Brewers’ Chad Patrick gets a shaky 2026 forecast that changes the conversation

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’s 2025 absolutely fits the vibe — which is why FanGraphs spitting out a 4.46 ERA projection for 2026 feels like a personal attack.

But projections aren’t trying to be your friend. They’re trying to be annoyingly right about the parts of a breakout that don’t always repeat.

FanGraph's projection model doesn’t buy Chad Patrick’s 2025 breakout. Should Brewers fans?

Let’s start with the receipt. Patrick’s 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.

So why does a 4.46 ERA projection make any sense? Because the model is basically shrugging and saying: “Cool year. Now do it again now that the hitters have adjusted.”

Patrick’s 2025 success leaned on a couple ingredients that can be a little fragile if you don’t keep evolving. The first is that hard stuff buys you instant credibility, until it doesn’t. When Patrick first arrived, the velocity theory worked in his favor — 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.

The second is the margin gets tighter if the secondaries aren’t true weapons. If you’re a starter living primarily off fastball variants and hoping your “other stuff” survives contact, you’re basically daring the league to sit on patterns. And by mid-rotation standards, that’s 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.

The nuance matters heading into 2026. Patrick doesn’t need to become Freddy Peralta overnight. He just needs a secondary pitch that hitters have to respect in bad counts.

That’s 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 over at brewerfanatic.com. If that pitch becomes more than a show-me option, the 4.46 projection starts looking lazy, because models can’t fully price in a legitimate pitch jump until it shows up over a full-season sample.  

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.