Milwaukee Brewers Spring Training Position Battles: The Fifth Starter

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.