{"id":574261,"date":"2026-02-15T18:18:21","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T18:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/574261\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T18:18:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T18:18:21","slug":"why-the-chicago-cubs-and-milwaukee-brewers-always-seem-to-like-the-same-pitchers-cubs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/574261\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers Always Seem to Like the Same Pitchers – Cubs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOn Friday, the Cubs signed right-handed reliever Shelby Miller<\/a> to a two-year, guaranteed big-league deal. It’s a rare step for a team to take to secure the services of a pitcher who won’t take the mound in the first year of the contract. Miller underwent Tommy John<\/a> surgery near the end of the 2025 season and won’t pitch for the Cubs until 2027, if at all. Most of the time, a pitcher in their mid-30s signs a minor-league deal while the recuperate from this kind of operation. For instance, after his Cubs career ended on a surgeon’s slab, Adbert Alzolay<\/a> signed a two-year minor-league deal with the New York Mets. In this case, though, the Cubs went the extra mile.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tDoing that has short- and long-term implications. The Cubs will have to designate someone for assignment to slot Miller onto their 40-man roster, even though they’ll pass him directly through that list and onto the 60-day injured list. That’s fine, in that the team has plenty of players on the fringes of the roster whom they can lose without being especially upset. It still means that acquiring Miller now was more important to them than seeing a few spring outings from whichever arm gets the axe\u2014likely someone like Gavin Hollowell<\/a>, Luke Little<\/a> or Ryan Rolison<\/a>. It also means that Miller will take up a 40-man roster spot all next winter. Given how many current Cubs are set to hit free agency after the World Series, that, too, is an acceptable tradeoff, but it’s a real cost. These considerations are why few teams sign players like this to deals like this one.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tWhy did the Cubs take that extraordinary step? In part, at least, it’s because of their neighbors to the north\u2014their foremost rivals, not only for division titles but for under-the-radar pitching help. Miller was the Milwaukee Brewers’ top trade deadline acquisition last summer, and though he didn’t last with the team long before his elbow blew out, he and Milwaukee had mutual interest in a reunion this winter. Miller is the kind of pitcher the Brewers like, which means he’s the kind of pitcher the Cubs like.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the five seasons since 2021, the following pitchers have twirled for both the Cubs and the Crew:\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a sense, even that list isn’t exhaustive. It doesn’t include players each team has brought into camp who had pitched for the other during the same span, but who never appeared with the second club\u2014or cases like that of Bryan Hudson<\/a>, the ex-Cubs farmhand whom the Brewers scooped up and briefly turned into a strong lefty setup man. It’ll suffice, though, to demonstrate the point: these teams look for a lot of the same things and compete for a lot of the same pitchers.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Brewers love a three-fastball mix. They prize pitchers who can use a four-seamer, a sinker and a cutter to positive effects, and ask their guys to lean on those offerings. The Cubs don’t preach using all three of those varietals together as consistently, but they like the cut-ride fastball, which is often a way of getting the benefits of a four-seamer and a cutter from one pitch, thereby simplifying the mix for the pitcher (but putting a bit more pressure on their secondary weapon(s)). That’s an important commonality, even if the two sides each think of it differently.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tBoth teams, too, assiduously build strong defenses, and they try to get the most of them by bringing in pitchers who manage contact, rather than dodging it. Each team prefers more of their resources to be allocated to position players, so they don’t often take big swings on pitching in the draft or splurge on high-priced hurlers with whiffs-forward arsenals. They’re trying to prevent runs, and they’re happy to do that a slightly more cost-efficient way (by sacrificing offense at one or two positions to maximize defense, and being excellent on balls in play, rather than racking up strikeouts).\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThe overlap is not perfect, in either philosophy or execution. The Brewers have to attack things this way when it comes to external acquisitions, but they focus on accumulating depth via internal development and team control. They don’t use first-round picks on pitchers, but they spend more time, energy and money on the later rounds of the draft than the Cubs do, and it shows. They’re better than Chicago at pitching development, and that difference gets exaggerated by the way they go about team building over multi-year periods. Milwaukee also maximizes their chances to get that kind of development right, though, through deals like the one they made earlier this month. In trading their starting third baseman (Caleb Durbin<\/a>) and two backup infielders, they created a small hole they had to patch, but also reinforced their pitching depth admirably with two new lefties.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tChicago, by contrast, is willing to walk the tightrope with a more expensive and less flexible (but more proven) pitching staff. They’ve paid a price for that, at times, but they’ve also reaped the benefits of it. Since these teams tend to prefer finding and using similar pitchers at different stages of their careers, it’s not surprising that they end up employing a lot of the same guys.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIt does add a sense of silliness to the ostensibly heated rivalry between the sides, though. Few teams in baseball are more similar than these two, in the ways they try to win games\u2014especially on the mound. The seeds of an eventual divergence between them have been planted, in the Cubs’ hiring and promotion of Tyler Zombro, who has some slightly different predilections than the Brewers’, but even then, there’s overlap. If one of the two clubs likes you, the other is likely to like you, too. Being a Brewer, especially, is a leading indicator of eventually being a Cub. The teams sometimes vie unexpectedly hard for the same otherwise forgettable players, which is a big part of why Miller has a 40-man roster spot right now. At least twice in the last two offseasons, both teams have pursued a pitcher who ended up signing a minor-league deal with one or the other; they often end up at the top of the market for hurlers the rest of the league is less high on. As much as each side might want to beat the other, they show considerable tacit respect for one another by so often locking in on the same targets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Friday, the Cubs signed right-handed reliever Shelby Miller to a two-year, guaranteed big-league deal. It’s a rare…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574262,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2401],"tags":[5,136,158,843,59,4280,4,849],"class_list":{"0":"post-574261","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-colin-rea","11":"tag-milwaukee","12":"tag-milwaukee-brewers","13":"tag-milwaukeebrewers","14":"tag-mlb","15":"tag-shelby-miller"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116076026887539027","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574261","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=574261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}