How Brewers Infield Defense is Uniquely Built Around Brice Turang's Brilliance

There have been a few more hiccups this year. Brice Turang has occasionally tried to do a hair too much, and his hands haven't been quite as automatic as they were in 2024. On balance, though, he remains one of the best defensive second basemen in baseball. Fans can see glimpses of that almost every night, as he often makes a great running play going to his right or leaps to snare a line drive that appears to be ticketed for right field. Harder to see, however, is how dependent on him the whole team is. 

Teams don't explicitly design their infield alignments to put the ball in the hands of any one player. If they could, they would, but that's generally beyond the control of anyone involved in the process. Pitchers can try to induce weak contact, but forcing it to go in one particular direction is difficult—and making that a major part of pitch selection or targeting might make one more predictable. The field is too big (and modern hitters strike the ball too well) for any player to cover an especially large share of the available ground. Instead, then, clubs try to put their defense in the best position to make as many plays as possible, as a unit. Individuals are, by and large, just asked to make the most of the slice of space they're assigned.

When it comes to the Brewers, though, you can see just how much they trust Turang—in their alignments, and in his individual numbers. Baseball Prospectus has a statistic called Attempt Range, which gives the number of balls above or below average an infielder reaches. Of the 128 infielders who have played a qualifying number of innings, Turang (14.9) not only leads the league, but is 3.5 ahead of the next player on the list, Nico Hoerner. He's the rangiest infielder in baseball, and it's not close at all.

Part of that is sheer skill and athleticism, but another part is that the Brewers build their infield defense around the knowledge that Turang will get to balls other players wouldn't. They use shaded infield positioning less often than all but two other teams in the league, but specifically, the way they array their defenders both in and out of shades (the closest thing now allowed to traditional shifts) shows their faith in Turang.

Here's what it looks like when the Brewers shade against right-handed batters.

Not every team looks quite like this. Yes, Turang is pulled all the way over near the bag, but notice that the third baseman (usually Caleb Durbin) is right on the line, and the shortstop (usually Joey Ortiz) is deep in the hole. That makes for a lot of relatively easy plays for those two defenders, but leaves Turang covering miles of ground in the middle of the diamond. He's liable to need to go four or five steps to his right, crossing the bag and making a long throw after his momentum took him away from his target. The team is fine with that. Many clubs also pull their first baseman farther from the bag than this when shading against righties, but not Milwaukee; they also trust Turang to be ready to move a long way to his left if needed.

They hardly ever use that alignment, of course, so let's look, now, at what their infield usually looks like against righties. Here's where they are when not shading against those batters.

That still leaves the biggest slice of the infield for Turang. Obviously, most ground balls by right-handed batters go to the left side, anyway, but the way they set themselves says the Brewers want the ball to find Turang as often as needed.

Here's what it looks like when they're shading against lefty batters.

This is fairly familiar. The shortstop (Ortiz, for the sake of the discussion) is pinned close to the bag, and the third baseman is well over toward shortstop. Notice, though, that Turang is still playing pretty wide of the first-base bag. The huge majority of the space toward which a ball might be hit is still going to be his responsibility. Compare that to the way the Twins play when shading against lefties.

This is an arrangement focused on sealing off the hole between the first baseman and the second baseman. Little is hoped for from the second baseman, in terms of range. The plan is to choke off anything near the line with the stacked defenders, and to have the shortstop range far to their left to make plays just on the right side of second. It's a big contrast from how the Brewers set up; they want Turang making a much larger share of the plays toward straightaway second base than the Twins ask of their second basemen. Now, consider the way the team from suburban Atlanta sets up when shading lefties.

This arrangement makes more space for the second baseman (usually Ozzie Albies) to field balls hit to the traditional space assigned to that player, but by swinging the third baseman over much closer to the shortstop, they're still encouraging the shortstop (usually Nick Allen) to cross the bag and take up a good amount of the space just beyond it. Contrast that with the Brewers, who let Durbin play more in the hole and leave Ortiz to respect the ball up the middle. Again, more than the Georgia club, Milwaukee is leaving their second baseman to make more plays and asking less of the shortstop.

Turang is as important to the Brewers infield as any infielder in baseball is to their team, which is saying a lot. Of the other 29 teams, there are only one or two who are similarly dependent on their second baseman as the centerpiece of the defense. Most clubs ask the most of their shortstop. It's a sign of what Turang has proved he can do, and of how much the coaching staff trusts him, that he's the player toward whom extra responsibility is pushed at virtually every turn within the context of this great team defense.