Matthew Trueblood

That's a good shout. Alexander, only with better command of the sinker, more physicality and the ability to be optioned to the minors.

Image courtesy of © Troy Taormina-Imagn Images It's not hard to see what the Brewers like about Colton Gordon. He's not a standout guy, but he has upside. The 6-foot-4 lefty gets down the mound well and has plus extension, which the Brewers always love. He's shown the ability to work east and west with a sweeper and a slow but slurvy curveball, and he's shown the feel to create depth with his changeup. There are just two problems: he doesn't throw hard, and so far, he sucks. In 95 1/3 innings over 24 appearances in the majors going back to 2025, Gordon has a 5.95 career ERA. This season, he's spent most of his time in the minors—not because the Astros haven't needed him, but because he's surrendered six home runs in 50 batters faced and his ERA is on the wrong side of 11.00. He's had steady and impressive success at Triple-A Sugar Land over the last two and a half seasons, with an ERA under 4.00 each year as a starter, but that hasn't carried over to the majors. He throws 91 miles per hour, and the shapes of his fastballs just don't work. He has below-average carry on his four-seamer, even for a low three-quarters arm slot, and he doesn't get the heavy action you'd like on his sinker, either. Nothing sets up his softer stuff well, so despite what looks like a plus sweeper in a vacuum, he runs into barrels way too often and can't consistently miss bats the way he needs to. On the other hand, he fills up the strike zone exceptionally well. Between Triple-A and the majors, Gordon has faced 958 batters since the start of last season. He's only walked 52 of them. He's allowed more homers (27) than free passes (22) in his brief big-league career. Though that sinker lacks the movement you'd prefer to see from it, he locates so well with it that hitters rarely do damage. He has good feel for the sweeper to the glove side and the curveball as a backdoor offering against righties. He's just in the middle of the plate with that hittable four-seamer far too often. As the Brewers take control of Gordon, they probably do so without grand plans. He's good depth to have, with a demonstrated ability to start and throw strikes and one more year of optionability beyond this season. However, they might also have multiple ways to unlock him and get more from him, in the short and the long term. First, expect them to ask him to lean into his sinker and cutter a bit more, at least for the balance of this season. The former should work well against lefties, and even against righties, using that pitch more at the expense of the four-seamer should allow the defense to work behind him. Gordon's cutter has been more slider-like this season than in the past, and is slowly replacing a true slider as his sixth pitch, but Chris Hook and Jim Henderson might ask him to tinker with the harder, more fastball-flavored version of that offering for a bit. Just as importantly, though, the team will almost surely make some mechanical changes. You can see a Brewers-like pitcher in the body of Gordon, but not in the way he moves it. He starts on the third-base side of the rubber and uses a fairly extreme crossfire stride pattern. The Brewers are likely to move him to the first-base side and try to get him on a slightly straighter line to the plate, without losing the facility with the zone that is his trademark skill. With a bit better posture near release, he can also naturally lower his arm slot and add deception to his fastball. TkFOMzJfWGw0TUFRPT1fQlFsVFVGTUhVUUlBV1ZwWFVnQUhCQTlVQUZnRlZGTUFCd0JUVWxaV0J3VURWbEFB.mp4 As strange as it sounds for a 27-year-old with subpar velocity and so much polish in terms of strike-throwing, the Brewers will see Gordon as a ball of clay with real potential. His delivery doesn't fit their preferences, but it shows the mobility they need to make the changes they'll want. His pitch mix is unimpressive, but the differences between the pitching philosophies of the Astros and Milwaukee leave ample room for tweaks even before they make any big physical changes. Gordon is insurance, for now, for a team that needed reinforcement because of injuries and medium-term durability concerns among their stable of existing hurlers. He can be a lot more, though. As Bob Howsam built some great teams as the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s and the Cincinnati Reds from the late 1960s through the late 1970s, he gained a reputation for frequently extracting a throw-in player in trades who turned out to be much more than that. Matt Arnold is getting exceptionally good at the same thing. Not all multi-player deals have that dynamic, but just as the one that brought in Kyle Harrison, David Hamilton and Shane Drohan felt that way, this one does. Lance McCullers Jr. has the big name, and he's at least a bit more likely to help the Brewers for the balance of 2026. They would not have made this deal without also acquiring Gordon, though, and a year from now, Gordon's stock is likely to be higher than it is right now. He's a quintessential Brewers pickup, and an excellent candidate to get a boost from a spin through the H & H Car Wash. View full article

Good question. His swing is both longer AND slower. He's right next to Ernie Clement, Nico Hoerner and Jeff McNeil—guys who can really hit when they're hot, but who have almost no power.

