"The pitcher was
throwing hard, and Jackson
Chourio wanted some.
It was the fifth
inning of a mid-August game when the Brewers prospect
leaned over to High-A Wisconsin manager Joe Ayrault for a quick scouting
report. On the mound, mowing down Chourio’s teammates, was South Bend Cubs
fireballer Yovanny Cruz.
“How hard is that?” Chourio asked his skipper. The answer: 102 mph. It should
have been intimidating, but a few months into his first full professional
season, little had cowed Chourio so far.
“I want to face
that guy,” the prospect replied.
It took two more
games, but Chourio got his chance. Cruz entered the game in the seventh and
rocketed a first-pitch fastball to the top of the zone. Chourio whipped his bat
around, shooting the ball into left field for a single. The hit was Chourio’s
fourth of the day, and the first of them had been even more impressive.
Facing Cubs starter
Danny Palencia, Chourio had
turned around 100 mph for a two-run homer.
“Some young
hitters, they work themselves into a good hitter’s count and they just get big
and they swing and fall down,” says Ayrault. “This was a perfect swing, smooth
and effortless. I was like, ‘Wow.'”
Clobbering
triple-digit fastballs with regularity is a remarkable feat for anyone, but
when Chourio does it, it’s all the more amazing. When he smoked those heaters
against South Bend last year, he was just 18 years old. The media guide listed
him at 165 pounds. He may have been a wunderkind, but he was not a man-child.
“Baby-faced,” says Brewers hitting coordinator Brenton Del Chiaro. “Long and
lean.” On average, Chourio was more than four years younger than the rest of
the Midwest League. He was the only player in the league born in 2004.
That he can
do that, that he can leverage so much power from his
still-maturing frame and lightning-quick hands, is exactly what makes Chourio
the pride of the Brewers’ system and one of the best prospects in baseball. The
Brewers saw a future star in Chourio first, but like the young outfielder
facing 100 mph gas, everyone else has caught up quickly. Chourio started last
year in extended spring training and didn’t make his full-season debut until
May. After destroying the Low-A Carolina League for two months — Chourio hit
.324 with a .973 OPS and 12 home runs — the Brewers jumped him to High A. By
the end of the year, he was patrolling center for Double-A Biloxi. Ascents that
rapid can give one the bends. Entering last year, Chourio was not listed
among The Athletic’s Top 100 prospects. Going into this
season, he’s No. 3.
He’s a known
quantity now, but familiarity breeds only further appreciation when it comes to
the young Venezuelan. Now barely 19, he is only marginally taller and slightly
more muscular than he was a year ago. His smile now beams with the glint of
braces, underscoring his youth. Yet, despite outward appearances, he has
matured. He still has those quick hands and that efficient swing, but he also
has a better idea of how to deploy them. He is learning to attack his at-bats
with precision, hunting for pitches he can destroy. Even pitches over 100 miles
an hour.
He is on a
startlingly straight trajectory — few peaks and valleys, says Brewers farm
director Tom Flanagan, “more arrows pointing up” — and Chourio is rapidly
approaching its terminus. He climbed three levels last year, and while the
journey will get tougher, little has seemed difficult for him to this point. He
should reach majors before his 21st birthday, and possibly before he leaves his
teens.
Baseball, most
experts agree, is supposed to be hard.
It often seems as
if Chourio didn’t get that memo. A different Chourio exploit sticks in the
memory of every Brewers staffer, although they’re all connected by a common
thread. Pitches he shouldn’t have barreled, not at those velocities and in
those locations. Balls that shouldn’t have traveled that far, not at his age
and with his frame. The fullest picture of Chourio combines all of them, and
the young slugger has a knack for presenting them in tidy packages. In his
first spring game with the big-league club earlier this month, Chourio hit
balls with exit velocities of 104, 108 and 111 mph — two went for doubles — and
cut down a runner at the plate. Two weeks later in a back-fields game, he smoked
a hit at 108 mph and nailed a runner at home again.
“You just start
to stack all these things up,” says Cam Castro, the team’s vice president of
player development, “and you’re like, ‘It should take more than four innings to
see all of that from one player.'”
