Brice Turang is in a Tailspin. Can He Get Right By October?

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of Benny Sieu-Imagn Images

There have been long stretches of this season in which Brice Turang looked like a credible MVP candidate. He had a .922 OPS through the midpoint of May. Thereafter, he batted .225/.302/.400 for a month and a half, but he rebounded with a thunderous .911 OPS in July. Combine that production (even considering the valley between the two peaks) with his defense at second base, and it was hard to find five players doing more for their teams, in either league.

Since the beginning of August, though, he hasn't been that guy at all. Turang went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in a series-ending loss to the Cubs in Chicago Thursday night, bringing his line since August 1 down to .174/.262/.239. In 124 plate appearances over that span, he's struck out 29.8% of the time, and there's been no power to compensate for all those whiffs. He's a mess up there.

The reason isn't some grand mystery, of course. Turang is playing hurt. He missed four games in the middle of last month with a knee injury that the team acknowledges has been nagging him for some time. Manager Pat Murphy said the problem didn't look unduly concerning on an MRI scan, and that it can be fixed via rest, but the few games Turang took off certainly weren't enough to fix his problems. No one is 100% healthy come September, but the Crew's star second baseman is dealing with more than fatigue and soreness.

It's not one of the first body parts you think of as compromising a player's operation, but in hitting, the back knee is important. When a batter engages their load and begins their stride, the back leg has to provide stability and dynamism at the same time. The back hip powers the swing by initiating the rotation that gives every cut its speed and danger, but that can only happen if the whole back leg is in a position to move powerfully and quickly. It becomes responsible for power and balance—for rotation and direction. If it's compromised, you're going to be in a world of hurt as a hitter.

Here's Turang hitting a home run to center field on a breaking ball low and away, from earlier this season. Watch his back leg work. Watch the way it kicks out behind him as part of the swing, helping him stay through the ball and extend to get the barrel to it, surviving the pull toward pulling off the ball because it's coming in slower than if this had been a fastball.

Now, compare that to this swing at a similar pitch, from the Little League Classic last month. The same kick is there, in the end, but it's not as certain or as aggressive; his back side isn't providing the same drive or keeping him through the ball as well. He's just a bit early and a bit inside the ball, resulting in a lazy flyout. He pulled off it, and although you wouldn't initially guess so, a part of the reason lies in the balkiness of his back knee. It's harder to stay in your back leg as long, or to avoid crashing forward or spinning off the ball, if that leg isn't fully healthy.

This affects him on other types of pitches, too. Here are two side-by-side comparisons of Turang as an opponent delivered a four-seam fastball up and away. In the shots on the left, he's about to line a double down the left-field line. In the ones on the right, he's about to swing under the ball for strike three.

If you're thinking that Turang is a bit later getting his foot down on the right, you're correct. His leg kick has a bit more of a hitch and hover in it right now than it did early in the season, when he was very smooth up and down with the front foot. That's the big culprit in messing up his address of this type of pitch lately; he's late from the very start.

You can also see his front shoulder leaking open a hair sooner and his hands coming forward earlier, on the right. Those flaws, too, bear some relationship to the knee issue, but let's not overly excuse Turang here. Another part of the blame for that mistake falls on Turang himself; he's gotten worse at staying back and trusting his hands recently. That shows up on video, but it also shows up in his plate discipline. Here's his rolling average for both weighted on-base average (wOBA, a holistic measurement of offensive efficacy) and out-of-zone swing rate (O-Swing%) for the season. When he's maintained a tight strike zone, he's performed very well. When he's gotten anxious or struggled with pitch recognition, he's gone in the tank. It doesn't take a knee injury to explain that; most hitters go through streaks and slumps because of swing decisions. Lately, Turang's have been bad, so he's slumping, rather than streaking.

It's reassuring to see the way those two lines move with respect to one another, in a way. It tells us that if Turang gets back to "ball-striking it well," as Murphy would say, he'll regain much of his lost production. That phrase is confusing; Murphy isn't talking about striking the ball. He means distinguishing balls from strikes. Since I brought it up, though, let's talk about striking the ball, too. We've already seen evidence, above, that Turang is striking it less cleanly of late, specifically because of his injury. Let's see how his wOBA moves in concert with his hard-hit rate.

