Hiura on struggles: It's early in season

Keston Hiura is enduring a rough start at the plate and in the field, and on Monday he had the mild limp to prove it.

“I don't even know how those MMA fighters do it,” he said.

Hiura entered the Brewers’ first road series of the season with a bruised thigh, the result of being run over by the Twins’ Mitch Garver as Hiura tried to cover first base on a ground ball into shallow right field. Garver was safe, and thankfully, Hiura was not seriously injured.

Hiura, entering a 162-game Major League season for the first time, is learning on the job out there where everyone can see. He committed his first error as a first baseman on an errant throw toward second base on Sunday; throws tended to be his problem when he was the Brewers’ second baseman, one reason the team was open to signing Gold Glove Award-winner Kolten Wong over the offseason and moving Hiura to first. Hiura, a middle infielder all his life, is learning when to ignore the voice in his head screaming, “Go get it!” and let the second baseman make the play.

At the plate, meanwhile, Hiura is 0-for-15 with eight strikeouts. In three games against the Twins he swung at 45 percent of pitches outside the strike zone. In Monday’s 5-3 loss to the Cubs, he uncharacteristically swung and missed within the zone.

“Anytime you’re not doing well at the plate it’s frustrating,” Hiura said entering Monday's series opener. “But at the end of the day, you’ve got to think it’s only three games. It’s really, really early in the season.”

Monday was particularly tough at the plate. In the fourth inning, Hiura swung right through two fastballs from Chicago starter Trevor Williams before striking out on a slider. In the sixth, with the bases loaded, Hiura again missed two hittable fastballs, starting with a first-pitch swing and miss on an 89.1-mph sinker. Two pitches later, Hiura got another middle-middle sinker, but he fouled it off. He grounded into a double play on the next pitch after that.

“It looked to me, without looking at the video, that he swung through a bunch of pitches in the zone and those are pitches that have to be hit,” manager Craig Counsell said. “He didn't have a good night tonight. He finished spring in a great place, really, he was as good as we've seen him for a while. He's off to a little bit of a slow start but we'll get him going.”

The Brewers are quite convinced that Hiura will better control the strike zone in time, considering that’s what he did while putting big offensive numbers in college at UC-Irvine, in Milwaukee’s Minor League system, and then as a Brewers rookie following a callup in 2019.

Defensively, however, he has a lot of developing to do. Before this spring, he’d never played first base. Now, he has to learn a new position with everyone watching -- and offering their critiques.

“At the end of the day, it's the same game you've played your whole life,” Hiura said. “When you failed as a kid, what's the best way to learn from that? It's making the next play, or practicing it off the field when no one is looking. …

“I've always been pretty good about shaking things off, moving on to the next play, to the next at-bat. That's something I always took pride on throughout my whole life, so I definitely give a lot of credit to former mentors, teammates, coaches, all of that, to help me kind of realize that there's always another play -- not even in baseball, but in life in general, to make yourself better.”

That’s a philosophy Counsell could get behind.

"This is a little bit of the psychology of just being an athlete or being on stage, a performer of some sort. That's the life -- you generally get used to it,” Counsell said. “Every player -- taking out Keston -- makes mistakes. They make them on a stage. They're criticized. And they have to perform the next moment or the next day. I think if you got to this place, you understand that. And if you're going to survive in this place and this job, you're going to be able to process that, put that behind you and know how to use it.”

Last call

• Assistant athletic trainer Dave Yeager was not with the team in Chicago following a fainting spell on the field during Saturday’s game against the Twins after assisting umpire C.B. Bucknor with his own medical scare. When Yeager had another spell of lightheadedness in the clubhouse, he was taken to a local hospital for observation as a precaution. Counsell connected with Yeager on Sunday night and said the 17-year organizational veteran “was in great spirits.” Yeager has since been released from the hospital and it's to be determined whether he joins the club on this road trip, president of baseball operations David Stearns said following Monday's game.

• Counsell called it “amazing” that the Cubs’ core from the 2016 World Series championship club is still intact, starting with Javier Baéz, Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Willson Contreras and Jason Heyward. Counsell said, “The core of the lineup is still certainly very noteworthy and very good. That's the first thing your eyes kind of always go to."