MILWAUKEE – It was 3 1/2 hours before first pitch Tuesday at American Family Field, and Brewers hitting coach Ozzie Timmons was feeding baseball after baseball into the pitching machine. 

On the other end of those fastballs was Jesse Winker, the former All-Star who is more than a year into the deepest hitting slump of his baseball life. His comeback, Winker said, has to start somewhere. He started by focusing on fastballs. 

When he connected with one during the Brewers’ come-from-behind 7-5 victory over the D-backs, it wasn’t only a weight off Winker. As he celebrated his first home run in his 140th Brewers plate appearance by spreading his arms wide to receive the home run cheesehead, teammates appeared just as elated.

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Maybe it was the beginning of the end of his funk.

“This is new for me,” Winker said hours earlier, wearing a tank top and wiping sweat from his forehead after his pregame hitting session. “It’s really the last year or year and a half that this is going on. But it’s baseball. I know nobody wants to hear that, but it is. And it’s my job to keep working, to keep grinding away at it. I’m not the last hitter who is going to go through something like this.” 

He added, “I believe in myself.”

The Brewers believed enough to acquire Winker with infielder Abraham Toro in the December trade that sent second baseman Kolten Wong to Seattle. So far, the deal hasn’t been a win for either team.

Wong went into Tuesday with a .430 OPS, nearly 300 points below his career norm. For the Brewers. Toro has spent most of the season at Triple-A Nashville and Winker went into Tuesday, his fourth game back from a stint on the injured list for a cervical strain, with a slash line of .197/.312/.222 with no home runs.

When asked whether he is healthy, Winker responds that he is “not injured.” The distinction may be notable considering that Winker’s lone season in Seattle in 2022 was ruined in large part by knee and neck issues that both required surgery at the end of the year.

The Brewers were banking that with better health, Winker could be the hitter he was with the Reds from 2017-21, when he posted an OPS of .830 or better every year, including an All-Star season in '21.

Unfortunately for Winker, the fresh start did not produce the expected results.

So he went to work on Tuesday afternoon with Timmons, focused on punishing fastballs. When D-backs starter Ryne Nelson tried to throw one by Winker at 93 mph, Winker turned it around and sent it a Statcast-projected 416 feet to center field to pull the Brewers within a run at 4-3.

“We all know what a good hitter he is, right?” said Brewers catcher William Contreras, who paired with five pitchers to hold the D-backs to one run over the final seven innings, and delivered the go-ahead hit with a two-run double in a seventh inning, highlighted by Blake Perkins’ hustle. “Sometimes you’re stuck. It's kind of a weight off his shoulder to hit that one out.”

Said Brewers manager Craig Counsell: “Everyone had a big smile and a deep breath. That’s got to feel good.” 

Snapping slumps is a tricky business. Winker said one thing that helped him was thinking about some of the small cues he’d found in past periods of non-production, even if they didn’t apply to today. It helped to merely remember that he’d emerged before. It also helped to hit the baseball over the fence a couple of times during his brief Minor League rehab assignment. 

“It’s a ‘feel’ that every hitter is trying to find,” Counsell said. “When you’re struggling, it doesn’t feel good and it doesn’t always look good. You keep going, keep competing, keep working, because you don’t know the swing or the conversation that’s going to trigger you.”

Winker hopes that this swing was his trigger. Time will tell.

Tuesday was time to celebrate the Brewers’ second come-from-behind victory in three days, after they went 30 games without erasing a multi-run deficit at any point of any game.

“I think some guys are able to mask [frustration] better,” Winker said. “I’m not one of those guys. The game has a tendency to wear on people in different ways, but it’s all part of it. Whenever I leave here I always tell myself there’s a lot of games left, a lot of at-bats. You’re always a swing away.”