Matthew Trueblood

I would *strongly* argue that he’s no less promising than Eric Lauer was three years ago. But you’re not totally wrong. (Also, be honest: is that you, Jake? Is this your burner? :D)

Haha. Yeah, that’s what fascinates me. There’s no obviously good news with him. But that’s the thing about this kind of development: the team isn’t only evaluating what he is or has been. If they see both mechanical and approach adjustments they want to make, and they’ve done their homework on what it could look like if those adjustments work, then the past is history.

This week at Brewer Fanatic, we’re running a series enumerating some of the X-factors of the 2023 Milwaukee Brewers. These are factors beyond sheer talent or previous production, which could have a huge impact on the way the long season ahead unfolds. Today, let’s discuss an under-the-radar project for Chris Hook and the team during camp: Bryse Wilson. Image courtesy of © John Jones-USA TODAY Sports Only a few years ago, Bryse Wilson was expected to become one of the cadre of promising arms driving the Atlanta Braves’ new NL East dynasty. He fired six innings of one-run ball against the Dodgers in the 2020 NLCS, and it looked like a coming-out party. Less than a year later, though, he was exiled to Pittsburgh, and the Brewers scooped him up from there only after the Pirates designated him for assignment in late December. It’s tempting, given that quick fall from grace, to think of Wilson as a non-entity, and it might turn out to be true. Now 25 years old, the former top prospect sports a 5.54 career ERA, and he doesn’t have high-end velocity or gaudy strikeout rates to recommend him as a breakout candidate. He also doesn’t have any minor-league option years remaining, so he has to prove himself worthy of a spot on the 26-man roster over the next month in order to stick around. What he does have going for him, though, is Chris Hook. It’s a minor miracle, really, that Hook has kept the Brewers’ pitching train on the rails so perfectly since taking over at such a perilous moment. In the afterglow of the Crew’s magical run to within a game of the World Series in 2018, then-pitching coach Derek Johnson made a shocking defection to the Reds. That could easily have been a killing blow to the momentum they had established, moving toward the goal of being an elite pitching development organization. Instead, Hook slid seamlessly from his longtime roles as minor-league pitching coach and coordinator into the big-league gig, and the team only gained steam. Under Hook, the Brewers’ greatest specialty has been their lack of any single specialty. Both Hook and the team have their preferences, but they don’t try to bend every pitcher to them or acquire pitchers solely based on their fit with the organizational philosophy. They’ve had success with pitchers of many different styles and with many different repertoires, and they take pride in that. Wilson might lack elite stuff, but he has a lot of traits with which the team can work. For one thing, near the end of a largely lost season in 2022, Wilson did find something potentially useful. In his final six starts, he lowered his ERA by over half a run, thanks in part to a splitter that took the place of his more conventional changeup. He used it 90 times in those six outings, to good effect, including against right-handed batters, whom he was never comfortable attacking with his old change. 21870b71-407d-4315-890d-2b9203d9c962.mp4 That was just one aspect of a broader set of adjustments, though. To see the big picture, compare the above to this video of Wilson throwing his old changeup to another right-handed batter, from April. a89316e0-9303-4562-bc53-2c0de1290b84.mp4 In early summer, Wilson moved over to the first-base side of the rubber, changing his angle of attack horizontally. Late in the year, he also raised his arm angle slightly. It didn’t yield immediate, mind-blowing results. It did, though, help him find a better changeup. It also made him a candidate for some other fixes, and (perhaps most importantly) it signaled that he’s open-minded and willing to take instruction in order to find a new direction. From his slightly altered arm slot, Wilson’s arsenal can take a new shape, even beyond the transition from straight changeup to splitter. His curveball has always had an extreme amount of horizontal sweep, but gained depth when he raised his arm angle. If the Brewers elect to have him stick with that mechanical change, he can probably find more whiffs when working with those pitches and his four-seam fastball than he has had in his career to this point. That slot is also a bit more friendly to the cutter, a pitch Hook and the pitching development team loved to help pitchers hone, and with which Wilson has tinkered a couple previous times in his career. He’s a good candidate to be better with a firm cutter than with the traditional slider he’s used throughout his career. On the other hand, though, the team could try to get Wilson’s release point back down, and emphasize the natural horizontal movement he creates on so much of his stuff. Working primarily in relief, he probably doesn’t need the five or six pitches he has often used until now, and could radically simplify his approach. Against righties, his sinker and curveball work nicely off of one another in that horizontal plane. Against lefties, his four-seamer and splitter are an effective pairing. Either way, the club has proved they're good at making pitchers more mechanically efficient, so Wilson might also pick up some of the velocity that has been missing from his profile recently. This is the genius and the mysticism of the Brewers’ infrastructure, and it’s what makes journeymen like Wilson more compelling than they might be in another team’s camp. With a high risk of getting nothing at all from the player; two highly disparate methods for trying to get something out of him; and considerable upside, Wilson typifies the way the Crew could exceed a projection system’s estimate of their talent by several wins this year–even if the odds of that are quite slim. 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That’s… fair, I guess, but I’m surprised that you (and several others here) seem to regard Cousins and Strzelecki as belonging to the same category. Because that’s what this comes down to. A big-league team sifts their relievers into two subsets: 1. High-leverage guys who are mostly beyond considerations like options and service time; and 2. Fungible guys. Most relievers belong to this set, especially for the Brewers. I can’t really see a case for counting Cousins as a Category 1 guy, alongside Williams and Bush. So I suppose the argument folks are making is that Strzelecki really belongs in Category 2, right along with Cousins and the trio on which this piece centered. I can see that case, but I don’t agree with it. Strzelecki has shown command (good) and durability (vital) that far exceeds that of the rest here. He’s pitched roughly twice as much as Cousins since the pandemic. I do take the point that Cousins has greater upside than Payamps, Guerra, and Varland. But I think we’re in danger of overlooking his considerable downside. They can stash him, give him more time to reclaim his control, and lose nothing, or they can take the health and performance risks he poses and lose one of these three in the process, right at the start of a long season. I reiterate that it’s possible he earns that before camp breaks! But it seems very unlikely.

