PHOENIX -- Players are traded. Managers, they say, are hired to be fired. A World Series champion is crowned every season, and it is seldom one from the year before.
Yet the connective tissue that runs through the game, the line that links past and present, is never far from the surface.
Meet Wade Miley's youngest son: Trace Gibson Miley.
Miley was a rookie with the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2011, when Kirk Gibson was in his second season as manager there. The two bonded, and Miley became a crucial member of the starting rotation. He won 16 games in a breakout 2012 season and had 34 victories in 98 games (95 starts) from 2012-14 before both moved on.
Naming rights seemed almost a foregone conclusion.
“He was a huge impact on my career, definitely, and even my life,” Miley said on the first workout day for pitchers and catchers at Spring Training Thursday. “How he carried himself and how he expected us to be.
“As hard-nosed as he came off as a player, which he was no doubt, the genuine care that he showed for us as players, especially when I was such a young player, it just stuck with me. That [name] was something special to us. It’s cool.”
Miley called Gibson with the news.
“He made a joke about why I didn’t name the first one after him,” said Miley, whose older son is named Jeb. “Just typical Kirk Gibson. It was great. I try to stay in contact as much as I can. He was a big part of why I’m still here now, giving me the opportunity while I was a young kid to play this game and show me the ropes. Blessed to be able to know somebody like that.”
Miley, who signed a one-year, $8.5 million contract this winter, figures prominently in the Brewers’ rotation plans and figures to slot in near the top. Right-handers Freddy Peralta and Colin Rea and Miley are the lone returnees who made as many as two starts on the Brewers’ NL Central title team last year.
Miley, 37, revamped his arsenal in his first season with the Brewers in 2018, going to more of a cut fastball/changeup combination than the two-seam fastball/slider package that he used early in his career, understanding that longevity required adjustment.
“People bash the technology all the time, but it has been incredible being able to refine things,” Miley said. “For me, the important thing is, you get to a point where you feel really good, and now we have technology to go back to it.
“Once things go haywire, you can go back to what I was doing when things were going good, rather than it being a guess. It’s always been possible, but it was more of a guess back then, where now it’s like ‘your hand needs to be here. Your body needs to be here.’
“You still have to go compete in the moment and be able to win with what you have that day. At the same time, that stuff gives you the best information you can get.”
Miley dug into that approach in 2018, when he was 5-2 with a 2.57 ERA in 16 starts, and he has since had a pair of double-digit victory seasons with a cumulative 3.43 ERA in 115 games while pitching around oblique, shoulder, elbow and lat issues.
He was 9-4 with a 3.14 ERA in 23 starts upon his return to the Brewers in 2023.
“I give a lot of credit to the Brewers’ organization for helping me make that adjustment and believing in it,” Miley said. “The hardest thing when you are changing something is getting behind it and believing in it. They helped me a lot. That’s why I was back here last year and why hopefully I can finish here.”
Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy has seen Miley’s growth, and said “his stuff is better than it has ever been.”
“He’s as old-school as you can get, but he loves the analytics because he loves information and he wants to be clear when he pitches. Data can create some clarity. It doesn't always. But for a guy that takes it on the way he did … an old school dude who wants to grow, he’s a masterpiece.”
Miley’s positive clubhouse vibe, Murphy added, is hard to overstate.
“You just wish every veteran looked at the game this way,” Murphy said. “He is special, because he can relate to all types. He’s like an extended member of the staff. He impacts people. The more people you can have to do that, the better.”