William Contreras is Not Healthy, and He's Not Right at the Plate

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images

Give William Contreras credit for his toughness, and an extra helping for his ability to make up for a major injury. He's dealing with a fracture in his left hand, which is (naturally) exacerbated and prevented from fully healing by the mere act of catching on a regular basis. Still, he's doing everything he can to be there for his team, and he's been better than many of the (closer to) fully healthy players on the roster.

Contreras has played in 64 of the Brewers' first 69 games, and he's hitting .242/.353/.342 in 272 plate appearances. A whopping 57 of those games played were at catcher. Although Eric Haase (.239/.286/.419 in 50 plate appearances) is actually hitting about as well as Contreras is, there's still a real service to the team in their star catcher being willing to gut it out on a near-daily basis. If nothing else, he's been a terrific defender behind the plate, shoring up the problems he had with accuracy and throwing better than ever on steal attempts; grading out well as a framer; and improving at blocking balls in the dirt. In this day and age, it's also quite helpful to have anyone who can sustain a .353 OBP in the lineup, even if they're light on power.

On the other hand, Contreras has batted second, third or fourth in every game in which he's appeared this year. He's giving up 80 points of slugging average to the league's standard at any of those places in the batting order. The Brewers needed Contreras to make good on the power potential he showed late last season, to help make up for the loss of Willy Adames via free agency. Instead, he's become one of the league's lightest-hitting should-be power hitters.

When he decided to play through the injury, one might reasonably have hoped that Contreras would heal even as he did so. Bones, especially in the hands, get good blood supply. Some day-to-day improvement should happen, as long as a player isn't actively renewing the damage to the injured area. We don't have access to medical data about Contreras; maybe that healing is (very slowly) happening. What we can see, however, suggests that things are only getting worse.

Through the end of April, Contreras's average bat speed was 72.6 miles per hour. That, itself, was down about 2 mph from where he was in the second half of 2024, but it was a tolerable loss. Some guys need time (and warmer weather) to get loose and achieve their full range of motion (whence comes bat speed) anyway. You could easily envision Contreras making the best of the situation and rounding more or less into form from that starting point.

In May, that number slipped to 72.2 miles per hour. That's a bad sign. The margin is small, but the trend is in the wrong direction. Contreras didn't slug any better (.362) last month than he had before that (.365). Interestingly, though, even as his bat speed faded, his contact point moved farther out in front of his body. In a sketch, it sure looks like he started making earlier decisions, trying to get out to the ball with a slower swing by starting earlier and simply opting not to swing when he couldn't identify a pitch immediately. His swing rate has fluctuated throughout this season, but it's holding to a lower ebb than where it spent most of its time last season. He's become more selective, and maybe that's just a change of approach—but it feels more like an accommodation of a bat slowed down by a slightly weakened bottom hand on the bat.

This month, that's come into even sharper focus. Contreras has just one extra-base hit since the calendar flipped to June, and although he belted it off the wall in the deepest reaches of The Ueck, it still only goes as a double.

He's slugging .212 for the month, so far, and damningly, that comes along with a bat speed that has fallen all the way to 71.2 mph. Again, his intercept point on swings is well in front of him, right where it was last summer. From a slower swing, though, that equivalent contact point means he must make swing decisions earlier. You can guess what that leads to: fewer swings, in general, and (since pitchers know they needn't fear him the way they did 10 months ago) a lot more called strikes. Here's the percentage of takes on which Contreras has taken a called strike, by month, since the start of last year:

• Mar./Apr. 2024: 27.8
• May 2024: 25.7
• June 2024: 28.4
• July 2024: 25.4
• August 2024: 24.3
• September 2024: 22.9
• Mar./Apr, 2025: 24.2
• May 2025: 27.6
• June 2025: 37.2

When we set the new Statcast visuals of players' swings side by side, we can start to see exactly why Contreras's bat is slower. Here's a first checkpoint: the moment when his bat first comes around to be parallel with the sides of home plate or the lines of the batter's box. 

Look both at the difference in Contreras's shoulder position and at the crook of his left wrist, in each frame. On the left, last year, you can see that he's already opened up that shoulder quite a bit. That's important to all the bat speed Contreras generated so well last year: he gets that shoulder open and forces his hands to catch up to the rapid rotation of his body. He sometimes pulled off the ball, at his best, but the bat speed created by doing things that way was still immensely valuable.

Simulate that motion, though. Grip a bat (or a golf club, or an umbrella, or a wooden spoon), get into an athletic posture, and try twisting enough to get your front shoulder well open, even while your hands are still even with your belly button or so. Keep in mind, you can't do so by just dropping your front arm into a relaxed position. It has to provide a lot of strength and an upward, shearing force, working in concert with the top hand to move your implement fast in rotation. Quickly, you'll realize the angle you're creating isn't comfortable, especially in your bottom hand. You're asking it to do a lot of work, because that shoulder is clearing out of the way. Your front arm is taking over from the torso to start whipping the bat forward, and that means the hand and wrist, specifically, absorbing a lot of force.