I hear you, but whether they should or shouldn’t matter, they *do*. Under the current rules, if you don’t figure options into roster decisions when you’re at relatively full health, you end up jettisoning viable pitchers, and then when someone gets hurt or overworked, you end up with a really ugly set of replacement choices.

He faced 156 batters last year, walked 19, plunked five. Plus the options thing means he has to actively *beat* the others. Again, I’m not saying he’s not talented or intriguing. But I don’t think he’s anywhere near a lock, unless he relentlessly throws strikes this spring.

He could be, but he’d have to pitch his way into it. Unlike the guys discussed, he has two options left, so they can keep him in AAA without losing anyone. I think he’d have to really show something that tells us his control problems are under control before they’d roster him over a healthy guy they’d have to waive.

It’s that. Assuming full health from here (always dicey!), I think Houser or Miley is sure to be in the pen. Probably Houser.

To close out our weeklong series highlighting the battles for roster spots and key roles on the Milwaukee Brewers during spring training, let’s turn our attention to the bullpen. There are probably two open spots available there, and three pitchers who will vie for the gigs. Image courtesy of © D. Ross Cameron-USA TODAY Sports We should start by listing the locks for the Brewers’ relief corps to open the season. Devin Williams, Matt Bush, Peter Strzelecki, and Hoby Milner have earned virtually guaranteed spots on the roster, thanks to their track records and recent performances. Milner’s left-handedness does half the work for him, in that regard. Less obvious (but nearly as certain) is Bryse Wilson, whom the team acquired via trade this winter and who will be the subject of one of our pieces next week on the club’s biggest X-factors for 2023. He has no minor-league options remaining, and the team targeted him because they think he can be effective. That makes five, and the sixth slot will be reserved for Adrian Houser, assuming that Wade Miley is healthy and solid enough to claim the fifth starting job come Opening Day. That leaves two spaces in the eight-man bullpen, and there are at least three serious candidates for the job: Javy Guerra, Joel Payamps, and Gus Varland. Let’s touch on each, and why they’re in the mix. Guerra, like Wilson, came to the Crew via trade this offseason, though the move was a bit less proactive. The Rays needed to clear space on their 40-man roster, and Guerra became a casualty of that crunch. The converted shortstop, now 27, just moved to the mound in 2019, and he has more capacity for improvement and reinvention than most pitchers his age. That said, the Brewers snagged him because they already see upside in what he does. In the minors with the Padres in 2021, he found more riding action on his four-seam fastball, and the Rays helped him lock in that adjustment in 2022. With his short stature and low arm slot, he creates the same formidable vertical approach angle (VAA) that Strzelecki, Freddy Peralta, and other Brewers do, and the team will try to help him attack the top of the zone with the four-seamer. dc1fe3b2-d484-492f-b41a-db69f16507f1.mp4 If he can do so, he’ll be a versatile weapon in relief, because his high-90s sinker and sharp slider make him tough on right-handed batters already. Being able to swap out the sinker for the four-seamer against lefties would open things up for him. The stakes are high for him in camp, though, because he’s out of minor-league options. If he isn’t on the active roster or the injured list, he’s unlikely to stay in the Brewers organization. The same is true of Payamps, who was a throw-in in the trade that netted Milwaukee William Contreras. A much more traditional reliever in terms of size, stuff, and career arc, Payamps still has some unique traits, too. He is, nominally, a four-pitch reliever, which is rare in the modern game. In truth, though, he mostly mixes four-seamers and changeups against lefties, with a smattering of sliders; and sinkers and sliders against righties, with a smattering of four-seamers. Payamps and Guerra both have messy deliveries, but Payamps has already cleaned his up quite a bit, relative to a few years ago, so it’s unlikely his mechanics will suddenly take a turn for the gorgeous. He did firm up and reshape his slider a bit toward the end of 2022, though. It’s more of a sweeper, if the new form he found in Oakland can be sustained, and that would make it a better partner to his sinker against righties. 