Should the Brewers demote Jackson Chourio? Positives and negatives behind top prospect's early MLB returns
Coming into the spring, Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Jackson Chourio was considered to be one of the favorites to win the National League Rookie of the Year Award. Chourio had several advantages over his peers. Foremost, he had signed an historic extension during the winter, giving him a leg up on winning a spot on the Opening Day roster. He also had a dynamic skill set that hints at a superstar future. CBS Sports ranked him as the seventh-best prospect, writing the following:
Chourio, the breakout star of the 2022 minor-league season, is a dynamic talent. He’s the rare player who can launch opposite-field home runs with regularity, as well as put infielders in a blender on would-be routine grounders. (There was a game in late April against the Angels’ Double-A affiliate where he recorded infield singles to the shortstop and the third baseman in consecutive frames.) Some evaluators have expressed hit-tool concerns generated by his aggressive approach. It’s a fair consideration, but Chourio has earned the benefit of the doubt by holding his own in the upper minors at such a young age. If everything clicks, he’ll provide the Brewers with their fifth 30/30 season. And their sixth, their seventh, their eighth, and so on.
Give those skeptical evaluators some credit: through Chourio’s first 30 games, it looks like they have had a point. He came into Monday’s series-opening contest against the Kansas City Royals hitting .219/.265/.352 (78 OPS+) with four home runs, 13 RBI, and six stolen bases. Reading too much into perceived trends is a dangerous game, but it’s not ideal that Chourio has performed particularly poorly as of late. Over the last two weeks, he’s sporting a .464 OPS and an 11-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 36 plate appearances. He has one extra-base hit during that span.
It’s hard to remember, but development isn’t always linear. Many of today’s top players struggled early in their big-league careers. Several of them required a trip back to the minors so that they could make the necessary adjustments. Don’t believe us? Consider this sampling of the season’s best performers and how they stacked up through their first 30 career big-league games:
Bobby Witt Jr: .585 OPS
Kyle Tucker: .421 OPS
Jose Altuve: .731 OPS
Trea Turner: .689 OPS
And so on and so forth. A rough introduction to The Show isn’t necessarily presaging a disappointing career. What it may be, though, is a sign that the player needs more seasoning in the minors. With that in mind, below we’ve recapped the positive and the negative of Chourio’s first 30 games while rendering a verdict on whether or not a return to the minor leagues might help him.
1. The positive
Give Chourio this much: the secondary value is there. He’s a perfect six-for-six on stolen-base attempts. Four of those have come on non-fastballs, suggesting that he’s picking his spots well.
Chouiro has also been a demon at taking the extra base during the run of play. He’s advanced an extra base 67% of the time, well beyond the league-average mark of 42%. He’s scored from first twice already (albeit both times with two outs) and he’s yet to make an out on the basepaths. Statcast models how often a runner attempts to advance versus expectations based on “runner speed, outfielder throwing arm, runner position on the base paths, and outfielder distance from both ball and bases.” Chourio has advanced 12% more than expected, the 16th-highest mark in the majors. Some might say, well, he’s fast, what do you expect? But there’s a lot more to baserunning than speed alone, and the Brewers have to be thrilled by Chourio’s efficiency given his volume.
Chourio’s speed shows up defensively, too. The Brewers have played him in the corners out of deference to Blake Perkins. He’s overqualified for either post, if you ask us. Here he is ranging into center field to track down a fly ball; and here he is skying to nab a line drive on a play that had a catch probability of just 50%. Chourio does need to improve his routes heading forward, as he’s had a few balls eludehim that he probably should have caught. On the whole, though, we think the Brewers have to consider his defense to be an asset, not a liability, at this stage in his career.
Now, onto the areas where Chourio has struggled.
2. The negative
You probably noticed how we did not reference Chourio’s bat at any point in the above section. There are a few reasons for that.
First, Chourio’s aggressive approach has been as advertised. He enters Monday ranked in the 13th percentile in chase rate and in the 23rd percentile in whiff rate. He likes to swing the bat, and right now opponents are taking full advantage of it. Below, we’ve included two heat maps. The first shows Chourio’s swing rate, the second shows his contact rate. Take a quick look at both:
TruMedia
TruMedia
It’s pretty clear that Chourio is looking for elevated pitches over the plate or on the inner third. Unfortunately, he’s been prone to whiffing on pitches away. Care to guess where most opponents are attacking him? You guessed it. According to TruMedia, 62% of the pitches Chourio has seen have been located on the outer half. Take a look at his performance based on horizontal location:
| Location | EV | OPS | Whiff% |
|---|---|---|---|
Something else worth noting about Chourio: he’s not pulling the ball even when he hits it in the air. You would think someone with his kind of bat speed would be wearing out left field. He did in the minors, reliably hitting more than 40% of his balls to left field at each step of the way, regardless of sample size. Thus far in the majors, he’s pulled just 30.6% of his batted balls. That puts him in Steven Kwan territory. No offense to Kwan, a fine player, but that’s not what you would expect from Chourio.
To be fair, there are some great hitters who aren’t pull-happy. Mookie Betts, Yordan Alvarez, Julio Rodríguez, and Bobby Witt Jr. are four examples off the top of our heads. Let’s take a look at their pull rates in a different context, by spotlighting their pull rate based on launch angle and exit velocity:
| Batter | Overall pull rate | 10+ degrees LA pull rate | 95+ mph pull rate |
|---|---|---|---|
If you’re familiar with this kind of data, it probably looks as you expected it to. Betts, Alvarez, and Rodríguez pull most of their hardest contact, and right now Chourio isn’t really. Witt shows that it is possible to succeed without yanking everything to the pull side; he’s yet to pull a home run this season, and most of his extra-base hits have been to either left-center or right field. It’s just not the easiest profile to master.
For evidence of that last statement, here are the six lowest pull rates among qualifiers on batted balls with an exit velocity of 95 mph or higher, along with their seasonal OPS+:
Jonathan India, 16% pull rate, 83 OPS+
Ty France, 17.5%, 97
Witt, 19%, 161
Nicky Lopez, 20%, 49
Tim Anderson, 21.7%, 45
Chourio, 22.2%, 78
Chourio certainly has the talent to be another exception, another Witt. But it’s clearly not the easiest path to offensive success.
3. The verdict
Figuring out what would best benefit a player’s long-term development is more of an art than a science. Leaving an overmatched player in the majors too long could, in theory, rattle their confidence in a way that they find difficult to overcome. At the same time, failure is the best teacher in the human experience, and some lessons that can be learned only at the big-league level.
Even if the Brewers wanted to demote Chourio — and we suspect that will become more of a conversation if he continues to scuffle deeper into May — right now would be a suboptimal time to do it. Milwaukee is currently without Garrett Mitchell, Christian Yelich, and Joey Wiemer due to various injuries.
That leaves manager Pat Murphy and company with precious few legitimate alternatives to Chourio. There’s Jake Bauers, who enters Monday with the same OPS+ as Chourio, and then there’s an assortment of infielders who could be shifted to the grass. On the minor-league front, the Brewers have three healthy position players on the 40-man roster stationed in Triple-A: Owen Miller (himself only recently demoted); Vinny Capra (sporting a sub-.700 OPS); and Chris Roller (running a 13-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio). Pardon our French bulldog, but woof.
Sometimes the only option is the best option by default. When it comes to Chourio and the Brewers, it appears to us they just have to stay the course and hope talent wins out.