Julio Teheran Shouldering Bruising Brewers Burden

Around this time a year ago, Julio Teheran left the Atlantic League’s Staten Island FerryHawks for the Mexican League’s Toros de Tijuana, a move that on the FerryHawks Instagram account described as the right-hander getting “one step closer back to Major League Baseball.” Those steps were many: over the next 12 months, Teheran would suit up for Staten Island, Tijuana, Sultanes de Monterrey in the Mexican League, Toros del Este in the Dominican Winter League, the San Diego Padres as a non-roster spring training invitee, Team Colombia in the World Baseball Classic, and the Padres’ Triple-A El Paso Chihuahuas. Seven teams (from four different countries) later, he got his MLB shot, signing in late May with a Brewers team that had already lost five starters — Brandon Woodruff, Aaron Ashby, Eric Lauer, Jason Alexander, and Wade Miley – to injuries. Milwaukee needed a healthy arm badly, and Teheran had been looking for just that kind of opportunity.

The Brewers couldn’t have expected much from Teheran, the way you can’t usually expect much from the most available pitcher on the day that you place a fifth starter on the injured list. He hadn’t thrown a major league pitch since April 2021 with the Tigers, when he allowed one run over five innings before hitting the IL with a shoulder strain the following week. Even his Triple-A stint in the spring had been a mixed bag in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League.

But Teheran has answered the call, allowing just four earned runs and averaging over six innings in his four starts for the Brewers, striking out 16 and walking just three with a 1.48 ERA, 3.52 FIP and 4.48 xFIP. Those final two stats suggest a few balls bouncing his way through these first four starts, and he’s not going to give up a single earned run each time out there. But the early returns are strong: opposing hitters have a .396 xSLG and .294 xwOBA against him, and both his barrel and hard-hit rates (on just 70 batted balls, mind you) are comfortably above league average. In his last start on Saturday, he fanned six A’s over 7.0 one-run innings, his longest big league outing in nearly four years.

With a pair of off days this week and both Lauer and Miley coming off the IL, this could have been it for Teheran; the Brewers could have thanked him for his work and moved forward with some combination of Corbin Burnes, Colin Rea, Freddy Peralta, Adrian Houser, Lauer, and Miley. Instead, Lauer was optioned when he was activated on Wednesday, Houser’s spot in the rotation was skipped, and on Friday night, with Milwaukee looking to end a six-game skid, it’ll be Teheran who takes the mound for the opener of a home series with the first-place Pirates — an improbable pitcher starting an improbably important series with a shot to bring Milwaukee back into a tie for first.

Teheran was so effective nearly ten years ago — he made his first of two All-Star teams in 2014 — that it’s easy to forget that he’s only 32 years old, three weeks younger than Kevin Gausman. After leading with a four-seamer through the first chapter of his career, he’s now favoring his sinker, which emerged around 2018 as his most effective pitch. He was never a high-octane velocity guy; in his first full season, he threw his four-seamer at 93 mph and his sinker at 90, right about where it is now. Despite retaining most of its velocity, the sinker is moving more than it ever has at the major league level. Its 32.4 inches of vertical drop are nearly four inches more than the average sinker and about 2.6 inches more than when it was last used regularly in 2020. It also runs 16.4 inches to his arm side, a modest improvement from 16.1 in 2020 but a big jump from 14.7 the year before. With its new look, the pitch has been worth -4 runs in just 140 uses, an excellent pace of -3.2 runs per 100 pitches.

The whole arsenal has gotten a makeover, really. Teheran is delivering his breaking pitches much faster than ever. According to Statcast, his slider is up from 81–82 mph in previous years to 85.8 this season, and his curveball has gone from the low 70s to 77.3, changes that have swung both pitches (albeit in limited use) into the net-negative in run value after both did more damage than good in 2019 and ’20.

It’s all so different that Pitch Info and Statcast can’t agree on what he’s throwing; what Statcast is calling a faster slider with less slide, Pitch Info is calling a cutter, and what Statcast is calling a faster curveball with less curve, Pitch Info is calling a slider. Pitch Info’s cutter classification makes some sense; the pitch Statcast is calling a slider has the second-least vertical break across all sliders and is one of just five in the majors that breaks at least an inch to his arm side on average. Meanwhile, it’s within about an inch of the average cutter in both vertical and horizontal break and just a few ticks slower. Statcast’s curveball could probably go either way between slider and curve. His changeup, meanwhile, still looks like a changeup, but is dropping and running more than ever — essentially the same movement as his sinker but seven mph slower.

Pitch taxonomy aside, it’s all worked well through this short stint. Teheran has made slight adjustments to his delivery since his last big league stint, releasing the ball lower and farther out on his arm side, and he’s doing a better job to make all his pitches look the same from a release standpoint. In 2020, his release point varied by pitch type, up to around three inches both vertically and horizontally. So far this year, all of his pitches have been released from within about an inch and a half of each other on average. Here’s how that looks from the batter’s perspective, first in 2020:

And then in 2023:

He has gone straight at hitters with a first-pitch strike seven out of 10 times, and he’s living in the zone throughout at-bats — not to get swings and misses very often, but to induce weak contact on those swings. Teheran’s 254 pitches over the heart of the plate and in the shadow zone so far have generated -9 runs, a rate of -3.5 per 100. And most of that damage (-6.4 runs) has come on 151 swings.

If Teheran’s impressive run is to continue, these are the factors that will make it happen: a retooled arsenal and delivery; a fearlessness in the zone that has allowed him to jump from the 28th percentile in walk rate in 2020 to the 98th today; and the weak contact that comes along with that combination. If it falls apart, it’ll be because hitters catch up to his stuff and start punishing him for hanging around in the zone, causing his low HR/FB rate and high stranded runner rate to regress. It’s no walk in the park to turn five pitches averaging below 90 mph into any kind of sustained major league success.

There’s a lot to suggest this might be less of a complete renaissance and more of a hot stretch at the right time, at least to some degree. But as hard as it is to get a first chance in the majors, once you’ve had a career like Teheran’s, battling through injuries and struggles on the field and ending up looking up at the big leagues from indy ball, it must seem nearly impossible to get another. This is the time of year when everyone is looking for pitching help — really any time of year is that time of year — and the Brewers have to be thrilled with what Teheran has given them when they were in desperate need. If this is as good as it gets for his comeback effort — if the small-sample-size magic wears off, or if he ends up the odd man out when Woodruff returns for his roster spot — it’s pretty cool to see him get a shot like this and pitch himself back into consideration as a viable major league starter.