What to expect from Joey Wiemer with the Brewers

Much was made this offseason about how four of the Brewers’ top five prospects are outfielders. Garrett Mitchell was the first to arrive in the Majors last season and began 2023 as Milwaukee’s Opening Day center fielder. Now, another member of the calvary is about to arrive, and he is arguably even more tooled-up than Mitchell.

The Brewers are calling up MLB Pipeline’s No. 90 overall prospect Joey Wiemer for his Major League debut, a source told MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy on Friday. The move comes after Wiemer was one of the final cuts from Milwaukee camp as the club decided to make Owen Miller and Brice Turang the final two position players.

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Instead of opening at Triple-A Nashville however, the 24-year-old outfielder will likely occupy right field with the big club, as Brian Anderson slides to third base to cover for the injured Luis Urías. Wiemer’s cannon of an arm -- he had 14 outfield assists last season between Double-A and Triple-A -- and plus speed should make him an instant defensive asset, much like Mitchell was upon his arrival in 2022.

But the separator between Wiemer being a temporary stopgap in the Majors and a productive long-term member of the 26-man roster will come down to his bat.

Taken in the fourth round of the five-round 2020 Draft out of Cincinnati, the right-handed slugger entered pro ball with a massive leg kick that was fun to watch on video and also may have contributed to high groundball rates in college. Despite his immense raw pop, Wiemer never slugged higher than .411 in school, and the Brewers immediately got to work on his setup in the box, trading the kick for a toe tap that allowed him to focus more on the quickness of his hands.

The results came quickly. Wiemer homered 27 times between two A-ball levels in 2021 and finished with a .296/.403/.556 line over 472 plate appearances. The breakout continued during a brief stay in the ‘21 Arizona Fall League, cementing Wiemer’s place as a Top 100 prospect.

However, his whippy swing remained kinetic headed into his second full season, and upper-level pitchers took advantage. Wiemer struck out a career-high 30.2 percent of the time and swung and missed at 20.4 percent of his pitches faced (second-highest swinging-strike rate in the Southern League) with Double-A Biloxi last year, and that heightened concerns that the movement and torque of his work in the box would keep him a below-average hitter in the end. A 19.5 percent K rate at Nashville following an August promotion belayed some of those worries as Wiemer stopped trying to force the issue and let his natural talents do the work.

The former Bearcat looked much the same this spring, hitting .262/.319/.429 while fanning in 10 of his 47 plate appearances (21.3 percent) in the Cactus League. Those numbers weren’t quite enough to earn him the gig straight away, but they did maintain some of his lower-K momentum.

Then again, the jumps from the spring to the regular season and Triple-A to the Majors are massive. Just ask Mitchell, who was punched out 41.2 percent of the time in his first taste of the bigs late last year. Major League pitchers can still find ways to exploit the moving parts of Wiemer’s swing and keep the whiffs coming.

If Wiemer can even keep the K rate in the high-20s in the Majors, he has easy 30-30 potential, especially with the new rules that encourage action on the basepaths. He has stolen at least 30 bags in each of his two Minor League campaigns, and the plus power is there for him to clear that threshold now that he knows how to tap into it regularly.

Power. Run. Arm. Glove. Four out of five tools can get any prospect a long way. They’ve gotten Wiemer to the game’s biggest stage, and they will likely help him pop up in multiple highlights in the weeks ahead. But that fifth tool -- the hit tool -- is the most crucial for his present and future contributions to The Crew.