Luis Lara is Going to Hit for More Power Than Sal Frelick

The temptation is to assume that Luis Lara's whole game is speed and contact and defense. The temptation is to think that he'll have to survive on singles and create his value mostly via run prevention. You expect this kind of player to spend most of their time on the bench. You expect them to hit at the bottom of the batting order, where they're asked mostly to lengthen the lineup and set the table for the guys at the top. 

That might even be true, for the most part. Lara is not a future superstar, by anyone's reckoning. For as long as he's been on the prospect radar, he's been talked about as a likely role player with a high floor but a low ceiling. That's still the way most people talk about him, and it's the kind of player who signs the kind of contract he signed with the Brewers before his debut in the majors. He's a small guy—not just short, as many good hitters are, but genuinely small, with a strong but slight frame to go with his 5-foot-7 height. He's never going to carry more than about 180 pounds on his frame, and right now, he weighs under 170.

Even one week into his big-league career, though, you can see what I've seen since first watching Lara swing in Arizona, during spring training back in 2024: this guy has some juice. His swing is not geared for power, and it has some elements of the defensiveness the Brewers like their young hitters to demonstrate when they first come to the majors. It also whips, in a way that (say) Sal Frelick's never has.

With all due respect to Frelick—a fine all-around hitter, and (for the moment) still a better overall player than Lara has had time to become—he could not do this. On a 1-2 pitch, plainly waiting back a bit to guard against something offspeed, Lara nonetheless not only caught up to a fastball at 97 MPH on the outer third, but turned on it and laced it to the gap in right-center field. That's just one swing, but it's an exceptionally impressive one. Pitchers will learn not to make mistakes like that to him when they're ahead in the count, so don't count on a whole lot of hits that look like this one, but then again, the ability to even scare pitchers out of throwing you that pitch in that situation is a valuable one.

Lara has 17 tracked, competitive swings from the left side since he came to the big leagues. On them, his average swing speed is 71.0 MPH, and his swing length is 6.8 feet. That puts him in a fascinating sweet spot:

Typically, the shorter your swing, the slower. This is not groundbreaking, because if you think about it, it's almost tautological. To generate maximal bat speed, you try to extend. You attack the ball. You trade some directness for extra magnitude in the arc of your assault. Lara has one of the shortest swings in the league, which is helped by the fact that he's one of the shortest players—but that, alone, doesn't explain it.

See the red dot above? That's where Lara's lefty swing would fit on the scatterplot, if he had enough swings to qualify. It drops him neatly into a line that contains three of the best pure hitters in the National League this season: Brice Turang, Freddie Freeman, and Otto Lopez. Being even a little faster with your bat than is predicted by your swing length is valuable. That means you're genuinely quick with the wrists and able to flash through the hitting zone, without a deep load or a long arc from the start of your swing to that zone.

Right now, Lara isn't in great position to fully avail himself of this easy bat speed. He hits the ball so deep in his zone that he's often just starting to work uphill to the ball when he makes contact (or misses, high or low). As we talked about earlier this month with Cooper Pratt, the Brewers ask rookies to let the ball travel and prioritize swing decisions early in their time in the majors; that's making Lara pretty late pretty often. But the signs of a quick stick are unmistakable, whether your trust your scouting eye or the data.

In time, I think Lara can more consistently hit for power than does Frelick, which makes for an interesting and onrushing conundrum. Frelick is part of what will quickly become a logjam in the outfield, if it doesn't count as one already. Lara has a long-term contract on extremely team-friendly terms, and we all know that he'll be better than Frelick as a defender. If he's also a disciplined hitter and will slug even .050 better than Frelick—that much seems almost certain to me, but I've been a believer in Lara since before most and might be biased about how real what we've seen so far will prove to be—then trading Frelick becomes a conversation worth having as soon as this week. 

Typically, teams like to trade prospects to bolster their contending team at the trade deadline. The Brewers have turned so many good prospects into good big-leaguers lately, though, that they're starting to overflow with the latter, and a team with a good pitcher whom Milwaukee might prize might well prefer Frelick to a further-off, riskier but higher-upside bet like Josh Adamczewski, or even Luis Peña. In the right deal, Frelick might have substantial value, and trading him (with the understanding that the team's present and future outfield will be well-tended by the likes of Lara, Garrett Mitchell, Jackson Chourio, Jake Bauers, Brandon Lockridge, Jett Williams, Braylon Payne and Adamczewski) might be the best plan. Frelick is a great competitor and is well-liked in the clubhouse; losing him midseason would be tough. At this point, though, the team has enough glue guys to survive a disruption like that, and Lara brings his own brand of intensity and psotivity, anyway. He also looks likely to be a more well-rounded offensive force than Frelick is, because his bat has power potential that Frelick's lacks. Even for the Brewers (who don't crave power as much as most teams do these days), that matters a great deal.