
Photo Via Aaron Civale - Instagram
Aaron Civale
In the absence of a late major addition, the Brewers’ chances of contending in 2025 would seem to depend on them getting more from the talent they already have.
While the projection models were generally low on the Brewers as a whole entering the 2024 season, they did have some significant success identifying some players who would take a nice step forward individually. Of the three improved projections we highlighted at this time last year Brice Turang made major strides and Robert Gasser was well on his way to doing so as well before injury abbreviated his debut season.
As projections come out for the 2025 season, however, it’s harder to spot where the growth may happen. While the Brewers are certainly hoping for major contributions from Brandon Woodruff (injury return) and recently acquired Nestor Cortes, there aren’t as many players who appeared for the Brewers in 2024 and are projected to be more productive in 2025.
With that said, here are a few candidates projected to make larger contributions to the Brewers this season than they have in the recent past:
Aaron Ashby
It’s been a long and often difficult path to consistent MLB opportunities for Ashby, a one-time top prospect who signed a long term extension during the 2022 season but then missed all of 2023 following shoulder surgery. He pitched in just two major league games over a span of 690 days from the end of the 2022 season through to the day where he rejoined the Brewers as a reliever in August of 2024, but he allowed earned runs in just two of his 12 outings down the stretch and struck out almost 37% of the batters he faced; the league average is 22.6%.
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There are at least two significant reasons to believe Ashby can make a big step forward in 2025. The first is that his pitch tracking data from 2024 suggests he was finally fully healthy. Ashby threw his average sinking fastball at 96.2 miles per hour in 2024, which is actually up a little from 95.7 pre-surgery. Pitchers often experience a velocity increase while working in relief, but the fact that Ashby can “air it out” again suggests he’s already cleared one hurdle on the way to a possible return to form. The second reason to suspect Ashby will contribute more is the fact that the Brewers are likely to need him to pitch more. While Ashby doesn’t currently slot into Roster Resource’s projected Brewers rotation, the current group of five will almost certainly experience some attrition and Ashby might be the top candidate to fill someone’s spot.
Aaron Civale
While many were skeptical when Civale was one of the Brewers’ biggest acquisitions at the 2024 trade deadline, he held up his end of the bargain in the season’s final months. Civale ended up making 14 starts as a Brewer with a 3.53 ERA and working into the sixth inning in an average start, a major boon for a starting rotation that had already cycled through a huge number of options before his arrival.
It’s highly unusual for the Tampa Bay Rays to miss an opportunity to get the most out of a player but it’s hard to ignore the fact that Civale declined almost immediately after joining them in 2023 (he had a 2.34 ERA before being traded there and a 5.36 mark after) and improved almost immediately after moving from the Rays to the Brewers in 2024 (5.07 ERA before, 3.53 after). If nothing else, Civale has a 5.17 career ERA while pitching for the Rays and a 3.73 ERA for anyone else, so a full season of not being on the Rays could bring his value up a notch or two.
Craig Yoho
Entering the 2024 season Craig Yoho was 24 years old and had never thrown a professional pitch outside of the rookie level complex league. A converted position player who lost a college season to COVID-19 and two more to injury, Yoho was not on the traditional path to MLB stardom when the Brewers signed him for just $10,000 coming out of the 2023 draft. Everyone involved appears to be on pace to see a major return on that investment.
Yoho rode a self-taught, devastating changeup to a 2.18 ERA and 42% strikeout rate across three levels in the minors in 2024, finishing the season with a successful run at the AAA level. It’s an extremely rare occurrence for a guy to go from rookie ball to the majors in a year, but Roster Resource’s projection models have him on track to throw 50 innings at the game’s highest level this season. With the Brewers’ tendency to mix and match and give lots of relievers a look, there’s a real possibility Yoho gets a chance in the majors soon and he has the stuff to stay there.
Rhys Hoskins
He’s certainly not a “breakout candidate” by any of the traditional definitions of that phrase, but Hoskins is a candidate to bring more to the table in 2025 just by getting closer to the pre-injury form that made him a star in Philadelphia. Hoskins appeared in 131 games for the Brewers in 2024 after missing the entire 2023 season due to a knee injury (and to a point he defied the odds by even doing that) but his offensive numbers were well below his career marks and FanGraphs estimated his value at roughly replacement level.
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Both Hoskins and the Brewers are almost certainly hoping he’ll be worth more than the roughly 1.0 Wins Above Replacement most of the projection models seem to have penciled in for him, but even that would be a significant uptick from his performance in 2024. The relatively pedestrian .222 batting average, .314 on-base and .431 slugging in Hoskins’ ZiPS projection would be both 82 on-base plus slugging points down from his career numbers and 23 points up from his performance in 2024. There’s at least two reasons to believe Hoskins will be more valuable than that: First, he should be closer to a normal offseason rhythm with the lost 2023 season now two years behind him and second, as we noted, a positionwide downturn at first base makes any contribution at that position more valuable than it would have been in the past.