2ece5e13-8852-4e70-a003-7ef79727e945.mp4 While both Payamps and Guerra are out of options, Varland technically has all of his remaining. Alas, that’s only because he had yet to be added to the Dodgers’ 40-man rotation, which is why the Brewers were able to pluck him in the Rule 5 Draft. The effect is the same as if he were out of options, from the team’s side: If he doesn’t make the roster, he departs the org. Varland was a starter until the early part of 2022, when he stalled out in that role in Double A and was moved to the bullpen. He proved the quality of his stuff down the stretch, with 46 strikeouts and just eight walks in a little over 30 innings after July 1. He still allowed too many hits and runs, though, which made not protecting him a fairly easy call for Los Angeles. Still, there’s upside here. Of the three candidates for the jobs, it’s Varland who will probably throw hardest this season. It’s also Varland who has the cleanest and most Breweresque mechanics, although the tempo of his delivery can get him into some trouble and compromise his deception. Beyond these three lie still more possibilities, including some delightfully weird ones. Could Alex Claudio really force his way back onto the Brewers, in 2023? Could Lucas Erceg, rather than Guerra, be the converted position player who carves out a role? Could Ethan Small show such upside in shorter bursts that the team eschews the chance to keep him stretched out as depth for the rotation? As fun as those are, though, they’re unlikely options. It’s much more realistic, and probably better, to hope for two of Guerra, Payamps, and Varland to step up and become reliable middle relievers. Each has so many intriguing questions surrounding them, though, that the spring really will determine who stays and who goes. Let the debate over which should be which begin. View full article

Last year, no team dominated the top of the strike zone with its fastballs better than the Brewers. With Josh Hader’s overpowering high heat gone, though, can they sustain that? Image courtesy of © Jeff Hanisch-USA TODAY Sports According to Statcast, the Brewers allowed a .243 expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) on fastballs in the upper third of the zone last season. That was tied with the Dodgers for the best mark in the league. However, the Dodgers threw such pitches almost 2,200 times, while the Brewers threw just 1,800 of them. Only the Rangers and Yankees attacked the top of the zone with heat less often. That was with Josh Hader in the mix for over half the season, too. Whereas high fastballs made up just 7.4 percent of all the Brewers’ pitches, Hader used them 14.1 percent of the time. As you would imagine, he was also one of the best pitchers in the league when he did locate there, with a .190 xwOBA allowed. Now that he’s gone, can the Crew come anywhere near having the same success at the top of the zone? The answer to that question depends heavily on Peter Strzelecki, as does so much of the team’s bullpen hope this year. The former undrafted free agent is such a fierce and awesome competitor, with such a compelling story, that it can be easy to miss the technical and new-age aspects of his brilliance. They’re there, though. Strzelecki can dominate at the top of the zone, thanks to the way his fastball movement interacts with his funky delivery. The “flat VAA” referenced in that tweet is a flat Vertical Approach Angle, one of the favored new toys for pitching gurus. It’s a measurement of how steep the trajectory of a pitch is when it enters the hitting zone. For fastballs (and especially high fastballs), a flatter VAA is almost always a good thing, because hitters have trouble seeing and matching that movement. Thus, they swing under the ball, whiffing or popping it up, or they freeze and let a called strike go by. A fastball’s VAA is mostly a function of its velocity, its spin axis, and the heights at which it leaves the pitcher’s hand and enters the strike zone. Strzelecki, who used high fastballs even more often (16 percent of all pitches) than Hader did in 2022, is just one of several remaining Brewers who have a flat VAA. Freddy Peralta is another. Anyone with that combination of a riding fastball coming out of a low release point will tend to have this characteristic. 3dc8ba10-0852-4db9-bec3-ca6a46012117.mp4 When it comes to high heat, though, the challenge is as much a mental as a physical or a geometric one. A pitcher has to attack the top of the zone with conviction, and they need a certain level of fearlessness. Like Hader and Peralta, Strzelecki has that. He’s unabashedly and unreservedly eager for the fight. “I always say, you can’t spell ‘compete’ without ‘Pete’,” he said in a podcast interview last year, and while almost no one in MLB could say that without it being rendered hokey through self-awareness, he pulls it off. It’s not some awesome insight, though in plenty of ways, Strzelecki is a thoughtful guy. It’s not a mantra that will miss bats for him; his pitches have to do that. With his mentality and the unique traits of his fastball, though, Strzelecki can deliver much of the swagger and the dominance at the top of the zone that Hader did. The Brewers should continue to win in that area, thanks in large part to their new setup man. View full article