Look, if you have to misspell a word, make it 'positivity,' right? Thanks!

Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-Imagn Images The temptation is to assume that Luis Lara's whole game is speed and contact and defense. The temptation is to think that he'll have to survive on singles and create his value mostly via run prevention. You expect this kind of player to spend most of their time on the bench. You expect them to hit at the bottom of the batting order, where they're asked mostly to lengthen the lineup and set the table for the guys at the top. That might even be true, for the most part. Lara is not a future superstar, by anyone's reckoning. For as long as he's been on the prospect radar, he's been talked about as a likely role player with a high floor but a low ceiling. That's still the way most people talk about him, and it's the kind of player who signs the kind of contract he signed with the Brewers before his debut in the majors. He's a small guy—not just short, as many good hitters are, but genuinely small, with a strong but slight frame to go with his 5-foot-7 height. He's never going to carry more than about 180 pounds on his frame, and right now, he weighs under 170. Even one week into his big-league career, though, you can see what I've seen since first watching Lara swing in Arizona, during spring training back in 2024: this guy has some juice. His swing is not geared for power, and it has some elements of the defensiveness the Brewers like their young hitters to demonstrate when they first come to the majors. It also whips, in a way that (say) Sal Frelick's never has. YkJMeExfWGw0TUFRPT1fVUFaWUJWQldYd01BVzFNRlV3QUhDUVJlQUZrRFZ3Y0FDbEFOQlFJTkJ3ZGNWVmRT.mp4 With all due respect to Frelick—a fine all-around hitter, and (for the moment) still a better overall player than Lara has had time to become—he could not do this. On a 1-2 pitch, plainly waiting back a bit to guard against something offspeed, Lara nonetheless not only caught up to a fastball at 97 MPH on the outer third, but turned on it and laced it to the gap in right-center field. That's just one swing, but it's an exceptionally impressive one. Pitchers will learn not to make mistakes like that to him when they're ahead in the count, so don't count on a whole lot of hits that look like this one, but then again, the ability to even scare pitchers out of throwing you that pitch in that situation is a valuable one. Lara has 17 tracked, competitive swings from the left side since he came to the big leagues. On them, his average swing speed is 71.0 MPH, and his swing length is 6.8 feet. That puts him in a fascinating sweet spot: Typically, the shorter your swing, the slower. This is not groundbreaking, because if you think about it, it's almost tautological. To generate maximal bat speed, you try to extend. You attack the ball. You trade some directness for extra magnitude in the arc of your assault. Lara has one of the shortest swings in the league, which is helped by the fact that he's one of the shortest players—but that, alone, doesn't explain it. See the red dot above? That's where Lara's lefty swing would fit on the scatterplot, if he had enough swings to qualify. It drops him neatly into a line that contains three of the best pure hitters in the National League this season: Brice Turang, Freddie Freeman, and Otto Lopez. Being even a little faster with your bat than is predicted by your swing length is valuable. That means you're genuinely quick with the wrists and able to flash through the hitting zone, without a deep load or a long arc from the start of your swing to that zone. Right now, Lara isn't in great position to fully avail himself of this easy bat speed. He hits the ball so deep in his zone that he's often just starting to work uphill to the ball when he makes contact (or misses, high or low). As we talked about earlier this month with Cooper Pratt, the Brewers ask rookies to let the ball travel and prioritize swing decisions early in their time in the majors; that's making Lara pretty late pretty often. But the signs of a quick stick are unmistakable, whether your trust your scouting eye or the data. In time, I think Lara can more consistently hit for power than does Frelick, which makes for an interesting and onrushing conundrum. Frelick is part of what will quickly become a logjam in the outfield, if it doesn't count as one already. Lara has a long-term contract on extremely team-friendly terms, and we all know that he'll be better than Frelick as a defender. If he's also a disciplined hitter and will slug even .050 better than Frelick—that much seems almost certain to me, but I've been a believer in Lara since before most and might be biased about how real what we've seen so far will prove to be—then trading Frelick becomes a conversation worth having as soon as this week. Typically, teams like to trade prospects to bolster their contending team at the trade deadline. The Brewers have turned so many good prospects into good big-leaguers lately, though, that they're starting to overflow with the latter, and a team with a good pitcher whom Milwaukee might prize might well prefer Frelick to a further-off, riskier but higher-upside bet like Josh Adamczewski, or even Luis Peña. In the right deal, Frelick might have substantial value, and trading him (with the understanding that the team's present and future outfield will be well-tended by the likes of Lara, Garrett Mitchell, Jackson Chourio, Jake Bauers, Brandon Lockridge, Jett Williams, Braylon Payne and Adamczewski) might be the best plan. Frelick is a great competitor and is well-liked in the clubhouse; losing him midseason would be tough. At this point, though, the team has enough glue guys to survive a disruption like that, and Lara brings his own brand of intensity and positivity, anyway. He also looks likely to be a more well-rounded offensive force than Frelick is, because his bat has power potential that Frelick's lacks. Even for the Brewers (who don't crave power as much as most teams do these days), that matters a great deal. View full article

