He is a bit like the showroom car that invites you to inspect everything — from interior to sticker price. Beau Brieske has a knack for drawing you closer.
There are, for starters, those gaudy numbers: four games covering 17⅔ innings, with 23 strikeouts, and not a single walk. Nifty work by a right-handed starter now chucking for the Single-A West Michigan Whitecaps.
There also is his size: 6-foot-3, 205 pounds, which helps explain why a right-hander’s fastball has been running mostly at 92-94 and hitting 96.
In fact, he has four pitches, the least of which is a curveball that West Michigan pitching coach Willie Blair says “has the potential to be pretty good for him,” even if Brieske personally is more enthused about the slider he picked up a year ago during the COVID-19 minor-league shutdown.
But maybe as fascinating, as entertaining, as his 0.68 WHIP, is the fact Brieske two years ago was a 27th-round draft pick. He signed for all of $75,000 after a junior season at Colorado State-Pueblo.
It implies scouts either missed something as Brieske sweated in the Rockies, or it might hint that a certain pitcher, born and raised in Arizona, is headed for an inexorable nosedive. These early showboat performances by late-round picks tend to fizzle, as baseball history more often proves.
Or, maybe this early, outlandish stuff can carry on, all because scouting isn’t perfect, and because, too, that 2020 season lost to the pandemic delayed by a year the point at which the Tigers might have been seeing more of what Brieske has been showing Blair and others a month into 2021.
“People would have known about him last year — he’s pretty good,” said Blair, the one-time Tigers starter (1997, and again from 1999-2001), who now supervises Whitecaps pitchers. “He’s got a four-pitch mix and he’s able to throw strikes with all four of them.
“Probably his biggest strength is that he can command his fastball to both sides — both down in the zone and then he can go up the ladder late in the count for punch-outs. His bullpens are professional, he’s got a good feel for what he’s doing, and he’s a good athlete.
“So, there are a lot of good things there, on top of the fact he’s a smart kid, and humble, but very, very confident.”
Brieske knows, of course, as does Blair that baseball is sadistic and ordeals tend to be moments away for prospect pitchers, or hitters. Brieske also says his story isn’t terribly exceptional, that his path to the Tigers farm and to 2021’s hot start isn’t as mystifying as his distant draft status might hint.
He was pitching five years ago for Perry High in Gilbert, Arizona, thinking he should be getting more Division I college offers than were showing up before deciding to pitch at nearby Glendale Community College.
He did fine there during a two-season stint and got an invitation to pitch for Colorado State-Pueblo. His junior year was fine — lots of strikeouts (116 in 79 innings, a school record for most punch-outs in a season, against 27 walks) but with too many hits (99) confirming that he essentially was a two-pitch pitcher: fastball and changeup.
Brieske says there was some actual strategy there. Colorado’s altitude can make pitching tough, with its atmospheric effects on spin— and with thin-air home runs often measured by yards rather than feet. He wanted to duke it out in the mountains.
The Tigers liked his upside enough to take a chance. They then watched him overmatch Gulf Coast League rookies two summers ago, all before COVID arrived in early 2020. Everything, and everyone, at that point needed to adjust.
Brieske got busy. He began making one-hour commutes to Glendale to work with a personal trainer.
“I saw a big jump in my strength and athleticism during COVID,” Brieske said during a weekend phone conversation. “And I came back (this spring) with a new pitch — a slider I worked on last year that I could begin using more.
“Basically, I was now throwing three pitches for strikes. And that’s been the biggest thing for me (during May). Just trusting my stuff in the zone.”
Blair didn’t have precise metrics at hand Saturday, but spin rates are strong and “spin-efficiency is in the mid-to-upper 90s,” Blair said, explaining that Brieske’s vertical break is likewise above average.
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“His changeup is probably his next-best pitch, — it’s an average to above-average pitch right now,” Blair said, “but that slider is coming — that slider is turning into a very good pitch for him. And the curveball has really good spin, good shape. It’s just inconsistent — the command of it, probably because he might be babying it as he still tries to get a feel for it.
“He’s not as confident with it yet, so he’s not as aggressive, but at times it’s a very good pitch.”
Blair and Brieske both acknowledge there has been a “cleanup” in Brieske’s delivery, which can sometimes cause him to sink down on his back leg a bit more than might be standard, or preferred.
“He’s got a pretty clear delivery, a good direction to his target, and he finishes pitches well,” Blair said. “He’s pretty clean, and he’s very athletic. I would say he’s one of our better athletes, overall.”
A man from the Southwest has been delighting in his introduction to West Michigan and to all this cool May weather he likens to climate he knew during those days at Pueblo.
He understands, of course, that this is now high Single A, where the Whitecaps work, and that a trip to Double-A Erie would be a logical next step. Not that logic matches performance when it comes to professional baseball.
For now, it’s about smoothing and streamlining those four pitches, beginning, as always, as it does with harnessing his four-seam fastball.
“It has a high-release height,” Brieske said. “So it plays down in the zone. It kind of looks like I’m straight over the top, and when it’s down in the zone hitters can have a tough time pulling the trigger.
“Willie and I have built a plan to get better — and then to trust that curveball so I can pull out four pitches on command.
“Really, where I think I am in not walking guys is that I’m attacking guys. I figure if I trust my stuff, they’re going to have a hard time hitting it.”
Especially when those pitches so often are strikes. At some point in 2021, Brieske will walk his first batter. But, for now, this strikeouts-to-walks ratio, a cool 23-to-none for May, is a streak he’s having a blast sustaining.
Lynn Henning is a freelance writer and former Detroit News sports reporter.