Brice Turang's Breakout Season

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Brice Turang - Milwaukee Brewers

Milwaukee Brewers' player Brice Turang at Wrigley Field in Chicago on Aug. 21, 2025

During Sunday’s series finale against the Giants Brice Turang picked up a single and stole a base in the sixth inning as the Brewers tried to tack on an insurance run. It says a lot about Turang’s season that his 1-for-4 day was a bit of a letdown as compared to his recent performance.

Entering play on Aug. 1 of this season Turang had played in almost 400 MLB games for his career and was batting .248 with a .314 on-base percentage and .338 slugging. At that point he had 19 career home runs, roughly one every 80 plate appearances. Since the calendar flipped to August, however, Turang has been one of the game’s best hitters. Across 21 games this month he’s hitting .359 with a .412 on-base and .744 slugging. He’s drawn the most attention, of course, by hitting eight home runs this month (one every 10.6 plate appearances), but that’s far from the only thing he’s done well.

At this point Turang’s career spans 17 months in the majors, counting a handful of March games as part of April. Entering play Monday August of 2025 was 26 points better than any other in his career by batting average, 22 points better in on-base percentage and 303 points better in slugging. In addition to his home runs, he also has a strong chance to match or break his career high in doubles in a month: He had seven in June and has six this month with a week to play.

Better Than Ever

Turang’s home runs have drawn a lot of attention to his hot month of August, but that recent performance has overshadowed the fact that he’s been swinging the bat better than ever before for much of the 2025 season. Most of his monthly records he’s passing in August were set in June of this year. In fact, by on-base plus slugging three of the four best months of Turang’s career have come this season.

One of the things that has changed in Turang’s offensive profile is somewhat obvious: He’s hitting the ball harder because he’s swinging the bat harder. Baseball Savant’s Bat Tracking metrics (produced using MLB’s Statcast data) showed that Turang rated near the bottom of MLB hitters in average bat speed each of the last two seasons but has raised his average from 66.2 mph in 2024 to 70.3 in 2025. Perhaps even more telling, less than four percent of his swings in 2023 and 2024 tracked as “fast swings,” clocking in at over 75 mph. This season almost 16% of his swings are surpassing that threshold.

There are several other distinctions to be drawn in Turang’s inputs. He’s several inches further back in the batter’s box than he was last season, he’s letting the ball travel deeper into the strike zone before making contact and he’s much more likely to impact the ball at what Baseball Savant calls the “ideal attack angle.” The outputs suggest that all of his changes have paid off: Turang leads all MLB hitters with a 16.6% improvement in hard hit ball percentage this season, and he’s one of just four who have raised their rate by more than 10%. (Sal Frelick is seventh on that list at 9.2% and Andrew Vaughn is 25th at 5.9%).

Best Defender

Turang’s offensive improvement, however, builds on what was already a pretty valuable frame. Despite posting a .665 on base plus slugging last season (54 points below league average) Baseball Reference still estimates Turang was worth 4.7 Wins Above Replacement last season, the second most of any Brewer. Turang generated a lot of that value on defense, where he won his first Gold Glove at second base and won the National League’s Platinum Glove as the league’s best defender regardless of position. This past weekend at Saberseminar, an annual conference focused around new baseball research, Syracuse students Owen St. Onge and Jameson Bodenburg identified him as the third best player in baseball at improving his team’s chances to win via situational hitting. He’s also stolen 98 bases in his career while being caught just 18 times.

Those 4.7 Baseball Reference WAR Turang accumulated in 2024 were tied for the 17th most in MLB history for a player with an OPS+ (comparing player on-base plus slugging to peers, where average is 100) below 90. He was already one of the game’s most valuable below average hitters, but now there’s evidence to suggest Turang has unlocked something at the plate as well.

This rapid improvement in Turang’s offensive game is going to create a challenge for setting expectations for him going forward. Certainly, he’s unlikely to hit eight home runs every month (roughly 48 per season) going forward, but those attempting to project his career path in the short and long term are going to have to grapple with the question of whether this is a hot streak or a lasting change. The projection models are already split on this. Four of the eight “rest of season” forecasts on Turang’s FanGraphs page now expect him to be an above-average MLB hitter down the stretch and the other four still have him below that threshold. “Can Brice Turang repeat his breakout 2025 season?” is likely to be one of the biggest questions facing the Brewers this winter.

In the meantime, however, Brice Turang is still only 25 years old and there’s evidence to suggest his new approach at the plate will pay dividends on offense for a decade or more to come. Turang was already one of the sport’s most valuable contributors, but it’s possible 2025 will be remembered as the season where he reached a new level.