Each profitable skilled athlete has to have a powerful drive for self-improvement. You begin every morning with the objective of being a bit of bit higher than you had been yesterday; I’m positive I’ve seen phrases to that impact on a ballplayer’s t-shirt or social media bio someplace.
Brice Turang can do you one higher: He will get quite a bit higher yearly. As a 23-year-old rookie, he hit .218/.285/.300, which isn’t the sort of line that ordinarily will get a man 448 plate appearances’ price of taking part in time. Fortuitously for Turang, the Brewers (for all their different successes) have been fairly terrible at home-brewing hitters over the previous decade, and Turang entered 2024 as their beginning second baseman.
That spring, Milwaukee supervisor Pat Murphy proclaimed that Turang was about to “make a quantum leap” on the plate. Huge speak about a participant who’d been such a poor hitter as a rookie, however by the tip of April, I used to be satisfied that Murphy had been proper all alongside. That model of Turang was nonetheless a slap hitter (seven residence runs in 619 plate appearances, and a .095 ISO), however a greater one. He additionally performed terrific protection at second base and stole 50 baggage; do these issues and also you is usually a good participant even when you hit .254 with no energy.
Even that sort of year-on-year leap is mighty spectacular, and had Turang let it relaxation there, he would’ve been an above-average second baseman and one of many Brewers’ higher place gamers. However everyone knows what occurred in 2025; he unlocked a brand new register of bat pace (as detailed by Esteban Rivera right here) and reworked himself from an excessive groundball hitter to an everyday groundball hitter. Final 12 months, Turang hit 18 residence runs, greater than doubling his earlier profession whole, and raised his batting common to a career-high .288.
That Turang was a 4.4-WAR participant; by that metric, he was one of the best participant on the group with one of the best document within the majors. When the time got here to decide on the World Baseball Basic groups, Turang was an uncontroversial decide to be Workforce USA’s beginning second baseman. Certainly one other quantum leap, to make use of Murphy’s phrasing, can be an excessive amount of to ask for.
Maybe not. By 20 video games, Turang is hitting .307/.430/.560 with 4 residence runs. (Within the curiosity of not having to remake a bunch of graphs, all stats from this level on are present as of Tuesday morning.) Now, it’s early. We used to say you can’t belief stats till Mike Trout is main the league in WAR; now, it’s extra like you’ll be able to’t belief stats if it’s so early within the season Trout hasn’t gotten harm but. Nonetheless, Turang is swinging the bat in a different way than he did final 12 months.
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Bat pace has by no means been a giant a part of Turang’s recreation; even final 12 months, he was within the twenty fifth percentile for bat pace. And in 2026, his common bat pace is just up 4 tenths of a mile per hour; evaluate that to a leap of 4.4 mph from 2024 to 2025. His fast-swing fee is definitely down barely from 2025.
Esteban, in his put up a 12 months in the past, went over what modified from 2024 to 2025; Turang introduced his palms up and his toes nearer collectively. This 12 months, he has gone barely additional in that route, and it’s had two main impacts. First, he isn’t making tougher contact on the excessive, however he’s making arduous contact extra persistently. That’s a little bit of an odd sentence to observe, so I’ll offer you a graph of his swing speeds, from Baseball Savant.
So Turang’s common swing pace is about the identical, and he’s misplaced just a few of the super-fast swings on the fitting facet of the graph, however he’s additionally misplaced some slower swings. He’s not accessing off-the-charts top-end energy (Turang is 93rd out of 179 certified hitters in most exit velo and sixty fourth in EV90), however he’s making extra arduous contact than Aaron Choose, Shohei Ohtani, and Kyle Schwarber. Actually; Turang has a 58.8% hard-hit fee; none of these aforementioned three is over 54.3%.
The second factor Turang is doing has to don’t with bat pace however assault angle. In 2024, once I thought he had become a wonderfully acceptable hitter, given his different items, 25.9% of Turang’s swings had what Baseball Savant considers to be a really perfect assault angle: between 5 and 20 levels.
This 12 months, that quantity is as much as 51.7%. In 2024, Turang hit 2.01 groundballs for each fly ball; this 12 months, that’s right down to 1.11. Extra balls within the air means extra extra-base hits, as you all nicely know.
However the factor that’s actually cooking my noodle isn’t what occurs when Turang swings. It’s how rare these swings have develop into.
Turang has all the time been pretty selective and had good management of the strike zone. Again in his Punch-and-Judy days, when his greatest likelihood for reaching base was to stay his bat on the market and hope the ball bumped into it, his chase fee was solely about common. Final 12 months, he was in one of the best quartile of all hitters.
This 12 months, his general swing proportion is simply 36.0%, and his chase fee is a minuscule 16.8%. Each figures are within the backside 10 within the league. Trout, Evan Carter, and Chase Meidroth are all increasing the zone greater than Turang is.
A few of that is because of Turang’s being pitched in a different way. A 12 months in the past, the scouting report on him was he swings like a pinball paddle; groove a fastball or dangle a slider, and the worst factor that he’ll do is hit a single. Clearly, pitchers turned extra cautious as he confirmed he may put errors within the seats. Turang noticed 53.4% pitches within the zone in 2024 and 52.7% in 2025; that’s down to simply 46.9% this 12 months.
And as pitchers work tougher to keep away from the wrath of Turang’s bat, he’s not chasing. He’s already drawn 17 walks in 88 plate appearances this 12 months; as a rookie, he drew 38 walks in 448 plate appearances.
Two years in the past, this man had made a quantum leap to develop into a barely below-average hitter, which I thought-about on the time to be a developmental feat that turned him from a Quad-A man to a first-division starter, given his all-around contributions. Now, Turang seems like a .300/.400/.500 man, with 30-homer energy.
My first inclination with any story like this, so early within the 12 months, is to name it a small-sample fluke. And I do count on a few of this to settle down; if Turang remains to be operating a 180 wRC+ and a stroll fee close to 20% in August, I’ll examine again in with you then. Probably in a column touting him for NL MVP.
However there’s no purple flag in his peripherals. Turang is operating a .370 BABIP, which is excessive for many hitters, however not for somebody who posted a .356 mark final season. You’ll be able to see the adjustments in his swing and plate self-discipline numbers. Turang’s xSLG and xwOBA match his real-world stats virtually precisely. April or not, this seems legit.
I’m, to be clear, astounded. Gobsmacked. Flabbergasted. Most hitters don’t make a single step change of their whole careers. Turang has now achieved it three seasons in a row.