Paul DeJong is Becoming an Irresistibly Interesting Target for Brewers

Willy Adames isn't walking through that door, but the Brewers still have to hit home runs in 2025. A dearth of spending power and a powerful organizational preference for chaining together on-base events as a primary engine of offense kept the team from replacing Adames directly to this point in the winter, but as the dance floor empties and teams and the straggling free agents look for chances to pair up, it's getting harder and harder for the Crew not to meet Paul DeJong's eyes.

Last season, DeJong was, frankly, quite good. That's his dirty little secret: he's stranded at the odd ends of the offseason with the misfit toys, but he's a misfit among them. Playing for the worse-than-misfit White Sox and then the out-of-nowhere darling Royals, DeJong batted .227/.276/.427 in a robust 482 plate appearances. Yes, that middle number is ugly as sin, and so was DeJong's overall means of getting the job done. He struck out in 32.4% of his plate appearances and walked in 5.0% of them, and the worst part is that that's not far off his career rates in either regard. Team Swing Decisions can't put itself in the Paul DeJong business, can it?

Well, let's answer that question with another: how badly do you want not to hit the fewest home runs in baseball? Because that's on the table, right now. It's not likely, strictly speaking, but it's certainly in play. Without Adames, the Brewers are depending on a power breakout from sophomore Jackson Chourio, the good health and bettered swing path of Garrett Mitchell, and one last burst of bop from the aged Rhys Hoskins. Meanwhile, DeJong is standing there, ready to address someone's power shortfall in a pretty heady way. For all his whiffs and his wanting walks, he walloped the ball last year.

Though he didn't even qualify for the batting title, DeJong socked 24 home runs and 17 doubles in 2024. Sometimes, guys wander into such power surges without a clear explanation. This was not one of those cases. DeJong's swing speed rose by 2.5 miles per hour from the second half of 2023 to 2024, fueling a rediscovery of the punch he'd had when he first broke into the league and hit 30 home runs with the 2019 aeroball for the Cardinals.

That version of DeJong was a plus defender at shortstop and an average-plus hitter, even if his offensive value was tied up almost entirely in his pop, and that was a dazzlingly valuable combination of strengths.

During his mid-career sag, though, he showed just how ugly it can be when a power-dependent hitter isn't swinging fast enough to generate that power. DeJong hit .189/.253/.330 in 2022 and 2023, and his career was on life support. Here's what it looked like when he connected perfectly, in 2023.

That, of course, isn't so bad. Almost every big-league hitter looks great when you seek out their best work. It's how they got rich. More often, though, DeJong 2022-23 looked like this—just a hair later, a hair more tentative, but more than a hair off. An easy out.

That swing, with the small turn and tap of the toe and a certain lack of rhythm, was not going to allow DeJong to stick in the majors for much longer. Thus, he went into the lab before 2024, and came out with a different lower half—and a rather radically different swing, in general.

There are drawbacks to this kind of high, hanging leg kick. It makes you a little bit manipulable, in certain situations. It's going to mean trading solid opposite-field contact for the power you generate to the pull field. DeJong's answer to all that would be: So what? If he gets to 25-homer power that way, he can make up for pretty much all his other shortcomings. He was just 5% worse than a league-average hitter in 2024, despite only having one offensive skill of any merit.

We don't have a lot of data yet about how bat speed ages—only one full season and one half-season of that data have been comprehensively collected and published. Already, though, it's pretty easy to see how much DeJong's transformation stands out. He overhauled his mechanics and got back the momentum in his swing. That's huge, and for any player on the high side of 30, it's exceptionally rare. There's no reason to think it won't stick, though, or at least that he can't continue to slug as that rejuvenated swing gently declines again. As we move from measuring the outputs of player movement to those movements themselves, we can get a bit more confident in projecting the way those movements produce certain outcomes. This much bat speed produces ample power.

Defensively, the ex-shortstop has only played 41 career games at the hot corner, all of them last year. He took to it like a barfly to Thin Lizzy, though. He would be a stellar final piece in a strong defensive phalanx on the dirt, and he'd be a more capable backup shortstop than Caleb Durbin or Andruw Monasterio, to boot. His minor regional stardom is a fading memory, but DeJong is a Midwest kid who offers every skill the Brewers are missing. He's not going to cost much, because he won't make a huge difference for most teams. He would make a huge difference for Milwaukee, though, and they should lock him up on a cheap one-year deal, before someone else does.