Yikes. This is less encouraging, because Turang's hard-hit rate has trended in one direction pretty much all year. He came out of the gates on a well-documented power binge, seeming to have carried over what clicked for him late in 2025, but ever since, he's steadily lost the ability to drive the ball. His bat speed has ticked down slightly; the frequency with which he squares the ball up (and the extent to which he does so, on average) has ticked down even more. 

That could just be the result of an unhappy coincidence: Turang is hurt, and he's making bad swing decisions. Put those two things together, and you get less damaging contact. But there's one more thing to consider, which can be seen as cause, effect, or (most likely) some of each in this accursed equation: timing.

Here's the visual profile of Turang's timing against fastballs in each month of the season, save September.

The key takeaway comes from the middle panel. In the first four months of the season, Turang had one mode for timing against the fastball; the curve that showed the distribution of his timings against individual heaters rose and fell on each side of one peak. In August, however, his distribution was bimodal, meaning there were two peaks. One is more precisely on time than the peaks for the other months, which sounds good, but isn't. (More on that in a minute.) The other is later on the ball than the peaks for the other months, which is as bad as it sounds. 

The smaller, left-hand peak is heaters on which Turang was quite late and was likely to whiff. That one on the right is also trouble, though, for two reasons. First, it tells us that Turang is no longer looking for and reacting to the fastball with conviction. Instead, he's sometimes cheating toward the heater, and therefore getting to it with his barrel farther around than it is when he swings best and most freely. Second, Turang's swing is naturally oriented to the opposite field, as much as that of any hitter in the majors. When he's right, he's going to stay in that later part of the "on-time" area on the chart above. If he's getting the barrel truly square to heaters regularly, it not only signals less coverage of the pitcher's other pitchers, but tells us he's probably not barreling the ball.

Here's the same set of images for breaking balls, month by month.

Much, much more often than earlier in the season, Turang is running out of bat for the breaking ball lately. That goes back to what we looked at with the lower-half mechanics above. He's not able to sustain a full-speed swing without pulling off the ball, or flattening out his swing. As a result, he's either pulling off the ball and flailing at a pitch that eludes the end of his bat or swinging right over that pitch, unable to dip the barrel smartly into it.

Hitting people talk about hitters being caught in-between all the time. Turang is a classic case right now. He's been early on breaking and offspeed stuff far, far more often recently than earlier in the year. He's trying to time up the fastball and cover the rest of what he might see from a pitcher, but neither his approach nor his body are up to that task. He's late on too many fastballs, and way early on the other stuff when he really commits himself to being on time for the heat. The adaptability of his swing is gone; so is his genius as a hitter.

The Brewers have ample breathing room in the division, but not much in the race for a first-round postseason bye. They'd prefer to sew up home-field advantage before having anyone rest up for the playoffs. In Turang's case, though, it makes some sense to pull the trigger now. Shelving him for two weeks should still give the team a good chance to claim a bye. After all, he's not helping them right now. Taking him off his feet and letting the knee heal now would also mean some time to get the timing back afterward, before the postseason begins.

It's not very likely to happen. In situations like these, teams and players almost exclusively choose to keep having the player play through the problem. I don't think this is a situation where anyone needs to be viewed as wrong or at fault, either. Injuries are an unfortunate and inevitable part of professional sports. They can't always be perfeclty managed, until they no longer cause a problem. They are, themselves, problems, and sometimes you just have to live an imperfect life as happily and productively as your circumstances allow. Turang might not heal up in two weeks off, anyway; this malady might need an offseason to get better. He might even need offseason surgery to address it. Sitting for that long might exacerbate his timing issues and affect his conditioning for defense and baserunning. There are drawbacks to the "let him get fully healthy" plan that fans and pundits are too quick to dismiss. I still believe it would be the best course in Turang's case, but the team and player know more about his specific case than I do.

Failing a stint on the IL, Turang should focus on tightening his zone and swinging with conviction. The better he gets ahead in counts, the more accurately he'll be able to guess what pitch is coming next, which should ameliorate some of his timing issues. There are solutions to pursue even while he remains hurt. The question, though, is whether it's possible he can be his best self even while hurt—and whether, if not, it's worth giving up part of the season to see if he shed that injury before the games become do-or-die.

View full article

[igor67]

As you stated giving Turang 2 weeks now isn't going to hurt Brewers chances of winning games since because of the slump. As a bonus Murph can even play Hamilton more.