The Milwaukee Brewers lost two significant pieces from their roster a season ago as Willy Adames signed with the San Francisco Giants and Devin Williams was traded to the New York Yankees. With Adames’ departure, there will be a new face at shortstop in 2025. Joey Ortiz is currently the favorite to man the position, but if he leaves third base that will then create a vacancy at the hot corner.
Internal options at third base?
This off-season, the Brewers have sort of addressed the potential need for a new third baseman as they acquired Caleb Durbin in the Williams trade. Durbin is a versatile infielder, but has not yet made his MLB debut. They also have Tyler Black, Vinny Capra, Andruw Monasterio, Oliver Dunn, and Sal Frelick as potential options. Here we take a further look at the possibility of Frelick, a gold glove outfielder, playing more infield in 2025.
How much infield experience does Sal Frelick have?
Last off-season Frelick was approached by Pat Murphy about potentially playing third base. The Boston native was then introduced to Red Sox legend Dustin Pedroia and spent some time training under him. Frelick saw a good amount of action at the hot corner during spring training, but only registered four innings at the position during the regular season. Prior to last year, Frelick did play some second base, third base, and even shortstop as a collegiate athlete.
Will the Milwaukee Brewers play Sal Frelick at third base more in 2025?
In an excellent write up by Eric Treuden at Just Baseball, he highlights the risks and benefits to Frelick playing more third base in 2025. One point he made was that because the Brewers don’t have a clear cut favorite to play third base entering spring training, that Milwaukee’s decision-makers will be more tempted into potentially making Frelick switch positions. This would then free up more playing time for Blake Perkins in the outfield, who is also a gold glove caliber player.
On the contrary, Milwaukee entered the 2024 season with multiple players competing for the everyday third base job. Joey Ortiz emerged as the favorite, he won a rookie of the month award, and he should have been in contention for a gold glove award as well. While he is now likely to shift to shortstop, there has to be a lot of optimism in the organization that Caleb Durbin could do what Ortiz did last year. Another possibility is that Tyler Black excels with more playing time or a healthy Oliver Dunn takes a step forward.
It will be interesting to see how the Brewers third base battles shape up during spring training. We are just a few weeks away from players reporting and games being played, so our answers will be here before we know it.
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