Just In Time, Brewers' Young Outfielders Are Coming Into Their Own

Coming into this season, the error bars on the Brewers' season projections were huge, because they were set to rely heavily on a bevy of young hitters with less than a full season of big-league experience on which to base any expectations. Most prominent among those players were Brice Turang, Sal Frelick, Jackson Chourio, Joey Ortiz, and Garrett Mitchell. Three months into the six-month marathon, we know practically everything about Turang and Ortiz; they look like very good players. We know practically nothing about Mitchell; he's been sidelined all year, and prematurely left his rehab game Wednesday with another possible injury. A good chunk of the remaining variance for this club lies in the middle, where we have a wealth of data but incomplete information on Frelick and Chourio.

These two have played side by side almost all year, but they make a strange juxtaposition. Frelick is a high-floor, low-ceiling, left-hitting player whose value comes more from his glove than from his bat, and who is a bit old for a prospect of such pedigree in their first full season. Chourio, of course, is a right-handed batter with as high a ceiling as almost anyone in baseball, but whose defense has been adventurous and who hasn't quite proved he'll be able to consistently handle big-league pitching yet. Being only 20 years old, though, he has plenty of time to change that.

Rather than try to treat their equally interesting and uncertain futures side by side, then, let's separate them and discuss each on their own.

Just over three weeks ago, I wrote about the calamitous absence of loft or danger in the swing of Sal Frelick. He doesn't have the sheer size, strength, or bat speed to hit for even average power, but in order to maximize the potential production from his hit tool-focused approach, he needed to start elevating the ball. When that piece came out, Frelick had hit just nine balls 95 miles per hour or harder, at a launch angle of 10 degrees or higher. Require that such hard-hit air balls be hit to dead center or around toward Frelick's pull field in right, and the number was just five.

Since Sunday, Frelick has four such batted balls, including one fly out to the warning track in dead center at Petco Park and one viciously well-struck high liner for an automatic double in that same game.

When he got home to Milwaukee, Frelick kept right on thrashing the ball, with almost identically scorched liners into the right-field corner on Monday and Wednesday. 

Even before his three-hit day in Wednesday's 6-5 win over the Rangers, Frelick was playing well. Since Jun. 7, in 60 plate appearances, he's hitting .339/.373/.393. There's still not much power here, but if he keeps generating hard-hit balls with air under them, some will come. In the meantime, he's cut down a strikeout rate that trended too high early in the season, and the overall result is (for the first time all year) a productive hitter with the promise of sustaining that for the long run.

Meanwhile, Chourio's flashes of brilliance are getting a bit more frequent, and the price he's paying in outs and bad at-bats between those flashes is getting lower. Whereas Frelick is fighting his way to a profile that works as a complementary piece, Chourio is turning a corner in a more exciting, lethal way. In April, he batted .206/.257/.351, striking out 32 percent of the time. In May, he slashed that strikeout rate to 19.1%, but he only hit .215/.250/.292, so it was hard to see real progress at hand. In June, he's batting .302/.348/.492, with the strikeout rate down to 18.8%. He's chasing less, meeting the ball on a line, and making plays with both his pwoer and his speed.

Joey Ortiz has a nagging neck problem, and left Wednesday's game early. Mitchell has been playing well in his rehab from a preseason hand injury, but seemed to tweak his hamstring and was forced out of what figured to be one of his last rehab games before returning. The Brewers were almost in a position to shrink the roles of Frelick, Chourio, or both, but they might now need to continue leaning on each for the foreseeable future. A month ago, that would have sounded like a threat--another problem to be solved for this team that keeps dodging bullets. Now, though, it sounds like a promise. It's exciting, even. Two young outfielders on whom the team was planning to rely anyway look like potential stars, as their bats become more consistently solid and they unlock the best versions of their respective games.