Brewers' Jackson Chourio vaults into the fun, flashy NL Rookie of the Year field: Sliders (2024)

Baseball gives us snapshots like this, one-on-one matchups within a team game, the chance for the shimmering future to stare down the proud past. So it was in Milwaukee on Monday when Jackson Chourio, the Brewers’ rookie outfield phenom, faced Clayton Kershaw, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitching icon.

Chourio, 20, was four years old when Kershaw made his debut, also at age 20, in 2008. It was exciting to face him, Chourio said later, because Kershaw is his father’s favorite pitcher. He flied out and grounded out in his first two at-bats, then ran the count full in his third. The next pitch was shoulder-high, easily ball four, but Chourio could not resist.

He reached up and swung hard, as if knocking a beehive out of a tree, and smashed the ball off the right-field fence. Chourio hit it so hard that he stopped at first base, right where he’d be if he’d taken the pitch. But the Brewers could not complain.

“To be able to get to that pitch and drive it, it kind of encapsulates what he’s about,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “To me, that’s that young talent. You can’t teach that kind of stuff.”

For that moment to be historically memorable – think of a 20-year-old Miguel Cabrera against a grizzled Roger Clemens, or a 20-year-old Jim Kaat facing the vaunted Ted Williams – Chourio needs another decade or so like his last two months. He’s vaulted himself into the fun, flashy field of National League Rookie of the Year contenders while helping keep the Brewers atop the NL Central.

He's a walking history book pic.twitter.com/6ZJOcA1rDb

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) August 15, 2024

Through June 1, Chourio was hitting .207/.251/.323. In 57 games since then, through Thursday, he has a .907 OPS while hitting .327, second only to Arizona’s Ketel Marte in the NL. The big leagues, Chourio said, have brought no surprises.

“To be completely honest with you, it’s kind of what I was expecting it to be,” he said through an interpreter, Brewers assistant coach Daniel de Mondesert. “I know it’s the highest level and it’s a difficult level to play at, so I knew I was going to have to make adjustments when I was here. And that’s how it’s been.”

The All-Star Game featured three other top NL rookies — the Chicago Cubs’ Shota Imanaga, the San Diego Padres’ Jackson Merrill and the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Paul Skenes — but not Chourio. He has continued his surge since then, giving the Brewers a high-impact hitter at a time when Christian Yelich, their former MVP, will miss the rest of the season due to back surgery.

“He’s going to be a superstar,” Brewers shortstop Willy Adames said. “There’s no doubt about that.”

The Brewers underwrote that belief in December with Chourio’s eight-year, $82 million contract, a record for a player with no big-league experience. The contract, Murphy conceded, carried its own kind of pressure for him — to keep Chourio on the roster, and stick with him through slumps.

But Chourio’s demeanor would be as important as his talent.

“All these kids that are the No. 1 prospects, they always have the talent to be in the big leagues,” Adames said. “But the way that they handle themselves, on and off the field, is gonna determine what they’re gonna be in the big leagues, if they’re gonna be a superstar or not. I saw the talent in spring training, and I was just waiting to see how he reacted when he was struggling the way that he did the first two months.”

Murphy said Chourio never stopped smiling, even when he dropped him in the order, benched him or pinch-hit for him. Ozzie Timmons, a Brewers hitting coach, said Chourio was uncommonly self-assured — “I’ll ask him, ‘Are you ready to go?’ because sometimes he looks like he’s not even here, and he goes, ‘Look at me, I’m always ready!’” — but positive reinforcement helped, too.

“We just remind him that he’s really good, that ‘you can do this,’” Timmons said. “They always say it’s hard to put speed into a slump, and the kid can run, right? So (we don’t) overwhelm him and just try to simplify, because he has a really simple swing anyway — not a big stride, not a lot of big movement.

“Sometimes he tends to leak out when guys are pitching him in, so we just talk to him about keeping his hip in there and not trying to do too much and taking what they give you. And the beauty of Jackson is he can go opposite-field with the best of them, and when he stays with that and trusts himself, it’s easy for him to get out of slumps. And that’s the thing he’s been doing lately is using the whole field, because that was his biggest strength coming up, and plus he has a really good eye at the plate, so that always helps.”

The Brewers have not lost four games in a row all season, but they’d lost their last three before Wednesday. With the game tied in the seventh inning, the Dodgers brought in one of their best relievers, Evan Phillips, to face Chourio with a runner on second. He fell behind, 0-2, fouled a fastball, then got a hanging sweeper and popped it foul, wincing at the missed opportunity.

Two pitches later, though, Chourio reached for a better sweeper — a pitcher’s pitch, down and away at the corner of the zone — and flared it off the end of his bat to right field for a single. Mookie Betts misplayed it, bringing in the go-ahead run in a 5-4 Brewers win.

