Brandon Woodruff accepts qualifying offer, becoming highest-paid Brewers pitcher in a single season
2025 Milwaukee Brewers player grades
Here are our Milwaukee Brewers player grades for 2025, based on analysis by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Brewers beat writers Todd Rosiak and Curt Hogg.
Brandon Woodruff remains a Milwaukee Brewer.
The right-hander accepted the $22.05 million qualifying offer from the Brewers ahead of the Nov. 18 deadline, keeping him with the organization that drafted him in 2014 and the only one he’s ever been a part of as a professional.
This marks the second time that Woodruff has chosen to re-up with the Brewers rather than explore a new start with a different team, also doing so before the 2024 season by signing a two-year deal with Milwaukee as a free agent while rehabbing from shoulder surgery.
Woodruff never became a free agent this time, instead accepting the Brewers’ one-year offer before the 3 p.m. CT deadline.
He was one of four players across the league to take a qualifying offer after only 14 of 144 players previously accepted them since the system was instituted.
That perhaps spells out it was going to be a tough market in free agency for Woodruff, who not only has his 2023 shoulder surgery in his history but also a right lat strain that sidelined him for the final weeks of the 2025 regular season and the entirety of the postseason.
When healthy, though, few have been better than Woodruff, who owns a 53-28 record and 3.10 ERA in eight seasons with Milwaukee. That’s what the Brewers will be banking on in the 32-year-old’s third full season removed from the serious procedure to repair the anterior capsule on his throwing shoulder.
At that price tag, it doesn’t come cheap for the Brewers, either, who have never paid a pitcher a higher average annual value deal than they will give Woodruff in 2026.
Woodruff, without regaining his full pre-surgery velocity and stuff, still managed to pitch quite well for Milwaukee last year, throwing to a 3.20 ERA across 12 starts. The under-the-hood peripherals indicated that wasn’t smoke and mirrors, either. He struck out 83 compared to just 14 walks, had a 3.17 fielding independent pitching (FIP) and a 2.18 expected ERA, according to Baseball Savant. Woodruff’s whiff rate actually increased from when he last pitched in 2023, which along with minimizing hard-hit contact through an 83rd-percentile hard-hit rate made him quite effective despite an average fastball of 93 mph.
In conversations throughout last season, Woodruff expressed repeated optimism for a full return to health, velocity and stuff in 2026 after his body hit a wall in reaching a workload of 106⅔ innings between the majors and his minor-league rehab in 2025.
A multi-year extension remains possible for Woodruff and the Brewers, with both sides interested in a deal for more years but a lower average annual value.
Woodruff rejoins a rotation that will be at the forefront of the Brewers’ plans to win a fourth straight National League Central title. Freddy Peralta is coming off his best season as a big-leaguer and is under team control for one more year, with the Brewers taking a fairly firm stance with other clubs early in the off-season of not wanting to trade him, although that could very easily change as the offseason progresses. Youngsters Quinn Priester, Jacob Misiorowski, Chad Patrick, Logan Henderson and Robert Gasser also figure to factor heavily into mix, making the position one of definite strength for Milwaukee.
This story was updated to add new information.