The Brewers can’t
claim to have seen all of this coming, at least not with this
kind of speed and ferocity, but Chourio’s breakout last year wasn’t a complete
shock. They’ve known about his finer qualities for a while. Chourio was hardly
a secret as an amateur in Venezuela, and his strength, speed and willingness to
shoot balls to the opposite gap led the Brewers to lavish him with a $1.8
million bonus three years ago. He was the star of Milwaukee’s international
class, but the light from stars usually takes a long time to reach Earth. What
has surprised the Brewers is how Chourio put all of his various tools together
so quickly.
Chourio debuted
in 2021 as a 17-year-old in the Dominican Summer League, where he experienced
one of his very few periods of struggle. “I didn’t start too well,” the
outfielder notes through interpreter Carlos Brizuela. “I was almost 0 for my
first 20 at-bats.” He finished batting .296 with an .833 OPS. The next step
usually is the Arizona Complex League, although Chourio skipped that level
entirely. The only thing that held him back was Milwaukee, not because the
Brewers weren’t hip to his talent but because they were hyper-aware of it.
Knowing that Chourio was destined to jump to a full-season affiliate from the
DSL, the Brewers held him in extended spring training last year not for the
extra at-bats but to work on the life skills he’d need once he was out on his
own.
Chourio torched
extended spring training, seeming to homer at an every-other-game pace and
likely speeding his planned promotion to Low A. It was a challenging assignment
for an 18-year-old, and while the Brewers didn’t think he’d fail, says Del
Chiaro, “I don’t think we expected him to go nuclear like he did.” As the
youngest player on the Mudcats, Chourio turned in more multi-hit games (21)
than hitless ones (13). Despite not having faced anything much harder than 92
mph as an amateur, he had virtually no trouble with pitches coming in nearly 10
mph harder. The reason for that, Brewers folks say, is Chourio’s incredible bat
speed.
Until last year,
bat speed was an anecdotal metric, something largely in the eye of the
beholder. But with Hawk-Eye tracking systems abounding in baseball, bat speed
can be measured with precision. Average major-league bat speed is between 81-83
mph, Del Chiaro says. (That roughly matches findings by MLB.com’s Mike Petriello last July.) The
hitting coordinator says that Chourio’s average bat speed is 85 mph. That’s how
he generates so much power despite his still-youthful build. Chourio’s
90th-percentile exit velocity — essentially, chopping off the top 10 percent of
his batted balls — is 102 mph.
Chourio’s
slugging percentage with Carolina was .600, second highest among any hitter in
the league with at least 250 plate appearances. The hitter ahead of him, Boston
prospect Niko Kavadas,
was five years older. Chourio also clubbed 12 home runs with the Mudcats, and
“he could have had eight more,” Del Chiaro thinks, if not for the high outfield
fences at Carolina’s Five County Stadium.
That’s the stuff
— the whip of his bat through the zone, the crack of the ball off of it, the
way balls tend to come in at 100 mph and leave even faster — that catches the
eye. But the Brewers are excited for Chourio not just because he can slug.
They’re excited
because he can hit.
It’s the first
day of minor-league camp when Chourio ducks into the outdoor batting cage at
Milwaukee’s spring training complex in Phoenix for a warm-up session. A tune is
blaring through a speaker, but the young phenom isn’t feeling it. “Next!” he
says, shaking his head. A press of a button produces the El Farsante remix by
Ozuna and Romeo Stantos, drawing a nod of his head. He then steps into the
batter’s box and soon the whack of his bat against the ball is echoing across
the cage.
Chourio is just
as discerning when it comes to pitch selection, it turns out. Watching him take
a pitch is almost as entertaining as watching him hit one. He’ll nod vigorously
when a close pitch is called a ball, and will shake his head when it’s not.
Every so often, you can hear an exhortation as the ball crosses the plate.
“No!” he will yell. This is Chourio’s internal dialogue leaking out for all to
hear — sometimes loud enough last year that it’d be picked up on the game
broadcast.
“That’s something
I’ve always said in my head. Sometimes, I’m just too into the at-bat that it
just comes out,” Chourio says. “It’s me talking to myself.”
Swing decisions
have been a frequent area of emphasis with Chourio, but it makes for a good
foundation that he’s this engaged in his plate appearances. In the cage, the
Brewers run a drill to work on laying off pitches outside the zone. It’s
conducted in short bursts, and with consequences. “If you chase one,” says Del
Chiaro, “the round’s over.” Another turn will come around, but the time in
between is inevitably spent reflecting on that last, ill-advised swing. Del
Chiaro says Chourio “was always the first one to adapt.”
