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In 2024, after an injury to Kodai Senga, Jose Quintana was the Mets’ Opening Day starter, facing the Brewers. Now, after a list of injuries that’s way too long for an introduction paragraph, Quintana will be joining the Brewers rotation. On Monday, the Brewers and the 36-year-old left-hander agreed to a one-year deal worth $4.25 million. Robert Murray of FanSided reported the deal, and MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand broke the contract terms. As the Mets signed former Brewer Frankie Montas in December, the two teams are effectively performing their own second-hand pitcher swap.
Quintana’s deal, such as it is, makes it the big-money transaction of the offseason for the Brewers. It’s definitely not enough to make fans forget about owner Mark Attanasio’s recent comments: “Is my job to win a World Series,” he said, “or is my job to provide a summer of entertainment and passion and a way for families to come together?” (Not that it’s the purview of this particular article, but the answer to both questions, of course, is yes.) Until yesterday, Milwaukee’s priciest addition was a $1 million deal for reliever Tyler Alexander, but the team’s biggest move of the offseason is still the one that sent closer Devin Williams to the Yankees in exchange for one year of lefty starter Nestor Cortes and infield prospect Caleb Durbin. Christmas only comes once a year in Milwaukee.
Let’s circle back to the injuries I mentioned. The Brewers will be starting the season without ace Brandon Woodruff, who’s recovering from shoulder surgery, DL Hall, who suffered a lat strain a few weeks ago, Robert Gasser, who underwent Tommy John surgery in June, and Aaron Ashby, whose oblique strain was just announced Monday. Its severity is still to be determined by an MRI. You see why I couldn’t put all that in the second sentence? All this means that Quintana will be joining ace Freddy Peralta, Cortes, Aaron Civale, and Tobias Myers in the likely Opening Day rotation.
I volunteered to write this article because I also wrote up Quintana’s two-year deal with the Mets back in December 2022, and I was curious about what might have changed. Back then, he was 34 and coming off a somewhat out-of-nowhere four-win season with a 2.93 ERA, mostly due to a massive drop in his home run rate. Over the first 10 years of his career, he’d allowed 0.96 home runs per nine innings, but in 2022, that rate fell by more than half, all the way to 0.43. As a regression candidate, he seemed like the world’s surest thing. A benign lesion on his rib that necessitated bone graft surgery limited him to 13 starts in 2023, and over that short sample, his home run rate stayed down, but it bounced all the way back in 2024. Although he’s run a 3.70 ERA over the past two seasons, the advanced estimators are smelling blood: His 4.24 FIP and 4.45 xFIP are the highest for any two-year stretch of his career.
For the most part, the advanced estimators are simply objecting to the ravages of time. (ERA estimators: They’re just like us!) Quintana’s fastballs finally settled in below 91 mph, which allowed batters to make more contact with his four-seamer, especially contact of the barreled variety. So he cut his four-seamer rate and backfilled with sinkers, which kept his groundball rate nice and shiny but crushed his popup rate. The reduced velocity also forced Quintana to be finer with his pitches. The heat maps below show his four-seamer. The one on the left combines 2021 and 2022, while the one on the right combines 2023 and 2024.
Quintana has always tried to elevate the pitch to his glove-side corner, but he also used to look for whiffs down the middle or above the zone. Now that he’s not getting the chases or whiffs, he’s just aiming for the corner. Quintana’s edge rate – the percentage of pitches that are within one ball-width of the edge of the strike zone – has risen in each successive season since 2019.
None of these changes did anything to help his already low strikeout rate, and it made the path to success more tenuous. It’s just tough when the margin for error is that small. It’s not like this is a new story. Quintana is 36, and although he’s never had the velocity to blow batters away, there’s no longer any doubt that he’s fully transitioned from regular lefty to crafty lefty.
Clearly, Quintana’s not afraid to make changes, tweaking his pitch mix, his locations, and even the pitches themselves. In 2024, he killed a little rise and added a little extra arm-side run to his changeup, leading the pitching models to improve its rating from “Please God, No” all the way up to “[Sigh] If You Must.” What more could he do, aside from hop in a time machine? Part of me, knowing that the Brewers ranked fourth in baseball in cutter rate last year and seeing the huge gap in movement between his four-seamer and his breaking pitches, thinks that Quintana would be a good candidate for a cutter. But another part of me thinks that adding an 86-mph pitch with eight inches of rise and pretty much no horizontal break at all would be be about as effective as wheeling a pitching machine up onto the mound.
As Jay Jaffe noted last week when he wrote up the best pitchers still on the market, Quintana struggled mightily for most of the season, then completely turned things around, beginning on August 20. Over his last seven starts, he posted a 0.74 ERA, 2.48 FIP, and 3.52 xFIP, all of which represented huge improvements on his numbers to that point. The biggest changes to his stats over that final hot stretch? Quintana stranded 89% of his baserunners, didn’t allow a single homer, and ran a 62% groundball rate. Obviously, the first two items on that list aren’t exactly repeatable, but Quintana’s fastball velocity also ticked back up to 91.4 mph over that final stretch, and not coincidentally, he started throwing more pitches in the zone and fewer over the edge. Even if the Brewers didn’t believe in any other part of Quintana’s closing run, the velocity spike, and the way he pitched when he once again had confidence in his heaters, must have been a big reason for their decision to take a chance on him.
The last point is a fun one: If Quintana’s goal was to keep beating his FIP, he couldn’t have picked a sweeter landing spot. His high groundball rate should play just fine in Milwaukee. Year in year out, the Brewers have one of the best defenses in baseball. Although they lost shortstop Willy Adames, if Joey Ortiz takes over for him like we expect, he might even represent an improvement at the position. There’s no way to know how much Quintana has left in the tank, or whether his increased velocity toward the end of the season was a mirage, but as long as he keeps it on the ground, he’ll have a chance.
