This has not been a good season for Sal Frelick. He has struggled at the plate. Even more alarmingly, he has struggled in the field. People are speculating as to whether he’s injured. And when the Brewers secured the signature of Luis Lara — who has been red hot all season at Triple-A Nashville — earlier this week, they gave themselves an obvious candidate to take some of Frelick’s playing time.
Frelick is an easy target right now. His at-bats don’t look good. He has never hit for power, so he’s not offering value as a low-average, high-homer guy akin to Gary Sánchez. Previously, living with Sal’s struggles at the plate wasn’t hard to do; he was a Gold Glove-winning outfielder in 2024 and still solidly above average out there last season. He has generally been a good baserunner (which, it should be said, continues to be the case this season).
But, contrary to another struggling veteran on the Brewers right now, Frelick shouldn’t be completely given up on. I’m not ready to pull the plug in order to hand his job over to Lara quite yet. In his time with the Brewers, Frelick — who is still only 26 years old — has earned a little patience.
That being said, the concerns are real and should not be ignored. Let’s go through it.
Take a look at Frelick’s Statcast page for 2026. Then take a look at Frelick’s Statcast page for 2025. What’s different?
The answer: not much. What is true is that Frelick’s Statcast page is ugly. There’s a lot of blue. His exit velocities, barrel percentage, hard-hit percentage, expected slugging, all of that kind of stuff, are all bad. He’s in the bottom 10% in most of them.
But what’s weird is that he was bad at all those things last year, too. This season, Frelick is batting .228/.299/.311. Last year, he hit .288/.351/.405. So what’s different?
Frelick is still one of the best players in the league at not striking out. He’s actually been quite a bit better this season at not chasing. According to Statcast, he is squaring up the ball at an elite clip — he is maximizing theoretical exit velocity on the swings that he is taking — something he did well last season, too.
Unfortunately, a major factor isn’t allowing Frelick to maximize that high square-up percentage: he’s hitting too many ground balls.
A simple indicator is batting average on balls in play. In Frelick’s first three seasons with the Brewers, he had BABIP numbers of .286, .306, and .317. This year, it’s .243. A more specific indicator is the ground balls. In 2024 and 2025, Frelick was just about league average in line drive rate, and he was a little below the league average in ground ball percentage. This season, his ground balls have jumped (GB = ground ball, LD = line drive, FB = fly ball):
- 2024: 48.0 GB%, 24.8 LD%, 18.0 FB%
- 2025: 46.7 GB%, 23.2 LD%, 20.2 FB%
- 2026: 53.8 GB%, 17.9 LD%, 17.9 FB%
Digging further into Frelick’s batted ball data, we can understand why the groundballs are happening. Statcast breaks down batted ball quality into six different categories: weak, topped, under, flare/burner, solid, and barrel. Barrels are what you want — that’s the best quality of contact — and while Frelick is slightly below last year’s 3.1%, at 2.2%, he’s actually slightly above league average this year (2.1%). He’s making slightly less weak contact (the worst kind) than last season. He’s getting under the ball slightly more often, but not alarmingly so.
The big problem is his percentage of balls that are “topped.” This matches the eye test: Frelick is hitting a ton of balls that go directly into the ground. At 42.4%, Frelick is more than four percent higher than the league average, and more than seven percent higher than he was last season. We see this is in his launch angle data, too: at an average launch angle of 8.3 degrees, Frelick is well below last season’s 12.1 degrees and even further below the league average (12.5 degrees).
Another thing that might be preventing Frelick from maximizing his square-up percentage is that he has a slow bat. But a slow bat and a good square-up percentage can work for players who can elevate the ball: Luis Arraez has first-percentile bat speed with a 100th-percentile square-up rate. But Arraez’ 14.6 degree launch angle dwarfs Frelick’s 8.3 degrees, and he’s hitting way fewer ground balls (43% versus 29.4% line drives and 24.2% fly balls).
Basically, what the Statcast data tells us is that Frelick is the same hitter he was last year, except for one crucial problem: he’s hitting over the top of balls way too often. This accounts for his poor launch angles, his high ground ball percentage, and his low BABIP.
