Scratch That: Jackson Chourio Lands on the Injured List Hours Before Opening Day

Nine days after the end of the World Baseball Classic, more than three weeks since he was hit by a pitch, and just hours before his team’s Opening Day game, another WBC participant landed on the injured list. Jackson Chourio, who served as the regular center fielder for Venezuela’s championship-winning squad and who is slated to be the starting left fielder for the Brewers, was placed on the IL on Thursday morning due to a fracture in his left hand.

Chourio, who turned 22 on March 11, was hit on the hand by a heater from Clayton Beeter in Venezuela’s exhibition game against the Nationals on March 4. Initial X-rays were negative, and he was diagnosed with a contusion. He sat out Venezuela’s first two games of pool play while the Marlins’ Javier Sanoja started in center field, but Chourio returned to the lineup on March 9, playing the final two pool games and the three knockout round games. For the tournament, he hit just .200/.278/.200 in 19 plate appearances, though he did barrel a few balls.

When Chourio returned to the Brewers, according to manager Pat Murphy, he underwent a scan of some sort — I’d guess a CT scan, which is much quicker than an MRI — but it did not show a fracture. He continued to play regularly, and even homered off the Padres’ Randy Vásquez on March 21, but after he felt pain in his hand during a check swing in an exhibition against the Reds on Tuesday, the Brewers sent him for an MRI, which reportedly revealed a small hairline fracture at the base of his third metacarpal. While the fracture has begun to heal, Murphy said the team is understandably “worried that there could be further injury if he doesn’t take care of it now.” Thus the IL move, which is retroactive to March 25. He’s expected to miss two to four weeks.

This is the second year in a row Chourio has landed on the IL; last year, he missed a month — basically all of August — due to a right hamstring strain suffered while legging out a triple on July 29. He wasn’t as productive after returning, though a peek under the hood shows that he actually hit the ball harder, only to suffer some regression:

Chourio has 93rd-percentile sprint speed; we don’t have monthly splits, but the general observation around the Brewers was that he didn’t get up to full speed again until late in the season. The numbers show that he collected just one of his 16 infield hits and three of his 21 stolen bases after the injury, all in his final four games in late September. That, and his reversal from overperforming his expected stats before the injury to underperforming afterwards, suggests a reluctance to test the hamstring, costing him some extra bases here and there. Recall that he reaggravated the injury running out an infield single in the Division Series opener against the Cubs; though it was just the second inning, it was already his third hit of the game. With the benefit of an off day, he returned to the lineup the next game and homered, and ended up playing all nine of the Brewers’ postseason games while batting .303/.314/.576.

Still, relative to his rookie season, Chourio’s .270/.308/.463 (111 wRC+) line last year represented a loss of 19 points of on-base percentage, though just a one-point drop in slugging percentage. His walk rate eroded from 6.8% to 5.1% with a more aggressive approach; both his 53.2% swing rate and his 36.8% chase rate were around four and a half percentage points above his 2024 numbers, with his chase rate placing in the eighth percentile among qualifiers. His chase rates against curves and sliders both increased by about 10 points relative to 2024, though he was still very effective against the latter, hitting .302 and slugging .615.

Despite the missed time, Chourio hit 21 homers and stole 21 bases, and after becoming the youngest player to go 20/20 as a rookie, he became the youngest player to do it twice:

Note that while Pinson and Trout both went 20/20 in their age-20 and age-21 seasons, as well, they were about seven months older than Chourio when they accomplished the feat. Chourio’s performance put himself in some tremendous company, though as you can see by my inclusion of wRC+ and WAR in the table above, his seasons were at the lower end of that group in terms of overall performance. He dropped a full win in value from 2024 to ’25, from 3.9 WAR to 2.9.

As for 2026, to replace Chourio on the active roster, the Brewers recalled Blake Perkins, a 29-year-old switch-hitter who had been optioned to Triple-A Nashville just a week earlier. Perkins served as Milwaukee’s regular center fielder in 2024, but he missed the first half of last season after fracturing his right shin by fouling a ball off it during batting practice in late February. Upon returning, he hit .226/.298/.348 (83 wRC+) in 171 plate appearances.

The Brewers have done a fair bit of mixing and matching in the outfield in recent years, for platoon purposes, to cover for injuries, and to keep Christian Yelich in the mix on the days that catcher William Contreras serves as their designated hitter. Chourio’s ability to play all three outfield positions has fit well within that plan. Last year, with Perkins and Garrett Mitchell both injured – the latter played just 24 games due to an oblique strain and left shoulder surgery — Chourio played 89 games in center, 40 in left, and 20 in right. With Mitchell healthy, the plan coming into this season was to have Chourio spend the bulk of his time in left, with the lefty-swinging Mitchell platooning in center with righty Brandon Lockridge, who beat out Perkins for the final outfield spot, and Sal Frelick in right field, with lefty-swinging Jake Bauers also logging time at the corners in addition to backing up Andrew Vaughn at first base.

With Chourio out, the 30-year-old Bauers, who hit .235/.353/.399 (114 wRC+) last year, is the most likely candidate to log additional playing time. The Brewers are particularly eager to find at-bats for him following a spring in which he hit an absurd .462/.571/1.154 while tying for the major league lead in home runs, with seven — for whatever that’s worth. Bauers started in left field against the White Sox on Opening Day, going 2-for-5 with a three-run homer off Jedixson Paez, a 22-year-old Rule 5 pick making his major league debut.

Chourio isn’t the only player injured during the WBC or its run-up to miss Opening Day due to injuries. The Cubs’ Seiya Suzuki opened the season on the IL after suffering a minor sprain of the posterior collateral ligament in his right knee during the WBC quarterfinals with Japan; technically, he could be activated as soon as April 1, but as of Thursday, his timeline wasn’t clear. The Astros’ Jeremy Peña, who fractured his right ring finger in a March 4 exhibition while playing for the Dominican Republic, was not placed on the IL to start the season, but he wasn’t in the lineup on Thursday. He’s still getting his timing back by taking live at-bats with the team’s Triple-A Sugar Land affiliate, though general manager Dana Brown said he’s “very close” to returning to action.

Hopefully, Chourio’s not far from returning himself. Still, hand injuries are pesky things, and as last year’s hamstring injury suggests, it may take some time for him to regain full confidence in what he can do once he is back in the lineup.