generously at six feet tall, Thomas is not an intimidating presence on the mound. He does not post gaudy strikeout figures, nor are modern stuff models enamored with his arsenal, but he effectively mixes and commands five pitches. He appeared on prospect lists in the St. Louis Cardinals organization but never near the top.

As a Rule 5 draft selection, the Brewers cannot send Thomas to the minor leagues without first offering him back to the Cardinals. That alone gives him a leg up on his competition for a roster spot, but he’s bolstered his case with solid work on the mound. He’s allowed just one earned run in 9 ⅓ innings across five appearances.

Team decision-makers have taken notice.

“He’s been very, very good,” Pat Murphy said. “He’s very much in the conversation, very much in the conversation. He’s pitched really well. I think that the consensus is he’s made our job a lot tougher than we thought. Do you know what I mean? He’s throwing the ball good.”

As Tobias Myers awaits word on the severity of his oblique injury, Thomas will likely be among the hurlers tasked with filling the void, whether as a long man in the bullpen or as a spot starter. He has starting experience and stretched out to three innings in his latest outing on Saturday.

Known as a cerebral pitcher (like most Milwaukee arms these days), Thomas is making his bid with a fuller understanding and tightened utilization of his glove-side-moving pitches. The Brewers selected him after a breakout 2024 season in which he permanently morphed his slider into a sweeper, seemingly in an attempt to differentiate it from his cutter. Thomas confirmed Saturday morning that was indeed his motivation.

“As I started throwing the cutter more, they started to kind of morph into the same pitch,” he recalled, “but the slider was slower and in the zone more, so it was getting hit pretty hard. And so I kind of self-assessed and said, ‘Hey, maybe I need to work on maybe sweeping it more to have a little differentiation.’ End of (2023), I started playing around with it, and then in (2024) kind of let it happen. And it turned out to be my best pitch last year in most aspects – movement profile, all that.”

While Thomas’s slider held opponents to similar slugging percentages across both seasons, the longer version yielded more sustainable success. Opponents’ hard hit rate dropped from 46.8% against his standard slider in 2023 to 35.1% against his sweeper in 2024.

“Hitters were just having a field day,” he said of his old slider. “Specifically, righties were having a field day whenever I threw it. And so when I started throwing the sweeper more, I started missing barrels again with it, and I was like, ‘Okay, that's kind of the result I'm looking for.’”

The linchpin of Thomas’s arsenal is his cutter, which he locates primarily up-and-in to right-handed batters. That’s a somewhat unique approach, particularly because his cutter is more of a gyro-spinning, slider-like pitch without much ride than a true cutting fastball. However, Thomas confirmed it plays up there due to his low three-quarters arm slot.

“From talking to righties that I've been teammates with, they said to me, ‘Just from your arm slot, it looks like it's going 20 inches inside the way you throw it.’ So it may not have a big movement profile, but to the hitter's eyes, it looks like it's bearing in on them, which is exactly what I was trying to do with it, because then that opens up the sinker and the changeup away, and I can truly go expand it to both sides.”

The feedback from hitters was helpful, but the informationally-driven Thomas also dove into the data to determine how to use the pitch.

“The Cardinals had a database, kind of like what the Brewers have. I think every team, for the most part, nowadays has a database to look at your numbers. And I just went and looked at heat maps and something called RAW and all these different advanced stats about where I should go – this pitch, what counts, and all that. It said if you're facing a righty, it's a reset pitch for me to get their eyes up. So I don't really want to throw that down. I want to get it up.”

Jamming righties with elevated cutters has worked well, but the Brewers’ top pitching minds have challenged Thomas to explore new ways in which the pitch can complement the rest of his arsenal. Specifically, they’ve encouraged him to adopt their strategy of “making X’s” with his cutter and sinker to both sides of the plate at the bottom of the zone, which has made past hurlers like Colin Rea and Bryse Wilson more deceptive.

“Kind of advancing my cutter to more of an early strike-throwing machine on both sides of the plate, as opposed to just kind of keyholing me to the inner part of the plate,” Thomas explained. “Now hitters are having to respect the cutter back-door and on both sides of the plate. We're playing around with it… They’ve really kind of opened my eyes to what I can do as far as crisscrossing on both sides of the plate, up and down, here and there.”

While working his cutter high-and-tight last year, Thomas unconventionally threw most of his sinkers over the middle of the plate instead of working them away as he did in past seasons. That wasn’t so much a conscious effort to better tunnel the two pitches, he said, as it was increased confidence that he could get more roll-over swings on sinkers over the plate because hitters were protecting against the cutter.

“Seeing the cutter, seeing their reactions – changing their eyes and kind of a little get-back from the hitter – it gave me so much more confidence just to have the sinker middle away in the zone and be comfortable that I'm going to get the ground ball or get the end-of-the-barrel kind of swing because they have to respect both sides of the plate now. And so that comes from me just having confidence throwing it for a strike, not worrying about nit-picking on the corner and missing away.”

Thomas is the latest entry into what has become a successful development practice for the Brewers: taking a smart, deliberate pitcher making strides toward maximizing his arsenal, implementing more changes to get him over the hump of productivity, and reaping the benefits of an unexciting but valuable innings-eater. He has eagerly bought into the process, and it could start to pay off even more in a few weeks.