The Brewers are about to put an old baseball idea to a very modern test: can a team built on power pitching still win in October?
Recent history leans hard the other way. Over the last 17 full seasons, not one World Series champion ranked in the top five in fastball usage, and 11 of those 17 champions finished in the bottom half of the league in fastball use. In a sport that has steadily drifted toward spin and away from heaters, Milwaukee is one of just three playoff teams - along with the Red Sox and Yankees - that throw more than 50% fastballs, not counting cutters.
The Brewers may be the most extreme version of that bet. Their postseason staff is set to carry the highest average fastball velocity in playoff history at 95.9 mph, and they have the most pitches clocked at 100 mph in recorded history by a 62% margin over any other staff.
Milwaukee could bring as many as six pitchers who have touched 100 mph onto its postseason roster. That gives manager Pat Murphy a very specific weapon: in Jacob Misiorowski and the high-leverage relief trio of Abner Uribe, Aaron Ashby and Trevor Megill, he can piece together a game with nothing but 100-mph arms.
The question is whether Milwaukee should resist the postseason instinct to tone down the fastball. Last year, in a sweep by the Dodgers, the Brewers backed off their heater-heavy identity. Freddy Peralta’s fastball usage dropped 10.3%, Misiorowski’s fell 13.3%, and the staff as a whole threw 3.8% fewer fastballs than usual.
That approach hasn’t delivered much October success anyway. Since 2018, Milwaukee has gone 11-20 in the postseason, even though it has played .573 baseball in the regular season over that span, fourth best in MLB.
The broader trend has been clear for years. The rise of pitch tracking in 2015 helped speed up the decline of the fastball, and postseason baseball usually pushes teams even farther away from it.
As former manager Joe Maddon has observed, the bigger the games get, the more people in the front office want to shape the plan. Everyone is trying to mine their own slice of information for the edge that decides a series.
Reinvent at your own risk.
The logic behind the shift is straightforward. October games are tighter, hits are scarcer and one swing can flip everything, so teams often try to avoid slug. MLB hitters slug .424 against fastballs and .381 against non-fastballs, which helps explain why so many clubs lean away from the heater when the stakes rise.
Still, the Brewers, Red Sox and Yankees are built to stay with what they do best. Boston throws fastballs 52.1% of the time, the most among playoff teams after Seattle.
Milwaukee is at 51.8%, and New York is at 51.2%. There’s no real reason to overhaul the profiles of Boston’s Peyton Tolle, Milwaukee’s Misiorowski or New York’s Cam Schlittler, the top three pitchers in fastball use among pitchers with 1,400 pitches.
Last postseason showed just how far teams can swing in the other direction. It became the postseason of the splitter, with splitter usage hitting 6.7%, more than double the rate ever seen in a regular season or postseason.
The champion Dodgers dropped from 45.9% fastballs in the regular season to 43.8% in October, the lowest fastball rate ever by a World Series winner. The Blue Jays went even further, falling from 45.7% to 37.9%, the lowest ever by a World Series loser.
Maybe this year brings a different kind of October. Only one potential playoff team, the Rangers, ranked in the bottom 10 in fastball use during the regular season. If the postseason does turn back toward old-fashioned hardball, the Brewers look like the team most likely to lead it.
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For Boston, the timing is especially awkward because any disruption could force MLB into a scramble for makeup dates or a doubleheader, the kind of logistical headache that can ripple through a tight September schedule. The league has already dealt with a similar weather-driven adjustment earlier this season with the Mets and Braves, and Fenway could be the next park where the calendar becomes part of the story. [Read more 🡒]