According to Haudricourt (and verified by common sense), there are five pitchers vying for those spots: Wily Peralta, Jimmy Nelson, Matt Garza, Chase Anderson, and Tommy Milone. However, there are also some other starting pitchers on the fringes of the rotation who may end up either in the big league bullpen or the Class-AAA Colorado Springs rotation. A non-exhaustive list includes Jorge Lopez, Taylor Jungmann, Josh Hader, and Brent Suter.

Starts are a finite resource. The Brewers only get 162 of them to dole out among all of these candidates, and they have to balance three separate goals. The club will be trying to win, develop young players, and maintain (or grow) trade value, all at the same time. For a team at this point in the rebuild stage, that is not uncommon, nor is it even a negative. It is simply a reality.

The most straightforward place to start is with trying to win, as that is the nominal goal of essentially every team at all times. If the Brewers simply threw their best pitchers, then this would be a different but equally difficult issue. The identity of the three next-best starters is an open question. Peralta, Anderson, and Nelson are probably the three favorites, but none of them were particularly good last season (4.60, 5.50, and 5.64 DRAs, respectively). A rebounded Garza or one of the younger arms could just as easily be better than any (or all) of those three.

Fortunately, though, the question goes beyond simply who the best pitcher is. Matt Garza’s contract status is a concern here as well, as it will likely expire after this season (there is are several options, including a vesting option with three conditions). The Brewers can handle this one of two ways; they can either give him a bunch of starts and hope that he performs well enough to have a modicum of trade value, or they can bury him on the depth chart or in the bullpen and keep him around as depth. He was so bad the last two seasons (DRAs of 5.48 and 5.22) that it is unlikely that anyone would want to trade for him without seeing a sustained run of success. To help him build trade value, then, the Brewers need to give him starts.

But doing so would come at a cost. First, as Garza is 33 years old, is coming off the two worst seasons of his career, and has a history of injury issues. He may in fact be over the hill and unable to regain his previous form. He may simply not be capable of pitching at a desirable level anymore. And second, if the Brewers give Garza 15 starts to try and build some value, they would be preventing one of their younger starters from taking the mound.

That is the real rub here, as both trying to win and trying to rebuild Garza’s trade value are in tension with allowing young pitchers to have the chance to prove themselves and learn at the big league level. A team that is trying to win almost never hands a rookie a sizable number of starts simply because major league baseball is very hard and requires an adjustment time. If the Brewers let Lopez and Hader make 25 starts each, the club probably wouldn’t fare very well.

However, the Brewers also don’t want to just let young pitchers rot in the minor leagues. None of the younger options are particularly appealing early in the season, whether it be because of performance issues (Jungmann, Lopez) or contract ones (the Super Two deadline). Thus, the club will have to strike a balance.

I expect Garza to break camp in the rotation just because it is the only irreversible decision. If the Brewers release him or send him to the bullpen, then he will have no chance to rebuild his value. If they send any of the other four to the bullpen or minors, though, they can just be recalled in a month if Garza proves he has nothing left.

Beyond that remains a question. Nelson, Anderson, and Peralta were all indistinguishably bad for the Brewers last year, and Milone has made a career of being a fringe fifth starter. None of them will inspire anyone with a ton of confidence (beyond maybe Peralta, who finished the season strong), but that leaves the question open as to who gets dropped when someone else is ready. Lopez spent most of the 2016 season in Class-AAA, so one would imagine that he does get a call-up at some point. Hader has shot up prospect lists (he ranks 19th on BP’s Top 101) and also was in Class-AAA last year, so he too should be expected to see big league time. Suter, Jungmann, and Tyler Cravy all started games for the Brewers last year as well, so they will also be in the mix.

Among those pitchers, Hader’s development is probably the most important for the club, so he should be prioritized. If Hader demonstrates that he cannot learn anything else in Class-AAA, then he will probably be called up by midseason so that he can continue to learn. But after that? Realistically, it’s anyone’s guess. This is a massive list of pitchers with wide ranges of possible outcomes. There are five established big leaguers (Nelson, Garza, Anderson, Peralta, Milone) and at least three minor leaguers (Suter, Jungmann, Cravy) who have potential claims to the starting spot. I would anticipate that the Opening Day roster spots will be decided by a combination of seniority and spring performance, but I have no idea how to predict who will win those jobs. I also have no idea how long they will be able to hold on to them.

The Brewers will have to balance these competing interests throughout the season, and how exactly they do that will be dependent on each pitcher’s performance. If the big leaguers pitch well, then they will remain in the rotation because the team will have the best shot at winning (and, except for Garza, none of them are all that old). But if they don’t and any of the minor leaguers do, then the Brewers will have to decide at what point in the season they want to start handing out developmental starts.

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Part 1: Piggyback Rotation

The modern bullpen is built to run deep. When the average manager walks out to the mound for the first time in a game, he has seven different weapons in his arsenal to deploy. That means several important things:

• If one of those weapons serves a very specialized purpose, such as retiring a single left-handed batter, that’s perfectly okay. Such a purpose is sure to come up, and you’ll be glad to have an ace up your sleeve then.

• If one of those weapons turns out to be a dud on any given night, well, that sucks regardless of circumstance. But you’ve got the luxury of the quick hook. There’s no need to ride it out with a pitcher who is struggling to find his groove. Just toss him on the slag heap and pick another candidate from the list before things get ugly.

