The hits just keep coming for the Brewers. Christian Yelich, who left Sunday’s game early with a hamstring issue, has landed on the injured list, which was not unexpected after manager Pat Murphy’s comments after the game. He’s been diagnosed with an adductor strain. Outfielder Greg Jones, who has been playing for Triple-A Nashville, has been added to the active roster. To make room on the 40-man roster for Jones, reliever Rob Zastryzny, who had a setback in his recovery last week, has been moved to the 60-day injured list.
It’s a blow for Yelich, a productive-when-healthy hitter whose ability to stay on the field is one of the major uncertainties around the modern iterations of the Brewers. The good news is that it’s not his back, which has been the issue that has been giving Yelich so much trouble over the past few seasons. Murphy has been quoted as saying he expects him to be out “for a while.” A little bit of research on past adductor strains suggests that in mild cases, a player can miss as little as two weeks, but in more serious cases it’s a 4-6 week injury. Given Yelich’s age and relative frailty, the early juncture of the season, and Murphy’s comments, I would expect Yelich to be out closer to the long end of that estimate.
Jones, 28, has appeared briefly in the big leagues with the Rockies and White Sox in the past two years. He was a 2019 first-round pick of the Orioles and even worked his way into the back end of MLB Pipeline’s top-100 prospects prior to the 2022 season, but he has struggled offensively since then and hasn’t been able to catch on in a big-league role. In 13 games with Triple-A Nashville this year, Jones is hitting .317/.462/.390. Jones has the outline of a player who the Brewers like—he is athletic, speedy (he stole 46 bases in just 89 games for Colorado’s Triple-A team in 2024), and a reliable defensive outfielder—but he’s struck out way too much in his minor league career, and I have my doubts that he’ll be able to hit major league pitching.
This probably isn’t the move that Brewers fans were clamoring for. Milwaukee is in a deep offensive funk and are now without three of their best hitters. A move with more upside would certainly have been more popular—Jett Williams, Luis Lara (who doesn’t profile as a plus hitter but has been very good to start the season), even Eddys Leonard, who is right-handed (unlike Yelich) but offers more upside offensively. This is especially unfortunate timing for Tyler Black, who would’ve been the most interesting and sensible move here. But Black, like Chourio and Vaughn, fractured a bone in his hand in late March.
It’s possible that Williams (who has not exactly been lighting it up with Nashville) is still in the Brewers’ short-term plans, but that the team wants to get past the service-time deadline in which they’d secure an extra year before promoting him. We don’t know exactly when that would be, but it would probably come sometime in the last ten days of April.
For now, the Brewers will have to make do with what they have, which increasingly seems like not much. Chourio remains the player nearest to a comeback, but is probably, at minimum, two weeks away. Vaughn is likely out until mid-May, and we’ll wait on an update for Yelich but I’d expect that mid-May would be an optimistic scenario for him.
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