Brewers option Taylor Williams to Triple-A, call up Jake Petricka

Now that the season is 10 days old, teams are allowed to recall players who were optioned down to the minors at the start of the year. The Brewers are taking full advantage of that to bring up a fresh relief arm for their series finale against the Chicago Cubs, recalling right-hander Jake Petricka from Triple-A San Antonio and sending Taylor Williams down for his first shuttle ride of the season.

Petricka was the final roster cut of spring training after striking out 13 batters but also walking 6 during 11 Cactus League innings. When Petricka was optioned down, manager Craig Counsell made it clear he would be back soon.

Williams was the pick to be the first reliever optioned down after a rocky first few innings to start the regular season. After putting up a 0.79 ERA with 13 strikeouts in 11.1 spring innings, Williams has been tagged with 5 earned runs in his first 4.1 innings of 2019. That includes giving up 3 runs and being unable to finish the 9th inning in what should have been a blowout Brewers win Friday night against the Cubs and another run while covering the last 1.2 innings in Saturday night’s loss.

If there’s a positive, it’s that most of those runs didn’t necessarily come on hard-hit balls — there were a lot of singles and productive groundball outs for the Cubs — but the fact he’s thrown 52 pitches in the past two days makes him the logical choice to go down. If the Brewers mange their bullpen the way they did last year, we can probably expect to see him back with the big league team soon enough — possibly before the end of the month.

Statistics courtesy of Baseball-Reference