Keston Hiura, a second baseman within the Milwaukee Brewers organization, was moved from AA Biloxi to AAA San Antonio in the offseason.
As they enter the second full week of the minor league season a theme has already emerged for many of the Brewers’ top prospects: Growing pains.
The top four minor leaguers in the organization, as ranked by MLB Pipeline, are all recent high draft picks: Second baseman Keston Hiura, outfielder Corey Ray and shortstop Brice Turang were Milwaukee’s selections in each of the last three first rounds, and outfielder Tristen Lutz was a competitive balance round pick in 2017. All four opened the season at a new level in 2019, with Hiura and Ray at AAA San Antonio, Lutz with High-A Carolina and Turang getting his first taste of full-season baseball with Low-A Wisconsin.
Hiura, for his part, continues to display the advanced bat that everyone has come to expect from him. He’s batted .293 with a .610 slugging percentage in his first 11 games in the Pacific Coast League with three home runs, following up on his Arizona Fall League MVP season from 2018. The only question with him continues to be how the Brewers will find room for him in the majors with Mike Moustakas currently occupying his position at the big league level.
For the others, the adjustment to a new level of competition has been a little more challenging. Ray, Lutz and Turang have combined to hit just .160 with a .180 slugging percentage across 100 at bats with their new teams, and the three of them are all still looking for their first home run of the season.
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For each individual player the sample sizes are too small to draw any major conclusion, but a better start would have helped demonstrate that Ray’s breakout year in 2018 was the result of a permanent change and not simply a hot season. Ray was the Brewers’ Minor League Player of the Year with Biloxi in 2018 as he connected for 66 extra base hits, including 27 home runs. Following Sunday’s game he was still looking for his first extra base hit in 2019.
The decision to place Lutz at the High-A level to open the season was an aggressive one for the Brewers. He’s still only 20 years old and is well over two years younger than most of his competition in the Carolina League, according to Baseball Reference. He also got off to something of a rough start in 2018, batting .125 with a .196 slugging percentage in his first 14 games with Wisconsin before posting .263 and .454 marks the rest of the way. As Lutz advances, however, he’ll need to find ways to prevent pitchers from taking advantage of the swing-and-miss element of his game: He’s struck out 149 times in 537 plate appearances since the start of the 2018 season.
The Brewers were also aggressive in having Turang open the 2019 season with Wisconsin at just 19 years old after 42 professional appearances in rookie ball in 2018. Turang showed excellent plate discipline in his pro debut season, however, and that skill has followed him to Wisconsin: Through his first nine Midwest League games he accumulated six walks and just six strikeouts. Meanwhile, the California native has also had to adjust to the midwest’s April weather.
“It’s how mentally strong you are, and how tough you are, to be able to overcome that,” Turang told the Rattler Radio Podcast on Sunday following a game where he went 1-for-4 with a walk and a double and scored a pair of runs despite a game time temperature of 33 degrees with 16 mph winds. “That’s what separates people: The mental toughness and being able to play in any type of weather, whether it’s 115 or 30 degrees and snowing. Everybody’s gotta play, and it’s whether you can be mentally strong enough to push it out of the way and play your game.”
