Trusted projection model bearish on returning Brewers slugger in 2026

After watching Andrew Vaughn crush baseballs in a Milwaukee Brewers uniform during the second half of last season, not many fans are expecting him to revert back to the struggling player he was with the Chicago White Sox prior to his arrival in the Cream City. But if you believe the numbers instead of the vibes, that’s exactly what one of the most respected projection systems in baseball thinks might happen.

ZiPS, the trusted projection model from FanGraphs, curated by the brilliant Dan Szymborski, is surprisingly cold on Vaughn’s chances of running it back in 2026. After his breakout in Milwaukee, the computers are basically shrugging and saying, “Cool story, but we’ve seen this guy before.”

And to be fair, they kind of have.

Andrew Vaughn’s Brewers breakout meets a brutally honest ZiPS projection

Vaughn’s 2025 season was a tale of two jerseys. He started the year dragging down the White Sox lineup, then flipped the script the moment he landed in Milwaukee. With the Brewers, he turned into the version of himself scouts always dreamed of: a .308/.375/.493 hitter with 9 home runs, 46 RBI, and a 141 OPS+ in a Brewers uniform. That’s middle-of-the-order production on a team that constantly lives on razor-thin margins.

However, when you zoom back in on the entire season, the overall statistics for Vaughn look far more common: a .254 batting average, .307 on-base percentage, .411 slugging percentage with 14 home runs and 65 RBI as a member of both the White Sox and Brewers. Good, but nothing that could be called "franchise-changing." This is what ZiPS is responding to, i.e., the smaller sampling of "Brewers Vaughn" as opposed to the much larger sampling size which appears to be more akin to "a league-average first baseman who shows potential rather than consistently delivers."

ZiPS is less convinced that 2026 will be a breakout year for the Brewers, however; the system projects Vaughn’s batting average to be below .250, and sees him more like a “struggling thumper” than anything else (Vaughn has a 20 percent strikeout rate in the ZiPS projection) with some on-base problems, but still enough power to hit 20+ HRs.

For a lot of teams, that’s fine. For the Brewers, it’s a little uncomfortable.

This is a club that can’t just paper over a miss with another $150 million bat. If Andrew Vaughn settles in as merely “solid,” instead of the lineup-tilter he looked like down the stretch, Milwaukee will have to find that missing thunder somewhere else.

The good news? The Brewers have made a habit out of beating projections, breaking models, and squeezing extra value out of players who don’t wow the spreadsheets. Vaughn doesn’t have to become a superstar — he just needs to keep looking more like the guy he was in navy and gold than the one he was in black and white.

If he does, ZiPS can stay skeptical. The Brewers will gladly take the outlier.