Blake Perkins is the Most Important Story in the Brewers Lineup

Last year, Blake Perkins was a pretty close outfield parallel to infielders Owen Miller, Brice Turang, and Andruw Monasterio. He had fine contact skills, and he didn't expand his strike zone. He played great defense, had excellent speed, and (unlike Turang, for instance), he even hit a good number of fly balls. Unfortunately, like all three of the Crew's spare infielders, he didn't hit the ball hard at all.

Parkins's average exit velocity in 2023 was an unintimidating 83.8 miles per hour. He did get the ball off the ground, but not in a productive way. His Medium Trajectory rate (the percentage of his batted balls between 2 and 25 degrees of launch angle, the most valuable one-third slice league-wide) was just 22.2%. Despite making contact at a roughly average rate on a per-swing basis and drawing plenty of walks, Perkins struck out over 27 percent of the time. That's because pitchers poured the ball into the strike zone against him. Perkins struck no fear into hurlers, and as a result, he struggled to stay ahead of the balls and strikes curve.

This year, everything is different. Perkins has traded some lift for more swing speed. He's hitting the ball, on average, 88.9 miles per hour, an exciting jump that has boosted his isolated power by 32 points. Though his average launch angle has gone down, his Medium Trajectory rate is up dramatically, to 33.8%. That helps explain an increase of almost 40 points in his BABIP. He's squaring the ball up much more often, which explains a substantial share of his improvement.

Perkins is chasing outside the zone a bit more often this year, but that's part of a more aggressive overall approach. He's also increased his in-zone swing rate from 54.9% to 58.7%, and specifically, he's going after pitches in the lower half of the zone much more frequently.

Last year, he was fixated on getting balls up in the zone, but that led to getting under the ball too often. It meant many mishits. Nearly 40 percent of his swings resulted in foul balls in 2023, and not enough of them led to hard contact in play. As he's resolved to cover more of the zone, he's traded some contact for more authority on contact, with the aforementioned exit velocity bump showing up especially clearly on stuff in the lower part of the zone.

That tradeoff in contact is not to be ignored. Last year, Perkins made contact on 77.1% of his swings. That's down to 67.4% in 2024, and some of that decrease in contact rate comes inside the strike zone. Yet, he's actually striking out slightly less than in 2023, because pitchers are throwing him fewer strikes, and he's not bailing them out when they nibble at the corners.

Don't throw a party yet, assuming Perkins has effected a permanent transformation into a star. He's hitting a robust .258/.363/.423, and if he can sustain that, his defense does make him star-caliber, but there are some reasons to wonder how sustainable these improvements are. Baseball Prospectus's DRC+, a holistic offensive value statistic, rates Perkins as a slightly below-average hitter this year (94, where 100 is average and higher is better). However, Prospectus also reports the standard deviation of its models' numbers, to give a sense of those models' certainty, and Perkins's STDEV on his DRC+ is currently 22. In other words, there's a 50-percent chance Perkins is better than 6% worse than league-average, and about a 16-percent chance that he's more than 14% better than average.

Perkins is only 27 years old. Because his career arc looks so much different from those of Christian Yelich, Sal Frelick, Joey Wiemer, Garrett Mitchell, and Jackson Chourio, the impulse is to treat him as less promising or interesting than they are. At this point, though, he's clearly as important and as valuable as at least two of those five players--and, at any given moment, perhaps as many as four of them. The team knew they could count on hitters like Yelich, William Contreras, Willy Adames, and Rhys Hoskins, but Perkins is turning out to be another reliable bat in their lineup--and he could be a difference-maker for them throughout the year.