The Curveball, the Comeback and the Calm of Aaron Ashby

MILWAUKEE — Two hundred twenty-eight years before the October of Aaron Ashby, Samuel Taylor Coleridge presaged the strange natural phenomenon of stillness for which the Milwaukee Brewers relief pitcher is responsible. Back then, the English poet wrote about the eerie stillness around the equator when the convergence of trade winds sends air upward, with not a breath to billow the sails of ships.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Sailors had a name for this awful, helpless phenomenon that today also befits what Ashby is doing to hitters this month: The Doldrums.

“It's weird,” Ashby says. “It's really weird to explain ... I can probably explain to you better when it's all done. But, dude, I just feel... I've never felt this calm before, which is weird. So, that's why it's just ... it's different. It's different.”

For the seventh time in Milwaukee’s nine games this postseason, this time in a nerve-jangling Game 1 of the World Series on Friday, Ashby entered a ferociously contested game and everything stopped. Given a 2–1 lead to protect, he faced five Tampa Bay batters and retired them all in just 20 pitches, 14 of them strikes, including three by strikeouts. His usual shutdown job enabled Milwaukee to tack on what proved to be the winning run in a 3–2 victory with the Brewers’ patented brand plastered all over it.

They scored twice on batted balls that bounced out of Rays’ gloves. They improved to 8–1 this postseason, including 6–1 in games decided by one or two runs. They kept the ball in the park again, having yielded just three homers this postseason. They were the perfect team to win the first homerless World Series Game 1 in 26 years.

Lather, rinse, repeat. If all of this sounds familiar, it is mostly because of Ashby. Manager Pat Murphy has used Ashby every time in a tied or one-run game. Ashby has responded with 14 shutout innings in which only seven runners have reached. Only Goose Gossage has thrown more shutout innings in relief in one postseason (14 1/3 in 1981).

Ashby is the most dominant player of this postseason, which is even more amazing when you consider the legend that when the Brewers first scouted him in junior college, he walked eight straight batters.

“No, that’s not true,” he says. Okay. “It was nine.”

It was a 40-degree day in 2017 at Crowder College in Missouri, when the baseball felt like a snowball. Ashby knew the Brewers and other teams were there to watch him.

“It was hard to miss,” he says. “They were the only people there. Every time I went to throw, I could see all of them raise their radar guns.”

Ashby, the nephew of former MLB pitcher Andy Ashby, was a freshman throwing between 89–91 miles per hour. But he was left-handed and had this freakish way of spinning a baseball, mostly with his slider. He threw from a high arm slot with a short stride. By the end of his sophomore year, he was throwing 94. The Brewers drafted him in the fourth round.

“I was pitching in a college game, and my curveball was getting crushed,” he says. “Chris Sale was my favorite pitcher. Maybe still is my favorite pitcher. And I go, ‘He throws a really awesome slider. I’m just going to change my grip and try to throw it like Chris Sale.’ And that’s how I came up with my slider, which was my best pitch from college until I got shoulder surgery. And I’ve never really gotten my slider back.”

Ashby failed at starting pitching for two years with the Brewers (5–12, 4.47 ERA) until his shoulder gave out, causing him to miss the 2023 season. He looked so bad coming back from surgery that one day in the following spring training, Murphy looked out his office window, saw someone throwing in the bullpen and thought, Hmm, the fantasy campers are still here. The pitcher Murphy thought was an Average Joe was Ashby.

Then, one day in August of 2024, everything changed.

“I was in Triple A,” he says. “My trainer had just popped some scar tissue in my shoulder, so I was starting to feel good again. And I was finally getting velocity back with my fastball.

“Well, I need a secondary. I have a little bit of a changeup, a little slider, and I was like, I’m just going to try to throw this curveball, a knuckle-curve, and I’m going to try to throw it as hard as I can. And I threw it and it was really good. And I was like, Okay, we need to figure out how to make this in the zone and get it in the dirt with two strikes. Got called up like a week later, pitched in Oakland and it’s been my best friend since.”

The pitch changed his career. Ashby gave up a home run on the fifth curveball he threw in the big leagues, to Miguel Sano of Minnesota on Aug. 29, 2021. Since then, he has thrown 1,045 curveballs without giving up a home run on the pitch. The secret?

“Throw it as hard as I can at the bottom of the zone,” he says.

This season his curveball has the highest whiff rate of any curve (52.4%) and the biggest drop of any curve relative to its speed (7.8 inches more than normal, dropping 56.5 inches. Since Sept. 5, hitters are 0-for-16 against the pitch.

The Skyfall hook is just one of his weapons. Ashby has hit 100 mph with his fastball, has a killer change and that imitation-Sale slider is better than he leads you to believe. He is a four-pitch strike thrower who is making history this October—in the most freakishly calm way possible.

“He’s just low-key, man,” says Brewers captain Christian Yelich. “He just goes with the flow, and he's got the same heartbeat every day. And he's been that way for us all season.”

Athletes search their whole careers to find moments or a day when they are in this special zone called flow, in which excellence seems not to require effort. The game slows down. The mind is uncluttered. Ashby has been in this state of flow for three weeks. It begins with prayer, both before the game and during the game. The rest of it is achieved by ... well, it is a state that is difficult to describe.

“Given the circumstances, no, I haven’t been in a stretch like this before,” he says. “I don't feel like I'm squeezing too tight. And I guess I've done that before in the postseason, and it's not been good in the past. So, I’m just trying to relax.

“I pray, yeah. And I just ask for peace. Before the game and during it. I think I just feel this overwhelming peace of like ... all I just have to do is pick my foot up and go home. Like, that's really it. So, I’ve been able to keep it that simple for the most part.”

The Brewers threw two Crowder alums at Tampa Bay, Jacob Misiorowski and Ashby. They also used Abner Uribe to gobble up right-handed hitters and closer Trevor Megill to get the last out twice—once on a double-play that was overturned on a challenge and then again on a strikeout to leave the tying and go-ahead runs in scoring position. All four pitchers hit at least 99 mph. The 78 fastest pitches in the game were thrown by Milwaukee pitchers. As has happened throughout October, the Brewers’ bullpen outpitched the other side. Milwaukee has outscored the Padres, Dodgers and Rays—all of whom won at least 91 games—14–2 after the sixth inning.

The Brewers own the endgame, especially when nobody can match Ashby. Tampa Bay manager Kevin Cash tried lefty Steven Matz, because Ian Seymour has pitched himself out of leverage spots, and Kevin Kelly, his best right-handed setup reliever, to keep the game close, only to see six Milwaukee batters reach base in a 10-batter sequence. There was no upside to Tampa Bay getting Misiorowski out of the game after five innings.

“The problem is when you knock him out of the game,” Cash said, “you've got just an elite bullpen that can match up and come in the ballgame like they did and kept us quiet there between Uribe, Ashby, and at the end with Megill.”

Coleridge titled his famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The phenomenon that stopped the ship dead in the water came to be identified scientifically as the Intertropical Convergence Zone. In perhaps his most famous lines, he wrote:

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

This is what happens when the Milwaukee bullpen door opens and out jogs a bespectacled, unimposing six-foot lefthander saying prayers to himself in a state of grace. Quietly does he turn opposing teams into a painted ship on a painted ocean. A still life.

It is the misery of nothingness. And the mastery of Ashby.