Brewers' All-Star wins NL Player of the Week after impressive road trip

Sometimes all you need is a trip to Coors Field to get your bat going. That was the case for Milwaukee Brewers All-Star catcher William Contreras, who returns home with an NL Player of the Week award after an incredible two-series road trip to Colorado and Arizona.

Brewers fans and the rest of the baseball world were shocked when Milwaukee snuck into a three-team trade with the then-Oakland Athletics and Atlanta Braves in December of 2022 and made out like bandits. The team flipped an unproven outfield prospect in Estuary Ruiz for an All-Star catcher with five years of team control remaining. At the time, fans might not have suspected that Contreras, the younger brother of Brewers' division foe Wilson Contreras, would become a perennial Silver Slugger and team leader, but now that he has logged two impressive seasons with the Crew, expectations are through the roof.

Those expectations were tested as Contreras started the 2025 season on a cold streak, a stark contrast to his 2023 campaign, when he hit safely in his first 11 games, and his 2024 season, when he posted a .952 OPS through March and April. This season, through the first three series prior to the team's recent road trip, Contreras posted a shocking slash line of .097/.263/.097 without an extra base hit. However, everything changed when the Brewers arrived in Denver.

Contreras breaks slump in a major way en route to NL Player of the Week honor

Things changed on a dime for the Brewers catcher, who homered in each of the team's first two games against the last-place Colorado Rockies. Contreras' game-one homer was a wall-scraper, traveling just 374 feet and leaving the bat at 96.4 MPH, but his game-two home run was an impressive opposite-field bomb to right-center that eclipsed the 400-foot mark and left the bat at 102.2 MPH. Contreras kept things rolling the following day with an RBI-double down the left-field line, ultimately finishing the Rockies series with three extra-base hits and five runs batted in.

However, those three games were just the start for Contreras. He kept the hit streak alive against a trio of tough starters in Arizona: Eduardo Rodriguez, Corbin Burnes, and Zac Gallen. Bill, as Contreras is sometimes referred to, hit safely in all three games and provided the only offense in the series finale by way of a two-run homer to left field off Gallen.

Contreras' home run in Arizona, which came on a line drive with a launch angle of just 18 degrees, served as a reminder of Contreras' ongoing struggle to elevate the ball. Despite Contreras' MVP-vote-earning 2024 season, he ranked in the fifth percentile in launch angle sweet spot percentage (a metric that measures how often a player hits the ball at the optimal launch angle) according to Baseball Savant.

Regardless of launch angles and exit velocities, Contreras looks like he's back on track. All in all, he tallied five extra base hits and 10 RBIs on the six-game road trip while raising his slash line to .222/.328/.426. Contreras, who played 155 games a season ago, has played in every game but one so far this season, so expect him to be in the lineup for at least two games in the upcoming series against the Detroit Tigers.