Milwaukee needs more from Contreras, Yelich, and Chourio
So far this season, the Milwaukee Brewers have been okay. Their starting pitching, which became a point of major concern when injuries decimated their depth early in the season, stabilized quickly and the team currently ranks a respectable 12th in starter ERA. The bullpen has struggled at times, but the emergence of Nick Mears, the reliability so far of Abner Uribe and Jared Koenig, and recent encouraging outings from Trevor Megill have that group trending upward.
Offensively, Milwaukee has gotten more than they likely expected from a few sources. Brice Turang has seemingly taken another leap forward with the bat after he improved significantly last season. Sal Frelick is defying the BABIP gods to the tune of a 120 OPS+. After his worst season in 2024, Rhys Hoskins is back to putting up numbers that look right at home with his six years in Philadelphia.
And yet, the Brewers, a team that raked all through spring training, are in the bottom third of baseball in team OPS. A lot of this is due to the utter lack of production they’ve been getting from the left side of the infield, and that’s a real problem, but one for another day. What I’d like to discuss today is the “big three” of the Brewers’ order: Jackson Chourio, Christian Yelich, and William Contreras.
What the first two games of the Cubs series over the weekend made clear was that their offense was on a different level, and that was primarily because of three guys: Kyle Tucker, Seiya Suzuki, and Pete Crow-Armstrong. (Also, Carson Kelly, but come back to me if he still has a 1.300 OPS in July.) The Brewers came into this season expecting Chourio, Yelich, and Contreras to carry their offense. So far, they have not. Are there any indications that they’ll turn it around soon?
Contreras and an alarming lack of power
Big Bill started poorly (at least on offense — his defense has been fantastic so far) and has been coming around a bit lately, but the thing that his game so far in 2025 has been missing is power. Since hitting his lowest point in batting average on April 9, Contreras is hitting a respectable .282 (one point better than last season) with a very good .386 on-base percentage (better than last season by a significant 23-point margin) … but he has just three extra-base hits in that span (24 games), two doubles and one home run.
How can Contreras improve here? Well — the somewhat troubling indicator is that Contreras’s bat speed is down from last season. Last year, Contreras averaged 74.7 mph on his swings, which was in the 86th percentile league-wide. This year, that’s down to 72.8 mph, in the 65th percentile. Contreras’s approach has generally been good — he’s not striking out much, he’s walking a ton, he’s not chasing, he’s hitting singles. He’s just not hitting the ball hard.
Could this have to do with an injury? Adam McCalvy noted on Wednesday that Contreras has been playing through a painful finger injury, which was reported to be an “old fracture” — one that Contreras will continue playing through, at least for now. Is that what’s slowing down his bat? It’s hard to say, but if it is the finger injury that’s sapping his power, the team should strongly consider giving him a couple weeks off if it’s the only way to let it fully heal. Contreras needs to get that bat speed back, or he’ll be no better than an average hitter, and the Brewers need more from him.
Could a breakout be in Yelich’s future?
Yelich has been hitting the ball hard. He’s in the 84th percentile this season in hard-hit percentage and 72nd in average exit velocity — those aren’t superstar numbers, but they’re solid. But the issue here has been the launch angle. Yelich just isn’t squaring the ball up in a way that is helping; he’s in just the 7th percentile in Statcast’s “Launch Angle Sweet-Spot Percentage,” and you don’t need me to tell you this, but the number of balls that Yelich is bashing into the ground is at an all-time high: going into Wednesday’s game, a whopping 37.5% of Yelich’s batted balls were grounders pulled to the right side, nearly 10 percentage points higher than in any of his other seasons. (For reference, that number was at 21.5% and 20.6% in 2018-19, and even during his run from 2020-22, when he was generally struggling, it hovered between 23-26%.)
