Brewers rumors: Insider's cryptic report has fans pondering possible bullpen addition

The Milwaukee Brewers have had a relatively quiet offseason up to this point in large part due to the front office's forward-thinking roster construction in recent years. Focusing on acquiring players with several years of team control, paired with a player development department that is one of the best in baseball, has left the Brewers with little work to do this offseason after winning an MLB-best 97 games in the regular season last year.

Sure, the Brewers could improve at several positions, but after team insider Adam McCalvy reported that the team is sticking with Joey Ortiz at shortstop to start the 2026 campaign, there aren't any glaring holes that Matt Arnold and company have to patch up this offseason. Therefore, any moves that the front office does complete during the rest of the offseason, outside of a potential Freddy Peralta blockbuster that will always be in the back of Brewers' fans’ minds, are likely to improve the margins of the back-to-back-to-back NL Central champions' roster.

One peculiarity of the Brewers' current projected Opening Day roster is the lack of right-handed options in the bullpen. Teams are often scrambling to find left-handed arms for their 'pen, so rarely do you hear of a club having too many. However, a lack of right-handed options could lead to some matchup issues for Pat Murphy next season, leading to a belief that the Brewers could still add a right-handed arm to their bullpen before spring training commences next month. Such a move could occur in the not-so-distant future after MLB insider Mark Feinsand just made the following cryptic post on the social media platform X.

MLB insider Mark Feinsand reports that several NL Central teams are interested in right-handed reliever Ryne Stanek

There's likely a good reason for Feinsand not including the specific names of the NL Central teams who are interested in Ryne Stanek, but as things currently stand, this is what Brewers fans and their divisional counterparts are left with. Regardless, the question remains: does Stanek even make sense for the Brewers?

On the surface, it's confusing why any team, much less most of the NL Central, would be interested in Stanek, who spent the last season and a half with the New York Mets. The 34-year-old Stanek has failed to post an ERA better than 4.09 in each of the last three years. His walk rate was inflated in 2025, and he was crushed when he did land the ball in the strike zone, with a hard hit rate and an average exit velocity against him that each ranked in the 23rd percentile or worse to prove it. Despite being reliable, making 55 or more appearances in each of the last five campaigns, those numbers don't scream "bidding war" as Feinsand's tweet suggests.

However, when you peel back a few layers, the interest in Stanek starts to make more sense. First off, because of his pedestrian numbers over the last three seasons, the right-hander is likely to sign a relatively inexpensive one-year deal with whichever team he ends up choosing. That's something that should make Brewers' fans' ears perk up.

Additionally, back in 2022, before his performance dipped, Stanek was a key part of the Houston Astros' World Series-winning team, posting an unbelievable 1.15 ERA in 59 appearances; he didn't surrender a single run in four appearances in the 2022 postseason. Stanek's success was in large part due to a strong arsenal of pitches that confusingly hasn't yielded good results in the recent past.

According to Stuff+, a metric that measures the "nastiness" of each pitch based on its movement and velocity compared to a league average pitch, all three of Stanek's offerings were above-average pitches in 2025. The combination led to a combined Stuff+ score of 116 for Stanek in 2025. Paired with a Location+ score of 101 and an overall Pitching+ grade of 117 that suggested Stanek was far better than the league-average reliever, his surface-level numbers (5.30 ERA in 2025) are even more perplexing.

It's certainly no guarantee that the Brewers are even one of the teams interested in Stanek, but paired with their loose need for more right-handers in their bullpen, the presumed price of Stanek's services, and Feinsand's report, it's fair to assume that the Brewers are at least entertaining the idea of adding the nine-year MLB veteran to their bullpen this offseason.