25 year-old right-handed rookie Coleman Crow take the mound for the Milwaukee Brewers. Crow probably isn’t the pitcher in this series you were most interested in getting an up close look at. That pitcher is scheduled to start on Sunday.
Still, Crow is a pitcher that I’m curious to see in action. The Brewers’ #25 prospect, this will be just his 3rd major league start. He was called up to make his major league debut against the Marlins on April 17, and went a respectable 5 1/3 innings, with 2 earned runs, 4 strikeouts and 1 walk.
Pitching Ninja captured two of his punchouts on this tweet: a beautifully delivered curveball catching the edge to lefty Graham Pauley, and nice fastball on the outside corner to righty Augustin Ramirez
What’s notable is that Pitcher List gave him a PLV Grade of A+ for his debut.
There’s a lot going on in the above graphic1. If you’re a regular reader of TLA, you may notice these PLV scorecards pop up in some of our game recaps, or posted by some of our readers in the comments section. The summary is in the upper left hand corner under Skills and Results. The pitcher’s pitches are evaluated by Stuff components: speed, break, how different the speed is from the pitcher’s fastball, VAA, etc. These factors contribute to the Stuff grade. Locations grades are based on pitches’ horizontal and vertical locations, with consideration to the hitter’s strike zone. Combine Stuff and Locations with consideration of Categorical factors like pitcher and batter handedness, pitch subtype, and the count, and you get the PLV (Pitch Level Value) grade.
Results is just that. A grade based on what ended up on the scoresheet. A pitcher can throw terrible pitches, but if at the end of the day, there’s no harm done and you log zeroes in the run column, the the results are good.
He was sent down again, and came back 2 weeks ago to make his second big league start on May 15. Against the Twins, he threw another 5 innings, allowing just 1 earned run, striking out 3 and walking none.
Last start he got a B+ PLV grade. Okay, so Crow pitched well in his first two games. Not anything amazing, right?
Well, it would be on the the 2026 Astros. 58 games in, though, no Astro has gotten an A+ PLV grade for their start. Only 4 starts have rated a PLV grade of B+ or higher:
- 3/31 – Hunter Brown’s second start of the season in a win against Boston (B+)
- 4/11 – Lance McCullers’ third start of the season in a loss to the Mariners (A-, although an F for results)
- 4/26 – Spencer Arrighetti’s third start of the season in a win against the Yankees (B+)
- 4/28 – Kai-Wei Teng’s first start of the season in a loss against the Orioles (A)
The PLV grading system isn’t perfect, but seeing he’s had 2 starts, and the quality of pitching of both was rated as good or better than 56 of the Astros’ 58 starts made me sit up a little to see what the kid is bringing to the table. Those are quite the reviews for a #25 organizational prospect.
Unlike his second year phenom teammate Jacon Misiorowski, Crow does not possess a blazing fastball. It averages 91.6 mph. He uses his cutter more often, which averages 87.5 mph and he mixes it with a sinker and sweeper to righties and a curveball to lefties.
The sample sizes are small with just two starts worth of data, but it also doesn’t look like he generates a lot of swing and miss either, but he does get batters to swing on pitches out of the zone, and ultimately end up with unfavorable batted balls. This is problematic for the Astros who swing at the pitches outside the zone the 3rd most in the AL (33.8% O-Zone%)
On the other hand, Crow’s BABIP shouldn’t stay down at .226; and his BAA of .189 should start to move closert to his xBAA of .241 (which is still pretty good), so hopefully Houston will see a few more ball land for hits. If not, well, he’s yet to get out of the sixth inning, so if the Astros can exercise a little patience at the plate, they can wait it out until the bullpen.
Brewers @ Astros Game Information and Gamethread Details
Kai-Wei Teng starts for the Astros, making his 5th start of the season. He is coming off 2 consecutive scoreless starts, and has gone deeper into games with each start. Last start, he went 6 innings against the Cubs after going 5 innings the start before against the Rangers. His 89 pitches against the Cubs were a season high.
As a starter, Teng is 2-2 with a 2.65 ERA, and 16 strikeouts to 8 walks in 17 innings. On the season, Teng is 3-3 with a 2.19 ERA, and 36 strikeouts to 15 walks in 37 innings.
The Milwaukee Brewers are 33-20, 1st place in the NL Central. They are 15-4 in their last 19 games and have won 3 in a row.
Taking this game will be critical for the Astros if they want to take the series, with Misiorowski looming as the Sunday starter.
