If you watch the Milwaukee Brewers and see Sal Frelick standing at the dugout railing with that hockey-player-from-Boston ferocity in his eyes, just know that he’s probably yelling the same thing over and over.
“Drag him! Drag him with you!”
It’s this competitiveness, this full-throttle intensity that defines the 5-foot-9 Frelick.
Only three games into the season, it might already define his team, too.
Frelick’s mantra is simple. Even if a pitcher is going to ultimately win the at-bat, he wants to take him down with him, turning the at-bat into a slog and at the very least making him earn the out.
“My thing is just, ‘Drag him,’” Frelick said. “Just standing there, yelling to drag him. “[Jason Lane] always says you gotta be able to hit in the fetal position. [Down] 0-2, you’re pretty much dead. So I always say how can I drag a guy under with me? How can I drag this pitcher to hell with me? Just get back to even ground. Take a chunk out of him.”
And, now, the Brewers right fielder has his whole team pounding on the padded railing after two-strike foul balls and hollering the same thing.
“It gets contagious,” Frelick said. “You get guys doing it and it’s fun. You can still make an out and drag a guy. Part of it is that it doesn’t need to always be a hit. Guys are [down] 0-2, we’re top step yelling, ‘Drag him.’ See pitches and take a chunk of the pitcher with you.”
The Brewers, three games into the season, are doing plenty of dragging. In their opening weekend series sweep, capped by Christian Yelich’s dramatic homer to complete a five-run comeback in a 9-7 win March 29, they dragged the White Sox pitchers to a dark place. They scored 29 runs, notched 35 hits, drew 22 walks and saw 22.8 pitches per inning.
BOX SCORE: Brewers 9, White Sox 7
“It’s quality at-bat after quality at-bat after quality at-bat,” is how Yelich summed up the Brewers’ approach.
What they did, though, isn’t particularly new. A year ago, the Brewers grit and grinded their way to the third-highest scoring offense in baseball and a franchise-record 97 wins. That they showcased a similar style on opening weekend isn’t all that surprising, either, considering the lineup is nearly the same.
“You watch us play and this is what we do,” second baseman Brice Turang said. “I feel like just the quality of at bats and moving the line to the next guy and getting runners in scoring position, stolen bases, homers, line drives, ground balls, you name it. We did it all. And we got a team that can do it all.
“When we play our game we’re a great team. We’re a dangerous team.”
A year after having the lowest chase rate in baseball, the Brewers are at it again. In the eighth inning comeback, after some uncharacteristic chase with runners on base earlier in the day, they saw 39 pitches and swung at one ball out of the zone – a two-strike sweeper just below the knees that Luis Rengifo spoiled. Five batters reached with two strikes on them, including Yelich’s roof-splitting 411-foot blast.
Does this offense, when you boil it down, really just come down to being as annoying as possible?
“I mean, yeah,” Frelick said. “That’s about it.”
In baseball lexicon, saying an offense relies on grittiness is often a backhanded compliment. If you’re gritty, then you’re not slugging. And if you’re not slugging, you’re probably not going to be a great offense.
But the Brewers do what they do about as well as anyone. It isn’t as quantifiable as looking at a slugging percentage leaderboard or seeing which teams have the highest exit velocities, but watch the Brewers, like a gnat that won’t budge, pesk their way to a 14-run opening day or four-run eighth inning comeback and you see the effect.
“I’d imagine it’s pretty damn frustrating having to throw seven pitches at every dang hitter,” closer Trevor Megill said. “It definitely wears on some guys. That’s what we do here, is never quit, put together great at-bats and go with it.”
At their best, this is an offense that makes a pitcher need a cold one on the couch after facing them, the baseball equivalent of a workday full of Teams meetings that could have just been an email.
“You’re taxed in the mind,” right-hander Chad Patrick said. “You’re always thinking and it’s exhausting at times when you’re thinking about these things constantly. You’re in deep counts constantly. You’re always in your head. That’s taxing. It’s not taxing on your body, but it’s mental. And this game is 90 percent mental.”
It’s not easy for an offense to have such a clear, shared identity. Every team has its scrappier hitters, and every offense wants to make life as hard as possible on the pitcher. But “it’s hard” to have a lineup of nine guys trying to be Sal Frelick, Frelick himself will tell you.
This, the Brewers say, is where buy-in comes into play, and that begins with Yelich.
“It’s an understanding that you have that in your leadership,” manager Pat Murphy said. “Yelich prioritizes base running. When that guy’s doing it, and that guy’s going out there to practice base running and bunting, that’s what makes him an amazing leader. That’s the s*** he does. It takes pressure off my job.”
You can see the burden Yelich takes upon himself to be the leader, to be on the top step screaming “Drag him!” in his reaction to his homer, a subdued-but-serious bat drop and glare into the Brewers dugout as the ball flew toward the second deck in right.
That pitch-to-pitch focus is passed down from there, whether it’s Blake Perkins passing the baton in the eighth by taking a slider down for ball four or even Frelick working a full count and grounding out in the first.
It’s 27 outs of teeth grinding. It’s 27 outs of hell.
“You said it,” Turang said.
If the Brewers plan on dragging pitchers to inferno for the next sixth months, maybe the offense needs a name. They’re not the Wallbangers. They’re not Crushers. They’re not the Woodpeckers. They’re something else…but what?
“The battlers,” Patrick said. “They’re the battlers.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: ‘Drag him!’: How Sal Frelick’s war cry has come to define the Brewers offense
Reporting by Curt Hogg, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
