Logan Henderson’s new pitch arsenal complicates ongoing battle for rotation spots

The Milwaukee Brewers’ rotation picture felt like it was starting to behave. You could squint at the board, circle a handful of names, and call it a plan: Brandon Woodruff back as the tone-setter, Quinn Priester and “Miz” (Jacob Misiorowski) as the high-upside youth core, Kyle Harrison as the lefty counterpunch, Chad Patrick as the steady type.

But now, Logan Henderson has come into spring training looking like he’s fixed the one thing that made it easiest to file him away.

Brewers rotation race just took a tense turn with Logan Henderson adding missing weapons

Henderson’s issue was never whether he could get outs. He already proved he can get big-league outs. In five MLB starts last season, he ran a 1.78 ERA, leaning almost entirely on a fastball and a changeup — nearly 90 percent of his pitches were those two offerings. 

But a two-pitch pitcher is a label that eventually comes due. Hitters adjust. Lineups stack against it. The third time through the order becomes a courtroom. And the Brewers know this, which is why pitching coach Chris Hook essentially pushed the conversation to the obvious next step: if Henderson wanted to stay a starter long-term, he needed another real look — something that wasn’t just a prayer-slider or a show-it-to-them-once novelty. 

So Henderson went out and did the exact thing that changes camp math: he brought a curveball back from the dead and started leaning harder into a cutter, trying to build an actual bridge between the heater and the changeup. Hook has said Henderson worked on the curve throughout the offseason, and the early spring has already featured him testing that pitch in games while sprinkling in more cutters than we were used to seeing. 

That’s why this suddenly complicates the rotation battle in a very predictable way. When Milwaukee believes in an arm, they don’t need 10 spring innings to prove it. They need to see whether the idea can survive contact. Henderson’s plus changeup has always given him a foundation. Now the question is whether this new breaking-ball/cutter package gives him the one thing that separates “nice depth starter” from “you can’t send this guy down without feeling dumb.”

If Henderson’s third pitch is even competent, his ceiling as a starter starts to look cleaner than some of the safer options. The tidy list of Woodruff/Priester/Miz/Harrison/Patrick may still be the most likely outcome. But Henderson showing up with answers instead of questions is exactly how Milwaukee rotations get reshuffled. And it’s how depth turns into a rotation battle where someone gets pushed out.