The Milwaukee Brewers’ first base and DH mix is only getting more crowded. On Tuesday morning, the team signed slugger Luke Voit to a minor-league deal with an invitation to big-league spring training. Let’s discuss the ramifications. Image courtesy of © Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports Though he’s 32 years old and had a rough finish to 2022 with the non-competitive Washington Nationals, Luke Voit is a player very much in the Brewers’ favored mold for right-handed power bats. He produces high-value contact as often as almost any hitter in baseball, though when he fails to do so, it’s often because he’s struck out, and the swing-and-miss element of his game is always a threat to his overall production. The easiest way to think about Voit, if a somewhat counterintuitive one, is as Keston Hiura, without the glaring hole in his swing on pitches up in the zone. He’s a Goliath to Hiura’s David, physically, but their batted-ball profiles are very similar: lots of fly balls, impressive top-end exit velocities and home-run power, and a modicum of plate discipline, but low, low contact rates. Voit suffers from the modern paradigm, which measures players against replacement level. That mode of evaluation breaks down when we’re talking about low-cost guys who occupy the bottom end of the defensive spectrum but have offensive value. He was an above-average hitter in 2022, according to OPS+, despite his ugly strikeout rate. He’s a good complement to Rowdy Tellez, and certainly makes the path to a roster spot or a regular role more narrow for both Hiura and Mike Brosseau, about whom I wrote this morning. Let’s pause a moment to reaffirm that penultimate assertion, though. Because Voit is not a guy with big traditional platoon splits, it might be tempting to dismiss the idea that he actually works well as a partner to Tellez. Certainly, that became a storyline last season, when Hiura (who doesn’t sport normal splits either) and the rest of the team’s would-be lefty mashers failed to deliver the boom. I think, though, that simple left-right thinking on this is too simplistic, and is considered outmoded within the game itself. Here’s Tellez’s xwOBA (expected weighted on-base average; .330 is the rough average, and higher is better) by pitch location since the start of 2021. Here’s the same chart for Voit. As you can see, Voit is quite strong in a couple of zones (up and away from him, which is up and in on the left-handed Tellez; middle-in on him, which is middle-away on Tellez) where Tellez is vulnerable. The reverse is true for other zones, where Tellez makes his hay but Voit is weak. Like reading off platoon splits, this, too, is an oversimplification. It illustrates something real, though, which is that teams increasingly set their lineups according to pitch shapes, bat paths, and plate coverage. In that way, Voit and Tellez make life more difficult for opponents than their raw numbers might suggest. There’s no way not to read this as bad news for Hiura. It’ll also make more interesting (but more messy) the sorting out of playing time at DH, where Voit could find some at-bats but make a harder road to partial rest for William Contreras. All of that, of course, is contingent on him actually winning a job in camp. For now, this is just a nice way to increase the organizational depth and give the team more potential paths to production from their most offense-first positions. View full article

