How Many Starters Will The Brewers Need?

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The Brewers opened the 2024 season with a new-look starting rotation and some of their effort to repeat as NL Central champions likely depends on that group being able to keep pace with their counterparts from a year ago. Even 2023’s much more established group of starting pitchers, however, was subject to heavy change.

Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, Eric Lauer, Freddy Peralta and Wade Miley opened the season as the Brewers’ five starting pitchers a year ago, but that alignment lasted just two trips through the rotation: Brandon Woodruff was held out with shoulder inflammation and Janson Junk and Colin Rea started the 12th and 13th games of that season, respectively. All told the Brewers used ten different pitchers to start a game last season and pitchers who did not open the season in the rotation combined to start 57 of the Brewers’ 162 regular season games. 

The Brewers were not alone in this phenomenon. In fact, it could not have been more typical: The 2023 Brewers’ 105 starts from members of their Opening Day rotation was the median among MLB teams. More than half of the teams got between 93 and 118 starts (or between 57 and 73% of all games) from their first five starters, and there were only a few major outliers from that group:

  • The Blue Jays got 147 starts (almost 91%) from Alek Manoah, Kevin Gausman, Chris Bassitt, Jose Berrios and Yusei Kikuchi.
  • The Orioles got 130 starts (over 80%) from Kyle Gibson, Dean Kremer, Cole Irvin, Kyle Bradish and Grayson Rodriguez.
  • On the other end of the spectrum, three members of the Rays’ Opening Day rotation combined to make just 14 starts and almost 60% of their starts came from pitchers who didn’t open the season in their rotation. Cleveland and Cincinnati were also at 40%.

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It’s not surprising that the teams with the most stable starting rotations both made the postseason in 2023: Being able to keep their best starters healthy and effective through a long season is a major boost to a team’s overall talent level. The Brewers had one of their best seasons in franchise history in 2011, for example, when they only used six starting pitchers all year. It’s virtually impossible, however, to build a rotation where “just stay healthy” can be a viable plan. Some of the members of an Opening Day rotation that had the shortest seasons had also been reliable contributors in the past. Former Cy Young Award winner Robbie Ray, for example, had pitched full, healthy seasons in each of his last two years before getting injured just four innings into his 2023 season and missing the rest of the year.

If teams can’t plan for or rely upon health, then their next best option is to have depth. Having (or finding) extra options to pitch saved the Brewers’ season in 2023: Colin Rea, Adrian Houser and Julio Teheran combined to make 54 of the 57 starts the Brewers needed from non-members of the Opening Day rotation, and their collective 4.36 earned run average was almost identical to league average. The Brewers went 31-23 in the games those three pitchers started, meaning they actually won a higher percentage of the games started by their fill ins (57.4%) than members of their Opening Day rotation (57.1%).

With Corbin Burnes, Adrian Houser, Julio Teheran and Eric Lauer all no longer in the organization and Brandon Woodruff not expected to pitch this season, however, the Brewers are virtually starting over in their search for starting pitching depth in 2024. The first piece to be added will almost certainly be Wade Miley. He was delayed building up for the season as he dealt with a shoulder issue but is expected to be ready soon and could pitch for the Brewers as soon as this week. Beyond Miley the next wave is more of a question mark: Aaron Ashby is still working to get all the way back from last season’s shoulder surgery, and top prospect Robert Gasser was shut down near the end of spring training with a bone spur in his elbow. Janson Junk is still in the organization after rumors that he was looking to go to Japan over the offseason and given Ashby and Gasser’s situations it’s possible he might be next in line behind Miley.

In the long term, however, it’s possible that most or all of these pitchers will be needed in the majors at some point this season and could be joined by more. For nearly every MLB team the performance of pitchers who didn’t start the season in the rotation will go a long way to decide that club’s outcome.