As pitchers and catchers report to spring training, news is filtering out about injuries. Brewers manager Pat Murphy passed along a discouraging update about left-hander DL Hall, per Todd Rosiak of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Adam McCalvy of MLB.com. The lefty has a lat strain and is going to be shut down for about the next two weeks before being re-evaluated.
That’s an uncertain path forward but it seems distinctly possible that Hall won’t be ready by Opening Day. Even if he gets some good news after this shutdown period, he will be weeks behind his fellow pitchers and might then be brought along slowly, if he and the club decide to proceed cautiously.
Murphy also recently said that Brandon Woodruff probably won’t be ready by Opening Day, as he works his way back from a shoulder surgery that wiped out his entire 2024 season. Robert Gasser had Tommy John surgery in June and will miss at least the first half of the 2025 season.
When discussing the Woodruff situation, Murphy identified Freddy Peralta, Tobias Myers, Nestor Cortes and Aaron Civale as the club’s likely front four in the rotation. MLBTR recently took a detailed look at the club’s rotation option behind those four, with Hall being one of the top candidates to fill a role in the short term.
If Hall ends up needing to miss time, Aaron Ashby could get an Opening Day nod, though there are some question marks there. Arthroscopic shoulder surgery wiped out his 2023 season. He returned last year but the results were mixed. In Triple-A, he worked mostly as a starter but didn’t fare well. He had an 8.24 ERA at the end of July when the club moved him to the bullpen. He had better results there, including a 1.37 ERA in 19 2/3 major league innings to finish the year. The club still wants to give him another chance to start but there’s plenty of uncertainty after his uneven 2024 and lost 2023.
He’ll have some competition, as Logan Henderson, Carlos Rodríguez, Chad Patrick and Elvin Rodríguez are also on the 40-man roster. However, Henderson and Patrick haven’t made their major league debuts yet, while the two Rodríguezes have less than 50 big league innings between them. Jacob Misiorowski is not on the roster but is one of the top prospects in baseball and has reached Triple-A. However, he walked 14.4% of batters he faced last year and still hasn’t hit 100 innings in a season.
Even if Hall were healthy, he would come with his own question marks. A knee sprain limited him to 84 innings last year, between the majors and minors. With the Orioles in 2022 and 2023, he was moved between the rotation and bullpen, as well as being sent to the minors and back. His workload stayed beneath 100 innings in each of those seasons as well.
As a former top 100 prospect, Hall would ideally take a step forward this year, both in terms of the quality and quantity of his results. He certainly still could, but this lat strain isn’t an ideal start to a key season for him. He is down to one option year and would be out of options going into 2026 if he gets sent to the minors for 20 days this year.
Adding an external arm to the mix could be an option but it doesn’t seem as though the Brewers are operating with a ton of payroll flexibility. RosterResource estimates them for a $116MM payroll this year. That’s already well beyond the $104MM figure they ran on Opening Day last year, per Cot’s Baseball Contracts. The only major league deals they’ve given out this winter have been for inexperienced arms like Elvin Rodríguez and Grant Wolfram.
Pitchers like Nick Pivetta, Andrew Heaney, Jose Quintana and others are still available on the open market. MLBTR recently took a look at some clubs that made sense for the remaining free agent pitchers, highlighting the Brewers even before this news about Hall’s setback, though the budgetary concerns were mentioned as an obstacle. Moving Rhys Hoskins and the $22MM he’s still owed would probably help, though that will be tough after he hit .214/.303/.419 for a wRC+ of 100 last year.