There are many possible permutations for the Milwaukee Brewers infield in 2023, but no matter which comes to fruition, it feels like there’s only room for one of the two right-handed infield bats who rode the bench for Milwaukee throughout 2022. Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports Because Mike Brosseau has a minor-league option remaining, allowing the Brewers to send him to Triple-A Nashville if they so choose, it’s just possible that Keston Hiuera has the inside track on the gig in question. As frustrating as he has been, Hiura is about as dangerous a hitter as a team might call upon, late in a close game, with the go-ahead run due up or on base. Hiura also retains just a bit of the sheen that laid over him for so long, thanks to his first-round draft pick status and dazzling debut season. Brosseau is about as much the antithesis of Hiura as is possible. One year before Hiura was the ninth player selected in the Draft, Brosseau was an undrafted college senior. Whereas Hiura’s one redeeming quality is the ability to hammer the ball when he manages to catch one fat, eliciting eye-popping exit velocities, Brosseau has a peculiar knack for hitting it solidly but without spectacle. Batted Balls 88-103 MPH, as Percentage of All Batted Balls, 2021-22 (min. 150 Batted Balls, n=469) Batter Rate Luis Arraez 61 Mike Brosseau 60.4 Andrew Benintendi 57.6 Anthony Rendon 57.6 Mookie Betts 56.5 He lifts the ball, he hits it soundly, and he has good athleticism, to boot. Brosseau is never going to be a hitter on par with Arraez or Betts, but he really does have an exceptional feel for making solid contact. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do it often enough. The biggest separator between him and all the other players populating the top of that leaderboard is that Brosseau strikes out 30 percent of the time, like clockwork. He’s fanned at least that much in each of the last three campaigns. Hiura, of course, makes him look great by comparison. Though his batted-ball numbers are much more impressive in a vacuum, he doesn’t get much more mileage from them than Brosseau gets from his contact, because he doesn’t manage to put bat to ball quite as often. His strikeout rate of 38.5 percent since the start of 2020 is the worst among players with at least 600 plate appearances during that span. When making these kinds of calls, though, it’s important to be strengths-focused. Hiura has menacing power. Brosseau balances good pop with defensive versatility and a slightly better batting eye. Either guy can help the team in 2023. Some of the question of which one makes it depends on things beyond either man’s control. For instance, if both Brice Turang and Abraham Toro have strong spring training showings, they’re more likely to make the Opening Day roster together. That would virtually eliminate the chances of both Brosseau and Hiura making the cut, but increase the likelihood that the Brewers would stash Brosseau in Nashville, awaiting an opportunity based on injury or ineptitude. Things would slant in Hiura’s direction, then, not only because Brosseau would be able to play regularly and step up if an opening emerged, but because his defense would be much less important if both Toro and Turang were there to patch in with Willy Adames, Brian Anderson, and Luis Urías. Brosseau’s path to forcing Hiura out of the way includes some struggles from at least one of Toro and Anderson, but it also requires Brosseau himself to continue to demonstrate an ability to evolve and adapt at the plate. When he came up in 2019, he had a slightly awkward, stiff-legged setup at the plate, and a complicated load phase before he actually got off his swing. Brosseau 19.mp4 Over the last two seasons, and even as 2022 progressed, he made some significant adjustments. His leg kick is quieter now. He’s more balanced and athletic. His hands start higher, and they move much more directly into the hitting zone, though a small hitch remains. Brosseau 22.mp4 That's just one example, of several. Brosseau has also incorporated a two-strike approach that involves just a toe tap, rather than a leg kick, and he's finding better ways to move his desired contact point deeper or further out in front of home plate, according to the situation. That very hunger to improve is the trait that got Brosseau this far, and the Brewers prized it from the moment they targeted him in trade. The question now is whether he can continue to adjust so quickly even as he nears age 30, and the answer should be evident some time during camp. The way Brosseau moves, attacks the ball, and manages the strike zone will be keys to watch during Cactus League games. There remains a decent chance, given the options available, that either Brosseau or Hiura will be traded sometime near Opening Day. Matt Arnold will, sooner or later, need the spot on both the 26-man and the 40-man rosters that one of the two currently occupies. That means that the stakes are high for Brosseau, but even higher for Hiura, who needs to show that he can lay off the pitch up and in and force pitchers to throw him a strike he can wallop. With Rowdy Tellez and Urías playing for Team México; Adames for Team Dominican Republic; and Toro for Team Canada in the World Baseball Classic, there will be ample game reps available to infielders early in camp. Brosseau and Hiura are the ones who will need to make hay while the early March sun is shining. View full article

