Tyler Black's Arrival Should Push Sal Frelick to the Bottom of the Batting Order

As I wrote recently, Tyler Black has made some important developmental progress in Triple-A this spring. He now joins a Brewers positional corps that went from surging to struggling almost overnight, and the team is hoping he can deliver a jolt of new life and dynamism to that group. He can, too. He won't hit for prototypical power for a defensively limited player, but he projects to have enough pop to supplement his excellent approach and loosely mimic the production of Brandon Nimmo, of the Mets.

Nimmo, of course, is New York's leadoff hitter. So should Black be, for the Brewers. That's a tall order to place with a rookie right away, but that's what the situation demands. With Christian Yelich and Garrett Mitchell on the injured list and both Jackson Chourio and Sal Frelick struggling mightily at the plate, Pat Murphy needs Black to make an immediate impact. He's the hitter the Brewers need in front of William Contreras, to make the offense more functional again.

Frelick isn't having a terrible season, from an OBP perspective. That's why he's been viable as the leadoff man, despite persistently feeble power output. His tenability in that slot depended on the guys right behind him hitting well, though, and the team doesn't have enough such players to keep putting up with Frelick as the guy who gets the most plate appearances in a given game.

Obviously, power is not a traditional part of the leadoff hitter checklist. That's changed a great deal in recent seasons, though, and not only because of the success teams have had with leadoff men like Kyle Schwarber and Mookie Betts. It's about the changing math of the modern game. With strikeouts constantly rising and the global batting average down to one of its lowest levels ever, it's harder to chain together hits in order to score runs. If you want to consistently score with singles and doubles, you need your top five hitters to have an aggregate batting average of at least .270, and ideally, it would push toward .280.

For much of baseball history, that's been the case for the top five hitters in lineups, so teams could focus almost solely on OBP from their leadoff hitters--even if, until about 20 years ago, they misunderstood the game and emphasized batting average, instead. Lately, though, the aggregate average of the top five hitters in teams' lineups is well under that breakeven point. First through fifth batters haven't collectively topped .265 in MLB since 2017, and they haven't been north of .275 since 2008.

Individual teams can break that mold, of course, but the Brewers don't. Contreras and Yelich are fine hitters who generate plenty of singles and doubles to move runners around, but Willy Adames, Rhys Hoskins, and the rest of those who bat third, fourth, and fifth for this team are low-average hitters. The conversion rate on singles and walks from the leadoff spot is not going to be high enough for the Brewers to make a powerless leadoff man work.

Powerless is the right word for Frelick, too. Entering Tuesday's action, he owned a .338 career slugging average, which is anemic. It's also too kind. He pounced on big-league pitching when he first came up, enjoying a power binge that lasted roughly until mid-August. Since last Aug. 16, Frelick is a .253/.325/.307 hitter, in 249 plate appearances. He last homered (if we don't count spring training) on Aug. 7, 2023. He's so ineffectual that pitchers are going right after him, and he's not even getting on base at an above-average rate. Yet, he's led off 11 of the team's last 14 games.

Frelick did triple off the center-field wall Sunday against the Yankees. That was just the fourth batted ball of his career with an exit velocity over 100 miles per hour and a launch angle higher than 20 degrees, and the first since last Sept. 5--which, itself, was the last one in almost a month. Frelick has decent contact skills, fair plate discipline, and good speed, but he's not able to deliver even the modest punch the team needs at the top of its order right now.

Black can be that guy, but even if Murphy isn't comfortable asking him to do so right away, the intermediate step should be demoting Frelick to eighth or ninth in the order and sliding Brice Turang up to the top. Turang doesn't have materially better batted-ball skills than Frelick does, but he's learned more in his big-league tenure about how to leverage the limited power he does have. He can find gaps, punish occasional mistakes, and work walks more effectively than can Frelick, because the latter hasn't figured out how to adapt to a league in which almost half the pitches thrown are something other than a fastball.

It's strange to think of a hitter as disqualified from batting first by their dearth of power, but that's the situation for Frelick. He can still be very valuable at the bottom of the order, because in today's game, the role of the sixth through ninth guys has changed somewhat. Most such hitters now have more power than Frelick does, too, but that really doesn't matter. Now that averages have sunk to the point where offense can't be about chaining together hits from the stars in the top half of the lineup, the game is really about getting your best hitters up there for an extra few plate appearances. On-base skills are, perhaps counterintuitively, increasing in importance for players in the bottom third of the order. It's how a team can lengthen a game and create more opportunities for their best players to deliver a win. Avoiding outs by your worst hitters provides an important advantage, as long as your best ones have the pop to make their extra chances count.

Let's take this from abstract to concrete. Until Yelich returns, when they face right-handed pitchers, the Brewers could trot out a lineup of:

1. Black - 1b
2. Contreras - c
3. Adames - ss
4. Hoskins - dh
5. Blake Perkins - cf
6. Turang - 2b
7. Chourio - rf
8. Frelick - lf
9. Joey Ortiz - 3b

If they're comfortable enough with it, they could get one extra left-handed bat into the lineup by sliding Hoskins to first base and Black to third, or by bringing Frelick in to play third and using Jake Bauers in left field.

Once Yelich does come back, they could go:

1. Black - 1b
2. Contreras - c
3. Yelich - lf
4. Adames - ss
5. Hoskins - dh
6. Perkins - cf
7. Turang - 2b
8. Chourio - rf
9. Frelick - 3b

Alternatively, here, Ortiz (or even Oliver Dunn, though he's looked overmatched by big-league velocity) could replace Frelick and push him to the bench altogether. Based on everything he's done so far, Perkins looks more valuable than Frelick, and although Frelick remains worthy of some investment of playing time in the name of development, the team needs to focus on winning games, more than on trying to get Frelick back on track.

In any event, Black is the right balance of batting average, OBP, and slugging upside to bat leadoff for the Brewers. If not right away, then he should be hitting there regularly within a month. There are no guarantees that he'll meet that challenge, but that's the role where he fits and where he can provide great value to the 2024 Brewers.