On Monday, the Brewers added another pitcher and traded with Cleveland to acquire J.C. Mejia.
David Stearns have been very active so far this off-season. He acquired utility infielder Mike Brosseau via trade not too long ago. Pedro Severino was signed to back up Omar Narvaez shortly after Manny Pina’s departure. Additionally, pitcher Trevor Gott received a major league deal and Hobie Harris a minor league deal with an invite to big league camp.
Let’s take a look at their most recent addition, right handed pitcher J.C. Mejia.
Mejia will be 25 years old for the majority of the upcoming 2022 season. He made his MLB debut last May for Cleveland, which is the team that signed him as an international free agent in 2013. One interesting tid bit about him is that he was recently granted a fourth and final minor league option.
Unfortunately, Mejia has struggled over the past few seasons, both at the major league and minor league levels. At the Advanced-A level in 2019 he made eight starts and finished with a 4.09 ERA. In 2021, he started the year at the Triple-A level where he made ten appearances, six of them being starts, and recorded a 6.75 ERA. Once in the major leagues, he covered 52.1 innings, played in 17 games, and had a 8.25 ERA. He started 11 games and found more success once he transitioned to the bullpen, although it was a very small sample size.
All of those statistics do not sound promising, however if you dig deeper into Mejia’s game there are some metrics to be excited about. For instance, his sinker has 6.8 inches of vertical drop, which is near the highest in the league. His slider generated whiffs 41% of the time in 2021 and his curveball is unique in that it has a lot more horizontal movement to it than most.
If you are Mejia, you have to excited about coming to Milwaukee. The Brewers have been great at sending pitchers into their secret pitching lab and suddenly making them studs. Mejia certainly seems like a pitcher that the Brewers saw metrics that they like and elected to take a chance on him. Only time will tell if he pans out or not.
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