Burnes gets another shot in Crew's rotation

MILWAUKEE -- The Brewers are giving Corbin Burnes another shot to stick in the starting rotation.

This is Burnes 2.0, the club believes, a pitcher better equipped to avoid the disaster that befell the right-hander in 2019, when Burnes started the Brewers’ fourth game of the regular season against the Cardinals, recorded his first nine outs via strikeouts, then began yielding home runs at an alarming rate. That caused him to quickly slip into a funk from which he never really recovered.

Burnes was demoted to the Minors three times, was sent to the team’s Phoenix pitching lab searching for answers, and spent the winter working with a mental skills coach. The results looked promising in Spring Training and remained so in Summer Camp, including one intrasquad outing last week in which Burnes went 12-up, 12-down with seven strikeouts and a fastball that touched 98 mph. In his final tune-up on Monday, he recorded 15 outs on 65 pitches.

The Brewers need him. Burnes is scheduled to start in the place -- Saturday against the Cubs at Wrigley Field -- originally assigned to left-hander Brett Anderson, who this week landed on the 10-day injured list with a blister.

“It’s taken months for [Burnes] to get where he’s at right now,” Brewers pitching coach Chris Hook said. “There’s a lot of hard work he put in, and it’s a slightly different pitch mix with a better delivery that has allowed him to command pitches where he needs to. Right now, it looks really good.”

The aim is to keep things looking good. That was not the case last year, when Burnes surrendered three home runs in each of his first three starts, and 11 home runs in 17 2/3 innings by the end of April. All told, he logged an 8.82 ERA in 49 innings in 2019. It was a significant step back from '18, when Burnes made his Major League debut with a 2.61 ERA in 30 regular-season appearances, then played a key relief role during the postseason.

The question was how to reclaim that success. Hook and Burnes go way back, since Hook was one of the Brewers’ Minor League pitching coordinators when Burnes was drafted by Milwaukee in the fourth round in 2016. In September, after rosters expanded and Burnes joined the big league club for a fourth stint, he and Hook went to work on honing Burnes’ power sinker.

Burnes generates remarkable spin with his pitches. Lumping all varieties of fastballs together, Burnes’ average spin rate of 2,663 rpm was the fourth highest in Major League Baseball last season, according to Statcast, and he was third with an average of 2,688 rpm with pitches that registered as two-seam sinkers. High spin is not always a good thing for a sinker -- lower spin generally creates more sinking effect -- but consistent spin is important, so a pitcher knows where the pitch is going. Burnes’ spin was inconsistent, Hook said, so they worked to improve his body position to in turn improve his hand position in an effort to stay “on top” of the baseball.

“I mean, you really have to stay on this pitch,” Hook said. “We started in September and took the time to really get after this, and he has really put a lot -- a lot -- of effort into this. And it’s really shown.”

Just ask the hitters.

“He's been pretty much unhittable,” veteran infielder Jedd Gyorko said. “All the hitters have said the same thing. His stuff has been electric. I faced him a couple of times last year, but he added a couple of wrinkles to his game and it's really paid off.

“As a team, we're excited to watch him go out there and pitch. It's been fun watching him here in Summer Camp, but we're tired of him ‘shoving’ … so it's time for him to do it against somebody else.”

Said manager Craig Counsell: “Corbin is in a good place. He’s one of the guys that, I think, benefited from being a Phoenix resident, being able to continue at our camp in Maryvale [Ariz.]. So, he never really shut down.”

Whether it was the Brewers’ plan from the start to place Burnes in the Opening Day rotation, or whether it is a reaction to Anderson’s injury, is unknown. The team piggybacked Burnes with Anderson and Freddy Peralta with another veteran slotted for the rotation, Josh Lindblom, from the start of Summer Camp. That gave them backups already on the same pitching schedule should one of the starters suffer an injury or fall ill. When Anderson developed the blister, Burnes took that spot right on schedule.

So far, Counsell’s only confirmed starters are Brandon Woodruff on Opening Day and Burnes in Game 2. Peralta is lined up to pitch Game 3 against the Cubs on Sunday, followed by Lindblom on Monday in Pittsburgh. Adrian Houser is expected to fill the fifth spot in the starting rotation.

“More than ever, it's any guy at any time, so you’ve just got to be ready to go out and get some outs,” Burnes said. “With a 60-game season, every game counts.”