Every year, no team laughs harder at the consensus preseason projections than the Milwaukee Brewers. In 2023, they won their division despite only a third of their lineup recording an OPS+ over 100 during the season, and had the best bullpen ERA in the NL even though they traded their franchise closer the year prior. Their ace, Corbin Burnes, was dealt to Baltimore that offseason…but they won the division again. This past offseason, they lost their most productive hitter in Willy Adames to free agency and traded Devin Williams, the guy who was supposed to fill the shoes of the franchise closer that was traded a couple years before, for a return that did not include an external replacement.
Judging by track record, then, it’s no wonder they’ve got the best record in MLB in 2025. They are one of just six teams in MLB to be averaging five runs scored per game or higher. They are one of just five MLB teams to be averaging less than four runs against per game. By run value, they are MLB’s best baserunning team. By fielding run value, they have the NL’s third-best defense. They just don’t do anything wrong year after year, which is even more impressive considering they currently have a bottom-10 payroll. The Brewers have rightfully earned a reputation for making players better across all levels of the organization, as they currently have five of the top-50 prospects in the game according to Baseball America. Up and down their big-league roster, there are guys playing a huge role in their success that were castaways a season ago, and in some cases, as recently as early this year. Who are they? And how are they exceeding expectations with Milwaukee?
The former third overall pick had his tenure with the White Sox come to an unceremonious end earlier this year, as he limped to a 47 OPS+ in his first 48 games. He was dealt to the Brewers after they took Aaron Civale up on his trade request by sending him to the south side of Chicago, and immediately optioned to AAA. An early July injury to Rhys Hoskins necessitated his return to the big leagues, and since joining Milwaukee, he has a 219 OPS+ in 22 games, and already has more home runs (7) than he did in more than double the amount of games with Chicago (5). To make a long story short, Vaughn has completely overhauled both his swing decisions and his swing mechanics. He was never a disciplined hitter in the best of times, with a career walk rate hovering just over 6% and a chase rate consistently in the low-30s, but he came into American Family Field showing more patience:
For reference, his last game with the White Sox was May 21, and his first game with the Brewers was July 7. His walk rate with his new club is way up to 11.8%, and he’s already earned three more free passes than he did with his former team this year. Vaughn is also doing plenty more damage at the plate. Even as his production bottomed out over the past couple years, he maintained an intriguing combination of above-average barrel rate, contact ability, and pulled fly balls. It’s still impressive how much work he did with his swing in such a short time in the minors.
In a matter of weeks, he made his swing both faster and shorter, started making more flush contact with heightened bat speed, and swinging up on the ball. His slugging percentage has jumped accordingly, by nearly 400 points since the trade. Rhys Hoskins, set to miss a few more weeks with his thumb injury, was having a decent season before Vaughn burst onto the scene, but there’s simply no way Vaughn can be taken out of the lineup if he keeps this up.
Collins, a ninth-rounder in the 2019 draft by the Rockies and a minor-league Rule 5 pick by the Brewers three years ago, has not only become the team’s everyday left fielder with Christian Yelich becoming a full-time DH, but inserted himself into rookie of the year talks as well. Collins’ 135 OPS+ on the season leads the team, and his offensive approach is simple: do not chase anything. Among the 202 players with at least 300 plate appearances this season, Collins’ 19.3% chase rate places 10th, and his 12.9% walk rate places 22nd. He’s particularly razor-sharp against fastballs, with a microscopic 15.1% chase rate against four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters this season. His ball-in-play skill is neither here nor there at the moment, with slightly above-average bat speed and lagging exit velocities and barrel rates, but he has shown a propensity to pull the ball in the air (21.8% air pull, +5.1% from league average).
Besides getting on base at a near-.400 clip, Collins also provides excellent outfield defense. He was merely given a 40-grade field tool by Fangraphs’ most recent prospect report, but his fielding run value of 5 leads all National-Leaguers with at least 200 innings at the position. Statcast allows us to slice outfield defense by direction, and in doing so, we can see that Collins’ 9 outs above average on plays in which he had to come in towards the ball are third among all qualified outfielders. If opponents hit anything to shallow left field, Collins has a good a chance of making those types of difficult plays as anyone. He possesses quite the unorthodox blend of a knack for getting on base and making sure the other team doesn’t. Of all the outfielders in baseball with a 12% walk rate or better (min. 300 PA), a pretty small group as it is, only Fernando Tatis Jr. has been better defensively as per Statcast. This is the type of fundamental strength on both sides of the ball that the Brewers are hoping will get them over the hump in October.