This post will be updated with starting lineups as they are made available.
After yesterday’s win against the Rangers, the Astros move into 3rd place in the division, by percentage points. They are now just 2.5 games back of the Mariners for the division, and 2.5 games back of the Jays for the 3rd wild card spot.
| W | L | Pct | GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEA | 28 | 29 | .491 | – |
| ATH | 27 | 29 | .482 | 0.5 |
| HOU | 26 | 32 | .448 | 2.5 |
| TEX | 25 | 31 | .446 | 2.5 |
| LAA | 22 | 35 | .386 | 6.0 |
The Mariners begin a 3 games series hosting the 31-24 Diamondbacks tonight. The A’s host the 34-22 Yankees for the weekend. The Rangers stay in Arlington to start a 3 game series against the 22-34 Royals.
The game will be broadcast at 7:10 p.m. CT on SCHN with radio coverage on KBME 790 AM.
We hope you will join us and the rest of the Launch Angle community for the game! The turnout has been amazing on the TLA Discord Server for the game threads. It’s been a blast as the Astros seem to be finding their footing on the season.
Join us again for today’s game. Just join the Discord server using this link: https://launch-angle.com/discord .
For more detailed instructions, please see the Guide to the Launch Angle.
If you’ve participated in game threads on other Astros sites in the past, you will probably see a lot of familiar names. Chat, lurk, do whatever! (But please say “hi”, so we know you’re not a bot.)
- For more information on PLV, these two resources are handy: What Is PLV? – An Introduction To Pitch Level Value And Its Applications and Explaining Pitcher List’s Player Card Grades ↩︎
By the breakdown from Crow, we will need a patient approach at the plate. Peña, Myers, and some others will need to practice a little bit of patience at the plate to get this guys pitch count up.
The Astros are pretty well tracking their remarkable rebound in 2024. The 2024 team was at “tombstone” level going into May, but ended up 1 game over .500 for the month (15-14). That team went on a wild .680 ride in the month of June, and the win percent was .607 from June 1 to season end. In 2026, the Astros are currently 14-12, two games over .500, in May. So the big question will be whether they can put up a dramatically higher win percent in June. The Astros are likely to have Hunter Brown and Josh Hader back in June. We will see.
Someone (Ford/Sparks maybe? Or one of the professionals who does podcasts?) noted that with Yordan getting a recent day off, and yesterday Walker getting one, Pena is likely next to have a day off.
Given who Crow profiles to be as a pitcher, maybe resting our first pitch swing / high chase rate guys in this game would be a reasonable gamble. I haven’t dug into the numbers but my guess is our outside the zone chase % is elevated by a few players rather than endemic to all of our hitters. This seems to be the type of guy that Pena, Meyers, Diaz, Altuve would struggle against, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a different lineup today.
I agree with the others, we need patience and the mindset of chasing Crow by the 5th while being prepared for a low scoring game early where Teng has to hold the visiting team down. I honestly can’t remember- is Teng one of the few pitchers we have who controls baserunners better than a little leaguer?
Yeah they were joking that Pena should request Sunday off so he’d miss Misiorowski
Yes, we need patience–mostly along the lines of not chasing. However, if they believe his exquisite control numbers, they might think they should be swinging early (which leaves you open to chasing sweepers and cutters). In my view, if the can be patient, they will end up driving the ball for some home runs. Crow has not been getting batted balls on the ground.
My thought is, you are gambling either way, but patience is the safer bet. Especially if the team trusts Teng to pitch well, being patient (at least first time through the order) would extend innings and put pitches on Crow to try and shorten his outing, both of which are beneficial for the next two games in the series. I don’t really condone being aggressive in this situation as a gameplan, unless we are facing a true TOR pitcher who has a proven track record of finesse (such as Eovaldi or DeGrom).
It’s better to try and test a pitcher like Crow and wear him down. But then again I am not the hitting coach or gameplanner.
Looking at his Fangraphs’ page, my immediate reaction is that Crow is due for some regression. He has been riding a weak K rate and an exquisite BB rate (unsupported by his minor league BB rate) in combination with a low 30’s% ground ball rate. Compare his 2.61 ERA to his projections in the 4-ish range ERA. I mean his current performance doesn’t add up. I think the regression will come for him, but who knows if it does so against the Astros. I mean, guys like Jason Alexander didn’t regress last season for 10 or more games.
Tough series ahead of us; would feel great to get this one. Hopefully we chase the starter and don’t go fishing after these cutters mentioned above