• If one of your pitchers can throw one or two pitches really well, but never developed that third offering, you can use them in the bullpen and never worry about a hitter seeing them for the second time in an hour or so and becoming too familiar with their stuff.

• Following these three points, the modern bullpen tends to function as a safe haven for pitchers who are unreliable or have a short in-game shelf life, but who balance out those negatives with a high strikeout rate or elite performance against one side of the platoon split.

A four or five-man bullpen required by a piggyback rotation, on the other hand, does not have the same luxuries, so the type of pitcher you’re looking for is going to look different. The elite tier of relievers, the game’s Chapmans, Jansens, Brittons, and Kimbrels, would all look great in either bullpen, because they’re great at everything while having precious few flaws to their game. But as you move away from the elite, and towards replacement level, the type of player that can fit in either system start to diverge.

I’ve come to identify three different traits that play pivotal roles in making the ideal reliever for a piggyback rotation.

• Stamina. A five-man bullpen will get burned to cinders in a hurry if its pitchers are getting wasted on seven-pitch appearances. That means that going longer than an inning out of the bullpen would, ideally, be the norm for a reliever, as opposed to the anomaly it tends to be now.
• Platoon splits. Going hand-in-hand with that last point, bullpen arms behind a piggyback system don’t have the luxury of specializing as a LOOGY or ROOGY. Pitchers with extreme splits tend to come in for one batter more often than not, which means that, in this system, they’re useful only as trade bait.
• Command. A shorter bullpen means that a dud outing from a reliever hurts the bullpen, and the team, even more. Therefore, the relievers we’re stocking in our bullpen should not be the sorts of guys who are prone to melting down regularly. Whiff rate plays into this too, as do exit velocities, but ask any pitcher what the number one cause of a meltdown-level outing is and they’ll immediately answer back “walks.” The modern bullpen has become something of a sanctuary for pitchers with electric stuff and tenuous control over it, but this is due in large part to the sheer volume of bullpen arms available on a game-to-game basis. If a wild reliever doesn’t have it on any given night you simply yank him, bring in somebody else, and roll the dice again. Remove that luxury, and it becomes more essential than ever that our bullpen arms be capable of locating their pitches in the strike zone reliably.

Upon this reflection, it makes a lot more sense why only the 2012 Rockies, the quintessential example of a downtrodden, desperate pitching staff, were the only team to entertain the piggyback rotation. People tend to be resistant to change, and the piggyback rotation brings with it sweeping, unprecedented changes in how the entire pitching staff is stocked, evaluated, and deployed. It is, in short, a complete departure from everything that has ever been done in baseball. And that is exactly why the rebuilding Brewers would be so smart to implement such a system. In this sense, completely overhauling the responsibilities of the pitching staff doesn’t sound like such a daunting obstacle; rather, it looks like the road to success just waiting to be paved.

One of the recent acquisitions who intrigues me the most happens to be a reliever. While left-handed pitcher Nick Hagadone doesn’t carry the pedigree of any of the aforementioned names, he’s succeeded recently — and how. In 2014, he posted a 2.70 ERA and 3.07 DRA, along with an 86 cFIP. Even over a mere 23.1 innings, those kinds of numbers will make a lot of relief pitchers jealous. How, then, did the Brewers manage to pick him up?

Well, his 2014 campaign really diverged from the others. For his career, Hagadone has an ERA of 4.72, a DRA of 4.07, and a cFIP of 103. It’s the classic flash in the pan — an otherwise-mediocre player explodes briefly, then regresses, then spends a lot of time trying to return to that peak. All Milwaukee can do is hope that Hagadone succeeds in that task.

On a basic level, Hagadone has one reliable pitch: a slider. It’s been worth 9.8 runs over his career, per FanGraphs, and it didn’t really get much better in 2014. The difference came on his four-seam fastball: A -4.5-run pitch overall, it broke even at 0.0 runs in 2014. And the greater success of the heater probably had something to do with its distinction from the slider:

When Hagadone broke out in 2014, he did so with a large slider-fastball velocity differential. It seems that the gap got too big for its own good last season, which sank both the slider (0.4 runs) and the fastball (-3.0 runs). Packing a little more heat back on his slider, to reach that sweet spot, could help him ascend once more.

The bigger factor, however, is pitch usage. Hagadone kept things pretty steady for the first four years of his career, but Year Five saw him swap out the slider for a cutter:

Hagadone discussed the change with Cleveland.com in May, explaining that he wanted another pitch “to keep [hitters] off-balance.” While his logic there appears sound — a three-pitch arsenal is generally better than a two-pitch arsenal — the results say differently. If Hagadone wants to avoid the struggles he endured in 2015, he might want to bring back the pitch mix that brought him prosperity in 2014.

With fixes this simple, why wouldn’t Hagadone make them? This analysis doesn’t take everything into account. For one thing, Hagadone faced really easy competition in 2014: The TAv for his opponents was just .252, compared to .259 for his career as a whole. There’s also the fact that hitters may have adjusted after he broke out, as they tend to do at the major-league level; perhaps his 2015 decline was inevitable. And the sample size-issue always pertains to cases like this — 23.1 innings does not a full season make. The velocity and pitch usage may only be ably to go so far.

Hagadone has some upside — he proved that in 2014. He still throws a superb slider, and his fastball brings the heat. He just hasn’t put it together convincingly yet, and at age 30, he doesn’t have much time left to do that. The Brewers are in a position to give him some reps this season, in Triple-A or the majors, so we’ll have to see what he accomplishes. The spark he had two years ago could come back, but the odds are that it won’t.