It’s Late April, Which Means Brice Turang Is Molting Again

Every successful professional athlete has to have a strong drive for self-improvement. You start each morning with the goal of being a little bit better than you were yesterday; I’m sure I’ve seen words to that effect on a ballplayer’s t-shirt or social media bio somewhere.

Brice Turang can do you one better: He gets a lot better every year. As a 23-year-old rookie, he hit .218/.285/.300, which is not the kind of line that ordinarily gets a guy 448 plate appearances’ worth of playing time. Fortunately for Turang, the Brewers (for all their other successes) have been pretty awful at home-brewing hitters over the past decade, and Turang entered 2024 as their starting second baseman.

That spring, Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy proclaimed that Turang was about to “make a quantum leap” at the plate. Big talk about a player who’d been such a poor hitter as a rookie, but by the end of April, I was convinced that Murphy had been right all along. That version of Turang was still a slap hitter (seven home runs in 619 plate appearances, and a .095 ISO), but a better one. He also played terrific defense at second base and stole 50 bags; do those things and you can be a good player even if you hit .254 with no power.

Even that kind of year-on-year leap is mighty impressive, and had Turang let it rest there, he would’ve been an above-average second baseman and one of the Brewers’ better position players. But we all know what happened in 2025; he unlocked a new register of bat speed (as detailed by Esteban Rivera here) and transformed himself from an extreme groundball hitter to a regular groundball hitter. Last year, Turang hit 18 home runs, more than doubling his previous career total, and raised his batting average to a career-high .288.

That Turang was a 4.4-WAR player; by that metric, he was the best player on the team with the best record in the majors. When the time came to choose the World Baseball Classic teams, Turang was an uncontroversial pick to be Team USA’s starting second baseman. Surely another quantum leap, to use Murphy’s phrasing, would be too much to ask for.

Perhaps not. Through 20 games, Turang is hitting .307/.430/.560 with four home runs. (In the interest of not having to remake a bunch of graphs, all stats from this point on are current as of Tuesday morning.) Now, it’s early. We used to say that you can’t trust stats until Mike Trout is leading the league in WAR; now, it’s more like you can’t trust stats if it’s so early in the season Trout hasn’t gotten hurt yet. Still, Turang is swinging the bat differently than he did last year.

Bat speed has never been a big part of Turang’s game; even last year, he was in the 25th percentile for bat speed. And in 2026, his average bat speed is only up four tenths of a mile per hour; compare that to a leap of 4.4 mph from 2024 to 2025. His fast-swing rate is actually down slightly from 2025.

Esteban, in his post a year ago, went over what changed from 2024 to 2025; Turang brought his hands up and his feet closer together. This year, he has gone slightly further in that direction, and it’s had two major impacts. First, he isn’t making harder contact at the extreme, but he’s making hard contact more consistently. That’s a bit of an odd sentence to follow, so I’ll give you a graph of his swing speeds, from Baseball Savant.

So Turang’s average swing speed is about the same, and he’s lost a few of the super-fast swings on the right side of the graph, but he’s also lost some slower swings. He’s not accessing off-the-charts top-end power (Turang is 93rd out of 179 qualified hitters in maximum exit velo and 64th in EV90), but he’s making more hard contact than Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Kyle Schwarber. Literally; Turang has a 58.8% hard-hit rate; none of those aforementioned three is over 54.3%.

The second thing Turang is doing has to do not with bat speed but attack angle. In 2024, when I thought he had turned into a perfectly acceptable hitter, given his other gifts, 25.9% of Turang’s swings had what Baseball Savant considers to be an ideal attack angle: between five and 20 degrees.

This year, that number is up to 51.7%. In 2024, Turang hit 2.01 groundballs for every fly ball; this year, that’s down to 1.11. More balls in the air means more extra-base hits, as you all well know.

But the thing that’s really cooking my noodle isn’t what happens when Turang swings. It’s how infrequent those swings have become.

Turang has always been fairly selective and had good control of the strike zone. Back in his Punch-and-Judy days, when his best chance for reaching base was to stick his bat out there and hope the ball ran into it, his chase rate was only about average. Last year, he was in the best quartile of all hitters.

This year, his overall swing percentage is just 36.0%, and his chase rate is a minuscule 16.8%. Both figures are in the bottom 10 in the league. Trout, Evan Carter, and Chase Meidroth are all expanding the zone more than Turang is.

Some of that is due to Turang’s being pitched differently. A year ago, the scouting report on him was he swings like a pinball paddle; groove a fastball or hang a slider, and the worst thing that he’ll do is hit a single. Obviously, pitchers became more cautious as he showed he could put mistakes in the seats. Turang saw 53.4% pitches in the zone in 2024 and 52.7% in 2025; that’s down to just 46.9% this year.

And as pitchers work harder to avoid the wrath of Turang’s bat, he’s not chasing. He’s already drawn 17 walks in 88 plate appearances this year; as a rookie, he drew 38 walks in 448 plate appearances.

Two years ago, this guy had made a quantum leap to become a slightly below-average hitter, which I considered at the time to be a developmental feat that turned him from a Quad-A guy to a first-division starter, given his all-around contributions. Now, Turang looks like a .300/.400/.500 guy, with 30-homer power.

My first inclination with any story like this, so early in the year, is to call it a small-sample fluke. And I do expect some of this to calm down; if Turang is still running a 180 wRC+ and a walk rate near 20% in August, I’ll check back in with you then. Most likely in a column touting him for NL MVP.

But there’s no red flag in his peripherals. Turang is running a .370 BABIP, which is high for most hitters, but not for someone who posted a .356 mark last season. You can see the changes in his swing and plate discipline numbers. Turang’s xSLG and xwOBA match his real-world stats almost exactly. April or not, this looks legit.

I am, to be clear, astounded. Gobsmacked. Flabbergasted. Most hitters don’t make a single step change in their entire careers. Turang has now done it three seasons in a row.