Why Did the Brewers Decline Devin Williams Club Option?

Since Devin Williams made his MLB debut back in 2019, there is only one reliever in Major League Baseball who has pitched to a lower ERA. That is Emmanuel Clase.

Across 235 2/3 innings pitched for the Milwaukee Brewers, Williams has pitched to a 1.83 ERA, with a CAREER strikeout rate of nearly 40% (39.4%). By any metric, stat or observable fact, Williams is one of the very best closers in baseball, who is well worth making $10+ million per season while he is in his prime. For the first time in his career, the 30-year-old was set to reach that figure in 2025.

Then the penny-pinching Milwaukee Brewers got in the way.

The Brewers are a small market team, that clearly has to operate within a certain budget to be successful. You can’t knock their strategy when it has allowed them to stay atop the NL Central in three of the last four years and four of the last seven.

Still, out of the necessity of counting every dollar in a tight budget to consistently win, the Brewers have managed to make some moves that could be deemed as a slap in the face to their star players (particularly the pitchers) who have most-led to that success.

Williams became the latest example of this over the weekend, as the Brewers declined a $10.5 million club option on him for the 2025 season. The option does not mean that Williams is a free agent however, but instead that he will be retained through the arbitration process instead.

Not Fair to Williams, Even Though He Agreed to the Option

What I do not want to do is write this to bash the Brewers front office, which is simply working within the restraints that are presented to them by ownership. With that said, when we look at Williams contract being declined over a few million of dollars, you can’t help but put the situation under a magnifying glass.

Last offseason, Williams signed a one-year deal with the Brewers to avoid his second-year of arbitration, which guaranteed him $7.25 million. Williams would make $7 million in 2024, and the club held an option for his final year of arbitration at $10.5 million.

This option included a $250K buyout, which Williams just collected when the Brewers made this decision on Sunday to decline his option. A quarter of a million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, but its penny’s to what he was going to make if the Brewers just picked up his club option.

Since Williams missed half the season due to a back injury, his projected bump in arbitration is not as significant as it could have been if he remained healthy all year. According to Spotrac, Williams is estimated to make $8.4 million in his final year of arbitration (now that he is back in the system).

When the front office does their calculations, it is a no-brainer to save $2 million in exchange for just a $250K buyout, but that does not make that decision any less cruel. Especially if they look to trade him this offseason as well.

Trade Will Be Slap in the Face, or Saving Grace

If the Milwaukee Brewers shopped Devin Williams on the trade market at $10.5 million, they would have had no issues finding a list of suitors. Again, he has been the best relief pitcher in baseball not named Emmanuel Clase across the last six seasons.

The last we saw of Williams, he gave up a season-ending three-run homer to Pete Alonso in Game 3 of the Wild Card round, but let’s not forget that he pitched to a 1.25 ERA prior to that in the regular season. There is no signs of decline for Williams when healthy, and if he were to hit the open market, he would receive far more than just $10.5 million on his next deal.

In fact you might have to just add a zero to that if he has a great season in 2025.

It is for exactly that reason that the writing was always on the wall for Williams in Milwaukee, just like it was for Corbin Burnes before him, and Josh Hader before them.

This is the time for the Brewers to cash in the Devin Williams chip, and many teams will look to buy. Buying at a projected salary of $8.4 million could be the difference in getting an additional lottery ticket prospect thrown into a trade, and Milwaukee needs to collect as many of those as they can.

From a cold-hard business perspective, the Brewers made the right move and did nothing wrong. Williams gets to cash in on an agreed upon buyout, and now he will go play for a team that is likely in a bigger market who make look to sign him to a new deal right away.

This is where the Brewers can still do Williams a solid, very similar to what we saw from the Tampa Bay Rays and Tyler Glasnow last year.

The Rays traded Glasnow to the Dodgers, who negotiated a contract extension as part of the deal that turned his one-year, $25 million contract into a five-year, $136.5 million extension.

Let’s just say the Brewers did the same exact thing and shipped Williams to a team that was willing to lock him into a four-year extension where he doubled his salary in 2025 anyway. In this instance, everything would have worked out for all parties involved.

If Williams goes to a team that takes him into arbitration for less than the original $10.5 million he was guaranteed, then he comes out behind. Although he can make it all a moot point when he hits free agency.

At the end of the day, nobody did anything wrong in this situation. But optically it’s not the best look when the Brewers could have just opted into the deal, flipped him to another contender, and the result may not have been much different from what they ultimately end up with in terms of prospect return in the trade.

It is just another reminder of who the Brewers are, and how ownership continues to make it hard on their front office to work through their constraints to keep their team at the top of the NL Central.