“Since spring training, that was one of the conversations we had: Just take great at-bats,” Adames said. “We have a lot of speed guys, and we want them to get on base and create chaos. They’ve been doing that the whole year, and I think that’s been helping us to score a lot of runs and help our pitchers be more comfortable.”

The Brewers won the Central last year while scoring 4.49 runs per game, ranking eighth of the 15 NL teams. This season, through Wednesday, they ranked fourth in runs per game (4.83) with a .332 on-base percentage that was just one percentage point behind the leading Arizona Diamondbacks.

Chourio’s sluggish start holds back his overall stats: .274/.320/.441, with 15 homers and 16 stolen bases. But his standout summer — and the superior skill producing it — gives Milwaukee a cornerstone.

“With that bat in his hand, those hands work, and it’s a beautiful thing,” Murphy said. “Short, quick, powerful. Like the great ones. He’s 20, he’s got a ways to go. But he’s on his way, and he loves it.”

From “Ground Chuck” to 2,000 K’s

Charlie Morton’s milestone

Charlie Morton’s career is a testament to reinvention. Morton, the Atlanta Braves’ stalwart right-hander, reached 2,000 strikeouts on Tuesday in San Francisco. Of the 88 other pitchers to do it, few could have taken a more unusual path.

“I’m really grateful that I’ve gotten to experience a lot of what I have,” Morton said, as David O’Brien reported in The Athletic, “considering the fact that I wasn’t sure that I was even going to be given the ball to start anywhere after 2015.”

In eight seasons to that point, including seven with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Morton had collected only 611 strikeouts. His nickname was “Ground Chuck” because his primary pitch, the sinking fastball, was meant to induce ground balls. The Philadelphia Phillies signed him for 2016, but Morton badly tore his left hamstring while running to first base that April and made only four starts.

His renaissance began the next season with the Houston Astros, who saw him as a possible avatar of the North-South pitching style just coming into vogue. With high four-seam fastballs and sharp-breaking curveballs, Morton transformed himself for an unlikely journey to 2,000.

How unlikely? Morton ranks 10th in strikeouts among pitchers in their age 33 to 40 seasons. Everyone above him on that list is in the 3,000-strikeout club except Dazzy Vance, a late bloomer who won seven strikeout titles and wound up in the Hall of Fame.

Morton won’t get a plaque in Cooperstown, but he deserves to be celebrated for one of the all-time turnarounds in pitching history.

The Sunday Stragglers

Which teams have gone the longest since hosting “Sunday Night Baseball”?

When ESPN visited Seattle for last Sunday’s Mets-Mariners game, it marked the first “Sunday Night Baseball” telecast from the Mariners’ ballpark since 2004. And while it seems like the broadcast all but resides at Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium, 20 teams have actually hosted at least one “Sunday Night Baseball” game in the last five seasons.

That leaves 10 cities still waiting for their turn in the Sunday spotlight in the 2020s. With Seattle off the list, here’s the updated tally of teams that have gone the longest since hosting MLB’s signature game of the week.

(*Game played at Dolphins Stadium)
Source: ESPN

Gimme Five

Five bits of ballpark wisdom

Chris Young on visiting the White House

Decades ago, United States presidents congratulated World Series champions with a phone call from the White House to the clubhouse. As you can hear from this 1984 recording, with President Ronald Reagan calmly congratulating the boisterous Detroit Tigers, there wasn’t much to it.

That changed a year later, with his second term underway, when Reagan welcomed the new champions, the Kansas City Royals, to Washington for a Rose Garden ceremony. It’s been a tradition for nearly every champion since, and the Texas Rangers got their turn last Thursday on a day off before a series in New York.

The team filed into the East Room to a classical rendition of its theme song — “Higher” by Creed. Then President Joe Biden arrived, accompanied by the Rangers’ 6-foot-10 general manager, Chris Young.

“I want to make it very clear,” Biden said. “I saw him and I immediately made friends with him.”

Biden cited a meeting Young held with his staffers last July, when he asked if they believed the sluggish team could win. The answer was yes, of course, and Young reinforced the roster to help the Rangers capture their first title.

“These players made history and forever changed the perception of our franchise,” Young said in his remarks, before manager Bruce Bochy presented Biden with a team jersey and Rangers cowboy boots.

For Young, who also won the World Series as a pitcher for the Royals in 2015, it was familiar territory. What was his major at Princeton University?

“Politics!” Young said, with a laugh. “I was right at home.”

Here are five takeaways from Young on visiting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

It’s a break from politics. “It is somewhat surreal to know that you’re shaking hands and standing with the President of the United States and being honored for an accomplishment that he’s recognizing. In both my visits, there were always political considerations that would come up — and it’s the most apolitical event you can imagine. It’s the experience. For a lot of our players, who knows if they’ll ever have (another) opportunity to set foot in the White House or meet the President of the United States? Adolis García grew up in a communist Cuba, and he’s standing in the White House meeting the President of the United States. To me, the significance of that is not lost. And this is the beauty of baseball is that it provides opportunities like that.”

