Passan: How Astros’ Hunter Brown became the calendar year AL Cy Young
Of the 460,000-plus outings by a starting pitcher in Major League Baseball history, among the ugliest came a little more than a year ago. Hunter Brown, a right-hander for the Houston Astros with a high-octane fastball and an array of off-speed pitches, allowed nine runs to the Kansas City Royals and mustered only two outs. He yielded 11 hits, the most ever for a start of less than one inning.
In the weeks following the thrashing, Brown journeyed to find the version of himself who had gone from unheralded high schooler to standout at Division II Wayne State to major league rotation piece. He asked hard questions — of his teammates and himself. He weathered a few more middling outings and was on the cusp of a demotion. And he realized that in order to secure his future, he needed to look into his past and reacquaint himself with a long-abandoned pitch.
“He embraced that ass whooping,” Astros closer Josh Hader said, “and just became who he is now.”
Today, the 26-year-old Brown is one of the best pitchers in baseball. Since a transformative relief appearance last May, in which he unleashed a two-seam fastball he had stopped throwing five years earlier, Brown owns the best earned run average among American League starters at 2.20, nearly a quarter-point better than reigning AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal. Only Paul Skenes, arguably the game’s finest starter, has a lower ERA in that time frame than Brown. In six starts this season, Brown sports a 1.22 ERA, has struck out nearly six times as many hitters as he has walked and resembles the archetypal modern pitcher, marrying velocity with a six-pitch arsenal that consistently flummoxes hitters.
It all started May 11, 2024, in Detroit, where Brown grew up rooting for the Tigers and trying to emulate Justin Verlander. He had fiddled with seemingly everything since the Kansas City nightmare, changing his stride and hand placement during his delivery to no avail. He had sought counsel from teammates — Verlander, Hader and veteran reliever Ryan Pressly. His best advice came from hitters, though, when Brown presented them with a question: If you were facing me, what would you be looking for?
“Oh, Brown, that’s easy,” nine-time All-Star second baseman Jose Altuve told him. “Hard and away.”
Brown asked Astros shortstop Jeremy PeƱa the same question and was greeted with the identical answer. Ditto for longtime Astros third baseman Alex Bregman. Each said Brown’s arsenal, with his four-seamer, cutter, slider and curveball breaking to his glove side, needed a complementary offering inside to right-handed hitters particularly. His two-seamer re-debuted May 5 against the Mariners but found its footing six days later at Comerica Park.
“It’s no secret. At the time I was pitching terribly,” Brown said. “I knew I was running out of time. Something had to give. I just switched my mentality. Like, all right, this is going awful. I got to see all my family and friends, and I was like, ‘You know what, if this is my last major league game for a while, I’m gonna go out there and let it all loose.'”
Brown entered the game in the third inning determined to embrace a pitch he had ditched when the Astros chose him in the fifth round of the 2019 draft. While others, including Statcast, call it a sinker, it doesn’t have the standard boring action of the pitch. Brown says it is a “flat, running” fastball thrown with a two-seam grip — and he is convinced it helped salvage his career. He limited the Tigers to one run on five hits over five innings with seven strikeouts that day.
He picked up the pitch almost immediately because of his familiarity with it. During his three seasons at Wayne State, Brown threw almost exclusively a two-seamer and slider. When he entered the Astros organization, their philosophy was simple: Pair a hard breaking ball with a top-of-the-zone four-seam fastball and find success. He did and shot through Houston’s system after COVID, joining the Astros for the stretch run of their eventual World Series victory in 2022.
Brown’s ability to add pitches had already endeared him to Houston’s development staff. During his draft year, he filled out a survey for the Astros on his pitch mix and said he threw a curveball even though he had scrapped it in college. Early in his time with the Astros, coaches asked him to throw the curveball just to see what they had. After the first curve Brown tried, a coach chimed in: “Yeah, you’re gonna keep throwing that.”
Considering he had added a changeup and cutter during his time with the Astros, too, Brown didn’t fret about the rebirth of his two-seamer. The pitch didn’t need to move like his teammate Framber Valdez‘s. It simply served as a reminder to hitters that Brown wasn’t afraid to throw inside and that they couldn’t hunt the rest of his arsenal on the outer half of the plate.
“I wanted to go back to just athletic throwing,” Brown said. “I don’t want to be a robot. I think people get so locked in and dialed into repeating the exact same delivery every single time, which, yes, in a vacuum, if you can do that, that’s awesome. There’s not a lot of guys that can actually do that over the course of the season. I kind of just like taking — I don’t wanna say a whiffle ball-in-the-backyard approach, but realistically, that’s what you’re trying to do. It’s just against the best players in the world.”