Image courtesy of © Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images It's going to be ok. Probably. Jacob Misiorowski has just enough fatigue that it made sense to skip his final start before the All-Star break and to hold him out of the game Tuesday night. Kyle Harrison has just enough irritation in his elbow to make it worth shutting him down here in the middle of July, when the schedule provides the weary Brewers four days off, anyway. The team and the players themselves each insist that there's nothing to worry about, and we all foresaw that there would need to be some point at which the club eased off the gas in terms of workload for one or both of its newfound aces. Let's be optimists, rather than doomers. Even embracing that mindset can't save you from some worry about Brandon Woodruff, though. It sure feels like the erstwhile workhorse of this team has run out of gas. He's on the IL with a second bout of dead arm, and watching his velocity evaporate within a start makes it essentially impossible to envision handing him the ball with the season on the line sometime in mid-October. Woodruff will try to work his way back into the mix, and every Brewers fan should root for him to have as much success with that as possible, but no longer can he be part of the team's firm plans for the stretch run or the playoffs. Logan Henderson just returned from the injured list, but doesn't have a track record that permits much faith in his staying power. Chad Patrick and Aaron Ashby are showing their wear after over a year of being worked hard. DL Hall is on the shelf. Quinn Priester is out for the year. Shane Drohan, Robert Gasser and Brandon Sproat have all shown promise, but also inconsistency, and none has ever managed the physical and mental grind of a full big-league season before. Coleman Crow is becoming increasingly important to this team's medium-term plans, and he's something like a poor man's version of Henderson or Drohan. It's a sign of privilege to have this many names to rattle off when rounding up a rotation mix in mid-July. The Brewers have built one of the best developmental systems and most robust talent pipelines in baseball, including the dozen guys already mentioned in this article. Most teams would be more severely hampered by even fewer injuries and/or constraints. Unfortunately, the baseball gods don't give hustle points, and they don't patiently repeat themselves. When they say 'you can never have too much pitching,' they mean it, and it's a threat, not a funny little aphorism. Despite all that depth and all that quality, the Crew are getting thin. Somehow, though they did every possible thing to avoid this, they're going to need to trade for pitching help before next month's trade deadline. Specifically, despite all those guys who can give them length out of the pen or are capable of being a mid-rotation starter, the Brewers need a starter. Remember Jose Quintana? Last year, Quintana was underwhelming for the Brewers, but he was cromulent. He ate 132 innings for Milwaukee, including often being a vital bridge starter when the team was scrambling. In other recent seasons, that role has been filled by Aaron Civale, Bryse Wilson, and Julio Teheran, to name a few. Often, the team is able to scoop reliable sixth starters off the scrap heap relatively early and cost-free. They've signed pitchers (like Quintana) to low-dollar one-year deals. They've swapped for guys (like Civale and Priester) during seasons, but at points at which they were highly available. By being so proactive, they've usually been able to avoid an acute need for pitching help in July. This year, though, they tried to leave open runways for the pitchers they acquired over the winter (including Drohan, Harrison and Sproat) and for some arms returning from injuries (Gasser and Henderson). That made sense, but now, it leaves them with an unexpected need for that low-ceiling innings eater they've so often had in the past. Quintana is out there. His numbers look atrocious, but that's because he's pitching his home games at Coors Field. Presumably, though, the Brewers would like to aim a little higher. They have lots of options. The Giants will be open to moving Robbie Ray, who's in the last year of his long-term deal and has stopped missing bats the way he used to. The Nationals' Foster Griffin, the Reds' Brady Singer, the Diamondbacks' Eduardo Rodríguez and the Orioles' Trevor Rogers are all in some version of the same situation. None of those guys would start a playoff game for Milwaukee, but that's not what the Brewers need. They just need someone who can absorb a share of the workload over the final two months, so that the rest of the team is fresher and the club is as well-positioned as possible when they get to October. It'll be a needle to thread for the Brewers front office. They don't want to end up in a roster crunch that costs them anyone important. They need to add help, but still have space for their best arms when those guys are back to full strength. They can operate on a six-man rotation for much of the rest of the season, but need to communicate well enough with each of their guys to ensure that those asked to spend time in Nashville or in the bullpen are open to the changes. The team is in too good a position to sacrifice the depth of their league-best farm system just to gild the lily. If they don't act at all, though, they might regret it. After all, clearly, the baseball gods intend to enforce 'you can never have too much pitching' in an especially draconian way for them this summer. 