The Brewers Are Gradually Making a Long-Awaited Change Atop Their Lineup

The Milwaukee Brewers are coasting toward their second straight NL Central championship, and fourth in the last six full seasons. They don't need to worry about much, right now, except staying healthy and being well-positioned to play their best baseball come the start of the MLB postseason. To do the latter, though, they do need to consider some tweaks to their lineup, and there are some recent signs of Pat Murphy doing just that.

Since Jul. 1, Brice Turang is batting .198/.265/.264. His average exit velocity is on the wrong side of 85 miles per hour, and he's swinging more often with each passing month--including expanding his strike zone too much. Because Turang was excellent in April and a serviceable OBP man in May and June, Murphy has tried to give his sparky second baseman time to work through those struggles, but his sustained failure has finally forced the skipper to explore some changes.

In only 18 games all season has anyone but Turang started at second base. However, seven of those have come since the All-Star break. On May 8, Turang was installed as the everyday, no-exceptions leadoff hitter against right-handed starting pitchers--but they've deviated from that recently, too. Against lefties, Turang has often batted ninth, but almost always started. In the last four weeks, though, he's made only two starts against lefties, more often beginning the contest on the bench.

It's just very small indicators, so far, and it can be explained away as a manager giving his infield's defensive anchor a day off here and there, but the fact is that Turang is losing his primacy in the collection of options from which the Brewers can choose near the top of their batting order.

Over the same two-month span in which Turang has looked so helpless, Sal Frelick is batting a modest but playable .266/.327/.351. He's been much more disciplined, and his contact rate is elite. Blake Perkins is hitting .310/.385/.391, with defense every bit as dazzling and irreplaceable as Turang's, but at a different position. Joey Ortiz went through a stretch of struggle as deep as Turang's, but can contribute more against left-handed pitchers than can Turang. Then, of course, there's Jackson Chourio, whose sustained star turn has him written in pen into the top two spots in the lineup for the foreseeable future--as in, the next several years.

Turang remains, perhaps, the best defensive second baseman on the senior circuit, and he'll still play most of the time down the stretch. Come October, it's even hard to envision Murphy sitting him against a left-handed starter, unless it be one the team believes Andruw Monasterio is ideally suited to handle. Being in the lineup and being in its top half aren't the same thing, though. Turang found multiple ways to create runs for the team this weekend, using his speed and bunting ability as well as his hitting, but he can help the team in those ways just as well if he's batting ninth as if he's batting first. It wouldn't be a surprise to see Perkins continue to claim at-bats near the top of the order, alongside Chourio, William Contreras, and the red-hot Willy Adames, with Turang sliding to the bottom on a more frequent basis and setting the table for the top of the order from there.

A lead that has hovered around 10 games in the division for the last several days gives the Brewers the luxury of experimenting a bit. They need to play representative ball the rest of the way to position themselves for the playoffs, but the actual stakes will stay quite low until the bunting is hanging from the railings. For the next month, Murphy can mix and match, and he might try some others out for the role that Turang has filled (with varying degrees of success) for the bulk of this campaign.