Yikes: Brewers Place Jackson Chourio on Injured List with Broken Hand

On the morning of Opening Day, the vibrant joy of the new season has been scumbled by a dark cloud. Jackson Chourio hit the injured list in the hours leading up to the Brewers' season opener, with a fractured hand that's expected to cost him the first month of the campaign.

Chourio, 22, was perhaps the best breakout candidate on the team entering the season, with a chance to consolidate the impressive but inconsistent successes he enjoyed over his first two years in the majors and blossom into a superstar. That's still possible, but it's on hold now.

Predictably, the roster move the team made brings Blake Perkins back to the majors, days after he was optioned to Triple-A Nashville to make way for Brandon Lockridge on the Opening Day roster. In the short term, it's neither Perkins nor Lockridge who's most likely to get extra playing time in Chourio's absence. That beneficiary will be Jake Bauers, who might play less at first base over the first few weeks than initially believed. Instead, he could spend more time in left field. Against righties, Garrett Mitchell and Bauers will probably start in center and left, respectively. Perkins and Lockridge could man those positions against lefties. 

Milwaukee has great positional depth this year—a luxury they haven't enjoyed in the past. To lose Chourio right off the bat hurts, but it also makes it easier for manager Pat Murphy to keep the hot spring bats of both Andrew Vaughn and Bauers in the lineup and in rhythm.

The injury traces, as it turns out, all the way back to when Chourio was hit by a pitch in an exhibition with Team Venezuela, before the official start of the World Baseball Classic, as reported by Brewer Fanatic's Jack Stern.

Because he's played through the injury for the last three weeks, it hasn't had adequate time to heal, but the hope is that he'll make a full recovery in short order. In the meantime, the team will get an earlier and fuller chance to see what they have in Lockridge and how sustainable Bauers's late-season surge from 2025 than they expected or wanted. 

Chourio only batted .200 and didn't produce an extra-base hit during the WBC, but he came back into camp with the Brewers hitting the ball hard. He had five batted balls with an exit velocity north of 100 MPH in four games after coming back to the team in the wake of the tournament, so the decision to sideline him now appears to be less about an inability to perform at all than about ensuring the injury doesn't linger throughout the season. In that way, it's the right move. It just saps a small percentage of the joy from the pageant of Opening Day.

The fracture is near the base of his middle finger, which is nearly identical to the spot where teammate and countryman William Contreras had a similar injury that lingered for much of 2025. After a check swing caused discomfort during an exhibition against the Reds at Uecker Field earlier this week, an MRI revealed the issue. The hope is that by giving him substantial rest now, the team can avoid the same shadowing effects that Contreras suffered for much of last year.