People usually aren’t known for their poise at age 23, no matter the profession. It’s a weird stage, out of college, testing the waters of true adulthood, and often facing grown-up challenges for the first time.
But Brewers rookie second baseman Keston Hiura is an anomaly. He already performs and carries himself like he’s been in the majors for years. And on a team that’s locked in a tight division race with the Cardinals and Cubs, Hiura is bound to play an important role in getting Milwaukee back to the postseason, where they came a game short of the World Series in 2018.
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So far, he has made the most noise with his bat. Hiura is batting .308 with a 141 wRC+ in 266 plate appearances this season.
“It seems like something that he was just born with. It’s natural,” teammate Christian Yelich told Sporting News of Hiura’s hitting.
Brewers manager Craig Counsell has used Hiura in the top half of his batting order in close to 50 percent of his at-bats, a clear sign of the trust Hiura has already earned.
“We needed him to be in that spot,” Yelich said. “And he’s responded and done really well.”
Some of Hiura’s best work has come in the cleanup spot, where he’s hitting .350 and has clubbed five of his home runs and nine of his doubles. He has also thrived in the sixth and seventh spots in the order, hitting .327 and .373, respectively. Since being called up initially on May 14, Hiura has quickly established himself as useful almost no matter where he hits.
“I was looking to come here and do what I’m capable of doing, doing whatever I can to help the team win,” Hiura said.
But Hiura’s initial callup was short-lived, and he spent the month of June in Triple-A, despite having hit .296 during that first stint in the majors. That’s where his poise showed again. Hiura went back to the minors and batted .320 with eight homers and four doubles in San Antonio before he was summoned back to join Milwaukee on June 28.
To those who have known him since long before he was a pro, the way he handled what looked from the outside like an unfair demotion was no surprise.
“When you have a guy that’s level-headed and has no ego, you can’t make a guy do that or teach a guy to do that. That’s just something in him,” Ben Orloff, head baseball coach at the University of California Irvine, told Sporting News. “He’s probably had that since he was 8, 9, 10 years old.”
Orloff was the assistant coach at UC Irvine during all three of Hiura’s years there, and he was involved in the process of recruiting Hiura as a high school player. He first saw Hiura when he was a sophomore at Valencia High School in California. He and the other coaches at UC Irvine knew early on that he was something special, but predicting the future success of a high school kid is an inexact science.
Hiura was the subject of much media coverage even as a high schooler, and that continued into college. In that, Orloff saw some of the kind of player and person Hiura was. The attention never affected him, and to this day he’s never felt the need to boast about his success. As a college player, Hiura was more likely to gush over the talents of his teammates or even his opponents.
And like what he’s done with the Brewers, Hiura was instantly important to the Irvine lineup. He hit third in the order from the beginning and did it successfully. In the season opener against Fresno State Hiura’s freshman year, he took little time showing off what he could do.
“In his third-ever college at-bat, he hits a breaking ball out to right field,” Orloff said. “Guys don’t do that.”
In college, Hiura played out of position for almost all of his career, starting in the outfield most of the time rather than his preferred spot at second base. During his junior year, Hiura couldn’t play defense at all because of a bad elbow. So he was a DH.
“And led the country in hitting,” Orloff said.
That year, Hiura hit .442 with a 1.261 OPS despite not being able to do what he wanted and play second base. Like how he handled being sent down by the Brewers earlier this summer, Hiura just rolled with it and did his best.
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Hiura said that when he was first called up to the majors in May he was told that it was going to be a temporary stint. His initial promotion coincided with Travis Shaw’s wrist injury, and then when Shaw was healthy again, Hiura was sent down again, no matter how well he had been doing at the plate. But when Shaw continued to struggle, he was sent down at the end of June and Hiura came back to the Brewers. This time to stay, it seems.
“I didn’t know how long it was going to be, so I was trying to make the most out of it,” Hiura said of his May callup. “I knew at some point I’d be going back down, and I think just knowing that I just told myself, at the end of the day it’s just business, do what you do, and do what you can to get back up here.”
That’s how Hiura has always operated, Orloff said. Through playing out of position and the injury his last year at Irvine, Hiura just kept putting his team first.
Hirua’s also one of the smartest players Orloff has ever coached, a quality Orloff said he believes was overlooked by MLB scouts. Orloff said that Hiura’s innate feel for the game on both sides of the ball is the best that he’s ever seen. Though as a major leaguer Hiura’s defense has not yet been a standout quality, his ability to read balls was practically instinctual.
“Everybody works on it, everybody practices it, and he was always good at it,” Orloff said.
In the majors, Hiura has impressed teammates for the way he has hit like a veteran. Yelich said that the way Hiura has jumped on mistake pitches by opposing pitchers has belied his experience.
“It doesn’t really matter what the report is or whatnot, it’s just like he hasn’t missed mistakes,” Yelich said. “When he gets mistakes, he’s done a really good job. That’s what hitting in the big leagues is.”
That kind of poise will play well for the Brewers in the final weeks of the season. With 35 games left to play and 13 of those against the Cubs and Cardinals, Milwaukee sits four games behind the Cubs for the top spot in the NL Central and three games behind the second-place Cardinals. In the wild card race, they trail St. Louis, New York and Philadelphia. It was around this point in 2018 when the Brewers took off and eventually won the division on the way to facing the Rockies and Dodgers in the playoffs. At the start of September last year, they were five games behind the Cubs and a half game behind the Cardinals. The Brewers ended up going 19-7 that month and won the division for the first time since 2011.
If Milwaukee is going to repeat that magic, they’ll need Hiura. Twenty-three or not, he’s that good.
“He just lengthens the lineup even more,” Yelich said, “and we’re going to continue to need his contribution down the stretch.”