PITTSBURGH – Attention, Major League Baseball: Christian Yelich’s schedule is free in a couple of weeks.
“I’ve been trying to figure it out,” Yelich said earlier this week in New York. “I haven’t really planned anything yet.”
Perhaps the Pacific Northwest will be the destination.
A resurgent summer from Yelich has thrust the Milwaukee Brewers outfielder firmly into the picture for a nod in the upcoming All-Star Game, held in Seattle on July 11.
Yelich is batting .272 with a .367 on-base percentage and a .796 OPS this season thanks to the tear he’s been on since the calendar flipped to May.
Those may not be the MVP numbers Yelich put up at the onset of his Brewers tenure, of course, but he’s sixth among National League outfielders in Wins Above Replacement with 2.4 and his OPS+ indicates he’s been 20% better at the plate than league average this year.
It will be seen Sunday if he hears his name called among the reserves on the NL’s All-Star Game roster.
Yelich said he has no idea where he stands in terms of likelihood to be named, but in a candid interview with the Journal Sentinel earlier in the week at Citi Field he acknowledged how big of a deal it would be when he considers how difficult the last couple of seasons have been since he signed the largest contract in franchise history after winning the NL MVP award in 2018 and finishing as runner-up for the same award in 2019.
“It’d be pretty cool,” Yelich said. “I think it would be different than the other times. More special in a way. For me, I think it would be pretty cool, just knowing what transpired in between (appearances). We’ll see what happens.
“If it happens, great. If not, great. I’ll just keep trying to help these guys win every day, help out our young players, keep grinding.”
After lots of deliberation, Yelich finally made the call to alter his swing. It’s paying off.
As Yelich reflected on his year to date, he referred to making more conscious changes to his swing than the past couple of years when he slashed a combined .251/.358/.379.
“Just some little things that I wanted to do and thought that I needed to do really helped me,” Yelich said. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Kind of just tinkering a little bit now.
“What I had been doing wasn’t working. I don’t think it’s where I want it to be yet, but it’s kind of a work in progress. It’s not really reinventing yourself, but kind of just going about it in a little bit different way, if that makes sense.”
Yelich expounded.
At the end of April, he was batting .223 with a .656 OPS and only six extra-base hits. He was still making hard contact, but the power was absent.
So he reached a decision point.
“Basically I went, ‘Alright, just because this is how I’ve always done it doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it,'” Yelich said. “I was kind of just like (expletive) it.'”
So, at the outset of the Brewers’ road trip to Colorado and San Francisco at the beginning of May, Yelich instituted a change.
He went back to a toe tap at the plate – similar to what he did to kick off the second half last year, just less pronounced this time around – and eschewed the leg kick he had used almost his entire career.
The change is easy to pick out in these two videos of him. The first is from April 28; the second is from May 4.
There is some apparent discomfort in the early at-bats with the new load, but Yelich also expected that.
After all, his whole life, he’s been using a different swing.
“You have to adjust a little bit and figure out how to use it,” Yelich said. “When something like that is foreign to you, it’s not going to come right away. You need to take a few weeks, months – you don’t really know. You kind of have to learn on the fly because I’ve never really had it before.”
Yelich believes he can still be a ‘great player’
The last couple of seasons, Yelich said he got away from his ‘A’ swing. Sure, there were flashes where he would find it, like when he blasted a 499-foot home run in Colorado last year, but those moments came and went.
Yelich disclosed that he got into ‘bad habits’ at the plate throughout 2020 and 2021, particularly with his pre-swing movement. He just didn’t feel right, felt fluid most of the time.
“For me, I wasn’t able to load the same way the last few years,” Yelich said. “I had a bunch of bad habits that I knew about and I couldn’t really stop. And that’s frustrating.”
Did those habits stem from his back problems that caused him to miss significant time in 2021?
“Maybe,” Yelich admitted candidly. “That’s kind of when it was all starting to go haywire on me. I got into bad habits because of that, and then once I got healthy from that, I couldn’t get out of that.
“You don’t want to make an excuse, but you learned a bad habit and you couldn’t get out of it. That happened. I knew I could still play really well. Just have to figure out how to get back to it. And in the big leagues you either adjust or die. Really, that’s what it is.”
Frustrated by the last three-plus years, Yelich finally decided it was time to make a change.
“And so I said, ‘You can either be a good player or you can’t,'” Yelich said. “You can’t fool anybody in this league.”
Yelich isn’t someone who leads on outwardly about his frustrations. He doesn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve, whether going good or bad at the plate. You’re most likely to see him with a bag of Rold Gold pretzels, casual and calm in demeanor, at his locker after a three-strikeout night.
But don’t mistake that for him not caring.
In reality, the past couple of seasons seem to have taken a mental toll on Yelich at times.
That’s because he cares deeply.
Yelich understands the importance of the role his production plays in the Brewers offense and the gravitas that comes with not performing up to the standards of his contract.
For as much as everyone involved with the Brewers, from front office personnel to fans, have wished for Yelich to unlock some version of the player who would have won back to back MVP awards had it not been for a freak injury in September 2019, nobody has wanted it more than Yelich himself.
“I they knew I could be a really great player if I could just do certain things,” Yelich said.
Yelich is doing some of those things right now. He’s become the team’s best player because of it once again – and maybe even an all-star.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Christian Yelich opens up on what’s fueled a return to all-star play