Half Season Hero: Wade Miley

Wade Miley will start Game 5 of the NLCS today in Los Angeles.

Wade Miley will start Game 5 of the NLCS today in Los Angeles.

Wade.

Miley.

will… OK, you get the point.

After 2017, it wasn’t out of bounds to believe that Miley’s career might effectively be over. He just finished his second straight season of 30+ starts with a 5.00+ ERA (a career-worst 5.61) and posted a 9% K-BB in the 323 innings of wretched work. His 4.85 FIP in that time didn’t offer much hope. The Orioles, a team that just lost 700 games this year, didn’t see fit to re-sign him, instead opting to give Andrew Casher (5.29 ERA), Alex Cobb (4.90), David Hess (4.88), and Mike Wright (5.55) a combined 493 innings (I could’ve included Dylan Bundy and his 5.45 ERA in 172 IP, too, but I understand why they gave him work).

When Miley signed a deal with the Brewers two days after Valentine’s Day, it didn’t hit the radar at all. I’m not even sure 10-team leagues where you have to draft guys with a W first name even noticed. The 31-year old lefty started in Double-A and made three starts there before getting called up for a solid spot start and another during which he was injured after just one out. He missed nearly two months with an oblique injury, but returned in mid-July and reeled off 14 second half starts without allowing more than 3 ER in any of them (2.66 ERA in 74 IP).

I admittedly dismissed the Miley run without much investigation. I leaned heavily on the 7% K-BB as reason why I just didn’t really buy it, in addition to the 1.21 WHIP that didn’t marry with his bottom line 2.57 ERA in the 81 innings. His 3.59 FIP wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t sure even that was very believable with such a poor K-BB rate and his 4.66 SIERA seemed to agree as well. It wasn’t until the season was over and the Brewers were in the playoffs that I finally gave Miley a deeper look.

When Nick Pollack actually spoke somewhat positively about Miley on our playoff pod, it piqued my interest. I watched closely as Miley cut up the Rockies in Coors in game 3 of the NLDS and did even better against the Dodgers in game 2 of the NLCS. It was after that I decided to take a closer look at his 16-start run with the Brewers this year.

By now, most of you are likely aware of the one massive change Miley has made – embracing a cutter while virtually shelving both his four-seamer and slider in the process. He dabbled with a cutter last year, throwing it 12% of the time, but he was still throwing his four-seamer 53% of the time and watching it get beaten around the yard (.892 OPS). This season saw 30-point jump in cutter usage, making it his primary pitch while the four-seamer (20%) and slider (3%) were used at his lowest rates ever and well below the 61% and 17% career marks he had coming into 2018.

Junking his garbage four-seamer alone was a win as it’s only once been a positive pitch (1.4 Pitch Value in 2012) and from 2015-17, it was 11th worst at -34.8. His slider has been fine so it’s likely less that he truly scrapped it and more that he dialed it up a bit and many of them became cutters. Now, about that cutter.

It is unquestionably the driving force behind his success, but let’s see what he’s doing with it. Among the 173 pitchers with 80 innings thrown, his cutter had the fifth-best pitch value at 9.8, which is bananas as many of the guys around him needed a full season to match or top him. The biggest advantage garnered from the cutter was that Miley finally had a weapon against righties.

He had nearly 200-point platoon split the last two seasons as they decimated his four-seamer (and just about every other pitcher, to be honest) to the tune of a .902 OPS. This year he shaved that split down to just 40 points thanks to the cutter holding them to a .584 OPS in 122 PA. His curveball yielding just a .507 in 41 PA was key, too. Cutters in, curves and changeups away was how he beat righties this year.

He also improved his OPS against lefties for the fourth straight season, down to .605 this year (second-best mark of his career). He only had 83 PA against lefties, a third as many as his 255 against righties. A down-and-away approach with the cutter and curve kept them at bay while also generating an 0-for-10 on the 63 four-seamers he threw to lefties.

Wow, I was about to spin this forward into how he might approach the Dodgers this afternoon and post it just as he was getting started in the bottom of the first, but Craig Counsell removed him after just one batter in favor of Brandon Woodruff. As for 2019, Miley is a complete wildcard for me. He’s a free agent so we don’t know where he will be pitching, let alone what his role will be with said team. If the cutter’s success maintains, he should avoid another 5.00+ ERA fate, but can he really be trusted anything better than a high-3.00s/low-4.00s over a full season?

His groundball lean (52% this year; 49% career) helps mitigate the meager strikeout rate as he regularly generated playable contact that the Milwaukee infield turned into outs. His 20% soft contact rate was also a career-best, but when you’re allowing so much contact (15% K), there’s just much more opportunity for things to go wrong whether it’s quality hitting, poor fielding, and/or plain ol’ bad luck. I acknowledge that Miley’s changes have made him better that the non-factor from 2016-17, so I can see a deep league scenario where I’d give him a shot as a reserve pick or waiver pickup, but he’s not all of a sudden sub-3.00 ERA guy or even necessarily a sub-4.00 without even further refinement.

As for the here and now, it’s being announced that this was Counsell’s game plan all along and Miley will now pitch game 6 on full rest. So he got the Dodgers to go with their lineup for a lefty starter only to bring in righty Brandon Woodruff immediately and doesn’t tax Miley at all so he’s ready for Thursday’s game. Wow, that is some chutzpah!