An appreciation of the Brewers other young outfielders

Chourio has the spotlight, but these guys are helping

Jackson Chourio has, rightly, been the young Brewers outfielder grabbing all the headlines lately. He deserves it. He’s probably been the team’s best offensive player over the past couple months, he plays good defense, he’s hit some impressive milestones, and oh, right, he’s 20.

But we shouldn’t let Chourio’s impressive season overshadow what the other young outfielders on this roster have done. Blake Perkins, Sal Frelick, and Garrett Mitchell may not have gaudy numbers. None are perfect ballplayers. But all three have played their part in the Brewers’ success this season and could contribute to this club for a long time.

We’ll start with Perkins, who—having recently celebrated his 28th birthday—is the old man of the bunch. Perkins is basically the Platonic ideal of a fourth outfielder. He’s an excellent defensive player. Whether you ascribe to Statcast’s Outs Above Average (in which Perkins was ranked 30th in the league, as of Thursday morning) or the Fielding Bible’s Defensive Runs Saved measure (with eight runs saved, Perkins ranks in the top 50), or you just like home run robberies, Perkins has racked up serious value defensively despite making just over 100 starts on the season, and it would not be a stretch to call him one of the best defensive outfielders in the game.

While Perkins isn’t what you’d call a good offensive player, he’s done a respectable job this season with the bat, and once he gets on, he’s a threat on the bases; he ranks in the 97th percentile in sprint speed and has 22 steals this year. Add it all up, Perkins has earned 1.8 bWAR—really good for a backup outfielder.

Frelick has, in some ways, been a disappointment this season. His Statcast page is the stuff of nightmares: he’s in the first percentile (that’s the worst percentile) in expected slugging, average exit velocity, barrel percentage, and hard-hit percentage. That’s bad! He’s been able to make up for it in some ways; Frelick rarely swings and misses and he’s very fast, so while he’s slugging only .334 on the season, he’s worked his way to an almost-respectable .655 OPS. That certainly qualifies as disappointing in light of the .365/.435/.508 batting line he posted in 46 games at Triple-A Nashville in 2022, but Frelick, like Perkins, rates as an excellent defensive player—with 14 runs saved via DRS, he ranks in a tie for 11th in the majors, and while OAA isn’t quite as high on him, he still ranks as a solidly above-average outfielder by that measure—and a good baserunner (17 steals in 20 attempts) and has thus been worth a solid 2.0 bWAR in 2024.

Mitchell, meanwhile, has looked good in basically all aspects of the game. His big problem has been an inability to stay on the field. A frustrating broken digit right at the end of spring training cost Mitchell the first three months of the 2024 season. But he’s been quite good since his debut on July 1, especially if you look just at August and September; entering play Thursday, Mitchell had an OPS of .835 since the beginning of August, and he leads the team in OPS over the last month. Like Perkins and Frelick, Mitchell is also very fast (all three of these players rank between the 93rd and 97th percentile in sprint speed), and while he doesn’t rate quite as highly as the other two defensively, he’s still a clear positive. He has earned 2.1 bWAR in just 65 games in 2024, a rate of almost five over a whole season, an amount that would put him in All-Star territory if he kept that pace for a whole season.

That gives you roughly two wins above replacement for all three of these players. Maybe that’s a low bar, but these year’s Brewers have been succeeding because they’re getting at least some production from all over the roster, and they have very few holes. (And, for what it’s worth, Mitchell, Frelick, and Perkins would be the best, second-best, and third-best position players on the White Sox, by the measurement of bWAR). It’s true that if you’re a Fangraphs diehard, the numbers aren’t quite as sunny: they have Mitchell at 1.7 WAR and Perkins and Frelick at 1.5.

But the point is not to split hairs between a couple tenths of a win; it’s to show that the Brewers have just been getting production here. There is no doubt that the most successful version of the Brewers in the immediate-to-medium term future includes a Sal Frelick that hits more than a couple homers and a Garrett Mitchell that can keep this sort of production up for a whole season. Those guys were first-round picks, after all, and we should have higher expectations for them. But Perkins’ usefulness has been gravy, proof that if you have a well-balanced team, you can afford to make the most of a player like him.

I’m not certain what the future holds. The Brewers still have five quality major league outfielders when Christian Yelich is healthy, and whether that problem is solved by shifting Yelich to a different role or by shipping out one of these guys (in all likelihood Perkins, who seems least suited to an everyday role, and is the type of player that all good teams want), I’m not sure that all of them will be around for the long haul.

The immediate point is this: the Brewers dealt with an injury to their leader and biggest name, and still managed to get good outfield production, even in addition to the exploits of their 20-year-old star. In fact, the Brewers combined positional Wins Above Average at outfield (basically, the combined value of these three, Yelich, and Chourio) ranks fourth in the majors this season, behind only the Yankees (Aaron Judge and Juan Soto), Red Sox (Jarren Duran plus an effective smattering of Wilyer Abreu, Tyler O’Neill, and Ceddanne Rafaela), and Padres (Fernando Tatis, Jurickson Profar, and Jackson Merrill). The “speed and defense” approach has proven to be a winner for this team—at least so far—and Perkins, Frelick, and Mitchell are all central to that mentality.