As the offseason draws near, the Brewers are in an interesting position with their starting rotation. They need more depth, to be sure, but they might not want to spend big to acquire it. No problem; here are some alternatives.

We know for sure that the Brewers will have Freddy Peralta at the front of their rotation in 2025. It’s also very likely that they’ll have Colin Rea, whom they can retain on an affordable team option.

Tobias Myers is a lock, as long as he’s healthy. Beyond that, though, things get murky in a hurry.

Everyone dearly hopes that Brandon Woodruff will be back in the middle of the rotation after he missed all of 2024 with a shoulder capsule injury, but how much like his old self he can be is very much an open question.

Aaron Civale is under team control, but MLB Trade Rumors projects him to earn roughly $8 million via arbitration in 2025, so the team will have to make a fairly difficult decision about him ahead of the mid-November deadline to tender contracts to arbitration-eligible players.

DL Hall and Aaron Ashby are intriguing young southpaws, but both might end up being better cast as relievers. One way or another, the Brewers will want to add veteran depth this winter, just as they did by bringing in Joe Ross and Jakob Junis last offseason.

Junis cost $7 million on a one-year deal, and a contract of that size might be off the table this time around. Civale fills that kind of role and payroll space, so if he’s non-tendered, the equation changes, but it’s more likely than not that the Brewers will hold onto him.

Today, we’ll look at a few candidates to be this winter’s answer to Ross, whom the Crew signed for $1.75 million last winter and whose 74 innings of work for them were his first big-league action since 2021.

Yonny Chirinos, RHP

In six starts with the Marlins this season, Chirinos had a 6.30 ERA. He spent most of the season in Triple A, and will turn 31 in December. On the surface, it’s not an appealing profile.

He could be available on a minor-league deal, and will certainly not command more than Ross did last winter.

Yet, he’s a very good fit for the Brewers’ philosophies of pitching and roster construction. He’s the same age Ross was last year and has similar upside.

He could play the same swingman role Ross ended up filling for the team in 2024; he has experience both as a starter and as a reliever.

Chirinos has a four-pitch mix: sinker, slider, four-seamer, and splitter. However, he hasn’t consistently used those offerings in any particular way, even if we focus closely on this season.

In the big leagues, he leaned heavily on the slider. During his time in the minors, it was a more orthodox approach.

The Brewers love a pitcher who utilizes multiple fastballs, and they love an adaptable slider. Chirinos offers both, with the ability to tweak the shape of his slider from a tighter, harder offering out to something like a true sweeper.

When you study those movement plots, though, you can see a lack of real command and conviction. Chirinos’s splitter doesn’t maintain sufficient separation from his fastball, which lacks the rising action of most four-seamers. Of his two heaters, he heavily favors the sinker, which pairs well with the slider but less so with the splitter—at least the way he currently throws each of them, and from where.

Like his pitch mix and the individual weapons’ movement patterns, Chirinos’s release point has been inconsistent. He even attempted a conscious shift toward the first-base side of the rubber during the season last year.

In the image on the left, from his time in the majors, the cluster on the right is a batch of pitches thrown in late July, just before he went down to the minors for the final time in the season. (These plots are, loosely, from the perspective of the batter and catcher, so further right means closer to first base.)

As you can also see, though, neither the lower release point nor that position on the rubber went with Chirinos when he pitched in August and September for Triple-A Jacksonville.

That attempted release point change yielded lousy results and a demotion from the big leagues, so Chirinos naturally chose not to keep experimenting.

He might have been onto something, though.

At the very least, keeping the release point a bit lower and his delivery more compact would be a good idea.

The Brewers excel at helping pitchers find the best release point, arm angle, and pitch mix for them, and Chirinos is someone who could benefit disproportionately from that kind of help. He’d be a strong addition at a minimal cost.

Cole Irvin, LHP

Even though the Orioles were a bit thin and pitching-needy as they tried to close out the season and ensure a playoff spot in September, they waived Irvin and let him land with another desperate contender, the Minnesota Twins. That reflects the extreme lack of success Irvin was having.

He’d been demoted from the rotation to the bullpen, and it wasn’t working much better for him there. Minnesota was so underwhelmed by their experience with him that they released him at the end of the season, even though he had two more seasons of team control left.

Irvin doesn’t throw very hard or have any one pitch that consistently puts away opposing batters. However, the only thing the Brewers like better than a two-fastball profile is a three-fastball profile, and Irvin has it.

His cutter is more like a slider than a fastball, but even so, he has that variation to force hitters not to sit on either his sinker, his four-seamer or his slider.

In total, he has six pitches, and the Brewers like pitchers who utilize their mix the way he does. Chris Hook could help Irvin transform a bit, not necessarily into a whole new creature, but back into the successful version of himself who pitched well for the Orioles in 2021 and 2022.

Anthony DeSclafani, RHP

Whereas Irvin and Chirinos primarily come with performance concerns, DeSclafani’s great limiter is his health. Surgery on the flexor tendon in his forearm ended his 2024 season before it began, and he’s thrown fewer than 120 innings in the big leagues since the start of 2022.

When he has been on the mound, he hasn’t been overwhelmingly effective, but he does have good stuff, even as he approaches his 35th birthday.

The fit here is tougher, because DeSclafani comes with the very questions the Brewers would surely love to avoid. They have to navigate so much uncertainty about Woodruff, Robert Gasser, and others whose health track records are spotty that bringing in another player who poses an injury risk might not be helpful.

On the other hand, if there is a veteran hurler who could turn in 20 starts with a sub-4.00 ERA at almost no cost, it might be DeSclafani, with his age and injury red flags.

Milwaukee should at least consider some higher-profile arms, and they might choose a different depth charge than any of those identified here.

Each of them has some features that should appeal to the club, though, and each should be available at a low enough cost to let the Brewers build a great roster by investing mostly in other, more urgent needs.