Over time, as the two-seamer paid dividends and was further incorporated into his pitch mix, Brown regained his confidence and began to understand the advice Verlander was giving him. Mindset isn’t just important, Verlander said. It’s everything. If a hitter gets jammed and flares a ball into the outfield, that’s not bad luck worth lamenting; it’s a reminder that process trumps outcome, and any sort of pitch that induces a weakly hit ball is a good one — and one that can be replicated to greater effect going forward.
Slowly, Brown cobbled together strong starts and began to live up to the nickname given to him a few years earlier, when he was at Triple-A. The team had gathered at the airport at 3:30 a.m. to return home, and Brown was pounding a drink loaded with caffeine. Why, his teammate Pete Solomon asked, would he do that in the middle of the night when their flight wasn’t scheduled to land until 8 a.m.?
“Hey, man,” Brown said. “You put diesel in, you get diesel out. I’ve got stuff to do today.”
On that day, Diesel was born — and Brown’s velocity numbers support the sobriquet. Only Hunter Greene, Skenes, Skubal and Jose Soriano throw an average fastball harder than Brown’s 97.4 mph. It’s almost a tick and a half higher than last season, a function, Brown said, of a more mature routine. In addition to offseason work on mobility and strength gained through Bulgarian split squats, the 6-foot-2, 220-pound Brown relaxed his off-day weightlifting habit and ramped back his velocity in between-starts bullpen sessions from 92-to-94 mph to 86-to-88.
“His whole demeanor when he steps out there is different,” Pena said. “He shows up ready to dominate every time he’s about to take the mound. Every time he’s up there, you see him strutting around.”
It’s reminiscent of Verlander, whose cocksure mound presence is a defining feature. During Brown’s struggles, Verlander tried to remind him that his raw stuff was good enough to stop trying to execute perfect pitches and instead challenge hitters to hit his stuff in the strike zone. Brown’s walk rate this year is among the game’s best, and on pitches in the zone, hitters are batting .191/.200/.258 against him, good for the third-lowest OPS in the game.
“It goes one way or the other,” Hader said. “You feel sorry for yourself and play the victim or you figure out, ‘Hey, I got to do this to be where I want to be, and I want to stay here. I’ve got to be better.’ And that’s just the type of dude he is. I mean, go and look at the numbers over the last year.”
They remained sparkling Sunday during his first outing in Kansas City since the disasterpiece of 2024. Brown blitzed through six innings against the Royals, yielding one run and striking out seven, and solidified his case for AL Pitcher of the Month. Awards don’t really matter to Brown, though. This time last year, he worried about simply keeping his rotation spot.
No longer is that a concern. Diesel has arrived, carving lineups, snatching hitters’ dignity, writing one more chapter in the story of a naysayer-slaying, doubt-squashing triumph. Now, he’s learning to embrace something far more palatable than an ass whooping: success.
While fans in Edmonton and Dallas are always singing about how they have friends in low places, only one of them has the high ground in the Western Conference finals. And that’s the Oilers after their 6-1 win Sunday in Game 3 to take a 2-1 series lead.
With the series tied heading into Sunday, the objective for Game 3 was to gain a firm grasp of the conference finals, and the Oilers did just that by having five players with multipoint performances. As for the Stars, losing Game 3 left them trailing a series for the second time this postseason, with the only other such occurrence coming after Game 1 against the Colorado Avalanche in the first round.
Now that the Oilers are in control of the series, what does it mean for them going forward? What must the Stars do differently ahead of Game 4 for them to return home tied rather than a game away from elimination? Ryan S. Clark and Greg Wyshynski examine those questions while delving into what lies ahead for two teams that not only faced each other in the conference finals last season but between them have been involved in every conference final since 2020.
Edmonton Oilers
Grade: A
Much could change between now and whenever the playoffs end. But for now, the argument could be made that this was the most important playoff game the Oilers have had this postseason.
The Oilers have had numerous strong performances, such as Game 3 against the Los Angeles Kings in the first round or their final two games against the Vegas Golden Knights in the conference semifinals. But what made the Oilers’ performance in Game 3 against Dallas arguably their most important was that they found a balance between being difficult in the defensive zone while not relying on a shutout to accomplish that objective.
The Stars finished with 37 shots, 13 high-danger chances in 5-on-5 play and scored only once. Connor McDavid has repeatedly stressed that the Oilers can play defense, and that has been made clear over their past five games. But Sunday proved they didn’t need Stuart Skinner or their defensive structure to blank an opponent to win. — Ryan S. Clark
Dallas Stars
Grade: C+
The final score doesn’t reflect the majority of this game, which Dallas coach Pete DeBoer can mine for positives among the many (many) negatives and some mitigating circumstances. Having Roope Hintz warm up but not be able to go because of the foot injury he suffered from a Darnell Nurse slash in Game 2? That’s deflating. Having the on-ice officials miss a delay of game call on Brett Kulak in the first period only to have Evan Bouchard open the scoring 10 seconds later? Also deflating.
