MILWAUKEE — Brice Turang doesn’t always stay late on the field to hit. Some years, he said he doesn’t do it all. But two nights before the start of the National League Championship Series, the Brewers second baseman felt the need.
Turang was one of the most valuable position players in Major League Baseball this year. He hit 21 homers and led the Brewers in hits, runs scored and RBIs. But that production didn’t translate into the National League Division Series, where he went 2-for-16 against the Padres.
So he decided to hit, hit and hit with Brewers hitting coach Daniel Vogelbach and player performance consultant Jace Peterson late Friday night, trying to find the right feel with his hands and a better path to baseball.
“I like trying to figure it out,” Turang said. “Like I grew up banging all the time for late nights. So sometimes it brings me back to being a kid.”
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Brewers manager Pat Murphy was throwing baseballs to his kids when he noticed Turang still working out of the Ferry car.
Murphy told me that Turang and the hitting coaches were in the cages by 10 p.m., five hours after the Brewers’ practice ended. Vogelbach could not confirm it, because he completely lost track of time.
“We could have been here not too long, and with that guy, you feel like a moment is coming,” Vogelbach said. “Good players will always come back to be good players. You never feel like he’s far from being Brice.”
In his first at-bat against Tarik Skubal in Game 1, Turang hit a kneeball before getting out.
In his turn, the Brewers’ lefty did something comparable only to a four-time MVP.
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Shohei Ohtani was the only left-handed pitcher during the 2026 regular season to send a pitch from a lefty into the inner third of the plate to the opposite side for a home run. Ohtani accomplished the feat twice, but neither came on a fastball with the velocity Turang saw Monday night.
“Sometimes, facing the lefty makes you more closed than anything,” Murphy said, “because you know you have to stay tight and you know you have to stay square.”
Skubal picked the Brewers’ lineup for the first time through the order Monday night, racking up six hits in the process. “It looked like he was going to dominate,” Vogelbach said.
And then came Turang’s slump-busting swing.
The fourth blast changed the course of Game 1, catalyzed the Brewers offense — who responded by striking out Skubal after a 26-pitch fifth — and could have gotten Milwaukee’s most productive position player going again in a 2-1 victory.
“Just trying not to kick it off my feet anymore,” Turang joked. “Yeah, if that’s a way to help you stay inside the ball, is hitting a ball off your foot or off your leg, then maybe that’s what it was for. Yeah, I was just trying to stay inside it and get it back up the middle.”
He did more than that.
(Photo by Daniel Shirey / MLB Pictures via Getty Images)
Turang took a 2-0 lead in the count when Skubal expertly placed a 95.5 mph sinker on the inside edge of the plate. The Brewers second baseman got his hands on it and somehow sent it 102.5 mph from 384 feet to the other end for a game-tying solo shot.
“You don’t see that a ton,” center fielder Garrett Mitchell told me. “But nothing surprises me about a guy like Brice. That’s why he’s one of the best in the game.”
Jake Bauers, another of his fellow Brewers lefties, was more incredulous.
During a pitch change later in the game, Bauers asked Turang where the pitch was.
“He said he was in,” Bauers recalled. “I was like, ‘What do you mean it was on?’ He said: ‘Yes, it was inside.’ Having seen a lot of lefties at 97 in my life, I have no idea how he hit it to left-center.”
Bauers credited that, in part, to Turang’s strength.
(Photo by Patrick McDermott/Getty Images)
Turang may not be the most physically imposing figure at 6-foot-1, 190 pounds, but he will display his raw power with epic moves in batting practice.
“It’s pretty impressive,” Bauers told me. “It’s not what you think when you look at it. The whip it can produce is second to none.”
While many in the Brewers club were in awe of Turang’s feat, Milwaukee southpaw JoJo Romero was not.
On May 4, Romero was pitching for the rival Cardinals when Turang threw a sinker in the inner half of the plate. Turang sent it the other way at 100.9 mph off the bat.
However, he was a single, not a homer. And it came with a 92 mph two-run homer, not a 96 mph drive from the American League Cy Young Award winner, who had allowed just four home runs to a lefty all year.
Turang entered Game 1 of the NLCS with just three total home runs off lefties this year and had performed much better against righties (.901 OPS) than southpaws (.619) overall. He didn’t have any extra-base hits in the NLDS, and he had just one hit in four games in last year’s NLCS against the Dodgers.
But the Brewers, with their Game 1 win, have already proven that they are not last year’s team.
And the extra work paid off.
“It’s something he’s been told he’s done since he was a kid with his dad,” Vogelbach said. “It’s just who he is … You always think he’s one step away from going back to being Brice Turang.”
