Brewers' Top 5 righty starters: McCalvy's take

No one loves a good debate quite like baseball fans, and with that in mind, we asked each of our beat reporters to rank the top five players by position in the history of their franchise, based on their career while playing for that club. These rankings are for fun and debate purposes only, and are updated through the end of the 2025 season.

Here is Adam McCalvy’s ranking of top 5 right-handed starting pitchers in Brewers history.

• Brewers' All-Time Team: C | 1B | 2B | 3B | SS | LF | CF | RF | DH

1. Ben Sheets, 2001-08
Key fact: Was the Brewers’ all-time strikeout leader from 2008 -- when he broke Teddy Higuera’s club mark -- until 2014.

Sheets couldn’t hit a lick, even as a kid in little St. Amant, La., so he earned notice with his arm. The Brewers drafted him 10th overall in 1999, and Sheets gained fame the following year at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, where he authored a shutout against mighty Cuba in the gold medal game for baseball’s version of hockey’s Miracle On Ice. It was the highlight of Sheets’ meteoric rise to the Major Leagues by 2001, and it was all rather simple: Sheets threw a steady diet of power fastballs and killer, 12-to-6 curveballs.

“I don’t know what you’d change,” he said in 2019. “I had nothing but two pitches. Everybody’s mad because I never had a third pitch. Dude, I worked on changeups and cutters, sliders. I couldn’t throw ‘em. That’s what people don’t realize, like from the fans: ‘He needs a third pitch.’ Shoot, you don’t think we know that? Looking back, obviously I could have been better. But I was pretty successful, and I only threw two pitches.

“One time [then-Brewers pitching coach] Mike Maddux said to me, ‘I think you’d be shocked at how effective the changeup is.’ So I looked it up. They were like 7-for-9 against it at that time, with like five homers. I was like, ‘You’re right, I am shocked. I didn’t know it was that bad.’”

Instead, Sheets took some advice from longtime Brewers bullpen catcher Marcus Hanel and honed his two best pitches. The strategy worked, to the tune of four All-Star teams in eight seasons with the Brewers, starting with his rookie season in 2001, and ending with his final season in Milwaukee in 2008, when he became the first (and so far, only) pitcher to start a Midsummer Classic. Sheets’ finest season was ’04, the year he logged a 2.70 ERA and 264 strikeouts -- a franchise record that still stands.

The signature performance was May 16, 2004, when he set a club record with 18 strikeouts in a complete-game masterpiece against the Braves at Miller Park. His second-best season was ’08, when Sheets had a sub-3.00 ERA until the final week of September for a team that was closing in on the Brewers’ first postseason berth in 26 years. A 1-0 shutout against Jake Peavy and the Padres on Sept. 6 proved his last great performance; Sheets battled an injured elbow after that and missed the playoffs, then underwent surgery that fall.

“We all know about his injuries,” teammate Geoff Jenkins said, “but even when he was injured, he was on that top step. He was just an awesome competitor. But man, he was an even better person. Maybe a lot of people don’t know that backdrop about Ben.”

2. Yovani Gallardo, 2007-14
Key fact: Brewers all-time leader as of 2025 with 1,226 strikeouts

There’s a common criticism of the Brewers during Doug Melvin’s era as GM, that while the club hit on many of the hitters it selected with high Draft picks, it commonly whiffed on pitchers. Melvin would counter that the Brewers could have drafted pitchers with more of those early picks, but then fans wouldn’t have had Prince Fielder, Ryan Braun and the rest of those hitters. Regardless of where one falls in that debate, Gallardo was one of the Brewers’ home-grown successes, a second-round pick in 2004 from Fort Worth, Texas, who could swing the bat a bit, too.

The Brewers’ opinion of Gallardo’s talent and poise was apparent in 2008, when, with Sheets injured and CC Sabathia having just defeated the Cubs in the regular-season finale to clinch the NL Wild Card, Gallardo was tabbed to start the team’s first postseason game in a generation. It was quite an assignment for a 22-year-old who had just made his Major League debut in ’07, never mind the fact that Gallardo had missed most of ’08 with a knee injury, and had pitched only one time since May 1.

