Milwaukee has the second-best record in baseball and still went out and added arms at the deadline window because that's what contenders with a banged-up rotation do. The centerpiece of the move is Lance McCullers Jr., who came over from Houston along with lefty Colton Gordon in a trade that sent outfield prospect Jadyn Fielder back to the Astros. McCullers has 10-and-5 rights, meaning he could've vetoed the whole thing, but he didn't.
So how do you use a guy who just got dealt for the first time in his career? Manager Pat Murphy already answered that one, and MLB Trade Rumors had the news first.
MLB Trade Rumors broke the news that McCullers is headed to the bullpen for Milwaukee to start his tenure.
That's a notable call given the Brewers are dealing with a legit pitching depth crisis right now. You'd think a team scrambling for innings would just hand McCullers a rotation spot and let him eat. Instead Murphy is starting him in relief, easing him back in rather than throwing him into a starter's workload right away.
There's a reason for the caution. McCullers had just been activated off the 15-day injured list, where he'd been parked with shoulder inflammation for roughly the last 2 months. That's on top of a career that's been repeatedly derailed by injury — Tommy John surgery wiped out his entire 2019 season, and forearm issues cost him most of 2023 and 2024. The Astros still got 8 starts out of him this year, but the results were ugly: a 6.86 ERA across 39 1/3 innings before the shoulder shut him down again.
Fantasy managers scrambling to figure out what to do with McCullers now have a clear answer, at least short-term: he's not a streamable starter yet, he's a bullpen arm on a leash. That changes his innings outlook, his strikeout upside and basically every prop tied to him until Milwaukee decides he's built back up enough to stretch out. For a Brewers team trying to protect a top-2 record in the league, patience with an oft-injured veteran makes plenty of sense even if it scrambles the fantasy math in the meantime.