No way.. I think if they'd come through with a fully healthy Ashby, in addition to the six discussed above, a trade around Opening Day would be on the table, but as things actually stand? No way. I hope we even get a chance to see how committed they are to Ashby as a starter. I suspect we won't. His injury, and the ramp-up involved when dealing with a shoulder injury, seem to me to ensure that he'll join the bullpen, even when he does get healthy. As for the Lauer thing, he's going to be treated as a locked-in rotation piece unless he pitches his way out of that role. I like the boldness but I think you're way off in estimating both Ashby's viability as a starter for 2023 and the team's willingness to push Lauer aside.

This week at Brewer Fanatic, we’re going to preview some of the key battles for positions and roster spots that will unfold during spring training. Today’s subject is the fifth rotation spot, a battle that just gained greater clarity in the worst possible way. Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-USA TODAY Sports The Milwaukee Brewers have five pretty firmly established starting pitchers slated for their five rotation spots in 2023. Co-aces Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff enter camp hoping to deliver something close to 400 combined innings. In the middle of the rotation, right-hander Freddy Peralta and left-hander Eric Lauer offer less certainty, but they have significant upside, and their success over the last two seasons has locked them into their roles. The return of Wade Miley, who signed a one-year deal back in early January, only left a small opening for anyone else to squeeze into the rotation plans. For the most part, those plans imploded earlier this month, when the team and Aaron Ashby discovered that Ashby would be unable to ramp up on a normal schedule in camp, and then that he would likely need to miss at least two months of action. Ashby is the prospect who was closest to finding his footing as a starter in 2022. He’s the one the team has signed to a long-term deal. To forcefully push Miley (with his veteran presence and his guaranteed salary) aside, it almost had to be Ashby who showed up and blew the doors off in camp. That possibility is now gone. That doesn’t quite end the conversation, though. Adrian Houser is not only on a guaranteed contract for 2023, but is technically due more morey this season than is Miley (although if you count the buyout on Miley’s mutual option for 2024 or assume he meets any of the incentives included in his deal, that’s no longer true). Houser, 30, had such a rough 2022 that it’s easy to dismiss him as a serious candidate for a rotation spot, but he’s still a credible big-leaguer, and there might be another level for him to reach if the opportunity arises. The questions facing the two are very different. For Miley, it’s mostly about whether or not he can stay healthy. When he does so, he’s a solid, above-average big-league starter. Since the start of 2018, he has a 3.50 ERA, and he’s been worth 8.5 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in his two and a half healthy seasons during that span. Alas, in 2020 and 2022, he pitched just 51 total innings, and whatever effectiveness he showed in those years was overshadowed by his lack of availability. The Brewers know Miley. He was a key contributor to that wonderful 2018 team. None of that will help, though, if he’s on the injured list. For Houser, there are also health questions, but the much larger ones are about how he can consistently get left-handed batters out. He’s pitched at least 100 innings in three of the last four campaigns, and was well on pace to burst past that figure in 2020, though that number of frames was unavailable due to the pandemic. He’s been as up and down as any Brewer, though, with ERAs in those four years of 3.72, 5.30, 3.22, and 4.73, respectively. For his career, righties have only managed a .609 OPS, but lefties have blasted him to the tune of an .832 OPS. That screams reliever, but there are reasons to think Houser could stabilize as a starter, too. His sinker is a good pitch; he just needs to stop throwing it against lefties. His changeup is a good pitch; he just needs to throw it more often. The change works fine off of his four-seamer, which could take the place of that sinker against lefties. He ought to ditch his curve, but throw his slider more against lefties, too. These sound like easy fixes. If they were, Houser already would have made them. He’s only really comfortable attacking one side of the plate (in on righties, away from lefties) with the sinker, and the other (in on lefties, away from righties) with the four-seamer. That does add some complexity to the way he needs to sequence and disguise his pitches, but he has the movement profile and the command to his preferred quadrants to do it. If he does, he could miss more bats, quiet lefties a bit, and become a better starter than Miley is likely to be at this stage of his career. That, then, becomes the major question as Cactus League play draws near. It’s not as sexy as the questions we might have been asking about Ashby, but it’s more compelling than the simple one of, “Will Miley stay healthy?” If Houser can demonstrate comfort with an adjusted pitch mix, or a newfound capacity to execute to other parts of the strike zone with the stuff he has, then he can charge past Miley and add the kind of upside that the Brewers rotation boasted in 2021, when they cruised to the division title. View full article