In the years that followed, he stayed healthy and was a steady contributor atop Milwaukee’s rotation, making the NL All-Star team in 2010 and topping 200 strikeouts in four straight seasons from 2009-12. In 2011, Gallardo led a starting rotation fortified by trades for Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum, going 17-10 with a 3.52 ERA and a career-best 207 strikeouts in the regular season before delivering a pair of stellar starts in the 2011 NL Division Series against the D-backs.

In 2014, Gallardo passed Sheets to become the Brewers’ all-time strikeout leader. He finished his Milwaukee tenure with 1,226 strikeouts before the team traded Gallardo to Texas for a group of prospects that included a future All-Star closer in Corey Knebel.

“Any time you have an established veteran who grew up in the organization and was your No. 1 starter for all those years, you miss having him around,” Brewers manager Ron Roenicke said the following spring. “Very steady and consistent. When you needed a big game from him, he’d go out and have a big game.”

3. Freddy Peralta, 2018-present
Key fact: In 2025 became the third pitcher to reach 1,000 strikeouts with the Brewers

The Brewers’ “Big Three” starters from this era – Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff and Freddy Peralta – were so intertwined with the club’s success from 2018 onward that it was difficult to separate them. If one values peak performance, then the nod goes to Burnes, who won the 2021 NL Cy Young Award. If it’s run prevention – the bottom line for a pitcher, after all – then perhaps it is Woodruff, who ended 2025 with the lowest career ERA in franchise history for a pitcher with 500-plus innings for the Brewers. But with longevity and consistency becoming rarer for starting pitchers as MLB evolves, there’s a case for putting Peralta at the top of the trio – especially in the wake of a ’25 season in which he was 17-6 with a 2.70 ERA and his third straight season of 200-plus strikeouts, leading the way to a franchise-record 97 victories. Peralta’s WAR was 5.5 by the Baseball-Reference formula. Only Sheets (2004) delivered a higher single-season bWAR.

Peralta also occupies some sentimental corners of Brewers history, starting with a magical debut on Mother’s Day in 2018 when Peralta was expecting to take the mound for Triple-A Colorado Springs in front of family and friends, who’d never seen him pitch professionally. Instead, Chase Anderson’s illness forced the Brewers to summon Peralta north to Denver’s Coors Field, where, firing almost exclusively fastballs, he took a no-hitter into the sixth inning and set a Brewers rookie record with 13 strikeouts. Less than two years later, Peralta further endeared himself to Milwaukee fans by signing a club-friendly contract extension that made him a relative bargain during his prime seasons.

4. Corbin Burnes, 2018-23
Key fact: In 2021 became the Brewers’ third Cy Young Award winner

Burnes joined the Brewers as an electric bullpen arm in 2018, only to follow up in 2019 with an 8.82 ERA. He served up 11 home runs that season before completing his 18th inning, and was so bad that eventually the team shut him down and shipped him to Phoenix to work in a pitching lab that was just starting to garner notice. Burnes spent the offseason working on his repertoire and his mental game and returned in 2020 a different pitcher. When baseball emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic and resumed a full schedule in 2021, he was one of the best pitchers in the sport, teaming with Josh Hader on the second no-hitter in franchise history and setting a slew of strikeout records on the way to winning the first ERA title by a Brewer. Burnes was named the Baseball Writers' Association of America’s National League Cy Young Award winner over runners-up Zack Wheeler of the Phillies and Max Scherzer of the Dodgers in a razor-thin vote, the only knock being Burnes’ relatively modest 167 innings. It was the fewest innings ever for a starting pitcher who won a Cy Young Award in a full season.

When Burnes did pitch, he was almost always dominant. He led MLB in ERA (2.43), expected ERA (2.01), Fangraphs WAR (7.5), strikeout rate (35.6%, eighth-best all-time for a qualifying pitcher through 2021), K/BB ratio (6.88), FIP (1.63), home runs per nine innings (0.38) and barrel rate (2.9%). Only Scherzer had a lower WHIP than Burnes’ 0.94. Only Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez, in 1999, had posted a lower FIP in the divisional era (since 1969). It was the first season of a three-year span in which Burnes made 93 starts with a 2.94 ERA and averaged 225 strikeouts before being traded to Baltimore on the eve of 2024 Spring Training.

