On Wednesday, we got news that many of us had been expecting all offseason: After eight years in Milwaukee, Freddy Peralta has been traded. I’m not here to analyze that trade (Jason both reported on the trade and looked at what the return, Brandon Sproat and Jett Williams, will bring to the 2026 Brewers, with more to come). Instead, I’m here to look back and appreciate Peralta’s career as a Milwaukee Brewer.
Peralta’s career didn’t start in Milwaukee. He signed as an amateur free agent out of the Dominican Republic with the Seattle Mariners in 2013, when he was 17 years old, and spent his first three years as a pro in Seattle’s system. In December 2015, Peralta was one of three minor leaguers the Brewers acquired from the Mariners in exchange for first baseman Adam Lind, who was having a solid season as Milwaukee’s first baseman. Neither of the other two players acquired in that trade – Carlos Herrera and Daniel Missaki – ever made it to the majors.
Once he got into the Milwaukee system, Peralta started to assert himself a bit. in 2016, he started the season 4-1 with a 2.85 ERA in 60 innings (16 games, eight starts) at Class-A Wisconsin, striking out 11.6 batters per nine innings. In 2017, the 21-year-old Peralta started at High-A Carolina and earned a midseason promotion to Double-A Biloxi, where he allowed just 16 earned runs in 63 2/3 innings (a 2.26 ERA). Throughout the entire 2017 minor league season, Peralta struck out nearly 13 batters per nine innings. When he was looking almost as good after being promoted to the offensive-friendly Pacific Coast League in 2018, Peralta was on his way to the majors.
Peralta’s debut came on Mother’s Day, May 13, 2018, and it was a day to remember. On the mound in Denver against the Colorado Rockies (who were good in 2018 – remember, that’s the team Milwaukee played in the divisional round of the playoffs), Freddy confused Colorado’s lineup. He threw almost exclusively his fastball, struck out five of the first six batters he faced, didn’t allow a runner until an error allowed a man to reach base in the third, and didn’t allow a single until the sixth inning, when David Dahl singled to center. Peralta retired one more batter after Dahl’s single and was removed from the game after 98 pitches and 5 2/3 innings: He allowed just one hit, walked two and struck out a whopping 13 batters, one more than the previous franchise record in a debut, held by Steve Woodard.
In that start, 90 of the 98 pitches Peralta threw were fastballs, setting the tone for his entire rookie season, during which he was nicknamed Fastball Freddy. Although the rest of that season didn’t go as well as his debut, Peralta made 14 starts and two relief appearances in the 2018 regular season and pitched to a 4.25 ERA while striking out 11 batters per nine innings, a huge total for a starting pitcher. He didn’t pitch much in that postseason, but he did throw three scoreless innings in game four of the NLCS after Gio Gonzalez was chased after just one inning; Milwaukee lost in extras.
After an encouraging start to his career, Peralta suffered some setbacks in 2019, as he made eight starts and 31 relief appearances and pitched to a 5.29 ERA. But he still struck out a ton of batters (12.2 per nine innings) and the Brewers were clearly still encouraged, especially when he made perhaps the best start of his career in his second start of the season on April 3: Peralta pitched eight shutout innings with eleven strikeouts, no walks and only two hits allowed in a 1-0 win. He wasn’t bad in 2020, striking out everyone (14.4 per nine), but it was such a strange season that it was difficult to assess his progress. It turned out that Peralta was on the verge of an outbreak.
In 2021, Peralta served as the third starter among baseball’s top three, behind Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff (who finished first and fifth, respectively, in the NL Cy Young voting). Peralta wasn’t in the Cy Young conversation like his teammates, but he was excellent: In 144 1/3 innings, Peralta pitched to a 2.81 ERA (147 ERA+) and 3.12 FIP, struck out 12.2 batters per nine and made his first All-Star team.
Over the next three seasons, Peralta was one of the steadiest pitchers in baseball. While he struggled to regain the form that landed him on the 2021 All-Star team, Peralta was almost always healthy (he missed some time in 2022, but made 30 starts in 2023 and 32 in 2024) and posted a 113, 112 and 113 ERA+ in consecutive seasons. There was some fluctuation in his underlying stats: his strikeouts went up and down a bit, he allowed a couple of home runs in 2023 and 2024, which hadn’t been a problem before. But he was extremely steady, striking out 210 batters in 2023 and 200 in 2024.
