The Brewers contract that started to look much better in 2025

The Milwaukee Brewers are one of the most deftly run franchises in professional sports, and that's reflected in the quality of the contracts up and down their payroll sheet.

The team had just three players with a salary of more than $10 million in 2025, and one of them (Jordan Montgomery) had 90% of his income paid off by the Arizona Diamondbacks. The other two players (Rhys Hoskins and Christian Yelich) entered this season with loads of questions, most injury-related, about how they would live up to the status as the team's highest-paid players. One of them came with answers.

It's safe to say it wasn't Hoskins. Despite a strong first half, the veteran first baseman was effectively replaced on the roster by Andrew Vaughn following a thumb injury.

Instead, it was Yelich who turned doom-and-gloom narratives upside down this year, and with three years and $78 million remaining on his contract, the 33-year-old designated hitter has a chance to make good on the final years of his mega-deal.

Christian Yelich's 2025 production proves his contract isn't dead in the water

Ignoring his significant postseason struggles for a moment, let's just review what Yelich did during the regular season as the Brewers marched to a league-best 97 wins.

The veteran lefty hit .264/.343/.452 with 29 home runs, 103 RBIs, and 16 stolen bases, good for a 121 wRC+ that ranked second on the team. That was enough to earn him a spot as a finalist for the National League's Silver Slugger Award at DH, and it was arguably his best full-season performance since 2019.

Did that production "earn" him his contract in 2025? To figure that out, we'll use WAR as a simple way to assess how much Yelich was worth. While WAR isn't a perfect stat by any means, it does give us an easy way to analyze relative value.

Yelich's 2025 campaign earned him 3.1 bWAR (Baseball Reference) and 2.4 fWAR (FanGraphs). He gets dinged by FanGraphs' model because of his lack of defensive impact and elevated strikeout rate, but either way, it's reasonable to say that Yelich was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of three wins for the Crew this year.

Most studies have concluded that MLB teams tend to pay about $8 or $9 million per 1.0 WAR on the open market. If we apply that to Yelich, it's safe to assume he was worth (in the vicinity of) $24-27 million in 2025.

And, what do you know, his $26 million salary (and $23.88 million AAV) falls right in that bracket. Again, this isn't a holistic analysis, but considering where things stood after his back surgery last year, that the Brewers are effectively breaking even in terms of WAR value on Yelich is a huge win for the franchise.

Considering that he was worth 3.0 fWAR in just 73 games last year, perhaps there's even a path to Yelich providing Milwaukee with a surplus of value in the final years of his contract. Talk about shifting the narrative.