I think it's only even mentioned because the Brewers have such a funny history when it comes to pitching. The first 30 years of the franchise were so chock-full of these guys who just pitched to contact and chewed up innings. Wegman, and Caldwell, and Haas, and Slaton... But yeah, it's weird. Higuera and Sheets are way, way ahead for me. To believe Burnes is the best-ever Brewers SP requires you to also acclaim Jacob deGrom as the greatest pitcher of our generation, I feel, which is nuts. Pitching is SO MUCH about availability that you can't just award a superlative on the basis of per-inning or per-batter excellence.

The Milwaukee Brewers like to maintain leverage and keep their options open, and by adding one potential second-half bullpen contributor now via free agency, they've decreased (if only slightly) the chances that they'll have to trade from their farm depth to acquire another at midseason. Justin Wilson is a good fit, if he can get healthy and on track. Image courtesy of © Kareem Elgazzar via Imagn Content Services, LLC If one player can be considered the model of the modern journeyman southpaw, it might be Justin Wilson. He's pitched for six teams in his 11 seasons, and the volatility of his performance has matched that of his employment. When right, he's dominant, with a high=spin, mid-90s fastball, a sharp cutter that misses barrels, and a slider that misses bats altogether. When off, he's helpless, unable to throw strikes consistently or get enough whiffs to keep the walks from coming back to haunt him. Now, he faces a new vector of challenge in finding consistent success. He'd dealt with minor shoulder inflammation and more serious hamstring trouble in 2021, but last April, he tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow while pitching for the Reds, and though he tried other options, he went under the knife in early June. Relievers can sometimes return as little as 12 months after Tommy John surgery, but given that Wilson will turn 36 this August and has never been a paragon of command and control, mid- to late July is the earliest anyone should expect to see him on the mound for the Brewers. Matt Arnold is already thinking along those same lines. "Those are the kinds of guys you're looking for at the trade deadline, so we figured we'd get in front of it and bring a guy in now and have him be part of our team the whole way," Arnold said to reporters, including MLB.com's Adam McCalvy. What Arnold didn't say, but which is clearly an important point, is that the preference there is partially about being able to get Wilson for mere cash, as opposed to having to trade someone the team might like quite a bit to land an impact reliever in July. What he even more pointedly didn't say, though, is that there's a reason why teams are always trying to acquire relievers so fervently at the deadline, but not so much in December. It's the same volatility that defines Wilson's career. You pay for the hot reliever at the deadline, because it's very hard to tell who's going to be hot down the stretch of the coming season during the winter. By adding Wilson now, then, the Brewers are taking on some risk, unless the deal has no impact whatsoever on their budget for 2023. Signing Wilson saves you a possible prospect but could cost you an opportunity to acquire someone in whom you'd have more confidence in late July. It's a bit like the reverse of the Trevor Rosenthal deal from last summer, and then again, it's a bit like a repeat of it. In the short term, though, the deal makes easy sense. The team moved Jason Alexander to the 60-day injured list to make room for Wilson, and when next they need to open up a roster spot, they can move Wilson there, too. They also have a club option for 2024, which is common on contracts like this one. For the protection and rehab aid that comes with being part of a big-league organization, a player allows the team to capture some of the upside of a return to healthy form. Performance-wise, the thing to watch with Wilson will be his slider. When he has command of it and is able to set it up well with his other offerings, he really is solid. When that pitch goes missing, everything gets messy. That last clause still represents one possible outcome for the Brewers' 2023 bullpen, but with Wilson as a plausible complement to Hoby Milner late in the year, they did get just a little bit deeper on Saturday. View full article

I love the exercise you propose at the bottom of the piece. And the way these projections work makes for an easy call for me. I want the 20th-percentile outcomes from the aces, the 80th percentile from Lauer and Peralta, and the 50th from Miley. But that definitely bakes in my bias in favor of a strong but flat rotation. Anyway: great insights.

Mm. I’m dubious of that. Teams come out of these squabbles looking bad, but fans hardly ever give meaningful, and certainly not tangible, credit to the player. It’s just vague sympathy flowing their way. Unhelpful. The cases in which guys actively WANT to go to a hearing are nearly always about pressing frontiers within the process, setting records and precedents. I don’t think Burnes WANTED to go to one here. Didn’t end up feeling that there was an alternative.