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Image courtesy of © Joe Puetz-Imagn Images Though the Brewers finally lost a game against the Cardinals Wednesday night, Garrett Mitchell did the same thing he's done in several recent Brewers wins: hit the ball hard, often. He had two hits, including a double, pushing his OPS for 2026 to .831. Though he still has just eight home runs, that was his 18th double, to go with three triples. He's batting .276/.366/.465 on the campaign, though for many, the most important column on his Baseball Reference page is 'PA'. Already, Mitchell has come to the plate 293 times, nearly matching the combined total (302) he had in 2024 and 2025. Before this season, Mitchell had only once collected more than 78 plate appearances in a month; that came in August 2024. In no previous season did he even appear in the majors during May or June. This year, he's had at least 79 plate appearances in each month. At last, he's had the runway to take off as a player. Many worried that when he finally found that runway, he would crash and burn. His profile at the plate—with an extreme swing-and-miss tendency and too many ground balls—seemed like it might doom him to a future as a fourth outfielder, or (if injuries eroded his raw talent) even less. There were some calls last offseason for the Brewers to move on from Mitchell already, and if he hadn't been extremely cheap to retain, they might even have done it. The takeoff has gone off without a hitch, though, and the air flow over Mitchell's wings appears to be well-balanced. It's not just about being healthier than ever, and it's not just about getting more reps and more experience against top-flight pitchers. It's also because Mitchell has made a real and crucial swing change, which probably looks subtle but has changed his game in a radical way. We can use Statcast's excellent visualizations of players' swings in animated movement-tracking form to spot the tweaks Mitchell has made. To do so, let's start by comparing what Mitchell looked like in 2024 (the only other time he's gotten enough playing time in a season for Statcast to build a composite animation of him) to what he looks like now, at the first major checkpoint of the swing—when his hands drop into the slot from which his swing fires. This is our starting point, because it is (in one sense) the starting point of the swing, but it's also a large share of the difference we're going to dig into. In the past, Mitchell had what hitting people call a "long front arm" early in his swing. Look how much higher he's ratcheted his front shoulder in the image on the left, and how it's already turning outward more than he's doing this season. As a result, note the fact that his hands are more centered within his frame on the right, even though he's positioning them to extend his arms through the swing already. Mitchell's weight begins to shift forward a hair sooner this year, but his front shoulder stays closed longer and his hands stay back a hair better. Now, here's where Mitchell was in each season, at the next major checkpoint in a swing—the moment when his attack angle becomes positive. In other words, this is when his bat stops working down from behind his shoulder into the hitting zone and starts moving slightly uphill, to get on plane with the incoming pitch. The differences are much more subtle here, because already, most of them are just remnants of the change he made to how he starts his swing. On the right side of each image, notice the difference in the two numbers below the attack angle. At the moment when he begins to get on plane with the pitch, his bat is angled more toward the opposite field this season. His swing is also flatter, with less downward tilt from his handle to his barrel. Why? because the change to keep his front shoulder in a bit longer early in the swing has allowed him to flatten out the swing to catch up with pitches above his belt. In the past, the early rotation of his upper body forced him to create a steeper plane. If he didn't do so, back then, he would sap his own power and be too short through the hitting zone, ending up with a weakly-hit ball off the end of the bat. This year, because of that earlier change, Mitchell can be more linear and longer through the hitting zone even if he needs to swing flatter than is his default. He still has the option of dipping more for low and bendy pitches, but he doesn't lose bat speed or the ability to cover his preferred timing window, either way. Mitchell is also swinging notably faster this year, by the time he reaches his contact point. That's because of the slightly later rotation of the shoulder, too. There's more torque in his