NEWS: Luis Urías to Injured List with Hamstring Injury, Joey Wiemer Coming Up!

There are more important players to the 2023 Brewers than Luis Urías, but not many of them. The young infielder showed really good all-around skills over the last two seasons, and grabbed an international spotlight with his big moments in the World Baseball Classic last month. He entered this season with a chance to take another step forward and become something close to a star-caliber infielder. His versatility, moving back and forth between second and third base and providing sound defense at each, will be missed, even if the team can nominally replace it with the likes of Mike Brosseau, Owen Miller, and Brian Anderson. 

We can hope, for now, that the team is just being very careful with this injury, the severity of which was not clear when Urías first came up lame trying to beat out a ground ball Thursday afternoon. Although the Brewers will play indoors or in good weather for a long stretch after this weekend, it’s not the time of year to risk further injury. Besides, they have excellent depth, as calling up Joey Wiemer reminds us. That makes it easier to make a call like this one. Still, it’s a bummer.

Wiemer’s arrival, though, is a lot of fun. Presumably, Wiemer will become the everyday right fielder while Urías is sidelined, with Anderson manning third base. Against lefties, though, he could just as easily be in center, with Anderson in right and Brosseau at third. In fact, with Miller, Anderson, Brosseau, Wiemer, and Luke Voit, Craig Counsell now has the ability to hide any or all of his left-handed batters from southpaws if he sees fit. 

Either way, Wiemer makes the team better than Abraham Toro would have, because Toro’s skill set is redundant on a team that already has all that infield versatility. The outfield defense should be better, which could come into play right away Saturday. It’s going to be under 40 degrees at Wrigley Field come game time, with the wind howling in from the north. Wiemer will have a stern first test, then, but he has the tools to be a very good right fielder. 

At the plate, Wiemer is very different from Urías, and the sense of extra length and competence Urías lent to the lineup is gone for as long as he is. In a certain way, though, Wiemer might make the Brewers more dangerous. His power could cut even the gale in Chicago on a cold day. His speed makes him a threat whenever he reaches base. In two pro seasons, he has 61 steals in 69 attempts. 

His idiosyncratic setup and swing make a lot of people doubt that he’ll hit in the majors. Last season, he had a strikeout rate of 30 percent with Double-A Biloxi, which is usually a sign of major trouble ahead. In a fairly substantial sample after being promoted to Triple-A Nashville, though, he cut that all the way down to 20 percent. Given Wiemer’s tools, that’s the difference between being a second-division starter and being an All-Star. It’s quite a contrast from Urías’s reliability, but Wiemer’s talent is tantalizing, and we’re getting an early opportunity to find out how it will translate to the toughest competition on Earth.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this piece indicated that the Brewers missed out on being eligible to gain an extra draft pick through the new Collective Bargaining Agreement's incentives to stem service-time manipulation, because they didn't carry Wiemer on the Opening Day roster. As was pointed out in the comments, Wiemer only made one of the three top prospect lists used for that incentive program, and would have needed to make two, so the Brewers could never have gotten that pick, anyway. We apologize for the confusion, and we urge MLB and the MLBPA to make the relevant lists available outside of subscription paywalls so that public analysis doesn't depend on those particular subscriptions in the future.