MILWAUKEE -- Denting the scoreboard with a monster home run one night, serving a big, two-out base hit to the opposite field the next.
The youngest player in Major League Baseball is developing right before our eyes.
Brewers left fielder Jackson Chourio continued to surge toward the finish of a sensational rookie season by delivering the fifth-inning single that not only scored the first run of Milwaukee’s 5-3 win over the Giants at American Family Field on Wednesday, but also opened the door to a five-run inning.
“That was a big hit for us, and he’s got to remember that it’s an opposite-field ground ball -- not every hit is going to be [449],” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said.
Then he added, “Although, we’ll take those.”
It was William Contreras this time who delivered the long homer, a Statcast-projected 435-foot two-run shot to cap a rally that made a winner of Brewers starter Freddy Peralta after the right-hander struck out eight and allowed two hits in six scoreless innings.
You can count Contreras and Peralta among the teammates who helped Chourio navigate a difficult second half of April and a terrible month of May, as the rookie has emerged since then as one of the most consistently productive hitters in baseball. From June 2 -- a two-hit, three-RBI game against the White Sox -- going into Wednesday, Chourio’s .886 OPS ranked 17th of 133 qualifying hitters in MLB. And his 6.09 plate appearances per strikeout was 32nd-best.
Chourio said he was “grateful” for the opportunity to contribute in any way at all, saying, “In that moment, I’m just looking to make good contact. There’s a chance to change the game there.”
There’s plenty of room to improve the consistency of his at-bats, Murphy will tell you, but Chourio has managed to change plenty of games of late.
“What’s kept him in the big leagues is his better understanding of the zone,” Murphy said earlier in the day. “He’s just developing, but his talent level was good enough to keep him in the big leagues in this particular year on this particular team.
“Then you see flashes of what you saw [Tuesday].”
On Tuesday, Chourio powered the Brewers’ longest home run of the season, a monster that sailed a Statcast-projected 449 feet and took out an LED panel on the team’s gigantic new scoreboard. By batting practice on Wednesday, that panel had been replaced, and a digital marker of Chourio’s clout was added in the form of a baseball with his No. 11.
“That was very fun. I don’t think I was expecting that kind of gesture,” Chourio said. “It’s beautiful.”
And for his teammates?
“He believes that he is great. You can tell,” Peralta said. “I laugh all the time because when he does that kind of stuff, he comes back to me [and says], ‘You see how good I am?’ I don’t even know the answer to give, I just smile about it. He is believing that, and that is very important to us.
“I have to take that for me, too. Sometimes you have to let yourself know that you are good, that you deserve to be here.”
Chourio needed every bit of confidence he could muster against Giants starter Kyle Harrison, who’d employed a combination of slurves at the bottom of the zone and fastballs at the top to hold the Brewers scoreless for the first four innings. In the fifth, Andruw Monasterio and Sal Frelick each worked walks -- the latter coming with two outs -- to keep the inning alive for Chourio, who’d grounded out on a slurve in his previous at-bat.
Harrison went to that pitch again on a 1-1 offering, but left it in the middle of the zone. Chourio waited back, then punched a single the other way that found the hole between first and second base for a 1-0 Brewers lead. When Blake Perkins followed with a two-run double and Contreras crushed a two-run homer, Harrison’s shutout bid was long gone and the Brewers were on their way to a victory behind Peralta, who has held opponents to one earned run on nine hits over 17 innings in his past three starts.
“I told you guys before, I knew at some point I was going to feel good and everything was going to work again,” Peralta said. “I’m working hard. Just keep it that way until the end of the regular season, and then after that, it’s different baseball.”