The GM shares the stage. “I got to hide in the background (with the Royals). I got to meet President Obama, and he was very kind and cordial — he was great — but there wasn’t as much personal interaction as there was this visit with President Biden. It all came together very swiftly. Our owner, Ray Davis, had a commitment and he could not attend, so at that point, John Blake, our head of PR, came to me and said, ‘You’re going to kind of have to take the lead here.’ But I was very comfortable doing so. It’s easy when I get to talk about these guys and what they accomplished.”

Book it. “In Kansas City, the team put together a scrapbook, a big photo book with all the pictures from the visit. And I’d like to do the same for our group and give them all something that they’ll be able to forever remember the experience and look back on.”

Savor the masterpieces. “They opened it up and we got to go through the Green Room, the Red Room, the Blue Room and see all the art on the wall. There was a portrait of Benjamin Franklin that they said was the oldest in the White House; I think it was painted in 1767. Just to see that, this is American history. I think probably 10 times people said, ‘If these walls could talk….’ I highly recommend it. When you win the World Series and have the opportunity to go, it’s a life experience.”

Being First Fan has its privileges. “This was actually my fourth visit to the White House. When President (George W.) Bush was in office, I got to visit him in the Oval Office while I was playing with the Rangers, and another time when my wife and I got to go back for a dinner with the president. He had a baseball dinner every year where he invited, I think, eight to 10 couples to come and have dinner at the White House and talk baseball. Terry Francona was there, and Curtis Granderson, Eric Byrnes, Mike Lowell, Jimmy Rollins, Julio Franco. It was a great group; George Will kind of put it together. No politics, just talking baseball.”

Off the Grid

A historical detour from the Immaculate Grid

George Halas/Yankees, One Team Only

There were 267 possible answers last Sunday when the Grid asked for a player who appeared for only the Yankees. Several are members of the Baseball Hall of Fame: Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and so on. Only one is so synonymous with pro football that his name graces the street address of that Hall of Fame, in Canton, Ohio: George Halas.

Born four days before Babe Ruth, in 1895, Halas played in 12 games for the Yankees in 1919. Slowed by a hip injury, Halas was 2-for-22 (.091), and by 1920 the Yankees had moved on to a different right fielder: Ruth. Halas also moved on, to a job with the A.E. Staley Company in Decatur, Ill., an association that led him to become one of the founders of professional football — and the Chicago Bears franchise, which still wears Halas’ initials on its uniform.

Halas had hits in his first two games with the Yankees, in Philadelphia, and then faced Walter Johnson, probably the greatest pitcher of all-time, in his first game in New York. Halas nearly homered twice, but both balls went foul. He went 0-for-5 off Johnson and never had another major league hit.

That game, on May 11 against Johnson and the Washington Senators, went down as a 0-0 tie in 12 innings, technically called on account of darkness. The umpire, Bill Dineen, enforced a Sunday law that limited baseball to the hours of 2 to 6 p.m. He rejected a suggestion from Senators manager Clark Griffith, who wanted someone to wind back the clock on the center field scoreboard. (Apparently it was customary to do this in Congress when legislation ran over time.)

“A statesman may get away with that stuff,” Dineen said, according to the next day’s New York Tribune. “They get away with a lot of things in Washington these days. But there is a difference between baseball and statesmanship. Baseball is on the up and up.”

The up and up? Not so much. Five months later, several Chicago White Sox players conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series. The scandal was exposed in late September 1920, the month before Halas’ Decatur Staleys — the future Chicago Bears — started play.

Classic Clip

The San Francisco Giants’ 2025 schedule reveal

Paul Lukas, who retired this May from a 25-year run as the world’s foremost sports-fashion critic, grew up doodling team logos in the margins of his school notebooks. Some of us (ahem) still do this. Most of the San Francisco Giants, it’s safe to say, do not.

In a recent Instagram post after MLB announced the 2025 schedule, the Giants asked players to draw opponents’ logos on a whiteboard. While Hayden Birdsong (Mariners), Alex Cobb (Rangers) and Sam Hjelle (Rockies) do credible jobs, Ryan Walker wins for degree of difficulty, with a respectable rendering of the Athletics’ elephant logo.

The rest, however… well, see for yourself. Erik Miller clearly doesn’t recognize that the Brewers’ glove logo is actually an “m” stacked on a “b.” Keaton Winn mistakes the Guardians’ “G” for a “C.” And I don’t know what’s going on with Jordan Hicks’ Marlins logo.

Luke Jackson gets a tough assignment — the Swingin’ Friar — and fails pretty miserably. But give him credit for artistic interpretation.

“Italian man selling bread,” he declares. “The Padres!”

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(Top photo of Jackson Chourio: Todd Kirkland / Getty Images)