In Carolina,
Chourio succeeded despite some swing-and-miss tendencies. His walk-to-strikeout
ratio of 1-to-4 was ninth worst in the Carolina League, although his overall
performance didn’t leave many teachable moments. The Brewers latched on to what
they could, which was often a stray 0-for-4 night among his frequent laser
shows. By the time he moved up to High-A Wisconsin at midseason, he’d become a
more mature hitter. He improved his walk numbers and though he swung and missed
with about the same frequency, his strikeout rate dropped eight points.
That’s thanks to
a mature two-strike approach. Chourio already has a swing that helps maximize
contact — he bridges the paradox of having great bat speed while keeping his
barrel in the zone for a long time — and he tightens things up even more when
he’s down to his last strike. He shortens his stride and is even more direct to
the ball, and his incredible power allows him to still do damage. Nine of his
20 home runs came with two strikes last season, as did 25 of his 55 extra-base
hits. He slugged .416 with two strikes in 2022. Last year, there were 90
hitters at the High-A level who didn’t slug that well no matter the count. Chourio
also had an OPS of 1.000 or better in seven different counts, including 1-1
(1.256) and 0-1 (1.317).
Chourio got a bit
swing-happy upon hitting Double A, but the Brewers felt he was a much smarter
hitter by the end of the season than he was at the beginning. “He started
funneling more pitches over the strike zone,” Del Chiaro says, an approach that
Chourio confirms. “When I go up there early in an at-bat, I’m just looking for
one pitch, trying to do damage for one pitch,” he says. “Once I get to two
strikes, I’m trying to stay alive and put the bat on the ball and fight.” His
numbers at High A were less superhuman — a .252 average and .805 OPS — but that
might have been due to the rigors of a long season on a young kid. Cut out
eight September games, and Chourio hit .269/.340/.538 with the Timber Rattlers.
The question now
is: What will he do next? And where?
During an off day
last summer, Chourio and a teammate decided to check out Milwaukee. They hopped
in a car and made the roughly two-hour drive from the Timber Rattlers’ home in
Appleton, Wisc., to American Family Field. He’d been to a big-league game
before, in Miami, but he wanted to see his future workplace. It sparked a
feeling in him that has lingered.
“As soon as I
touched the warning track, you felt it. You felt it. You felt it was a different
atmosphere,” he says. “You look around and you see the stands are a lot bigger,
and you feel how special it is to be there.”
His true arrival
in Milwaukee is eagerly anticipated. When Chourio was with Carolina, Flanagan
would hear often from High-A Wisconsin staff asking when the phenom would be
promoted. Fans would call the Timber Rattlers’ office begging for intel, and
Carolina League coaches would call Ayrault hoping he could convince the Brewers
to get Chourio out of there. And that was just buzz surrounding his eventual
promotion to High A.
The road to the
majors could start back there in 2023, or it could start in Biloxi, where
Chourio wrapped up last season. When speaking about him, Brewers staffers leave
room for both outcomes. Wherever he begins, he’ll spend the largest chunk of
his season in the Southern League — unless, of course, he plays himself out of
that level as quickly as he did all the others. “We’ve shown in the past we’re
not afraid to challenge guys,” Flanagan says. “If he does what he did last
year, the sky’s the limit.”
So will be the
hype. Chourio is aware of the attention around him, although he shows few signs
of being burdened by it. “As much as we think it’s the Chourio Show,” says
Castro, “to him, it’s not.” His younger brother, Jaison, is a prospect
with the Guardians, and when asked who is the better player, Chourio
offers a skeptical “Me?” (There is another Chourio, an 11-year-old catcher
named James, about whom Chourio is a bit blunter with his assessment. “He still
needs a little strength,” he says. “He’s a little weak.”) His favorite
player, Mariners star Julio
Rodríguez, is only three years older than he is. Chourio is on pace to beat
Rodríguez’s blazing timeline to the majors by at least a year. Pretty soon,
they’ll be peers.
But for now,
Brewers fans can find Chourio on the back fields in Phoenix, putting on a show
for Milwaukee staffers and a smattering of looky-loos and autograph hounds. In
a matter of days, when camp breaks, the Chourio Show will hit the road, bound for
the Midwest or the Deep South. Wherever the destination, spectators should get
their tickets now."
-The Athletic, Written by Zach Bunchanan (3/23/23)