Milwaukee Brewers: Top Prospect Jackson Chourio Finds Relatability with Former MVP

Milwaukee Brewers‘ top prospect Jackson Chourio celebrated his 20th birthday on Monday, and with that comes a whole new level of phenomenon.

Though he’s aged another year, the expectations haven’t changed. Chourio, a top prospect in the MLB, has been crushing it in Spring Training with the hopes that he makes the Opening Day roster for the 2024 season. From the moment that Chourio stepped to the plate (literally), he’s had scouts and people lining up to see his young talent with the dream that they would be the lucky ones to sign him to a big contact.

Chourio kind of went under the radar for a while, but once he got his promotion to Class A, the gloves were off, and he was all baseball fans wanted to see, and saw himself as a top-10 prospect by the end of 2022.

Milwaukee Brewers’ Expectations for Jackson Chourio

Milwaukee is known for having a pretty strong farm system. We saw it last season when Brice Turang, Garrett Mitchell, Joey Wiemer, and Sal Frelick all saw their major league debuts and performed in big ways, getting a substantial amount of playing time.

In the offseason this past year, the then 19-year-old, signed a record-breaking, eight-year $82M contract. This was a one-of-a-kind deal, as Chourio hasn’t even made his big league debut yet, but Milwaukee is locking him down so no one else can have him.

Currently, the 20-year-old is on a trajectory to become just the third player in MLB history under the age of 21 to start in center field on opening day. Other players that accomplished this feat are Ken Griffey Jr. and Andruw Jones.

He’s been named the highest-rated prospect to come through the Brewers organization; Even higher than the “freshmen”, who made their debuts last season.

Chourio Finds Relatability in MVP Teammate

It’s not common to have a prospect sign such a huge contract, but in the case of the Brewers, when you have a prospect like Jackson Chourio, you want to keep him around for a while. However, Chourio has been lucky enough to confide in a teammate who can relate to the type of expectations both from the team and from the outside that comes with signing a huge contract extension like that.

Christian Yelich was crowned the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 2018 and was on his way to a repeat in 2019 until disaster struck and he fractured his kneecap, taking him out of contention. In February 2020, Yelich signed a massive nine-year, $215M extension, making it the largest extension ever inked by a Milwaukee Brewer.

Yelich said with signing a huge extension comes expectations that you put on yourself, being the best version of yourself.

“As a player, you put the expectations on yourself when you sign a deal,” Yelich said. “For every player, inside you know what you’re capable of doing. You always expect the best out of yourself and you should always have that drive to be the best version of yourself. What that can be, we don’t know. You just keep striving to get the most out of your talent.”

There are some clear distinctions in their extensions, seeing as Yelich was already considered a veteran by the time he signed his extension, and Chourio is just getting started.

“Jackson is obviously plenty talented. There’s some similarities and some differences with the expectations,” Yelich said. “My deal comes with expectations and the contract. All that in combination with past performance. Past performance combined with a new deal equals all these very high expectations.

“For him, hopefully, people understood that he’s a 19, 20-year-old kid who is going to be at some point getting his feet wet in the big leagues for the first time…The tools and talent are there for sure. You just have to go out and rep it out.”

Like Chourio, he knows that if you put the work in, you’ll live up to personal expectations, and the ones that are put upon you for inking your name to such a big price tag.

“As players, you hear all the outside noise,” Yelich said. “You’re going to hear in this day and age. But you just have to be really focused on your process and improving. Jackson should be Jackson. He should be the best version of himself in 2024. Take what he learns from this year because you’re going to learn something – good and bad – and then the key is to apply it to the following year and try to make improvements.”

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