In the image on the right, Contreras is much less open with his upper half. That, plus a slightly more rolled wrist on the left arm, means he's carrying the bat into the hitting zone with more of his big muscles, leaving less to his left hand. He's subtly babying that tender hand, and already, he's a bit behind the curve in terms of generating exit velocity.

Here's the moment when he first gets on plane with the incoming pitch, for both years.

Contreras is considerably slower at this point of the swing this year, too, but the most interesting thing (almost imperceptible, but there) is how he's accelerated the transfer from the bottom to the top hand in terms of what's powering the swing. Well before contact, on average, he's extending that back arm forward to throw the barrel through the zone. He's also slightly further forward, in terms of balance and weight transfer. This could be (and probably even is) happening subconsciously, but the effect is to take a little strain off the bottom hand and generate as much of the swing's force and stability as possible in other places.

Here's the frame closest to his contact point, for each year.

This just completes what we've already seen. The differences are slight, but the front shoulder is more closed this season, and the back arm has taken over the path of the swing much more than it had by contact last year. It's a fine little compensatory fix, for a hitter playing at far less than 100%. However, it's also costing him a tick or two of bat speed, and it's coloring the swing decisions even upstream from that. He just isn't capable, right now, of consistently executing the swing that made him a fearsome, middle-of-the-order hitter over the last two seasons. Since it sounds unlikely that his hand will heal well within the season, Contreras will have to keep finding ways to succeed despite diminished bat speed.

For the team's part, sliding Contreras down in the batting order seems urgently necessary. He can be helpful to the team just by showing up and taking the field, but a few more days off are in order, and when he's in the lineup, he should bat sixth or seventh. In all likelihood, that's the kind of player Contreras can be even as he plays through this injury. At some point, he'll be well enough again to start slamming the ball and slugging nearly .500. Until that point comes, though, he should move down the batting order to permit hitters with better health and better present pop to come up more often. He probably won't be back to the hitter we all expect Contreras to be until the end stages of this season, or 2026. That's a bummer, but looking at the data, it's hard to feel any other way. The Brewers must adjust to what's happening.

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[WAN2]

Where does management think you're wrong?

[Trax]

Agree and then some.   Don't have to put him on IL, just tell him he's riding pine until fully healthy.  He can back up Haase until then.

[Snoebird]

38 minutes ago, Trax said:

Agree and then some.   Don't have to put him on IL, just tell him he's riding pine until fully healthy.  He can back up Haase until then.

Now we're seeing the repercussions of Jeferson Quero and Brock Wilken's lost season, although Keith Law doesn't think Wilken will amount to a front-line player. Now might be a good time to promote switch-hitting, switch-throwing C/2B/3B Anthony Seigler from Nashville. A 40-man roster spot could open up with an Aaron Civale trade. 

[Brian]

13 minutes ago, Snoebird said:

Now we're seeing the repercussions of Jeferson Quero and Brock Wilken's lost season, although Keith Law doesn't think Wilken will amount to a front-line player. Now might be a good time to promote switch-hitting, switch-throwing C/2B/3B Anthony Seigler from Nashville. A 40-man roster spot could open up with an Aaron Civale trade. 

I agree, just let Contreras's hand heal and be done with it.  Geeze, next thing you know he will be catching in the all star game not giving it the required 3 weeks to heal up. 

[Sugarrayray]

Literally a fantastic article.

[keephopealive]

How does Quero look defensively this year?  I'd be up for bringing him up for a month or so, let Contreras take some time off and heal. 

[wiguy94]

1 hour ago, keephopealive said:

How does Quero look defensively this year?  I'd be up for bringing him up for a month or so, let Contreras take some time off and heal. 

The AAA manager Rick Sweet said in an interview with Jeff Hem the Sounds radio guy that Quero's arm is probably just going to be above average going forward and not double plus like it used to be.

[Jim French Stepstool]

It's almost as if they value his defense, framing & handling of pitchers so much that they'll live with the poor ABs. That doesn't sound appealing to me but neither does Haase catching for a week & a half, and I have no idea what kind of work Siegler turns in behind the plate. 

If he ever does get IL'ed & they deem Quero not quite up to snuff yet, I wonder if they'd find a way to get Jorge Alfaro on the 40 & up here. He has quite a bit of MLB experience & if they feel he's a better game-caller & defender than Siegler it just seems like something they might consider. Doesn't look like he can hit much anymore but enough power that he might run into one now & then.