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Luis Lara - Milwaukee Brewers (2026)
Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Luis Lara makes a catch (2026).
Luis Lara has already produced a fair share of highlight reel plays and memorable moments across his first 37 games with the Brewers, but questions remain about how his skill set transitions into a long-term role for the team.
After his late triple in Sunday night’s game Lara is batting .259 with a .331 on-base and .380 slugging across his first 121 plate appearances as a Brewer, but the early numbers suggest he’s provided more value on defense than offense. Some of those numbers also contradict each other about Lara’s value in total.
The rosiest picture of Lara’s performance comes via Baseball Reference, which credits him with 0.9 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) in his relatively short stint in the majors. That would put him on pace to be worth roughly four wins in a full season, which would make him one of the 100 most valuable players in baseball regardless of position.
Defensive Value
FanGraphs, however, is not as convinced. They have his early performance below average both at the plate and as a baserunner but have his value at 0.3 WAR largely based on his defensive value and ability to play center field. That translates out to roughly 1.2 WAR across a full season, which leaves him in much less lofty territory. Last season about 200 position players and 150 pitchers accumulated that much value.
Defensive value, especially for outfielders, is difficult to calculate with any level of precision in a small sample of games. Lara has played just 265 total innings in the outfield across his first season in the majors, and so his opportunities to fully show what he’s capable of have been limited. As such, Baseball Savant (using MLB’s Statcast data) estimates Lara has been worth just one run defensively. At first glance those numbers would seem to fail the eye test as surely Lara saved more than one run with these three catches alone, but Savant does seem to have spotted something of note: All of those plays required Lara to go back on the ball, but he’s given some of that value back by being slightly below average when coming in. Statcast estimates an average fielder would have caught 94% of the batted balls hit in Lara’s direction, while he has caught 96%.
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Range and Speed
Lara’s defensive skill set also plays up a bit at least in part because he has the range and speed to be a very good center fielder but the Brewers have primarily needed him in right. Garrett Mitchell’s big season has meant the Brewers haven’t had as many games to fill in Lara’s natural position, but Sal Frelick’s struggles and injury have opened up some time in the corners. Many days recently the Brewers have been playing lineups with three capable center fielders with Jackson Chourio in left, Mitchell in center and Lara in right. When or if everyone is healthy the Brewers will once again find themselves with more outfielders than available playing time, especially with Jake Bauers occasionally playing in a corner to keep his bat in the lineup.
The Brewers, of course, are no strangers to the concept of gaining defensive value by having a capable defender lower on the defensive spectrum than their full capability. Brice Turang spent most of his pre-MLB career as a shortstop before winning a Platinum Glove as a second baseman in 2014. Turang has since evolved into a much more potent offensive player, but early in his career his defense also carried much of his value.
If Lara is not going to regularly play in center field, however, then his defensive contributions might be negated by an offensive game that is less than one might expect from a corner outfielder. Lara’s numbers on the season are buoyed at least slightly by the home run he hit last week, his first in the majors, off of a position player. All eight of the projection models shown on his FanGraphs page suggest that his offensive numbers the rest of the season will be worse than what he’s done so far, some by as many as 100 points of on-base plus slugging. A player has to provide a lot of defensive value to have it outweigh below average offensive production in a corner outfield spot.
The Brewers must have significant faith in Lara’s ability to settle into a role and perform there, as they signed him to a seven-year extension this season before he had played a single game in the majors. In the short term, however, the Brewers may face a challenge finding an opportunity to maximize his skill set.
