The Subtle Slugger Who Could Be the Coup of the Winter for Brewers

It's been a steady evolution for Randal Grichuk, the man first famous for (technically) being taken just before Mike Trout in the 2009 MLB Draft. He played very well in the minors, earning top prospect status, and he emerged as a credible outfield sidekick to Trout before being traded to St. Louis. Throughout what should have been his prime, though, he was held back by a near-calamitous amount of swing-and-miss. Only over the last few years has he fixed that flaw in his game, as he transitions from a fine defensive outfielder into more of a fringy corner guy and platoon DH.

The culmination of that progress came in 2024. After years of more or less being deployed as a full-time player, this year saw Grichuk sign for a paltry $2 million with the Diamondbacks, and then play mostly against left-handed pitchers. For his career, through 2023, Grichuk took 30.6% of his plate appearances against lefties. That's about the platoon advantage rate an average right-handed hitter would have if they played every day. In 2024, though, that rate skyrocketed to 66%. Grichuk became a platoon bat, and he thrived in that role.

For the year, Grichuk hit .291/.348/.528, and if you isolate his work against lefties, it was even better. In fact, since the start of 2022, he's been a downright elite hitter against lefty pitching, at .317/.367/.573. He's only struck out 17.3% of the time, and he's drawn walks in 7.0% of his plate appearances against southpaws. As Grichuk has matured at the plate, he's become one of the league's great situational lefty-mashers.

Overall, through 2019, Grichuk struck out at a 28.3% clip. From 2020-22, the figure fell to 22.1%, but his power dipped, too. He was trying to figure out how not to trade contact for power, but it took a long time. Since the start of 2023, it's clicked. He's posted an 18.9% overall strikeout rate, hit 46.2% of his batted balls at least 95 miles per hour, and stopped hitting the ball on the ground the way he too-often did in that intermediate phase of his career.

Back in May, I created a metric designed to capture overall offensive production through the prism of contact quality and the ability to avoid strikeouts. It's called Skills-Adjusted Exit Velocity (SAEV), and it's a very robust measurement of hitter quality. It not only correlates better with real production (as measured by weighted on-base average) than any other single metric of its kind, but is more consistent year-to-year than wOBA, and predicts a player's wOBA in the following season better than their actual wOBA does. Of the 325 hitters with at least 200 plate appearances in 2024, Grichuk's SAEV was 20th-best, at 93.5.

Of course, there are major drawbacks. Grichuk did all that in just 279 plate appearances, and his track record tells us that either his performance or his health gives way if he's asked to play much more often than that. He's also 33 years old. He'll make more than $2 million this winter, but he'll make less than $10 million, for sure. In fact, he might well find a contract worth just about what Gary Sánchez got from the Brewers last winter: $7 million on a one-year deal, with a good chunk of the money deferred to 2026 via a mutual option.

Grichuk is a perfect target for the Brewers. They need to replace some of the power they're losing with Willy Adames and Sánchez departing via free agency, but they can't afford to buy a player like Adames and they want to maintain their superb defense. They have an opening for some at-bats at DH and in the outfield, but they have to go to a right-handed hitter; the team is already set to play Garrett Mitchell more often in 2025 and will lean left by plenty when Mitchell, Sal Frelick, Brice Turang, and Christian Yelich are in the lineup together. Grichuk can slot right in as a right fielder or DH against lefties, occasionally come off the bench to give opponents a bad matchup, and deliver the punch the team could otherwise be missing. He's more or less a right-handed answer to Jake Bauers, but with much, much better recent indicators. He's Sánchez without defensive value, which sounds unsexy, but that very unsexiness is how the team can surely afford him.