MILWAUKEE — On top of everything he did on the field during this resurgent season, Christian Yelich was the voice of reason for the best-in-baseball Brewers. When they were 0-4, he said they would be fine. During team meetings in San Francisco in April and Cleveland in May, he reminded the room of how much season remained. When a 14-game winning streak ended in August, it was Yelich who, according to one teammate, stood and said, “F– it, let’s come back and do it again tomorrow.”
But who does the voice of perspective go to when he’s the one in need of exactly that?
Yelich singled out one name from the Brewers’ past in former infielder Jace Peterson. And one big part of the Brewers’ future, second baseman Brice Turang.
“Everybody needs that at some point,” Yelich said. “It’s such a long, hard year.”
That Yelich identified a 35-year-old whose playing career is in the rearview mirror and a 25-year-old who has a brilliant career ahead probably says something about Yelich, the thoughtful 33-year-old who struck coaches and teammates as a much more vocal leader in his 13th Major League season.
It also says something about the mental and physical marathon that is Major League Baseball, and a lesson Yelich learned long ago: To survive, you have to always keep an open mind.
“We’re locker roommates,” said Turang, pointing to Yelich’s neighboring space, “so we talk a lot about the game. Me and him are usually the last ones to leave. We’ll sit here and just talk ball, talk shop. We talk about what we can do better.
“Sometimes you figure out answers. Sometimes there is no answer to it.”
It’s been like that forever for Yelich, who broke into the league with a Marlins team populated by young, wide-eyed players just like him. It was in Milwaukee that he found himself surrounded by some veterans, even ones just two years older like Peterson, who came to the Brewers as a well-traveled Minor League free agent for the 2020 season.
That was a hard year for everyone. It was a particularly hard year for Yelich. He’d won the NL MVP Award in 2018, then finished runner-up in ‘19 — earning him a club-record-setting contract. But he was also coming off a fractured kneecap that ended his season the previous September, and surely contributed, along with the pandemic-shortened schedule, to a down year in ‘20 and pedestrian seasons in ‘21 and ‘22, at least by his standards.
“It was a very weird year with COVID and me and Yeli became very close,” said Peterson, who is back with the Brewers on the club’s “high performance team” as a sort of Chief Vibes Officer. “I think we both felt a sense of ‘realness’ and just security in somebody who doesn’t just see you as a ball player. I learned so much from Yelich, and I think we fed each other in that way.”
That happened privately. But in his visits with the club this season, Peterson has witnessed Yelich become a more vocal leader in public.
“I’m so proud of him,” Peterson said, “because it can be hard for guys who are leaders but not necessarily vocal leaders. When you start morphing into the vocal side, it can be unnatural. Some guys can’t do that. But Yelich has the unique gift to not only lead by example, but lead vocally.”
Rickie Weeks has seen the same. Weeks was regarded as a quiet leader during the latter half of his 11 seasons with the Brewers, but calls that a misconception and says he was always talking behind the clubhouse doors. Now that he’s in his second season as Milwaukee’s associate manager, he’s witnessed Yelich doing the same.
“One hundred percent, he’s been more vocal,” Weeks said. “That’s been really good for him, and it’s been great for us, too. It means so much more when it comes from a player. A coach can tell you, ‘You suck,’ and you brush it off as, ‘He’s crazy,’ or, ‘He doesn’t know.’ But when it comes from a teammate, that hits different.”
Yelich might not be quite so blunt, but you get the point. Sometimes, it takes some tough love to keep the clubhouse together.
Yelich has talked about that at length lately, that one of the reasons the Brewers have punched above their weight for so long, with seven postseason appearances in the last eight seasons since he arrived, and five division titles in that span, is that their young players are open to listening even when the message hurts.
“For lack of a better term, it’s giving a s–t,” Yelich says. “That can make up for a lot. We go to every city and people ask us, ‘What’s the secret? How have you guys done this?’ Partly it’s from giving a s–t, honestly.”
More and more, he has been sharing that perspective with the group.
Yelich, though, doesn’t view that as a dramatic development.
“For whatever reason, this year there’s been more of a focus on it, but I don’t feel like I’ve been any different than I have in the past,” he said. “It’s not forced, you know? Somebody’s got to speak up sometimes because if it’s your first time coming through, it’s more difficult than for someone that’s done it 12 times now and understands that the season’s long and there’s good moments and bad moments.
“I think this year, we did a good job of letting the bad moments bring us closer together rather than tearing everybody apart. And [stuff] was going bad at the beginning of the season.”
While he’s giving his perspective on popular narratives, here’s another: Yelich says he never felt like the weight of the contract was a factor in those uncomfortable middle years of his Milwaukee tenure, between the MVP candidacy and the past two years when he emerged again as a force.
“I’ve never gone out on the field being like, ‘Well, I hope that I do good so everybody thinks I lived up to this deal,” Yelich said. “I think when you sign a contract like that, people are going to have opinions both ways. To some people, you’re never going to validate it. You’re never going to live up to it no matter what you do. And to other people, they don’t care. This is a business of, ‘What have you done for me lately?’”
Yelich has done it all in a Brewers uniform at this point, from individual awards to team success to, now, becoming the team’s unquestioned captain.
“The ultimate one,” he calls it.
“Every player wants to win the World Series,” Yelich said. “For how much it would mean to the organization and the city and everything else. To win a World Series, it would change this place, for sure. It’s looked at in a totally different light once that happens. That would be cool.”
