With Christian Yelich and Garrett Mitchell Healthy, Brewers Lineup Won't Require "Stretching" in 2025

When last season began, the Brewers (and specifically, their rookie manager) felt good about second baseman Brice Turang. They didn't know enough (or have enough objective cause for their optimism) to start the season with him as the regular leadoff man, though. Turang was coming off a season in which he had betted .218/.285/.300. He was better after a mid-season demotion to Triple-A Nashville, but nonetheless, that version of Turang was a poor fit for the top of the order.

Over the first several weeks of the season, therefore, he mostly batted in the bottom four slots. Sal Frelick, Jackson Chourio, Oliver Dunn, and occasionally William Contreras manned the No. 1 spot, while Murphy waited to get Garrett Mitchell back from the injury that felled him on the eve of Opening Day. As Turang started hot and Mitchell's recuperation failed to progress, though, plans changed. On May 8, in the 36th game of the season, Murphy moved Turang up to the top of the lineup card—an arrangement that quickly became, functionally, permanent.

By the time Mitchell returned from his injury at the start of July, Christian Yelich was already frequently dealing with the back problems that would eventually cut his season short and force him to undergo surgery. In the three weeks between Mitchell re-joining the active roster and Yelich being shelved for the year, they were only in the same lineup 10 times.

They look likely to be on the same card about 10 times that often in 2025, and if that likelihood becomes a reality, Murphy is likely to use a lot of lineups that look like the one he wrote Saturday against the Rangers, when Texas visited Maryvale for a spring training game. Murphy's Mar. 1 lineup was:

1. Jackson Chourio - LF
2. Christian Yelich - DH
3. William Contreras - C
4. Garrett Mitchell - CF
5. Rhys Hoskins - 1B
6. Brice Turang - 2B
7. Joey Ortiz - SS
8. Sal Frelick - RF
9. Oliver Dunn - 3B

That's a significant departure from the shape of the lineup they used last year—even acknowledging that reproducing last year's group was not an option, after the departure of Willy Adames via free agency. However, it's not necessarily a signal that Murphy or the team have changed how they feel about Turang. Moving him up last year was more of a creative solution to what Murphy perceived as a problem than it was a demonstration of full-fledged belief in his short-term offensive upside. Murphy termed this strategy "stretching the lineup", and it's all about what's asked of whom, in an offense functioning at any less than its full capacity.

"We did that a little bit last year with Turang, and I don’t know that everybody understands that, but sometimes when you take a guy that doesn’t profile as a leadoff hitter but you’re stretching your lineup a little bit, you’re allowing the other guys to hit one position lower," Murphy told reporters Saturday in Maryvale. "You’re gambling on the one player. We gambled on Brice Turang. He didn’t have the pedigree and the history that he would bat leadoff for us like he did, but when you do that, I believe you stretch your lineup. If you believe a player’s gonna overachieve and you’re right, you stretch your lineup, it makes you better offensively."

In the absence of a second left-handed hitter who truly "profiled" as belonging in one of the most important places in the order, to match Yelich and offset the right-handed bats of William Contreras and Willy Adames, Murphy simply plugged Turang into the gap and asked him to be that guy. Doing so allowed Murphy not only to keep Contreras, Yelich and Adames in the places where he wanted them (Nos. 2-4, rather than Nos. 1-3), but to slide Frelick, Rhys Hoskins, Jake Bauers and Gary Sánchez (whenever each of them was starting) down a spot. That's how Hoskins, often a fourth or fifth hitter throughout his career, often ended up hitting sixth or even seventh in 2024.

That was Murphy's theory in making the switch. Why did it work so well, prompting him to stick with it?

"[Turang's] strike-ball was better," Murphy said. "His confidence. He exuded confidence, and with what he was doing to help us defensively, we felt like it would help our lineup to push guys down a little bit."

Murphy is not at all naïve about the drawbacks or the risks of putting an underqualified hitter in the top spot in the order. He acknowledged that the "bottom line" is that the leadoff hitter bats most often, and that putting a player there whose overall skills either don't merit that much playing time or are limited to specific matchups requires a manager to be aggressive about in-game moves, or to be right in a big roll of the dice. That's why, this year, the team is more likely to embrace a different gamble.

If Yelich and Mitchell are both healthy, they have their two dangerous lefty bats, to go with two dangerous righty ones. The risk lies in the fact that Mitchell (however good his numbers in MLB have been, thus far) has issues with strikeouts and ground balls, making it uncertain how well he can meet the requirements of a big-league cleanup hitter. He has ample raw power, though, and showed more signs of consistently tapping into it last season—after which he also went to Driveline Baseball and worked on doing that very thing over the winter. Securing great production from the top three hitters in the lineup seems to be best assured by slotting in Chourio, Yelich and Contreras there, with Mitchell being the young hitter on whom the team has to take a risk.

Meanwhile, Turang, Joey Ortiz, Frelick and Dunn (plus Caleb Durbin, Eric Haase, and others who might win part-time jobs as rotational parts of the lineup) will all bat in lower-pressure positions. The stretching of the Brewers lineup, in 2025, will be a different kind than that felt in 2024. They lost their top slugger, but if they have better health, it could more than make up for that departure—to the point that Murphy won't feel the need to push any of his top bats down a spot. Instead, he might reduce his club's reliance on its glove-first youngsters.