Too young for the brew, Chourio still comes of age
Milwaukee's 20-year-old hasn't missed a beat in the Wild Card series.
They gave him an $82 million, 8-year contract before he ever stepped into a major league batter’s box. Then they spent all of spring training warning everyone to be patient with Jackson Chourio.
Now it’s October, and Chourio, 20, is finishing his rookie season. Three things are apparent. He has a chance to be a Most Valuable Player someday. He has a better chance to be the most underpaid player in baseball. And “paciencia” is the last thing he needed.
On Wednesday Chourio hit two home runs in Game 2 of the Wild Card series for Milwaukee against the Mets. The second one, in the eighth inning, tied the game, and Garrett Mitchell followed it with a game-winning home run. That set up a deciding Game 3 on Thursday.
Houston and Baltimore had already been swept at home, and you could already hear the questions: Did the Brewers have everything too easy in their regular-season job to the N.L. Central title? Is mojo the only determining factor when you let 12 teams into your playoffs? All of that is to be determined, and we also don’t know if the teams who earned byes — Philadelphia, Cleveland, the Yankees and the Dodgers — have mastered the unnatural art of sitting around for a week and then recovering their precision. Having Chourio means that Milwaukee has one fewer problem, and its opponents have one more.
When the Brewers clinched the N.L. Central, they recognized that champagne was an illegal substance for Chourio. So they packed some non-alcoholic bubbly and beer, added a few Chourio bobbleheads, and put them all in a stroller for the kid who had started the pennant-clinching rally with a ninth-inning triple.
Chourio hit .275 this season, 19th-best in the National League, with 21 home runs and 79 RBI, with a .791 OPS. If there was a Rookie Wall, Chourio either didn’t recognize it or jumped over it. He had a .926 OPS in August, .831 in September, and for the season he was a .307 hitter with men in scoring position. He also played 147 games, 145 of them in either left or right field and never made an error.
In doing so, Chourio softened the impact of Christian Yelich’s season-ending injury, one of many traumas that should have derailed the Brewers. Their strength was the 1-2 pitching punch of Brandon Woodruff and Corbin Burnes, yet they traded Burnes to Baltimore and got nary a pitch from Woodruff. Devin Williams, the former Rookie of the Year and the Brewers’ closer, worked only 22 games. The Brewers still had the highest save percentage in the league (74 percent), and they rummaged around and found a viable starting rotation and, in fact, chalked up the league’s second-best ERA.
Chourio grew up in Maracaibo, Venezuela and became a fan of Aguilas de Zulia, the local team. He played for them as a teenager, as did his brother Jaiden, who is the top prospect in the Cleveland organization. Jackson’s representative, Cesar Suarez, had played in Venezuela with Luis Perez and Fernando Veracierto of the Brewers’ scouting staff. That provided a head start, and when they saw Chourio slamming opposite-field drives in a tryout, they campaigned for him and eventually saw him sign for a $1.8 million bonus.
In 2022 Chourio played in three different minor league classifications and was the youngest player in every one, winning MVP honors in the Carolina League. In 2023 he hit 22 home runs for Double-A Biloxi and became the first player since 2005 to get 20 home runs and 40 steals in a Double-A season. He also set the Biloxi franchise record with 89 RBI.
“He was doing things like that when he could have been at Whitefish Bay High School,” said Brewers’ general manager Matt Arnold.
In this series Chourio is 4-for-8 against the Mets. The Brewers also played the Mets in the final regular-season series, and Chourio was 4-for-13.
Chourio’s contract seemed stunning, but it might be stunningly club-friendly. After it expires at the end of the 2031 season, the Brewers have two years of club options that would pay Chourio $25 million a year. That’s still ten million fewer bucks than Corey Seager of the Rangers earns per annum. So there’s a chance Chourio will be severely underpaid, relative to his contributions, until he takes on real free agency when he is 30.
A two-out-of-three baseball series is cruel, and essentially unfair, because teams don’t reveal their pitching motherlode until they’ve played four or five games. The Astros, for instance, didn’t get to the point where they could use lefty starter Yusei Kikuchi, who was 5-1 with a 0.933 WHIP after Houston got him from Toronto. But that’s what happens when you stretch out the playoffs in a sport that isn’t designed for wintertime play. Now the Brewers and Mets play a survivor game with everyone else in baseball watching. It’s win or walk. Fortunately for Milwaukee, Chourio never had the time to learn patience.
Meanwhile, the Amazing Tigers — yes, it’s their official nickname now — are in the Division Series against division rival Cleveland, and just because you didn’t know any of their names until this week doesn’t mean they’re underdogs. Again, we see how September heat finds its way into October. The Tigers and Royals had to grind their way into the playoffs, while the Astros and Orioles were basically marching in place. For the second consecutive year Baltimore went 0-for-2 in home wild-card games, which means the thrill of Oriole renaissance is over.
Of course, the Astros might have won Game 1 if Jason Heyward’s sizzler had gotten past first baseman Spencer Torkelson instead of becoming the 27th out. But they didn’t, and in Game 2 they got five hits against seven relievers. Perhaps the biggest pitch of the series came from Sean Guenther, the lefty from Notre Dame who was summoned in the seventh. Houston had scored twice after loading the bases with no out, and the formidable Kyle Tucker was hitting. Guenther threw one of his many sinkers on 0-and-1, and Tucker hit into a double play. That kept Detroit within 2-1.
In its eighth, Detroit moved ahead 5-2 when pinch-hitter Andy Ibanez slammed a 3-run double off Josh Hader, the moneyed Houston closer who, last year, informed the Padres that he would only be available to pitch one inning. He couldn’t get through this one, and now he’s done and two of his former clubs, Milwaukee and San Diego, are still playing.
Guenther is 28, came up with the Marlins, had Tommy John surgery, was waived and picked up by the Tigers, and hadn’t pitched in the big leagues since 2021. Then he came up in August, gave Detroit 21 innings, and gave up nine hits down the stretch.
In Baltimore, the Orioles walked four times in two games, struck out 22 times and hit .167. Bobby Witt got the game-winning hit in both games for Kansas City, which, like Detroit, strutted out its bullpen, a persistent question mark during the Royals’ breakthrough season.
Lucas Erceg got the save in both KC wins. He has 11 saves and an 0.840 ERA since the Royals got him from Oakland, where he had been setting up Miller. His dad grew up in Croatia during wartime, and Erceg became an All-Pac 12 third baseman at Cal before he got behind academically because of too many happy hours, and had to finish up at Menlo College. The Brewers drafted him anyway, and as Erceg struggled to hit, they suggested he try pitching, which he had done sporadically at Berkeley. That’s what Erceg wanted to hear, and he was in the majors three years later.
There was a retro feel to the first round, at least offensively. The first eight games brought only 10 home runs, six by San Diego and Milwaukee, one by Detroit, none by Kansas City. The Tigers’ three-run rally in the second inning of Game 1 was a tutorial in RBI singles up the middle, and it frustrated Houston starter Framber Valdez.
And Francisco Lindor of the Mets, whose home run won Game 1 of Monday’s doubleheader in Atlanta, kept showing his mastery of both sides of the ball in Milwaukee. It almost made people lean over and whisper, “Are you sure Shohei Ohtani is the MVP?” although no one would dare say that out loud.