The Brewers don’t need to solve Nick Pivetta so much as pick their spots and cash them in.
That’s the job in Game 3, with the Padres turning to a pitcher who spent much of 2025 sidelined by a right elbow flexor strain and is now being asked to keep San Diego’s season alive. Pivetta still put together a strong year, logging a 2.87 ERA across 181 2/3 innings, but the surface numbers only tell part of the story. His 2025 expected ERA sat at 3.96, with an expected FIP of 3.85, and his profile points to a pitcher who lives on vertical shape, fly balls and deception more than clean contact suppression.
Pivetta’s four-seam fastball is the foundation. He throws it from a high release point, averaging around 94 miles per hour with more than 20 inches of induced vertical break on average this season.
TJStats gives the pitch a strong Stuff+ grade, and it plays as his main offering to both left- and right-handed hitters. The rest of his mix is built to support it: breaking balls that tunnel well, a cutter that gives him another lane, and a sweeper that becomes especially important against right-handers.
The tricky part for Milwaukee is that Pivetta has found a way to make a fly-ball profile work at Petco Park. He’s been one of the easiest pitchers in baseball against whom to pull the ball in the air, which normally spells trouble, but this season he paired the second-highest air-pull rate of his career - 22.6% - with a career-low home-run-per-fly-ball rate of 4.3% in a small sample. That makes the matchup feel tailor-made for a Brewers offense that doesn’t naturally hunt pull-side lift and hits more ground balls than any team in baseball.
For Milwaukee, the key is not changing identities. It’s recognizing the mistakes when they show up and doing real damage to them.
Against left-handed hitters, Pivetta has actually shown reverse platoon splits over the last two seasons, though his xFIP has been higher versus lefties in that span. The left side of the Brewers lineup matters because those hitters have produced the highest pull rate against him, at 46%, and when they do pull the ball in the air, it tends to come off with authority. Brice Turang, Garrett Mitchell and Christian Yelich loom as the names to watch there.
Mitchell stands out in particular. He has long had issues with high four-seam fastballs, but he can do damage against in-zone breaking balls, which gives him a path against Pivetta’s curveball.
Pivetta has thrown roughly half of his curveballs in the strike zone to left-handed hitters, about the same rate as his in-zone fastball usage, so the pitch can work both as a chase weapon and as a strike-stealer. That also creates a window for a hitter like Mitchell to jump one if it catches too much plate.
The fastball itself still has to be respected, even if it doesn’t miss a ton of bats. It gets enough swings underneath it to stay out of the barrel, and Pivetta leans on that timing disruption to help the curveball play up. The numbers suggest both pitches have done more than their quality of contact would predict, and Milwaukee would surely welcome a little regression in Game 3.
Right-handed hitters get a different look. Pivetta leans on the sweeper more often than the curveball against same-handed batters, and the cutter gives him another way to keep hitters from sitting on the heater.
But that cutter is less consistent in the zone than the four-seamer, and both pitches have taken some hard contact from righties. The four-seamer, in particular, has been vulnerable: a 57% hard-hit rate and a 15.7% barrel rate tell the story.
That’s why the sweeper matters so much. It gives Pivetta in-zone swing-and-miss, it draws chase, and it helps protect the fastball by forcing hitters to cover another shape. The cutter sits between those two pitches in the mix, and the relationship among the three is reflected in the pitch profile data, with strong ProMatch+ scores of 115 for the sweeper and 132 for the cutter.
So the Brewers’ path is straightforward, even if it isn’t easy: make Pivetta throw strikes, don’t help him by chasing the breaking ball, and punish the fastballs that wander into damage zones. His tunneling makes that a difficult assignment, but the contact data says the opportunities are there.
Milwaukee doesn’t need to beat him at his own game. It just needs to recognize which pitches can be hit hard and do it before Pivetta turns the inning around.
In Other News...
Brewers May Have Uncovered Something Huge In Mason Millers Meltdown
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Brewers Padres Series Just Got A Petty New Edge
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The Padres answered in kind at Petco Park, rolling elevator music over the speakers while Milwaukee was going through an off-day workout. It was a fitting little jab for a series that already has an extra layer of annoyance attached to it, and it served as a reminder that in October, the battle can start long before the first pitch. [Read more 🡒]
Brewers Had A Strange Game 1 Warning That Suddenly Looks Huge
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Chourio was back in the middle of it in Game 2, this time delivering the walk-off single that sent the Brewers home with another victory and a 2-0 lead in the NLDS. In a series already shaped by small details, the roof call from the opener suddenly looks like the kind of early warning that can take on outsized meaning once the games start tightening up. [Read more 🡒]