“Having a front row seat to watching Corbin pitch was incredible,” said Woodruff. “If you look across the board at what he’s done, nothing has been given. He’s worked for all of it.”

5. Brandon Woodruff, 2017-present
Key fact: Brewers’ all-time ERA leader through 2025 (min. 500 innings)

You never doubted Woodruff’s ability to overcome adversity. The Rangers selected him in the fifth round of the 2011 Draft out of Wheeler, Miss., but Woodruff thought he could do better so he went to pitch for a big-time college program at Mississippi State. It was a struggle, however. Woodruff says he “stunk” in college after his freshman year, he had surgery for a bone spur and a stress fracture, and he fell all the way to the Brewers in the 11th round as a Draft-eligible junior.

Again and again, he rebounded. Thrown into the unfamiliar role of reliever during the 2018 postseason, he not only pitched, he homered off Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw in Game 1 of the NLCS. When his first All-Star season in 2019 was interrupted by an oblique injury, he made it back in time to start the NL Wild Card Game. He made another All-Star team in 2021 and delivered a solid season in ’22 before dealing with shoulder problems in ’23, including a season-ending injury on the eve of the postseason that needed major surgery. But after nearly two years of rehab, he made it back to the mound in Miami for an eight-strikeout gem against the Marlins.

“Two years, you get emotional thinking about what this kid has been through,” manager Pat Murphy said. “Then to see him go out and compete like that? It just sets an example for everyone else.”

Honorable mentions

Chris Bosio, 1986-92

By the Baseball-Reference measure of wins above replacement, Bosio owns two of the top 11 seasons ever for a Brewers starter (through 2025). And he was one of the team’s all-time competitors.

“I remember him coming into the dugout in Toronto,” said catcher-turned TV analyst Bill Schroeder. “We didn’t all have our own bat bags then. You would bring 3-4 bats on a trip, and that’s it. The big boys would have more. But I remember him coming in and grabbing two of my bats and he just destroyed them. He’d had a bad game, so he came in and grabbed anything. He probably figured I wasn’t going to use my bats, so he might as well beat them up. He didn’t take any crap from anyone.”

Moose Haas, 1976-85

Bryan Edmund Haas -- “Moose” was a nickname bestowed by his father at birth -- logged the second-most starts, third-most complete games, third-most innings and fifth-most strikeouts in the Brewers’ first 50 years while pitching a decade with the team. His 14 strikeouts against the Yankees on April 12, 1978, set a franchise record that stood until Sheets broke it in 2004.

Pete Vuckovich, 1981-86
Key fact: Another old-school stat: Vuckovich’s .606 winning percentage for the Brewers is tops in club history (min. 50 decisions).

The statistics don’t do justice to Vuckovich, who fares poorly in advanced stats but was also the only starting pitcher in Brewers history to win the Cy Young Award until Burnes in 2021, and was one of the top starters on the Crew's most beloved teams in the early 1980s. He came to Milwaukee with a pair of future Hall of Famers -- Rollie Fingers and Ted Simmons -- in a trade with the Cardinals at the 1980 Winter Meetings that gave the Brewers the final pieces of their first two postseason teams.

In '82 he fought through searing shoulder pain in the postseason to help the Brewers reach the seventh game of the World Series against the Cardinals, grunting and grinding his way through every batter.

“His shoulder was blown and he still got us to the sixth inning of the seventh game,” said Simmons. “He was giving me, like, half a fastball. He knew it. And finally, the Cardinals knew it. But Peter is an extraordinary man. Peter is the kind of guy who would say, ‘Hey, everyone has got challenges.’”

Jim Slaton, 1971-77, 1979-83

There’s something to be said for longevity, and no one had more longevity with the Brewers than Slaton, who is the franchise’s all-time leader in starts, wins, losses and innings, and watched the team transform from essentially an expansion outfit in the early 1970s to a contender by the end of that decade and to the World Series in 1982.

“He was a stalwart of our rotation for a long, long time,” Gorman Thomas said. “You could never tell if he had a great day or a not-so-good day. He was so dependable and consistent. Quiet people like him never draw attention to themselves.”