CINCINNATI -- Christian Yelich won his first NL Player of the Week Award in more than six years on Monday and celebrated the way every hitter wants to.
By getting a head start on another good week.
With his right hand bandaged where he’d been hit by a pitch the day before in Philadelphia, Yelich smacked a long home run off the center-field batter’s eye for the go-ahead run in the Brewers’ 3-2 win over the Reds in the series opener at Great American Ball Park.
Yelich’s hitting streak reached nine games while the Brewers’ win streak stretched to eight, and the fact they loosely coincide is probably not a coincidence. A week and a half ago, the Brewers were searching for an offensive identity and Yelich was searching for his swing in the wake of back surgery last summer. Now they all appear to have found something.
“Just getting your teeth kicked in every day, it’s hard to take the positives from it,” Yelich said while prepping for the second leg of this weeklong road trip. “Once you have a little success, it’s like, ‘OK, now we’re headed in the right direction. Now let’s keep going.’”
The Brewers kept going with Yelich, with starter Aaron Civale and relievers Rob Zastryzny, Jared Koenig, Abner Uribe and Trevor Megill combining to do something you don’t often see in this hitters’ park -- holding Cincinnati scoreless after the first inning to extend Milwaukee’s longest winning streak since the club rattled off nine in a row in August 2023.
The lead came courtesy of Yelich, who launched a Brady Singer breaking ball 111.1 mph off the bat with two outs and the bases empty in the third inning and saw it sail a projected 417 feet, according to Statcast -- though Yelich wanted the over on that estimate.
“Those guys watch him go through this struggle and then get ‘on it’ a little bit. It’s been fun and a great example,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “It’s been a big reason why we’ve played better.”
“It just gives a lot of guys the freedom to go up there and not have to try and create,” Civale said. “‘Yeli’ has handled it like the pro that he is through the downs, and now through the ups.”
Yelich had not won a Player of the Week Award since claiming three of them during his MVP season in 2018 and two more in April 2019. But that changed after he went 10-for-20 last week with three homers, nine RBIs, a double, a walk, five runs scored, a stolen base, a 1.000 slugging percentage and a .545 on-base percentage across five games that included his first career walk-off home run on Tuesday against the Red Sox -- a grand slam, for good measure -- and a two-homer game on Saturday in Philadelphia.
Even for a hitter with an MVP Award and three Silver Sluggers on his mantle, it was a stunning surge, considering that Yelich’s batting average was below the Mendoza Line at .199 as recently as May 23. By then, however, he was already starting to see some results from the work he’d been putting in with the Brewers’ hitting coach triumvirate of Al LeBoeuf, Eric Theisen and Connor Dawson.
“It was a lot of talking, honestly,” Yelich said. “You have to work on stuff, too. But just talking and looking at things and trying to figure out what you want to accomplish. That’s how I go about it: Identify what the goal is, what’s going wrong and what needs to go right. Then work from there.”
The results began to show up in Pittsburgh, where the Brewers split a four-game series and Yelich had a hit in every game, starting with a two-homer night on May 22. That was the start of his current hitting streak, which paused Sunday when Yelich was hit on the right hand by a Ranger Suárez sinker and had to leave the game after that lone plate appearance.
Negative X-rays provided solace, and Yelich was able to get treatment throughout the rest of Sunday’s game and during the flight to Cincinnati. With more treatment on Monday, he was back in the lineup.
“Once we knew it wasn’t broken, it’s like, all right, get back out there and go post for the boys,'” Yelich said. “You just want to be out there. That’s something we take pride in here. Showing up for each other.”
As Yelich sees it, there’s a message in his recent surge for everyone.
“I was just trying to stack good day after good day,” Yelich said. “If you do that, you can come a long way in a week.”