Isaac Collins outs above average by direction, 2025 (Statcast)
Another former first-round pick in 2019, Priester has become a fixture in the Brewers’ rotation just a year after failing to make the Pirates’ roster out of spring training. He was traded to the Red Sox at the 2024 deadline for Nick Yorke in a classic swap of post-hype, change-of-scenery-candidate prospects. In hindsight, it’s pretty surprising that it didn’t work out for Priester in Boston because some of their organizational pitching philosophies noticeably overlap with Milwaukee’s: both teams have a reputation for fixing bad fastball shapes by making use of cutters and sinkers, especially for guys like Priester who tend to naturally cut the ball. In 2023 with the Pirates, Priester’s fastball sat around 93 MPH with only ~13″ ride and ~2″ arm-side. The outlier horizontal movement profile would’ve been easier to leverage, but that velocity and carry simply do not play with other four-seamers at this level. His 2024 arsenal data suggests the Red Sox were beginning to work with the idea of a cutter for him, but he was traded in an early-season roster crunch this past April. Then, he pitched so well for Milwaukee that they decided to bump Aaron Civale from the rotation when they called up Jacob Misiorowski in June. Reminder: that resulted in him getting traded for Andrew Vaughn. Talk about striking gold.
You can probably guess where this is going. With the Brewers, Priester got rid of his four-seamer for good, adding a cutter in its place. He’s still primarily a sinker-slider guy like he had been the past couple years, but the cutter (92 MPH, ~11″ carry, ~1″ glove-side) is a viable secondary, and he has backed off his curveball in light of this addition as well. Another sneaky adjustment was adding 3 more inches of drop on his slider compared to last year, which creates ample separation between the movement patterns of the cutter and slider to keep hitters guessing. What’s the bottom line here? A 3.15 ERA in 21 appearances, 16 of them starts. He is overperforming his FIP (4.01) and xFIP (3.76) to a degree, but has become one of the most consistent groundball pitchers in the game with this new polished arsenal. His 57.4% ground-ball rate is in the 96th percentile, which is something he has always excelled at in his big-league career, but now his strikeout and swing-and-miss rates are slightly below-average as opposed to bottom of the barrel. He has been durable as well, averaging over 5.1 innings per appearance, which includes those bulk relief outings. It probably isn’t happening the way he drew it up, but he’s pitching like a first-round pick all the same.
Quinn Priester Pitch Plot, 2025 (Pitcher List)
Sometimes, part of player development is working on the fly with a different game plan when an injury permanently alters your physical abilities. Brandon Woodruff had major shoulder surgery at the end of 2023 after a rock-solid stretch of seasons in Milwaukee’s rotation, missed all of 2024, and didn’t come back until the beginning of July this year. He’s a big dude at 6’4″ and 242 lbs and still only 32 years old, but his fastball velocity is down over 2.5 MPH since his return. How, then, does he have a 2.22 ERA and a strikeout rate over 35% in his first five post-surgery outings?
They can’t keep getting away with this. Woodruff, like Priester, cut his four-seamer more than most in his prime. He’s leaning into that even more now, with only 3.6″ of arm-side movement on the pitch and the fully-restored 18″ carry that he had before to offset the velocity drop. He’s also using it a hair over 30% of the time in near-perfect tandem with his sinker when he threw it closer to 40% of the time before. It had been his primary pitch to righties his whole career, but that title now belongs to his sinker, while he remains a fastball-changeup-sinker guy to lefties. He also dropped his slider and added – you guessed it – a cutter, which sits ~90 MPH with ~13″ carry and 3″ glove-side. This cutter is his best offering by PLV, and has thrown quite the wrinkle into his usage patterns vs righties: Nearly 90% of the time in 2025, right-handed hitters have been thrown some type of fastball from Woodruff (sinker 42%, four-seamer 28%, cutter 17%).
Woodruff had always been a power pitcher, so whenever opponents managed to make contact, they didn’t hit it on the ground much. That has gone to an extreme this year, with the added fastball diversity and subtracted breaking ball use from his arsenal leading to a hilarious 21% popup rate. Counterintuitive to that, he’s working down in the zone more with his four-seamer and using 4 pitches between 14% and 32% of the time, getting a ton of swing-and-miss and weak contact. For a pitcher whose velocity was lowered this much by surgery, the transformation and return to the mound have been about as graceful as possible. Imagine a playoff rotation featuring Peralta, Misiorowski, Priester, and now a fully refurbished Woodruff.
