Brewers Seek Rotation Help, Trade for Aaron Civale

Last summer, I wrote about how Aaron Civale “King Ralph-ed” his way into an exciting postseason race. The Rays entered the 2023 season with five playoff-caliber starting pitchers at the top of their depth chart and a star pitching prospect waiting in the wings. Yet after several major elbow injuries, they were forced to send a Top 100 prospect to Cleveland in exchange for Civale at the deadline. By August, the right-hander was Tampa Bay’s no. 3 starter. The beneficiary of so many others’ misfortunes, Civale went from a scuffling Guardians club to one of the best teams in the league.

Conversely, Civale probably would have preferred to be back in Cleveland this season. As of today, it’s the Guardians, not the Rays, who are competing with the Orioles for the best record in the American League. Meanwhile, it’s the Rays, not the Guardians, who are struggling to stay above .500 with the trade deadline fast approaching. Thus, I have no choice but to go back to the King Ralph parallel. At the end of the movie, Ralph decides he’d rather return to his old life and abdicates the throne. However, when Ralph abdicates, his aging and childless successor, Sir Cedric, warns him that he might have to be king again once Cedric dies, leaving open the possibility for a sequel. King Ralph never got a second chapter, but as luck would have it, Civale just King Ralph-ed all over again. The rules of the CBA prevent him from simply packing up and heading back to Cleveland, but he’s just taken his place in a new Midwestern court.

The NL Central-leading Brewers have seen their rotation ravaged by injuries this season. In addition to Brandon Woodruff, who underwent shoulder surgery last fall, the Brewers will be without Wade Miley and Robert Gasser for the rest of the year. DL Hall has been on the injured list with a knee injury since mid-April, while Joe Ross went down with a back injury in mid-May. Hall and Ross are both on track to return at some point in July, but it’s hard to know what to expect from them when they return. Hall is a rookie who might ultimately end up being a reliever, and Ross has never pitched more than 108 innings in a season (and he hasn’t even done that since 2021). Finally, Jakob Junis came off the injured list a couple of weeks ago, but he has been pitching in long relief.

The Brewers probably could have used an extra starter before the deadline even if all the arms from their Opening Day rotation were healthy, but with all the injuries they’ve suffered, another starter became an absolute necessity. So they traded 20-year-old shortstop prospect Gregory Barrios to the Rays in exchange for Civale. Once again, due to the misfortune of others, Civale’s chances of pitching in the playoffs just got significantly better.

Before the trade, the only proven and trustworthy arms in the Brewers’ rotation were Freddy Peralta and Colin Rea, and calling Rea proven and/or trustworthy is a stretch. Tobias Myers and Bryse Wilson deserve nothing but praise for the way they’ve stepped up this season, but with their spotty track records (and the sizable gaps between their ERAs and FIPs), they don’t exactly inspire confidence as your third and fourth starters. Myers, in particular, has earned a longer look out of the rotation, but a team with World Series aspirations would be playing with fire if it relied on him too heavily. The final member of the rotation right now is 36-year-old Dallas Keuchel, whom the Brewers acquired from the Mariners last week in exchange for cash considerations. The former Cy Young winner, who has bounced around between six organizations since the 2022 season, seems more like a band-aid than a long-term solution. The “proven and trustworthy” label has not applied to Keuchel for several years.

With all that in mind, it’s clear why the Brewers sought a pitcher like Civale. Although various (non-serious) injuries have prevented him from qualifying in any year aside from the shortened 2020 campaign, he has made at least 20 starts in each of the past three seasons. The right-hander owns a 4.10 ERA and 4.11 FIP across 103 starts (562.1 IP) over his six-year big league career. It’s also easy to understand why Milwaukee pulled the trigger now instead of waiting until the end of July. The Brewers would be wise to watch just about all of their pitchers’ workloads to limit fatigue and attempt to avoid any further injuries. The sooner they have Civale tossing five or six innings every five days – and it seems like that will start tonight – the easier that task will be.

To that point, Civale’s primary identity is that of an innings eater. His career 100 ERA- is exactly league average, and he has averaged five and a half innings per outing since his major league debut. However, Civale teased something more last season with the Rays. His 5.36 ERA was ugly – a .370 BABIP and 68.8% LOB% will do that – but he flashed the potential to be a different kind of pitcher than he ever was before. His strikeout rate jumped from 19.0% to 29.3% after the trade deadline. To put that another way, he recorded 58 strikeouts pre-deadline and another 58 strikeouts post-deadline – despite facing 108 fewer batters with the Rays. His career strikeout rate entering the year was 21.6% and had never been higher than 26.8% in any 10-game span. On top of that, his walk rate dropped from 7.2% to 5.6% following the trade. More strikeouts and fewer walks is almost always a sign of good things to come.

