Can Brice Turang Get Back On Time?

Major League Baseball released its latest All-Star balloting update on Monday afternoon. Brice Turang is the closest to representing the Brewers in Philadelphia next month, but he remains roughly 63,000 votes behind Phillies second baseman Bryson Stott for second place. To advance to the next phase of voting, Turang must bridge that gap to land within the top two spots at his position.

Turang deserves to play in the Midsummer Classic for his performance on the whole this year. He leads qualified second basemen with a 132 wRC+, and his 2.9 bWAR ranks second. However, he hasn’t been in his All-Star form for several weeks. It’s been an especially rough go lately. Since June 5, Turang is hitting .225/.267/.437 for a .703 OPS. During that time, he’s struck out in 35.2% of his plate appearances, while walking at just a 5.6% clip.

“I think he's going through a little lull,” Pat Murphy said in the visiting manager’s office in Cincinnati earlier this week. “I think he'll self-correct.”

Since a red-hot start to his season, Turang’s bat has cooled considerably. After posting a 160 wRC+ in April, he slipped to 105 in May and 124 in June. His strikeouts have steadily increased throughout. The good news is that even the slumping version of Turang has still been a solid hitter, particularly for someone still playing strong defense at the keystone.

“There's a few exceptions, but he figures it out for a hit for one at-bat,” Murphy said. “Well, not figures it out, but he's good enough to still produce, and his lulls are not that low. That's a sign of a really good player.”

During the club’s last homestand, Murphy explained that Turang was struggling with his timing because he was drifting forward off his back leg, rather than staying back and working behind the baseball with his swing.

“He understands his swing, and he understands what he's doing right now that's holding him back a little bit. We talked about it in the dugout yesterday,” Murphy said at the time. “He totally understands what he's doing when he gets in these modes where he drifts forward and gets to his front, he can't stay behind the ball.”

When a hitter drifts forward, velocity gets on them quicker. Turang has always let the ball get deep, which means he swings later at fastballs, but it has progressed to the point where he’s too late too often. That lateness means that even when he lines the ball up and makes contact, it's weaker than it should be, because the ball sails a hair deeper before his bat can get to it, so he catches it off the end. Overcompensating for that can also result in pulling off the ball, with the same result.

“You're going forward, ball's coming, it makes sense,” Murphy said. “So then you start cheating to it, and then what happens? Then you come off the ball. So there's all sorts of ramifications of it.”

The issue has been most pronounced against left-handed pitchers. Turang has kept his head above water against right-handers, but the quality of his at-bats has fallen off badly against southpaws. According to Statcast, he was late on 30% of his swings against left-handed fastballs in May. That’s up to 58% in June.

Murphy wanted to give Turang, who has played in 73 of the team’s 77 games and experienced a slight decrease in bat speed, more days off to work through the issue, away from the pressure of a game setting. That may be more plausible now that Cooper Pratt is in the fold as the everyday shortstop. On June 14, two days after Pratt’s promotion, Turang was out of the lineup for the first time since May 3. In eight games since then, he’s hit .303/.343/.455 while making more loud contact, but he’s remained too late on velocity and continued striking out 37.1% of the time.

The good news is that Turang and the Brewers have already diagnosed the problem, and it’s a fairly simple fix. Nothing is wrong with his swing path, which is nearly identical to when he was crushing the ball in April. That doesn’t necessarily make applying the adjustment easier, though.

“It's easy to talk about. ‘Well, just change it.’ But it's hard to do when the action’s on and you've repeated it,” Murphy said.

Fortunately, Jackson Chourio and Jake Bauers have alleviated the pressure on Turang to be the linchpin of the lineup. Those hitters will fall into their own ebbs. At that point, it could again be Turang’s turn to carry more weight in the middle of the order. In the meantime, his timing and contact rate are worth monitoring.

“If he stays behind the ball, things are a lot different for him,” Murphy said. “The swing is just beautiful. I mean, it's what you dream about.”