Milwaukee Brewers: Bullpen Needs More Depth Before Opening Day

It’s been an active offseason for the Milwaukee Brewers, however, one area that still needs to be addressed before Opening Day is in the bullpen.

There’s a few words that come to mind when describing the Milwaukee Brewers’ offseason up to this point: interesting, active, and unexpected, are just a few. This was a team coming off their second straight postseason appearance – something that has only happened one other time in the team’s history might I remind you – but GM David Stearns is in the midst of conducting a mini-rebuild on the fly.

The result of all of this has been a lot of roster turnover. However, for as much change as there has been, one area of this team that could use some additional help is in the bullpen.

I believe the old saying goes, “you can never have too many arms,” and that rings especially true for Craig Counsell and the Milwaukee Brewers. As we all know, Counsell doesn’t like to send his starting pitchers through the batting lineup a third time, which means the bullpen is expected to cover a lot of innings.

In 2018, the Brewers’ bullpen pitched 614 innings that season, the 5th most in baseball and then in 2019, they saw that number increase to 670.2. Which once again was the 5th most. There’s no reason to expect that this upcoming season will be any different, especially with a starting rotation that has some question marks as well.

In taking a look at Milwaukee’s current bullpen, of course, we all know how dominant Josh Hader is and hopefully Corey Knebel can return to form, however, he won’t be back for the start of the season. Meanwhile, Brent Suter finished 2019 strong and will hopefully build upon that, while Alex Claudio eats up a lot of innings.

However, it takes more than four pitchers to have an effective bullpen and there are also quite a few unknowns as well.

Bobby Wahl is returning from an ACL injury, we hope that Freddy Peralta and Corbin Burnes bounce-back, but that remains to be seen. Then we have the likes of Deolis Guerra, Ray Black, Jacob Faria, Taylor Williams, and a few other candidates that we don’t really know what we will get from them outing to outing.

Like the rest of this roster there is potential, in fact, Fangraphs ZiPS projections has the group with a cumulative WAR of 6.3. However on the flip side, there are some low floors as well.

Although at this point many of the top relievers have already signed elsewhere, a few names still available include – Sam Dyson, Brandon Kintzler, Collin McHugh, Jeremy Jeffress, and Robbie Erlin. It’s also worth pointing out that the Brewers were linked to Pedro Strop, but a recent report suggests that he will likely be either a Marlin or a Ranger in 2020.

The good news is that the Milwaukee Brewers still have time and as Stearns always does, he will continue adding and subtracting from this roster through Spring Training and into the regular season. Let’s just hope that there’s an addition or two made to the bullpen.