The Milwaukee Brewers’ winning streak finally came to an end yesterday after eight games when they lost to the Cincinnati Reds 4-2. They’ll look to start a new streak — and win the series — in an early afternoon game today.
On the mound for the Brewers will be DL Hall, presumably followed by his partner in crime from last Friday, Quinn Priester. On Friday, Hall pitched the first three innings of the game and Priester entered in the fourth and pitched the rest of the game. Both pitched quite well: Hall looked dominant, allowing only a single walk over three innings while striking out four, and Priester put up six innings while allowing four hits, no walks, and two runs in a sort of backwards quality start.
It will be interesting to see what sort of balance the Brewers find with this duo moving forward, and how long they’ll stick with it. Hall, hypothetically, is a bullpen arm, but he hasn’t pitched since last Friday, and you’re not all that useful as a bullpen arm if you only pitch once every five days. Priester, meanwhile, seems to be a member of the current rotation, but the Brewers likely see more upside with Hall and thus could be testing to see if he’s ready to take Priester’s spot in the rotation. For now, it seems like we might see the two of them as a tandem for the immediate future, but in the long term it does seem like it would be limiting the flexibility of the pitching group a bit by essentially having six starting pitchers (and thus one fewer bullpen arm in an already taxed bullpen).
In any case, the Hall/Priester duo will take on Cincinnati’s Andrew Abbott this afternoon. Abbott, who had solid seasons of 20-plus starts in 2023 and 2024, is off to a terrific start in 2025. After missing the first two weeks of the season, Abbott debuted on April 12 and in nine starts since then he is 5-0 with a 1.51 ERA (though his FIP lags behind at 3.13). If you throw out his April 25 start in which he allowed four runs in four innings on the road in Colorado, Abbott hasn’t allowed more than one run in any of his other eight starts — a pretty remarkable stat. He was particularly good in May: he made six starts in the month and allowed one earned run in two of them and zero earned runs in four of them. That includes his best start of the season his last time out on Friday, when he went seven shutout innings with eight strikeouts, one walk, and just one hit allowed against the powerful Chicago Cubs’ lineup.
The group tasked with getting to Abbott today features some less-familiar faces, on this “day game after a night game with an off day tomorrow.” The first surprise comes right at the top of the lineup card, where we’ll see Andruw Monasterio play third base and lead off for the first time in almost a year — the last time he started a game as the Brewers’ leadoff hitter was June 11, 2024. (He came into that game hitting .147/.256/.521!) Today’s lineup also features a couple other non-regulars: Daz Cameron will bat fifth and play left field, while Eric Haase will do the catching and bat eighth. Christian Yelich, Sal Frelick, and Brice Turang remain in the lineup versus the lefty Abbott.
This is an early one, so get your coffee ready for an 11:40 a.m. CT start. As always, catch the game on FanDuel Sports Network Wisconsin and the Brewers Radio Network.