Surprise Brewers star Sal Frelick is finding success in spite of new-age metrics

The book on Sal Frelick is well-known at this point.

He's an excellent baserunner, as shown by his 18 steals, 28.8 mph top-end sprint speed, and his 92nd-percentile baserunning value, per Baseball Savant.

Frelick is also an excellent defender, and just in case his Gold Glove from 2024 doesn't do him justice, his five Outs Above Average and six Defensive Runs Saved rank among the best figures of any outfielder this year.

On top of that, he's one of the best contact hitters in the sport, one who never whiffs (12.6% whiff rate, 97th percentile), rarely strikes out (13.0% strikeout rate, 92nd percentile), and ranks first on the Brewers in batting average (.299).

And yet, despite all of those overwhelming positives, Frelick has never graded out as an above-average hitter, and WAR has always treated him as a middling regular rather than a budding star.

Until this year, that is.

Sal Frelick has figured out how to make his profile work at the MLB level

Frelick is sort of the quintessential Brewers player, in that he does all of the little things really well but doesn't do any of the flashy things well enough to garner national attention.

Currently, Frelick ranks fourth on the team in wOBA (.344), fourth in wRC+ (122), and first in fWAR (3.3). It's kind of funny to think that the best player (by WAR) on the best team in baseball is someone most fans outside of the NL Central have never heard of, but like I said, that's pretty much par for the course with this Brewers team.

What's really fun is that Frelick is getting even hotter as the summer moves along, rocking a 169 wRC+ and .935 OPS in August. His walk rate is also three percent higher than his strikeout rate this month; suffice it to say, he's on fire.

Now, the reason Frelick has never been seen as anything more than a quality fourth outfielder is because his batted ball metrics remain abysmal. His xWOBA is 33 points lower than his actual wOBA, he almost never barrels the ball or hits it hard, and his 68.5 mph bat speed is slower than that of 35-year-old Jose Altuve.

That's the profile of a guy who's lucky to have nine home runs and a slugging percentage above .400, but Frelick has learned how to make it work against MLB pitchers. He's dropped his ground ball rate by more than six percent from his rookie year, and he pulls the ball in the air 18.1% of the time. That's a good recipe to do damage, even if you aren't going to swing that hard.

In fact, do you know who else swings a really slow bat? All of the best contact hitters in the sport. Jacob Wilson, Luis Arraez, and Steven Kwan are the three slowest swingers in MLB this year, and no one's questioning their ability to hit a baseball. "Bat control" is rarely viewed as an elite skill among hitters, and yet guys like Frelick and Wilson are proving that you can thrive with smart swing decisions and a level bat path.

It's unlikely that Frelick will ever be viewed in the same light as guys like Jackson Chourio or William Contreras, but he doesn't need to be. The Brewers succeed by playing their own brand of baseball, and no one personifies that more than Frelick.