Post-surgery, Yelich sees bright future both for himself and young Crew

MILWAUKEE -- In the short term, Christian Yelich would much rather be playing for the Brewers instead of watching while he recovers from back surgery.

In the long term, he knew it was the only option.

“I think everybody sees ‘back surgery’ and they think, ‘Oh, that’s the end of your career,’” Yelich said on Tuesday before the Brewers’ 5-4 loss to the Giants at American Family Field. “But in my mind, that couldn’t be any farther from the truth. I think that it’s going to help me tremendously. I think I’ll feel a lot better than I have in the last few years.

“In that sense, it’s cool. It’s really a nice thing. The only thing that’s really not great about this is the timing aspect of this and not being able to finish the season, to take part in what is hopefully another postseason run. That’s unfortunate, because it’s a really fun team to be a part of.”

They can even be fun in a losing effort. The Brewers, with first-year manager Pat Murphy and five rookies or second-year players in Tuesday’s starting lineup and a rookie (Tobias Myers) on the mound, opened their brief, three-game homestand with rookie Jackson Chourio knocking out a chunk of the scoreboard with the team’s longest home run of the season (his go-ahead shot in the second inning sailed a Statcast-projected 449 feet).

Willy Adames hit his team-leading 24th home run and then singled to bring the winning run to the plate with two outs in the ninth for Blake Perkins, who’d robbed a home run with a leaping catch in the fifth inning, and just missed hitting a walk-off home run when his deep fly ball fell from the sky for the night’s final out.

“I wish [the catch] would have meant more in the game in the end,” Perkins said, “but it’s still cool.”

Also still cool for the Brewers: Even with the loss, they own a nine-game lead on the second place Cubs in the NL Central standings with 31 games to go, and are within 2 1/2 games of the Phillies for the second seed in the NL (and the first-round bye that goes with it).

All of which is to say the Brewers are well-positioned to make the postseason for the sixth time in the past seven seasons despite losing an All-Star Game starter in Yelich, who, after managing flares of his lower back all the way back to his earliest days in the Major Leagues with the Marlins, succumbed to a microdiscectomy on Aug. 16, a minimally invasive procedure to relieve the effects of a herniated disc.

Yelich expects a three-month recovery, leaving plenty of time to be ready for the start of next year’s Spring Training. And more than that, it positions him for healthier years ahead as he plays out a contract with the Brewers that runs through at least 2028.

“It was to the point that daily living sucked,” Yelich said. “It was really uncomfortable. It was a lot of pain. It was something I had to get taken care of, and I’m glad I did, honestly.”

The Brewers have managed to hang on without him. From July 24, when Yelich landed on the injured list, to the start of Tuesday’s slate of games, the Brewers went 17-12 and doubled their division lead from five games to 10.

“I tried to tell you guys in Spring Training that we might surprise some people,” Yelich said. “I understand that the team, the names, the faces might be a little different than what everybody has been used to the last 5-6 years because we had a lot of young talent coming in with some veteran guys returning. In our eyes, we were still going to compete and still be a good team.

“We saw it as we were playing with house money because everybody thought we were going to suck and take a step back. In a way, that gives you a sense of freedom, like, ‘What do we have to lose?’ It drives the team. It was something you can rally around as a group.”

The group looks different this year. Of the 26 players who were on last year’s NL Wild Card Series roster against the D-backs, only 12 were on the Brewers’ active roster on Tuesday.

And yet, their odds for another playoff appearance, according to the number-crunchers at FanGraphs, stood at 99.1 percent going into Tuesday.

“I think the thing that’s made us really good this year is we have the right kind of guys,” Yelich said. “Everybody says that. But what that means is you have the right guys in terms of character and caring about winning, you can make up for a lot of things over the course of a season if the guys on your team know how to win, if you care about winning, if you compete really hard and have good teammates and a good clubhouse.

“That’s what we have. In that sense, I’m not really surprised that we are in the position we are as a team.”