MILWAUKEE -- Ask Christian Yelich what it means to reach 100 RBIs for the second time in his career, you hear very little about coming back from right knee surgery or back surgery, about the weight of a mega-contract and being the face of a franchise, and a whole lot about the people around him.
“It means you’ve got good teammates, right?” Yelich said after his run-scoring double came amid the go-ahead rally in Thursday night’s 5-2 win over the Angels at American Family Field.
Yelich, sitting on 29 home runs and 99 RBIs entering the game, reached triple-digit RBIs for the first time since 2018, the year he won the National League MVP Award in his first season in Milwaukee following a trade from the Marlins.
Since then, he’s battled major knee and back injuries, signed a club-record contract that still has three seasons guaranteed beyond this year and shouldered the burden of living up to that deal. In some ways, the past year has provided the biggest test of all since -- after years of on-again, off-again back issues -- Yelich underwent surgery last August in an effort to put that in the past.
“There were a lot of questions that I had to answer, and people doubting whether or not that I could play,” he said. “I still felt like I was still going to be able to play at a high level after dealing with what I had to deal with, all the back stuff. …
“Being available for most of the games this year and being able to play is kind of refreshing. I know that I’m still capable of playing at a high level if I can just do it, if I can just play. Obviously, a lot of that stuff was frustrating in the past, but there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just nice to be able to help the team and be out there every night.”
Yelich is slashing .268/.346/.467 in 141 games this season, including 120 starts as the designated hitter and 18 in left field. His 29 homers are his most since he hit 44 in 2019, and his 100 RBIs are the second-most in his career, behind only his 110 in ‘18.
Rookie third baseman Caleb Durbin called Yelich “the backbone of our team.”
“It’s a team effort, but we go where ‘Yeli’ goes,” Durbin said.
So perhaps it was not surprising that Yelich spent more time Thursday talking about the team’s young players, which include not only the crop of rookies such as Durbin, who drove in Milwaukee’s first two runs on Thursday, but second- and third-year players such as Jackson Chourio, Sal Frelick and Brice Turang. Those guys are mainstays on a perennial contender at a stage of their careers that Yelich was just learning the big leagues with a young crop of Miami Marlins.
“There’s not that grace period for you to get your feet wet in the big leagues and make mistakes and go through the growing pains,” Yelich said. “There’s been moments where people have been hard on them because they want the expectation of, ‘You have to do this right.’ You have to grow up fast if you want to develop players and win games.”