The fact that Frelick is so poor in terms of exit velocity, barrel percentage, expected slugging, etc., means that he has very little wiggle room. If he’s not hitting line drives like he was last season, he’s just going to ground into a ton of outs. That’s true of anybody, but even more so with Frelick, as his low-exit-velocity grounders are less likely to sneak through the infield.
Whether you think this is good news or bad news depends on how you saw the Frelick of 2025, the one who finished seventh in the league in batting average and had a 111 OPS+. If you think that version of Frelick was good and had a repeatable approach, then you should be optimistic that some adjustments to his bat path should help him stop topping the ball, and he can return to being that player. But if you saw Frelick’s 2025 performance as mostly luck-based, and that all the blue on his Statcast page was a major red flag, then you will think that this year’s version of Frelick is simply what last year’s version should have been.
The defensive question is far more alarming. Simply stated, if Frelick isn’t offering anything in the field, his bat isn’t good enough to be a starting corner outfielder for a good team, and that was probably true even last season when things were going well.
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s use Statcast’s defensive metric, Outs Above Average. Frelick has been a good outfielder the past two seasons by OAA. But it sees him as poor in 2026 (as does Baseball Reference’s preferred metric Defensive Runs Saved, for what it’s worth). Statcast has Frelick in just the 28th percentile in fielding run value. That’s an alarming drop; Frelick was in the 85th percentile in 2025 and 79th in 2024 via the same metric.
The issues are all over. Frelick was in the 90th and 93rd percentile in range in 2024 and 2025, respectively. This year, he’s in the 48th percentile. His arm has suffered, too: Statcast has two numbers to grade a player’s arm, “arm value” and “arm strength.” In 2026, Frelick is in the 9th percentile in arm value and in the 44th percentile in arm strength; that’s down from 71st and 66th in 2025, and 66th and 68th in 2024.
Why has this happened? There has been a lot of speculation that Frelick, a player who plays with no real regard for his own body, is playing hurt. He does seem to react with pain at certain times during games. But if this is the case, it’s not really hurting his sprint speed, which you would expect to be an accompanying issue. Frelick’s speed as measured by Statcast is down slightly, but not much — he’s still in the 86th percentile in sprint speed (he was 87th last season).
If Frelick’s speed is intact, I’m not sure how to explain his diminished defensive value in right field. There could be an injury that’s affecting his upper body, but not his legs — that would be supported by the fact that some of the speculation about Frelick’s potential injury being related to his oblique. That could explain the dip in the value of his throwing, but it doesn’t really explain why he is or isn’t getting to balls that he used to be catching.
He has earned some patience
Whether there’s some positive regression in Frelick’s future or not, we do not know. Fans are getting frustrated, and Lara is making waves in Nashville. But Frelick didn’t turn 26 until April. He’s got two years of solid major league baseball behind him. He was a 3.6 fWAR player last season. By all accounts, he is a great teammate, he works hard, and he is clearly one of Pat Murphy’s favorites.
There are signs that Frelick is improving, too. It’s only 10 games, but in June, Frelick is hitting .303/.378/.394. The pessimists will point out that his xwOBA (.293) in that span is only 14 points higher than his season total (.279), and he is outperforming it by 55 points (.345 wOBA).
If Frelick is injured, then he should stop trying to play through it, go on the injured list, and let Lara have a chance. But it’s worth remembering that Lara is no sure thing, either; he’d be a defensive improvement over this version of Frelick, surely, but there’s no guarantee that he would outperform even Frelick’s 71 OPS+ this season.
In the case of the Brewers’ infield, I advocated for moving on from Luis Rengifo and giving Cooper Pratt the shortstop job. Sal Frelick isn’t Rengifo. Rengifo is on a one-year contract, and everyone has known since the day that he signed that there were big prospects behind him. Frelick is a bigger part of Milwaukee’s past, and he can still be a part of their future if he turns things around, and the Brewers should give him the chance to do so. He’s earned it.