Brewers Activate Christian Yelich, Completing Pat Murphy's Best Lineup Yet

The Brewers offense rediscovered its stride after just a short wobble. They missed Christian Yelich, but they've done fine without him lately. He returns to the team's lineup Tuesday night against the Padres, joining a team that's currently fifth in MLB in runs per game and 10th in Baseball Prospectus's DRC+. The team survived the long absences of Jackson Chourio and Andrew Vaughn, the pressure of which was compounded when Yelich, too, went down.

He returns without having embarked on a rehab assignment—a rare thing, after four weeks away, but understandable in this case. Yelich is the veteran leader of the team and has never felt he gets much from rehab games. With the Trajekt system available to him at Uecker Field, he was able to get simulated reps without leaving the team or risking injury in game action. 

Slotting Yelich back into the top part of the Brewers batting order makes it quite fearsome. Brice Turang's emergence as a superstar with burgeoning power has made it easier to see the upside of this time, and with Chourio, Yelich, William Contreras and Jake Bauers behind him, pitchers don't get a break until they get all the way to the bottom third of the lineup card.

In some other matchups, the team might also elect to slide Chourio to center field and move Bauers to left, getting Vaughn into the mix with the aforementioned top five. Garrett Mitchell's recent slump makes that seem like a pretty good idea; so does the utter lack of punch delivered by David Hamilton and Joey Ortiz at the bottom end of the order.

Yelich takes the place of Tyler Black on the roster, sending Black back to Triple-A Nashville after his most encouraging taste of the majors to date. Black still has no defensive home and doesn't add anything Bauers and Yelich don't do already, so his path to playing time remains murky. When he rejoins the Sounda, though, he'll be alongside a few players who could soon be in play to take this lineup from whole to truly complete.

Cooper Pratt, Jett Williams and Luis Lara are all showing varying signs of readiness to have an impact in the major leagues. Meanwhile, Mitchell, Ortiz and Hamilton are struggling. It doesn't seem that a swap of any of the three prospects for one of the current big-leaguers is imminent, but another week or two of things trending the same way would force a more serious conversation. If the Brewers can find even one more solid bat among Williams, Pratt and Lara, they could turn the corner and become an elite offense, even before the arrival of Jesus Made in the bigs some time in the next 12 months.

It's strange that Yelich's return occasions this vision of the future, since he's very much a part of the team's present but is slowly moving toward being part of its past. However, his return is a symbol of what's possible for this team, and increasingly, what seems possible is a future in which a team long built around pitching and defense will have the league's most formidable offense, too.