For most of his career, Peralta had operated somewhat out of the spotlight behind his star teammates, but Burnes was traded after the 2023 season and Woodruff was injured that same year, so in 2024 Peralta became the de facto ace of Milwaukee’s staff. 2024 was experienced as somewhat disappointing: Peralta certainly was not bad, but he had the worst FIP of his career (aside from 2019, when he was almost a rookie and pitching out of the bullpen) and it just felt like things weren’t quite falling into place. Peralta had also developed a frustrating habit where it felt like he would lead every batter 0-2 and then miss badly on three consecutive pitches until it was a full count; Whether or not he struck out the batter, Peralta’s pitch count suffered, and he rarely worked deep in games.
In 2025, things changed. As the team coalesced around Peralta, Milwaukee had a remarkable run over the summer that gave them the best record in baseball. The Brewer ace was the constant, the thing all the young players around him knew they could rely on. In a career-high 33 starts and 176 2/3 innings, Peralta led the National League with 17 wins, finished fourth in the league with a 2.70 ERA and finished sixth with 204 strikeouts, the third straight season in which he had struck out at least 200.
For the first time, Peralta earned Cy Young votes, as he finished fifth in the National League and voted for that award, and he added his second All-Star selection. But Brewer fans knew their time with Peralta was running out. Before the 2020 season, Peralta had signed a very team-friendly extension with Milwaukee, a five-year deal that bought out his arbitration years for just $15.5 million, including club options for the 2025 and 2026 seasons for just $8 million each. With only one of those option years remaining before free agency, the Brewers made the decision this week to move him for controllable assets.
Peralta now relinquishes his status as the Brewer with the third-longest tenure, as only Christian Yelich and Brandon Woodruff have been on the Major League team longer: Yelich by just over a month, since his debut on the opening day of the 2018 season, and Woodruff by about three months, when he debuted near the end of the 2017 season. Had he returned for his ninth season as a Brewer in 2026, Peralta would have set a major franchise record had he stayed healthy. He now leaves the club third in their history in strikeouts with 1,153, 73 behind Yovani Gallardo’s record. Among Brewers with at least 500 innings pitched, Peralta is first in franchise history in hits per nine (6.7) and strikeouts per nine (11.1).
Now, for the first time in the major leagues, the soon-to-be 30-year-old pitcher will ply his trade for a team other than the Brewers. It will be hard to see him pitching for the Mets, a team that has become something of a rival in recent seasons, a team with deep pockets that desperately wants to be as good — and as unlikely — as the Dodgers. But there’s some poetry in that move: David Stearns, the Mets’ president of baseball operations, was the Brewers’ newly minted general manager in 2015 when he made the move to Peralta, just his third trade as boss.
Transactions like these certainly bring mixed emotions, one of which may certainly be fear. From everything we can see as fans, Peralta is a humble, friendly, fun-loving guy, a leader that others in the clubhouse looked up to, just the type of guy who is fun to root for. (He’s one of my favorite brewers of all time.) He’s also a very good pitcher. It’s a drag losing those things. Those sad feelings are also mixed with the excitement of the two new players, both with tantalizing potential, that the Brewers welcome into their system this week.
But it’s safe to say Peralta will always be a hero to Milwaukee Brewers fans. He is, at worst, one of the ten best pitchers in franchise history, and it is extremely rare for players to stay with one team as long as Peralta did – eight years – in the modern game. Now that he’s moved on, you know who the third longest-tenured Brewer is, after Woodruff and Yelich? That would be Aaron Ashby, who debuted in 2021 and still hasn’t made 100 MLB appearances.
So thank you, Freddy Peralta. You had a fastball that didn’t make any sense, you were the reason many of us Brewers fans learned what “extension” on pitches was, and you had a great rapport with Sophia Minnaert (I’m having a hard time tracking it down, but Minnaert traveled with Peralta to his parents’ home in the Dominican Republic for a special that aired on Brewers television a few years ago and is worth watching). You frustrated us, you delighted us and you made yourself one of the best pitchers in team history. Good luck in the future (unless you’re playing the Brewers of course).
#Goodbye #Freddy