We wrap position players with our only active player (so far?!)
The Brewers All-Time Team wraps up position players today with right field. A reminder of the rules:
- We’re looking for the best individual season at each position, not the best career
- Players can only be used once
- A player must have played more games at the given position in the given season than any other position
Here are all the other positions: C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF
We’ll finish up here with someone from the current squad.
Right Field: Christian Yelich, 2019
130g, .329/.429/.671, 179 OPS+, 29 2B, 44 HR, 97 RBI, 30 SB, 80 BB, 7.0 bWAR, 6.6 fWAR
Some of you have been on this for quite a while, but for those of you who have only sort of been paying attention, you might say “Huh? Isn’t Christian Yelich a left fielder?”
You are mostly correct. The vast majority of Yelich’s games as a Brewer have come in left field (fun fact: Yelich is in fact the active career leader in games played in left field), but he has not always been exclusively a left fielder. He played a good amount of center field when he was in Miami (including 155 starts there in 2017, the year before he became a Brewer), and in his first season in Milwaukee, he split time almost evenly between left and right.
But that season—his MVP season—Yelich played 90 games in left (which belonged to Ryan Braun, when he was in the lineup) and 75 in right which, per our rules, makes him ineligible for right field. You can dig deeper into those numbers and find that he started more games in right than left, so I probably could have bent the rules here, if I wanted to. But in 2019, Yelich played right field almost exclusively—the only season in his career that he did so—and given that Yelich was actually better in 2019 than in 2018 (albeit in fewer games because of his late-season broken kneecap), I’m good with unambiguously following the rules and using Yelich’s 2019 season in right field.
You don’t really need the background here, but Yelich, acquired by the Brewers via trade in January of 2018, morphed almost immediately upon arriving in Milwaukee from a solid gap hitter to a complete, dynamic offensive force. In 2018, he won a batting title (.326) and led the NL in slugging, OPS+, total bases, and WAR, and he was a big reason why the Brewers got as close to the World Series as they have since their only appearance in 1982.
He was even better in 2019. Yelich’s power jumped considerably—his ISO went from .272 to .342, and he hit 44 home runs in just 130 games. (Juiced balls? Maybe. Who cares.) He won his second straight batting title, but in ’19 Yelich won the slash-line triple crown with a line of .329/.429/.671, which gave him an OPS 100 points higher than his MVP-winning mark of the previous season. And Yelich really leveled up as a base stealer in ’19, with 30 steals in 32 attempts; that’s the highest success rate (93.8%) in the history of the team for a player who stole at least 20 bases.
Unfortunately, Yelich fouled a ball off his kneecap on Sept. 10, he didn’t play the rest of the season, the Brewers lost the Wild Card game in heartbreaking fashion, the world got ill, Yelich went into a weird three-year funk, and now he’s finally looking like himself again but he can’t stay healthy. It hasn’t been great since that stupid foul ball.
That foul ball also likely cost Yelich his second straight MVP award, a feat that has never happened in Brewers history (and has been done by only 15 players ever). Yelich and the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger were neck-and-neck for the award all summer (Yeli vs. Belli); with Yelich going down in early September, Bellinger ended up winning fairly easily (19 first-place votes to 10 for Yelich—and one for Anthony Rendon!). But Yelich’s rate stats were easily better than Bellinger’s, he hit nearly as many homers (47 for Bellinger to 44 for Yelich), and Yelich was far better on the basepaths. Despite missing the last two-and-a-half weeks, Yelich still led the NL in oWAR; the only real advantage over Yelich that Bellinger had was good defense at a more premium outfield spot in center.
I think there’s a good argument that Yelich’s offensive season in 2019 was the most impressive in team history. His 179 OPS+ is the highest ever posted by a Brewer over a full season by a decent margin over the 166 number that three prominent Brewers have achieved (Braun in 2011, Prince Fielder in 2009, and Robin Yount in 1982). Add to that his baserunning prowess, and I think it’s pretty clear. (Yount’s shortstop defense in ‘82 puts him head and shoulders above any of these other seasons in terms of total value, so I am not at all suggesting that Yelich had a “better season” than Yount did—I’m talking purely about offense, here.)
The one other season I’d like to mention specifically when it comes to right field is the truly great peak season from a sometimes-overlooked Brewer, Sixto Lezcano. When I was younger, I only knew Lezcano as the guy with the cool name, but he was a heck of a ballplayer. He sometimes gets omitted from the casual histories of the team because it was Lezcano who was the key to the big trade that brought Rollie Fingers, Ted Simmons, and Pete Vuckovich to Milwaukee after the 1980 season. That trade is generally viewed as what put the Brewers over the top, and since Lezcano was not on the 1981 and 1982 teams that achieved so much, he’s easy to forget.
But Lezcano was a terrific offensive player, and things really came together for him in 1979: he hit .321/.414/.573 (a 164 OPS+) with 29 doubles, 28 homers, and 101 RBI in just 138 games, and while modern metrics would disagree with the decision, he also won a Gold Glove. That team won 95 games and even though Gorman Thomas led the AL with 45 homers, Lezcano was clearly the Brewers’ best offensive player. But he had a disappointing 1980 season, he was traded to St. Louis, and then traded again before St. Louis beat the Brewers in the 1982 World Series. He did have one more great year with San Diego in 1982, and he finished his career with almost 30 WAR and a 124 OPS+.
Also considered, besides Yelich’s 2018, which is maybe against the rules, and Lezcano’s 1979: Jeromy Burnitz in 1997, when he hit 37 doubles, 8 triples, and 27 homers and played what appears to be the best defense of his career; Corey Hart in 2007, when he had 33 doubles, nine triples, 24 homers, and 23 stolen bases while hitting .295; and Geoff Jenkins in 2005, his first season not in left field, when he hit .292/.375/.513 with 42 doubles and 25 homers while playing defense that should have gotten him into Gold Glove consideration.
That does it for position players. We’ll be back next week with pitchers. Here’s your Brewers All-Time Team so far:
C: Jonathan Lucroy, 2014
1B: Prince Fielder, 2009
2B: Paul Molitor, 1979
3B: Tommy Harper, 1970
SS: Robin Yount, 1982
LF: Ryan Braun, 2011
CF: Carlos Gómez, 2013
RF: Christian Yelich, 2019