Yelich looks to snap out of skid
It remains to be seen how flavorful home cooking is for teams during the 2020 season with no fans in the stands, but if anyone might be able to use familiar surroundings to get going, Brewers leftfielder Christian Yelich is the guy.
To put it mildly, Milwaukee's opening six-game trip to Chicago and Pittsburgh was a miserable one for Yelich, who won the National League batting titles in 2018 and 2019 – the first Brewer to do it even once. He went 1 for 27 (.037) with 12 strikeouts, the one hit being a two-run homer in the second game at Wrigley Field.
After smacking that home run, Yelich went hitless over the next four games – something he never had done in his career when in the starting lineup. He failed to collect a hit over four-game periods last season and in 2014 with the Marlins but both times started only three of those games.
Having gone 0 for 19 with 10 strikeouts since that home run off Cubs believer Brad Wieck, Yelich returned home in the worst slump of his career.
"We talk about depth all the time, and part of depth is having guys who can pick each other up," Brewers president of baseball operations David Stearns said Thursday. "In this case, we're having to pick up a guy who's carried us for large portions of the last two years, and we certainly anticipate he's going to carry us at some point this season as well.”
In his two years with the Brewers, Yelich has been a Miller Park monster, compiling a .699 slugging percentage, including 27 of his 44 home runs last season. In 2019, he put together a remarkable 1.201 OPS in 65 games at home.
This year, however, teams have only 30 home games scheduled, and 60 total, meaning the Brewers already have played 10% of their season.
At the outset of summer camp, in a Zoom session with reporters, Yelich predicted some players would have tough seasons because of the limited number of games.
"You're going to see really good players have really bad years," he said. "It's going to happen."
Yelich is far from the only elite offensive player stumbling out of the gate. As of Thursday, Los Angeles' Cody Belllinger, who topped Yelich for NL MVP last season, was batting .192 with no homers. The Mets' Pete Alonso, who led the majors with 53 homers in 2019, had only one with a .375 slugging percentage. Cincinnati's Eugenio Suarez, who bopped 49 homers last year, had none and was batting .095. Atlanta's Ronald Acuna Jr., after slugging 41 home runs last season, had none with a .208 slugging percentage.
Why are so many proven sluggers off to such horrid starts?
"I'd be a little careful about reading into trends this early," Stearns cautioned. "It's possible that because pitchers were maybe for the most part able to keep their arms going during the shutdown, while it's much tougher for hitters to see quality live pitching in a quarantined environment, that could have something to do with it.
Protocols must be followed
Stearns said the number of players who tested positive for coronavirus on the Miami Marlins was "alarming" to everyone in the game. League officials knew there would be positive tests at times but never expected more than half of a team's roster to contract the virus at once.
"I think everyone feels that way," Stearns said. "We have a very robust set of protocols in place for the explicit reason of preventing something like this happening. It's designed so that if someone contracts the virus, we don't have it spread throughout an entire clubhouse. So, I think it's very important from a league perspective to understand how this happened in Miami."
Because MLB decided to assign protocol compliance officers to each club in response to Miami's outbreak, Stearns was asked if that meant some Marlins players were not following the rules.
"I don't know what to read into that, to be honest with you," he said. "What I'll say is we are all adults. Everyone in the clubhouse is an adult; everyone on the traveling party is an adult. I don't think it's any one person's responsibility to police the rest of the group. We are all responsible to each other.