So it’s to the Stars’ credit that they got to their game at 5-on-5 in Game 3 better than they have in any game of the series, at least before Edmonton ran up the score in the third. The results weren’t there and a loss is a loss — and a loss by this margin is difficult to stomach — but their second period and the performances from some of their slumbering depth players give the Stars at least a glimmer.
However, there’s no question Edmonton has this thing in well in-hand and the Stars have to find a way to solve Skinner, which is not something I thought I’d be writing at this stage of the postseason. — Greg Wyshynski
Three Stars of Game 3
Two goals and an assist for his seventh career multigoal playoff game. Hyman’s second goal was the Oilers’ fourth off the rush, the most in one game by any team this postseason. Hyman also was plus-5 Sunday.
Bouchard scored his sixth goal of the postseason and these two were on the ice for the first two Edmonton goals. At 5-on-5 this postseason, the Oilers are outscoring their opponents 7-1, and 5-0 in this series, when Bouchard and Kulak are on the ice.
0:48
Connor McDavid restores Oilers’ 2-goal lead
Connor McDavid finds the back of the net to restore the Oilers’ two-goal lead vs. the Stars.
3. Connor McDavid
C, Oilers
For all the talk about the lack of goals from the best hockey player in the world (which was odd because he had 20 points in 13 games and was a plus-7 entering Game 3 despite having only three goals), McDavid punched out a pair of tucks for his sixth career multigoal playoff game. Also, seeing McDavid with the puck barreling toward the net on a 3-on-1 is nightmare fuel for opponents. — Arda Ćcal
Players to watch in Game 4
Zach Hyman
LW, Oilers
To go from 16 goals last postseason to just three goals entering Game 3 of the conference finals is one way to assess Hyman. Another is to realize that he’s been the most physical player on a team that is among the tallest and heaviest in the NHL.
Hyman came into Game 3 leading the NHL with 99 hits. He remained physical Sunday by leading the way with six hits in a game that saw the Oilers continue their punishing style with 47. But to then see Hyman score two goals and finish with three points in addition to that physicality? It once again adds to the narrative that the Oilers might not only have more dimensions than last year’s team, they could be better than the team that finished Stanley Cup runner-up in 2024. — Clark
0:53
Zach Hyman’s 2nd goal puts Oilers up 4
Zach Hyman taps home his second goal of the game to put the Oilers up 5-1 vs. the Stars.
This is the first two-game losing streak for the Dallas goaltender in the playoffs. A lot of what happened in Game 3 wasn’t necessarily on him — a Connor McDavid beauty and a Zach Hyman breakaway were among the Edmonton tallies — but outside of the third period of Game 1, he’s not been a difference-maker in this series. Oettinger came into the game leading the playoffs with 5.58 goals saved above expected, according to Stathletes. The Stars have been able to depend on him as a slump-breaker. But this is his third game with a save percentage south of .900 in the series. As the Stars try to build on some positives from this game, they need Otter to provide the foundation for it — and in the process, silence those “U.S. backup!” chants from the Oilers fans. — Wyshynski
Big questions for Game 4
Are the Oilers about to do to the Stars what they did to the Golden Knights?
Simply put, the Oilers are where hope goes to die. Teams in a championship window that have yet to win a title are always being judged on their evolution. What the Oilers did to the Stars a year ago in the conference finals by winning the last three games showed that they could close out a series after trailing. This postseason Edmonton has shown a calculated and methodical coldness when it comes to putting away opponents.
The Golden Knights won Game 3 on a last-second goal to create the belief they may have found an opening. They didn’t score again for the rest of the playoffs after being in the top five of goals per game throughout the regular season. Breaking out for six goals to open the series seemed to be a sign the Stars may have found an opening. Since then? They’ve scored only once in the last six periods while facing questions about what’s happened to another team that went from being in the top five in goals per game in the regular season. — Clark
Can Dallas make Edmonton uncomfortable at all?
Our colleague Mark Messier made this point between periods of Game 3: The Stars have yet to do anything to get McDavid or Leon Draisaitl off their games. That extends to the rest of the Oilers. Outside of an anomalous run of three power-play goals in the third period of Game 1, there have been precious few instances of the Stars carrying play for long stretches or putting a scare into Edmonton at 5-on-5.
They had that for a bit in Game 3 with a dominant second period: plus-14 in shot attempts, plus-11 in scoring chances and a 10-1 advantage in high-danger shot attempts. But they were digging out of a 2-0 hole, only managed to get one goal of their own on the board and then McDavid stuck a dagger in them with 19 seconds left in the second.
The Stars need a lead. They need zone time. They need to get their rush game going: Skinner had a .897 save percentage on shots off the rush entering the game. Edmonton is playing with a champion’s confidence. Dallas has to find a way to inject a little doubt into its opponent or this series is going to end quickly. — Wyshynski
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