The Brewers’ Battered Backstop Is Back In Business

Last year was arguably the best of William Contreras’s major league career. He started the season off as a potential MVP candidate, and although he slowed down significantly in June and July, he finished with strong numbers and set career-best marks in hits (167), home runs (23), RBI (92), stolen bases (9), walks (78), and rWAR (4.9). 

2025 has been a different story. For much of the first half of the season, he seemed average at best at the plate, and things only regressed as time went on. Earlier in the year, the good folks here at Brewer Fanatic talked about how playing through a fractured left hand was hampering his effectiveness and questioned why he hadn’t yet been moved to the injured list. On the field, the biggest adverse effect this had was on his power, restricting him to a slugging percentage of just .347 over the 390 plate appearances he had before the All-Star break. 

However, since the start of the second half, it seems that both he and his stat line have returned to full health. In the 115 plate appearances he has had, he’s slashing .317/.391/.554 with as many home runs as he had in more than three times as many plate appearances in the first half. The biggest sign that things are finally moving in the right direction is his ISO, which has increased from .102 in the first half of the season to .237 in the second half, and the main driver behind this positive shift has been a resurgence in his bat speed. Here are how some of his major bat tracking statistical categories compare before and after the All-Star break:

A jump in bat speed of nearly 2 mph is nothing to sneeze at and is a major improvement on its own. However, what might be an even bigger step forward is the massive increase in fast swing rate. Statcast describes fast swings as swings with a bat speed of >=75 mph, and Contreras went from exceeding that threshold less than ⅓ of the time to crossing it nearly half the time. His fast swing rate over this span puts him in the same ballpark as noted sluggers like Kyle Stowers (49.2%) and Bryce Harper (48.0%).

This has predictably coincided with a jump in barrel rate and exit velocity. Contreras had an average exit velocity of just 89.8 mph and a barrel rate of just 4.6% in the first half. In the second half, he bumped his average exit velocity all the way up to 93.3 mph with a barrel rate of 9.6%. He has essentially made the shift from being Josh Lowe to being Julio Rodríguez when it comes to quality of contact.

Even more encouraging is the fact that the other characteristics of his game that were already good before his power outage have remained. He’s still walking at a near 10% clip over this span and striking out 16.5% of the time. Simply put, he’s still exercising good plate discipline, but he’s now hitting the ball with more authority, something he has done his whole career.

He still has a slight launch angle issue, which has limited the amount of home runs he has been able to produce, even with the added pop on his batted balls, but even with flatter flight paths, hard hit balls can still be immensely impactful if they end up as doubles in the gaps. This was most recently apparent in Milwaukee’s recent series against the Pirates, in which Contreras had an exit velocity of 107.6 mph on this RBI double against Paul Skenes.

Much of the Brewers' news cycle as of late has surrounded the team’s seeming inability to lose games, even when faced with insurmountable odds and with no clear superstars leading the roster. What most have gotten right about this team is that the responsibility of winning has been placed on everybody’s shoulders. Still, as one of the most talented and longest-tenured members in the lineup, William Contreras’s role in the recent stretch of good fortune shouldn’t be overlooked. 

He may have given us plenty of reasons to doubt and question his abilities, but his recent results have demonstrated that he’s turned a corner at just the right time. He isn’t just holding his own; he’s leading Milwaukee’s charge towards their next pennant.