This is a problem. Yelich’s 37.5% pulled groundball rate is the highest in baseball among qualified hitters — only two others, Pittsburgh’s Tommy Pham and Houston’s Jose Altuve, have even 35%. Only 9.1% of Yelich’s batted balls are pulled in the air; the league leader in that metric is one of the season’s best power hitters, Cal Raleigh, at 36.7%. (An encouraging nugget in here for Brewer fans is that Hoskins ranks third, there, at 34.2% — a good indicator that more home runs should be coming.)
Basically, Yelich needs to figure out how to elevate the ball. When he does, good things happen: Yelich ranks first in the majors in home runs per fly ball, at 31.6%. When he gets the ball in the air, he hits homers. He’s just not hitting the ball in the air.
Will that improve? Yelich has hit a lot of ground balls over the past five years, but he’s never hit this many. It’s difficult to suggest much in terms of a change of approach because there’s evidence underneath his numbers to suggest that if he just finds a way to lift the ball, he could be in for an explosion of homers. Some regression could be coming, here, and if Yelich can get his groundball rate back to the 26% or so that he’s had the last few years — still high, but definitely manageable — things could turn around quickly.
The other note is that Yelich is striking out too much. His 27.5% strikeout rate is the second highest of his career, behind only his disappointing 2020 season. There are some similarities between Yelich’s 2025 and his 2020: that season, Yelich became an extreme three-true-outcomes hitter — he had career highs in strikeout rate but also in walk rate, and he maintained the elite HR/FB rate that he’d had during his previous two MVP-level seasons. This season, the HR/FB rate is back in that territory — it’s been over 30% only from 2018-2020 and, so far, this season — but his strikeouts are creeping back to 2020 territory, without the elite walk rate.
Strike out less and elevate the ball. That’s extremely easy for me to say. But there’s evidence here that he could be in for a major breakout if he can do those things.
Where are we on Chourio?
I’ll be briefer on Chourio, as we’ve already covered some of his struggles this season. It’s been a weird year: at times, Chourio has looked like one of the best hitters alive. To call him “streaky” wouldn’t even necessarily be accurate; his streaks are so sudden and unpredictable that they come and go without warning. Willy Adames was streaky: he’d be bad for a week, good for a week, and bad for a week. Chourio will look good for four at-bats then terrible for four then all-world for four. It’s strange.
The headline object here is still the walks. Chourio has walked three times in 165 plate appearances. The fewest walks ever by a player who had 500 plate appearances in a season (Chourio is on pace for roughly 650 PA) is 13, done by Randall Simon in 2002, Bengie Molina in 2009, and Salvador Perez in 2015; Perez, who had the most plate appearances of the three, had a walk rate of 2.4%. Chourio’s as of today, is 1.8%.
He is a talented enough hitter that he is still helpful to the team, but in his last 25 games Chourio is batting just .226, and he’s only got one homer since April 12. With the complete lack of walks, Chourio’s OBP in the last 25 games is an eye-gougingly bad .255.
Maybe he’s starting to turn things around: in Tuesday’s game against the Astros, Chourio saw more pitches than usual and leveraged a 2-0 count into a double, even if it was a cheapie. On Wednesday, he drew another walk, just his third of the season.
My suspicion is that the coaching staff views his confidence as a strength and believe that Chourio is in a better place with a “do, don’t think” mentality. I get it: sometimes with players who are clearly very talented, overcoaching will lead to overthinking which will lead to loss of results and loss of confidence and those things can spiral. But this level of anti-walking is just completely unsustainable, and I think it needs to be addressed sooner than later.
Final thoughts
None of these players has been a disaster. Chourio has won games with his offense, and he and Yelich are tied for the team lead in home runs. Contreras has been pretty good lately on offense even though the extra-base hits aren’t there, and the way he’s been throwing out base stealers this season has been a revelation.
But the Brewers are not trying to settle for mediocrity, and with mediocre performances from these three players, that’s exactly where they’ll end up. This team has the talent to give the Cubs a run for their money in the division race, and while there are a variety of issues that have contributed to the Brewers’ 19-19 record through 38 games, I think this is the one that will need to turn around if they want to really separate themselves from a .500 record.