The Brewers have debuted several glove first, top 100ish short stop prospects ober the past 20ish years. Here’s how they did:
2005 Hardy: age 22, 84 wRC+ in 427 PA.
2010 Escobar: age 23 (although he had a cup of coffee in 2008 and 2009), 62 wRC+ in 552 PA
2015 Arcia: age 21, 65 wRC+ in 216 PA (86 wRC+ in 2017 across 548 PA)
2023 Turang: age 23, 61 wRC+ in 448 PA
2024 Ortiz: age 25, 105 wRC+ in 511 PA.
My point isn’t to make direct comparisons about the careers or specific skills, I was just curious to see how these guys hit during their debut and overall they pretty much stunk at the plate. So we may not see much if any improvement offensively, but as Spencer noted it probably won’t get worse.
at least this way Pratt will have a half season of big league experience going into the next season. We will be debuting plenty position players over the next few years and it’s nice to stagger them since they’ll likely all go through some growing pains.