With Blake Perkins Taking Tyler Black's Roster Spot, Will He Also Claim Regular Playing Time for Brewers?

The Brewers continue to convalesce as they approach September. On Thursday, they reinstated Blake Perkins from the injured list and optioned Tyler Black back to Triple-A Nashville. It's a minor disappointment that Black hasn't put together the pieces of his potentially valuable skill set in his big-league stints this season, but a major relief for the team to have one of the best defensive outfielders in the game back in their mix.

Before hitting the shelf, though, Perkins had lost out on some playing time, in the wake of the return of Garrett Mitchell from the hand injury that sidelined him for the first half. Mitchell is younger, and the team has considerably more invested in him than in Perkins. Ditto for Sal Frelick. Those are two teams on whom the team spent first-round picks and multi-million-dollar signing bonuses, and the theory of the case is that each has more upside than Perkins, 27.

Theory of the case be damned, Perkins has 2.1 WARP this season, according to Baseball Prospectus. He's ahead of Frelick, at 1.8, despite the younger player having played 25 more games and taken 107 more plate appearances. Prospectus's DRC+ is the most holistic and far-seeing offensive value market available to the public, and it does peg Frelick as slightly superior to Perkins--but only slightly, by a margin of 94 to 90. The confidence of the model on the two is within 12 and 16 points, respectively, so while we can say that Frelick is probably a slightly better hitter than Perkins this year, we can't state it with anything near certainty. Meanwhile, Perkins's actual OPS is .033 higher than Frelick's, and his defense is far more valuable than Frelick's. Mitchell has only been worth 0.2 WARP in his limited playing time, with a 77 DRC+.

You can hand-wave the model's low estimation of Mitchell's offense, because he has a unique skill set and has shown some resistance to the regression expected from him by many analysts, but again, it's Perkins who has actually produced a higher OPS, and who plays much better defense. The case for playing both Mitchell and Frelick more than Perkins is very simple, and not in a good way. It's a matter of being wedded to either outdated or overly optimistic player evaluations, and of trying to build toward an uncertain future instead of embracing more of the present.

Perkins was a minor-league free agent after the 2022 season. He was supposed to be nothing more than a role player. Much of his success this season has come on singles up the middle, bunts, and other small things that don't wow most observers of the loud, fast modern game. Nonetheless, with Christian Yelich, Perkins is incontrovertibly one of the team's three best outfield options every day. It would be malpractice to let Mitchell and Frelick continue claiming everyday roles at his expense, and with the playoffs in mind, the team should focus on preparing Perkins to be their regular center fielder for the final month of the season.