swing; it's more violent. Swinging a bit flatter has meant a few more whiffs and no fewer ugly swings, but it's allowed him to wait longer to make his swing decision, which has contribued to his very strong walk rate. He's also able to square up a wider variety of pitches, so despite a bit more error baked into his address of the ball, there's less glaring a hole in his swing. Will Mitchell remain this good all year, if he stays healthy? It's hard to say. He still swings and misses a lot, for a guy who doesn't hit for all that much power and often hits it on the ground. But maybe a quick comparison to two players with similarly superb bat speedcan elucidate why what Mitchell is doing is working, even if it's not working as well for him as for either of them. First, here are visuals of Kyle Schwarber's swing at the same two moments as we studied above for Mitchell. Schwarber has almost identical bat speed to Mitchell's, and like the new version of Mitchell, he swings fairly flat. On the left, you can see that his hands get into their firing position without the long from arm; he's ready to rip through the ball. However, Schwarber doesn't create as much early bat speed as Mitchell does. The Brewers center fielder has his hands much deeper in the hitting zone when he gets his barrel out from behind his body than Schwarber does when he gets to the same point. On the right, you can see that Schwarber is coming much closer to square to the path of the incoming pitch than Mitchell is when he starts to work uphill. He's going to catch the ball farther in front of his body, with his bat angled much more toward the pull field. That's why Schwarber produces titanic pull-side power so consistently, whereas Mitchell does so rarely. Again, though, Mitchell is ahead of Schwarber in producing early bat speed. He can be late and still hit the ball hard; Schwarber doesn't have that luxury. Here are the same two images for fellow Brewers slugger Jake Bauers. Bauers creates that early bat speed and keeps his hands back, just like Mitchell. He gets around the ball more, like Schwarber, which is why he's produced more power than Mitchell has. However, he's compelled to be steeper to the ball, just as Mitchell was a couple of years ago. He's put himself in great positions to be on time, but when he's not, he doesn't have much chance to catch the ball with his barrel. His timing window is somewhat narrow; so is Schwarbers. Increasingly. Mitchell's is wide, giving him a margin for error in one dimension that he's sacrificed in another. Mitchell is unique. No one else who swings this fast is this oriented toward the opposite field. He's creating so much bat speed while still getting into the hitting zone that he can afford to catch the ball deep. It's a quintessentially Brewers way to hit; only they could help a player with so much bat speed engineer such a non-damage-focused approach. And yet, it seems to be the perfect one for him. It's preserved much of what made him intriguing over his previous, injury-plagued stints, but it's also introduced more adaptability. Whatever his flaws, Mitchell is emerging as something very close to an All-Star center fielder. His rejiggered swing gets the credit for that, and in turn, the Brewers and the player get a lot of credit for the diligent adjustments and perseverance to achieve that transformation while keeping Mitchell healthy and ready to play every day. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-Imagn Images It's neither a secret nor a coincidence that, by the standards of big-league ballclubs, the Brewers are run rather like a college team. After all, their manager is one of just two active ones whose background is mostly as a college coach. Pat Murphy has acknowledged that, though he doesn't consciously try to bring the model that made him successful at Notre Dame and Arizona State University to bear in his management of Milwaukee, there's a degree to which his skill set and the way the small-market Crew run things match nicely to what a college program has to do in order to thrive. One way in which that shows up on the field is the collective discipline of the lineup, and not just in terms of swing decisions. When the team brings any of its endless line of young players to the big leagues—or even when they (re)acquire guys who have been in the majors elsewhere, as they did when they dealt for David Hamilton in February—they ask them to let the ball travel. It's important to the team that those guys learn to recognize pitches and to frustrate hurlers' attempts to lure them out of the zone and strike them out. They coach hitters to be patient and to hit the ball deeper in the hitting zone than they normally would. It's an essential part of their offensive DNA, including and especially when it comes time to get a clutch hit. This can make their young hitters look awfully unimpressive, at first. Brewers fans will well remember the ugly early days of Brice Turang, Jackson Chourio and Caleb Durbin, who took anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to tap into their offensive upside. In the meantime, those guys also get deployed strategically, sometimes being held out of the lineup when the matchup favors another player and other times being fed into the woodchipper in a bad matchup so they can learn the ropes. Almost no Brewers hitter comes up and gets to their power quickly. In service to the team and to optimize their development even