Questions surrounding the Brewers' rotation ahead of Deadline

This story was excerpted from Adam McCalvy’s Brewers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

MILWAUKEE – Could Freddy Peralta wind up back in a Brewers uniform? It’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. This season’s struggles notwithstanding, any team would love to have a pitcher like Peralta, as manager Pat Murphy sees it.

But he isn’t holding his breath.

“I don’t know how that works,” Murphy said before the Brewers roughed up Peralta in Monday’s 8-3 win. “[Getting a player] from a team you just traded him to? I don’t think that works that way very often.”

So, maybe it won’t be Peralta, but the Brewers are surely shopping the starting pitching market with the Aug. 3 Trade Deadline now less than two weeks away and questions abounding in Milwaukee’s rotation:

1. Is Jacob Misiorowski right?

The Brewers’ ace didn’t pitch in Pittsburgh before the All-Star break as scheduled, then lost his legs after two innings Monday night while pitching on 12 days’ rest and was out of the game after 65 pitches. Murphy used the word “concerned.” Misiorowski certainly did not, saying, “I’m right in the spot I need to be.”

2. Is Kyle Harrison right?

The breakout left-hander landed on the injured list at the end of the first half with a sore elbow but insisted it isn’t concerning, then said a precautionary MRI scan over the break was “all good.” Harrison is eligible to return from the injured list on Friday, but Murphy indicated that “there’s a little trace of something there” and that he’ll "have some sides and some build-ups" before returning to pitch for the Brewers.

There’s no public indication of how long that will take, though the team typically releases an injury report on Tuesday afternoons that provides clarity.

“He’s champing at the bit to go,” Murphy said.

3. Is there enough rotation depth beyond that?

The Brewers’ rotation coming out of the break was Logan Henderson, Shane Drohan, Robert Gasser, Misiorowski and Brandon Sproat. Harrison would be a sixth. Coleman Crow is back from a forearm injury and pitching at Triple-A Nashville, where he delivered six scoreless innings with one hit on Sunday.

That’s seven.

Lance McCullers Jr. covered three innings in his Brewers debut on Monday night and topped out around 91 mph, but retired the first seven hitters he faced before running into trouble in his third inning of work. If he stays healthy, he could make starts. So could another recently acquired veteran, Bryse Wilson, in a pinch.

That’s eight and nine, but with some limits.

Maybe it’s enough. Even with Brandon Woodruff going down, and Quinn Priester going down, they own the second-best team ERA in the Majors (3.44) behind the Yankees (3.42). But what works over the course of the regular season sometimes isn’t what works in a short postseason series. So, president of baseball operations Matt Arnold and his crew will have to decide over the next two weeks whether to spend prospect capital from MLB Pipeline’s top-ranked farm system in order to add an experienced arm or two.

Murphy was asked whether he considers starting pitching among his club’s needs.

“Yeah, for sure,” Murphy said. “I think we have tons of needs, you know what I mean? But that’s not really my deal. I can give opinions, but I have to worry about what we have. You can’t get divided attention away from my job. My job is to worry about what we have. We have very capable people in place to worry about that and other things.

“But if somebody asks me, ‘Hey, could you guys have a need in starting pitching? Do you have a need in the bullpen?' Yes, yes. 'Do you have a need here, a need there?' Yes. Especially the way I think, I’m always looking for the holes in the dam to try and plug them.”

Peralta would be somebody the Brewers not only know, but love. He had a 3.59 ERA, made two All-Star teams and delivered three seasons of 200-plus strikeouts over his eight memorable seasons with the Brewers before they traded him to the Mets in January.

After taking his lumps on Monday night, he’s 5-9 with a 5.01 ERA in 21 New York starts. The Mets are in last place in the NL East and charting their own course for the Trade Deadline.

"I don't know what the future holds. That's out of my control,” Peralta told reporters, including our intrepid Zach Sweet.

Peralta knows he doesn’t want to stay on the same path he’s on.

"Everything's there,” he said. “Velocity is there. I think compared with last year, even, I have the sweeper or the slider. It's better than last year. So, I don't know. I've been working, trying to figure it out, but I'm not going to give up on this."

That’s the Peralta the Brewers loved.

“Look, Freddy was a huge part of this whole thing,” Murphy said. “Just thinking about Freddy, he posts every time. The smile, the way he treated people, what he was about. To me, that’s the memory.”