Milwaukee Brewers: 3 starting pitcher free agent targets

Marcus Stroman

If you were to ask me who my personal favorite free agent is this offseason, this guy would be the answer. Stroman packs all the velocity, emotion, and swagger you could want into his 5’7″ 180-pound frame. He’s also a workhorse in disguise. In 140 career starts, he’s thrown 839 innings for an average start length of 5.99 innings. Having a guy that can consistently get through the sixth inning like Stroman would be huge for the Brewers to give the bullpen some rest once in a while.

When Stroman broke into the major leagues, he was mainly a four-seam fastball pitcher with a sinker, curveball, and cutter. He quickly changed his sinker to his main pitch to keep the ball in the park and induce more ground balls and substituted the slider for the curveball. That slider is one of the best in the league, with an opponent average of just .168  and slugging of only .239 against it in 2019.

After being in the bottom 10 percent of the league in hard-hit rate from 2016 to 2018, he remedied that in 2019 and was in the 58th percentile. After opting out of the 2020 season in which he had a one-year deal with the Mets, he hits the free agent market with some uncertainty. After not pitching the whole season, will he be on his game in 2021? That’s the question that teams will have to ask themselves.

Unlike the other two guys, he has had a bad season of pitching with a sufficient sample size. In 2018, his ERA was 5.54 in 19 starts. He walked more and allowed more hits, giving him a very high WHIP of 1.476. However, he still managed to keep the ball in the yard, which kept his FIP fairly low at 3.91. In that season, he also had multiple injuries that kept him out, and that could be another red flag for teams.

If the Mets gave him $12 million after trading for him in 2019, his 2021 salary should be less than that. After making a big trade for a star, a team is basically obligated to try and re-sign them because they put in a lot of resources to acquire that player, so that drives the players’ price up.

After not playing in 2020, hopefully, that number dips under $10 million, and there’s some money from Ryan Braun’s contract coming off the books to go get him. Just imagine having fans in the stands again and Miller Park (it’s still Miller Park until next season starts just go with it) exploding as Stroman hops off the mound with a big yell after a huge strikeout to get himself out of a seventh-inning jam.

What do you think of these three possibilities? Do you think they’re unrealistic for the Milwaukee Brewers’ budget? Leave your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter @DairylandXpress.