after they matriculate to the majors, those guys are asked not to swing as aggressively as they otherwise might, in addition to not swinging as often as they otherwise might. Cooper Pratt is the latest exemplar. He came to the majors an unfinished product, because the team has sufficient confidence in Murphy and his coaching staff to finish off development after a player gets to the parent club. Pratt's arrival makes the team deeper and better defensively, and eventually, having him up right now will pay off. He might be better in 2027 than he would otherwise be, because he's here now. He might hit the turbo button and achieve the stardom that is very much possible for him in 2028, because he got some of the toughest adjustments to the bigs out of the way in 2026. That can make the first stint for players like Pratt frustrating, though, because you know this guy has a good chance to be good, but he's not good yet. Pratt entered Tuesday's doubleheader batting .204/.313/.222, with just one extra-base hit in 64 plate appearances. He'd already drawn eight walks and had only 11 strikeouts, but there was little lethality in his lumber. On Tuesday, alone, he raised his career OPS by .091. He came to bat nine times, drew three walks, and cracked two extra-base hits. This week, it seems, Pratt has been let off the leash. Of this 115 tracked swings Pratt has taken since coming up, six of the 12 fastest have come in the last two days. His double down the left-field line came on the third-fastest swing of his young career; his triple to right field came on the 21st-fastest. Pratt is a big guy, and scouting reports have always cited some latent raw power in his frame and his swing. We knew he was capable of more than he showed when he first came up. Now, the team seems to believe he's ready to let it eat. That doesn't mean Pratt will suddenly go on a power binge any time soon. His double was a grounder; two balls he hit on similarly vicious swings Tuesday stayed too low and didn't escape the infield. As our Jack Stern has already laid out, Pratt is more than a small tweak or a few weeks from becoming a full-fledged power hitter. However, he can be more dangerous than he's looked so far. He can get hits, as well as simply keeping the line moving by drawing walks. He can split gaps and find corners. He can make outfielders run backward now and then. We haven't seen much of that so far, because when he got here, the Brewers focused first on ensuring he could organize his zone properly and produce what the team needs in certain situations where the batter's stats aren't the focus. As we've seen this week, though, that talent is still in there. It could burst out of him down the stretch, if only in the form of a lot of singles and doubles, now that Pratt is swinging the way he's always been capable of. The hope when he came up was that he might lengthen the lineup, in a way neither Joey Ortiz nor David Hamilton could. At first, he didn't do so, but that was during an apprentice phase. Now, he's ready to deliver on that promise. View full article

Image courtesy of © Dave Kallmann / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images For many Brewers fans, this move will feel overdue. The Brewers tried to give Blake Perkins time to work through what has effectively been a season-long slump at the plate, but ultimately, they needed more functional depth in their outfield. Perkins, still a fine defender but no longer the elite of the elite in center field and without any offensive value of which to speak, was the odd man out—but the corresponding move is an exciting addition to the 26-man roster. It will be fascinating to see how rookie Luis Lara fits into the team's plans. He's taking Perkins's roster spot, but he'll need a bigger role than the one Perkins occupied in order to justify being brought to the majors now. The team already demonstrated its faith that he can thrive in a larger role than Perkins had, though, when they signed him to a seven-year deal earlier this season, before he made it to the majors. The best role for Lara is one similar to Perkins's best one, in that Lara's best tool might also be his fielding prowess. That makes this move interesting, though, because Garrett Mitchell has a 1.042 OPS over the last four weeks. It seems like this is no time to reduce the playing time of the starting center fielder, so will Lara eat into Sal Frelick's role, instead? Or will Mitchell spend some time in a corner spot or at designated hitter, with Christian Yelich getting more days off—whether he wants them or not? This change, like the one the team made when it swapped out Luis Rengifo for Cooper Pratt, makes the team younger and better on defense at the same time. It also affirms the organization's commitment to developing players and building a lasting pipeline. Though no Pat Murphy team will set aside the goal of winning for any meaningful period, these moves accept a certain amount of temporary on-field cost in the service of improving the team's long-term outlook. That's a luxury Milwaukee has afforded itself, with such a comfortable lead in the division and one of the best records in baseball. They'll have to sort through their options and have at least one or two difficult conversations with team-controlled players, but they're going to win the NL Central this year—and doing this, like promoting Pratt last month, just might help them do so next season, too. View full article