The Top 10 Brewers Players Right Now: #10 Hunter Renfroe

The Milwaukee Brewers have made the playoffs four straight seasons and look to make it a fifth in 2022. They’ve had so much success because of the strength of their roster from top to bottom.

Brewers president of baseball operations David Stearns prides his rosters on their depth, and that does help as the Brewers go through their season. But even with all that depth, you need high quality players at the top of the roster to get where you want to go.

As we head into the 2022 season, which players make up the “top” of this roster? Here at Reviewing the Brew over the next few weeks we will rank the top 10 Brewers players right now one by one.

Top 10 Brewers Right Now: #10 OF Hunter Renfroe

The newest Brewer snuck onto the roster right before the lockout and he sneaks onto the list of Top 10 Brewers, coming in at number 10.

Hunter Renfroe spent all of last season with the Boston Red Sox, hitting .259 with 31 homers and a 112 OPS+. He is now slated to be the everyday right fielder for the Brewers in 2022, taking the place of Avisail Garcia who departed in free agency for the Miami Marlins.

Renfroe has a cannon for an arm in right field, and he had 16 outfield assists last season. He’ll certainly be a defensive upgrade over Garcia out there.

Offensively, Renfroe has been a little up and down over his career. He had a very strong season in 2021, but a down year in 2020 with Tampa Bay. He put up big power numbers in 2019 with 33 homers, but his batting average and on-base numbers were down.

Renfroe is an immensely talented player, and it’ll be exciting to see him in a Brewers uniform. He’s slated to earn over $7MM this season in his second year of arbitration, but we won’t know for sure until the lockout is over and teams can either take players to arbitration or agree to salaries with them. He’s under contract for 2023 as well.

Renfroe will fill the role of the right-handed power bat in the Brewers lineup that they desperately need, especially after Garcia’s departure. Outside of Renfroe, the top “power bats” that are right handed the Brewers have are Willy Adames and Luis Urias, but more on them later in our Top 10 Brewers Right Now series.

Putting Renfroe in a hitter friendly ballpark like American Family Field should only help his numbers. Last year, he struck out at a 22% clip, which, for a power hitter, isn’t that bad. He hits the ball hard and went up the middle 51.5% of the time last season.

Right now, Renfroe looks like he’s going to be the cleanup hitter in the Brewers lineup in 2022, hitting behind and protecting Christian Yelich. Having a good protector behind Yelich will help him get more pitches to hit.

We’ll continue with the No. 9 player on our Top 10 Brewers right now series next. Who do you think it’ll be?