Further fueling rumblings of a breakout, Civale changed up his pitch mix with the Rays to achieve those results. Against same-handed hitters, he threw fewer curveballs and cutters. In their place, he was using more sliders and four-seam fastballs – pitches that typically work better when the pitcher has the platoon advantage. Against lefties, he leaned more heavily on his sinker as a secondary weapon and decreased the usage of his other primary pitches. That decision eschewed conventional wisdom – sinkers usually aren’t as good against opposite-handed opponents – but it was hard to argue with the results. Lefty batters put up a .162 wOBA and .194 xwOBA against his sinker.

Unfortunately for Civale, those promising signs from last August and September have not carried over into 2024. Once again, he has an ERA over 5.00. And this time, the underlying numbers aren’t quite as rosy. His strikeout rate has dipped back down, and his walk rate has climbed back up. What’s more, his 32.8% groundball rate (fourth-lowest among qualified pitchers) is at an all-time low. It’s probably not a coincidence that his 1.66 HR/9 is the highest among all qualified pitchers in either league.

His struggles come despite the fact that he has continued to refine his arsenal, turning his sweeping slider into a bona fide sweeper. PitchingBot and Stuff+ agree that his sweeper is a nastier breaking pitch than his slider was, and Civale clearly likes it too. He has turned the sweeper into his primary breaking ball against right-handers, occasionally mixing it in against left-handers as well. Nonetheless, he still looks like a league-average starter and not much more. His 5.07 ERA and 4.69 FIP are higher than usual, but his 4.14 xERA and 4.09 xFIP sit pretty close to league average. With 87 innings across 17 starts, he is averaging just over five frames per outing.

At this point in his career, Civale likely is who he is. He has always liked to tinker, but the tinkering is just as much a survival strategy for a pitcher without overpowering stuff as it is an attempt to unlock something new. Still, it will be interesting to see what the Brewers have planned for Civale. They like to tinker with their pitchers as much as anyone, and his diverse arsenal gives them plenty to work with. He is under contract through the end of next season, and who knows, maybe Milwaukee can unlock something that Cleveland and Tampa Bay failed to discover. It can’t be easy for any player to get traded two years in a row, but as a pitcher, there are far worse fates than getting to work with all three of the Guardians, Rays, and Brewers before your 30th birthday.

You can read about Gregory Barrios, the young shortstop Tampa Bay acquired in exchange for Civale, on our Rays top prospects list, so I won’t go into detail about the minor league side of this deal. However, it feels worth mentioning that this trade closes the book on Civale’s brief tenure in Tampa Bay. With hindsight being what it is, it’s hard to deny that the original trade worked out poorly for the Rays. Civale did his job in 2023, and the team won six of his 10 starts, but ultimately, they would have been the first Wild Card team with or without him. They also didn’t end up needing a third starter for the playoffs after the Rangers swept them out of the Wild Card Series in two games. Civale continued to eat innings for the Rays this year, but his 5.07 ERA ranks last among qualified AL starters by a sizable margin, and Tampa Bay went 5-12 (.294) in his 17 starts. The team probably wouldn’t have done any worse with a replacement level arm in his shoes sleeves instead. For all that, the Rays parted with Kyle Manzardo. His stock has fallen over the past year, but Manzardo (45 FV) remains a more highly valued prospect than Barrios (40 FV).

Will the second Civale trade work out better for both sides? Only time will tell, but you couldn’t script a trade that makes more sense for these two teams. The Rays dealt Civale before his final year of arbitration, and they’re hoping they have enough arms in reserve (i.e. Shane Baz and Jeffrey Springs) that they won’t even notice his absence. The Brewers, for their part, bolster a beleaguered rotation with a crafty veteran, and they didn’t have to expend much money or prospect capital to do so. Milwaukee could still use another starter for the playoffs – Peralta, Civale, Rea, and Myers doesn’t exactly sound like a postseason-caliber rotation – but the Brewers’ six-game lead in the NL Central is much safer than it was earlier this week.