Brandon Woodruff PLV arsenal distribution, 2025 (Pitcher List)
I don’t think it gets talked about enough how the Brewers traded Josh Hader and Devin Williams, two closers at the peak of their powers, two years apart, and still boast an elite back end of the bullpen. They’re like a high-leverage reliever farm. It starts with Megill, who hopefully doesn’t have to worry about being expendable in the eyes of his front office like his predecessors were. The 6’8″ fire-balling closer was once on an unspectacular journey from the Cubs’ bullpen to the Twins’ bullpen not that long ago, and landed in Milwaukee in 2023. With a 6.03 ERA in 68.2 career innings to that point, he had an upper-90s fastball and knew how to throw strikes, but got knocked around and couldn’t earn consistent playing time as a result.
A couple things happened once he got to the Brewers. He began by dialing up his already-wicked 98 MPH fastball to sit 99, added an inch and a half of carry to it, and raised his already-high arm angle from 51° to 54°. At his height, a 99-MPH fastball with 18″ carry coming from that slot is a brutal look for opposing hitters. He also refined the location of that fastball, filling up the middle of the zone less and doing a better job of elevating away to both sides of the plate. Coming into Milwaukee, he had a knuckle curve and a slider to back up the heater. He did away with the slider and added over 2 MPH to the knuckle curve, and then added 2 more MPH going into 2024. It now sits ~87 MPH with -7″ iVB and clocks in at 145 according to Fangraphs Stuff+. Going into this year, his first full season atop the pecking order of Milwaukee’s bullpen, he added even more carry to the fastball. It now has a little over 19″ of ride, making it one of the 15 most gravity-defying heaters in the sport.
Thanks to this going above and beyond to boast some of the best stuff that any bullpen has to offer, Megill has a 2.31 ERA and 26 saves, the latter placing second in the NL behind only Robert Suarez of the Padres. What impresses me the most about him is that he didn’t just accept his place as an above-average reliever once he achieved career-bests with the Brewers in 2023. He took leaps and bounds beyond even that, and has been rewarded with the task of getting the most important outs in the ballgame as a result.
Trevor Megill Pitch Quality, 2025 (Pitcher List)
Bullpen Quick Hits
The most dramatic reclamation project of this group has to be side-armer Grant Anderson, who had a career 6.35 ERA in 62.1 relief innings for Texas in 2023-24 and is the way down to a 3.23 in 55.1 innings for Milwaukee this year. His primary pitch last year was a rising slider that got knocked around, so he developed a sweeper instead that has ~4″ more drop and ~7″ more glove-side action. The pitch has a 36.4% swing-and-miss and a .164 opponent AVG so far. He also added 1 MPH (92 to 93) and 2″ of carry (10″ to 12″ iVB) to his running fastball, which has even more impressive results (44.7% miss, .105 AVG). He was an above-average arm last year per Fangraphs’ pitch models despite the horrendous results and quality of contact, and the upside has come to fruition this year.
There’s also Nick Mears, who has a 2.74 ERA through 48 appearances so far. I loved this move for Milwaukee when they got him from the Rockies at last year’s deadline – his mid-90s rising fastball would play way better closer to sea level, and his mid-5s ERA was severely underperforming his quality of contact metrics and his high-20s strikeout rate. He continued to struggle upon arrival, but has finally found it this year, striking out fewer batters (22.6% K) but with a deadly combo of command (56% zone, 5.5% BB) and a 95th-percentile chase rate. He dropped his high arm slot from 61° to 56° to generate more run on the fastball, but for the most part, it was simple regression to the mean and addition by subtraction, as he got rid of his curveball which posted a -7 run value despite only ~17% usage last year.
I’d be remiss not to conclude with Abner Uribe, who has been around for a few years now but returned to form in a big way in 2025. He burst onto the scene in 2023 with a 99-MPH sinker and somehow managed a 1.76 ERA despite being in the zone less than 45% of the time and getting virtually no chase, living and dying by the ground ball and in-zone miss. Last year, he was in the zone more but stopped getting ahead of hitters, and so his already-low chase rate cratered, walks crept up, and ERA ballooned to 6.91. He’s back down to a 1.99 this year and has already smashed his career-high in appearances with almost two months remaining in the season, thanks to a rediscovered ability to throw strike one, career-high zone and chase rates, and more in-zone misses than ever. Carry on, you bionic, electric, erratic arm.
All figures entering August 7, 2025.
