{"id":529044,"date":"2026-01-20T13:15:14","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T13:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/529044\/"},"modified":"2026-01-20T13:15:14","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T13:15:14","slug":"brewers-chad-patrick-gets-a-shaky-2026-forecast-that-changes-the-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/529044\/","title":{"rendered":"Brewers\u2019 Chad Patrick gets a shaky 2026 forecast that changes the conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Milwaukee Brewers fans have seen this movie many times: a young arm shows up, pitches much better than expected, earns a rotation spot, and suddenly they have a new, intriguing young starting pitcher. Chad Patrick\u2019s 2025 absolutely fits the vibe \u2014 which is why FanGraphs spitting out a 4.46 ERA projection<\/a> for 2026 feels like a personal attack.<\/p>\n

But projections aren\u2019t trying to be your friend. They\u2019re trying to be annoyingly right about the parts of a breakout that don\u2019t always repeat.<\/p>\n

FanGraph’s projection model doesn\u2019t buy Chad Patrick\u2019s 2025 breakout. Should Brewers fans?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the receipt. Patrick\u2019s 2025 performance was legitimately solid: He posted a 3.53 ERA, made 27 appearances (23 starts), and logged 119.2 innings with a 1.279 WHIP and 127 strikeouts. He was worth 2.6 fWAR on the season. Dig into the rate stats and you see why it played: 9.6 K\/9, 3.0 BB\/9, 8.5 H\/9, 1.0 HR\/9, and a 3.18 K\/BB.<\/p>\n

So why does a 4.46 ERA projection make any sense? Because the model is basically shrugging and saying: \u201cCool year. Now do it again now that the hitters have adjusted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patrick\u2019s 2025 success leaned on a couple ingredients <\/a>that can be a little fragile if you don\u2019t keep evolving. The first is that hard stuff buys you instant credibility, until it doesn\u2019t. When Patrick first arrived, the velocity theory worked in his favor <\/a>\u2014 hitters had to honor the heater, and everything else played up because they were a tick late and just unsure enough to guess wrong. Practically everything out of Patrick’s hand was a fastball variation at the beginning of the season, which only works for so long.<\/p>\n

The second is the margin gets tighter if the secondaries aren\u2019t true weapons.<\/a> If you\u2019re a starter living primarily off fastball variants and hoping your \u201cother stuff\u201d survives contact, you\u2019re basically daring the league to sit on patterns. And by mid-rotation standards, that\u2019s how you end up with the classic Brewers dilemma. The guy is useful, but the third time through the order turns into a choose-your-own-adventure.<\/p>\n

The nuance matters heading into 2026. Patrick doesn\u2019t need to become Freddy Peralta overnight.<\/a> He just needs a secondary pitch that hitters have to respect in bad counts.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where we can find some optimism. Patrick came back in August with a new breaker that Statcast tags as a slurve, but that he typically calls a curveball, and it gave him real movement separation off his cutter. Brewer Fanatic’s Jack Stern published an excellent in-depth analysis of the new pitch<\/a> over at brewerfanatic.com.<\/a> If that pitch becomes more than a show-me option, the 4.46 projection starts looking lazy, because models can\u2019t fully price in a legitimate pitch jump until it shows up over a full-season sample.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

So where does that leave us? Expecting Patrick to repeat the 3.53 ERA that he posted in 2025 feels like a bullish prediction, but jumping all the way to 4.46 feels unfairly bearish. Split the difference and you get an ERA right around the 4.00 mark, which feels very reasonable for Patrick’s sophomore season. Of course, it’s highly dependent on whether he pitches in the rotation or out of the bullpen, which has yet to be decided.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Milwaukee Brewers fans have seen this movie many times: a young arm shows up, pitches much better than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":529045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2401],"tags":[5,136,843,59,4280,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-529044","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-milwaukee-brewers","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-brewers","10":"tag-milwaukee","11":"tag-milwaukee-brewers","12":"tag-milwaukeebrewers","13":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/115927615080867563","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/529045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}