Brewers Depart With Four Relievers At Non-Tender Deadline

The 2022 Non-Tender Deadline has come and gone and the Milwaukee Brewers have departed with a quartet of players, all of whom pitched some big innings out of the bullpen last season.

The big news of the day was the departure of Brent Suter. He was not an official non-tender but was instead claimed on waivers by the Colorado Rockies. The Rockies avoided arbitration with Suter by agreeing to a $3MM salary for 2023, Suter's last year of arbitration.

Milwaukee likely floated Suter through waivers as a way to gauge if other teams thought he would be worth his projected arbitration salary with the hopes he would sneak through and no one would claim him, but instead the Rockies strike again, stealing another Brewers pitcher off waivers after claiming Dinelson Lamet back in August after the ill-fated Josh Hader trade.

The Brewers also decided to non-tender relievers Trevor Gott, Luis Perdomo, and Jandel Gustave after losing Brent Suter on waivers.

As the Brewers looked at their massive 18-member arbitration class, a few players stood out as candidates to be non-tendered. Although they were projected to earn very little money, Jandel Gustave and Luis Perdomo were at the top of the list of non-tender candidates.

These relievers simply didn't perform up to expectations in 2022, either dealing with injuries or ineffectiveness and it didn't come as much of a surprise they were non-tendered. Gustave posted a 3.86 ERA in 2022 but only appeared in 28 games after dealing with an elbow injury that ended his season early. Perdomo was returning from Tommy John Surgery in 2022 but appeared in just 14 games at the big league level with a 3.80 ERA.

Overall their ERA numbers weren't horrible, but the Brewers couldn't rely on them and Perdomo especially had a few blow up performances.

The mild surprise of this group is Trevor Gott, who performed well for a large portion of his first season in Milwaukee. But he dealt with some injuries and struggled down the stretch, posting a 4.14 ERA in 45.2 IP of work. The Brewers did like his stuff and was excellent in the first half, but his late season struggles were too much to tender him a contract for 2023.

All told, the Brewers just cut 164 IP of work from their 2022 bullpen on Friday and cut approximately $6.3MM in projected payroll, nearly half of which came from the departure of Brent Suter alone.

The Brewers 40 man roster currently stands at 36 after the Non-Tender Deadline. The next big date on the offseason calendar is the Winter Meetings in San Diego. Those will take place the week of December 5th.