There is a pretty obvious favorite for National League MVP, a guy who unfortunately plies his trade for the team 90 miles down I-94. But just because Pete Crow-Armstrong is likely to win the MVP (and if he weren’t, the inevitable Shohei Ohtani is lurking behind), that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t celebrate the guy who should be in that conversation and has a real case to finish in the top three: Brice Turang.
Turang, who has played in 112 of Milwaukee’s 118 games as of Monday morning, is having
the best full season of what has already become an excellent career; I think it’s safe to say at this point that Turang is, pretty clearly, the best second baseman in the history of the Brewers. Via FanGraphs WAR, Turang has already matched his career high from last season, and via Baseball Reference, he’s just behind. He will cruise by both numbers, as he’s currently on pace for slightly over seven bWAR (compared to a career high of 5.5) and about six fWAR (4.4).
His surface-level stats are headed for career highs, too. Turang will sail past previous high-water marks in doubles (he has 27, with a career high of 28 in 2025) and home runs (16 versus 18 last year), and he’s currently got his career-best OPS+ or wRC+ or whatever you prefer (126 versus 121 in OPS+, 127 versus 124 in wRC+).
The big change this season, though, is Turang’s defense, which has returned to the excellent levels of 2024 after a significant step back in advanced metrics last season. Baseball Reference bases their defensive statistics on the Defensive Runs Saved metric (DRS), and look how Turang’s last three seasons have gone:
- 2024: +22 DRS, 2.8 defensive WAR (which led the NL)
- 2025: +6 DRS, 1.1 dWAR
- 2026: +16 DRS, 2.1 dWAR
FanGraphs’ defensive numbers draw their data from Statcast’s Outs Above Average (OAA) model. A similar story is told there:
- 2024: 6 OAA (90th percentile), 76th percentile fielding run value
- 2025: -1 OAA (34th percentile), 50th percentile fielding run value
- 2026: 10 OAA (98th percentile), 97th percentile fielding run value
In 2024, when Turang won the Platinum Glove, DRS was mostly in alignment with that choice while OAA saw him as good but probably not the best defensive player in the league. This season, OAA and DRS are aligned: Turang has been one of the league’s best defensive players. Via Statcast’s fielding run value, only eight players rank ahead of Turang, while by DRS, only the Dodgers’ Andy Pages has more than Turang. (It is perhaps worth noting that while OAA ranks Crow-Armstrong as the league’s best fielder by a relatively immense margin, he ranks fifth, behind Turang, via DRS.)
In any case, I have written before that if Turang could find a way to combine last season’s offensive production with the defense and baserunning of 2024, then he would become an MVP caliber player, something that seemed unimaginable when he was a slick-fielding slap hitter in 2023 and 2024.
It has mostly happened. Turang’s defense this season is as good as it was when he won his 2024 Platinum Glove, and he’s on target to complete a full season with the offensive prowess that suddenly appeared about a year ago. The only thing that’s missing is the baserunning. In 2024, Turang stole 50 bases and was caught only six times, a legendary season on the basepaths. Those numbers dipped to 24 steals in 32 tries last season, and this season he’s in roughly that same zone, with 16 steals in 20 tries. The metrics that try to measure baserunning reflect this downward trend as well:
- 2024: 7 Rbaser (BRef), 7.3 BsR (FanGraphs), 98th percentile (Statcast)
- 2025: 3 Rbaser, 2.6 BsR, 84th percentile
- 2026: 0 Rbaser, 1.4 BsR, 65th percentile
But Turang turning from one of the league’s best baserunners to merely a slightly above-average one is nothing more than a mild disappointment when taken in context. Baseball Reference has had DRS at its disposal since 2003. In the 23 seasons since then, there are only 24 seasons in which a player reached 20 fielding runs (which Turang is easily on track for) with an OPS+ of 125 or better (Turang is currently at 126). Those 24 seasons consisted of:
- Seven top-five MVP finishes, including one winner (Cody Bellinger in 2019)
- 11 more MVP finishes between sixth and tenth
The players who achieved these seasons are predictably among the best of the century. Among the 19 players to hit these benchmarks:
- Five did it twice (Nolan Arenado, Mookie Betts, Matt Chapman, Evan Longoria, and Chase Utley)
- Nine are in the Hall of Fame or have, at minimum, a very good chance of getting elected in the future (Arenado, Betts, Utley, Scott Rolen, Manny Machado, Ichiro Suzuki, Albert Pujols, Adrian Beltré, and Aaron Judge)
- Six others have shakier Hall of Fame cases but have at least 40 career bWAR (Ryan Zimmerman, Mark Teixiera, Carlos Correa, Ben Zobrist, Chapman, and Longoria—who I would vote for if I had a HOF vote!)
- The only players with less than 40 career WAR who’ve had a season like this are Bellinger, Jarren Duran, Nick Markakis, and—wait for it—Carlos Gómez, who had a 128 OPS+ and 29 fielding runs in 2013.
Partially I include this list because there’s nothing I love more than making lists of good baseball players. But I’m also doing it to illuminate that Turang has reached an MVP-ish level, even if only one of the qualifying seasons mentioned above actually won an MVP. (If we had the information we have now, that might be different; I’d give Ichiro the 2004 MVP, and there are a handful of these other seasons where I now see the player as deserving of a second- or third-place MVP finish where their actual place was substantially lower.)
This season, Turang is deserving of that type of MVP finish if he stays on his current level of production, and deserving of the highest finish for a Brewer in the MVP race since Christian Yelich was second in 2019. Crow-Armstrong should win the NL MVP this year, and Ohtani will probably finish second, but after that I don’t see anyone more deserving than Turang. In terms of bWAR, he’s neck-and-neck with Pages and the Marlins’ Otto Lopez for fourth in the NL (Philadelphia’s Cristopher Sánchez is third behind PCA and Ohtani, but pitchers don’t really get MVP votes these days, which also applies to Jacob Misiorowski, who might otherwise garner some consideration).
There’s still a decent chunk of season left and we’ll see how things shake out, but the Brewers right now have the best record in the league and Turang is their best non-pitcher. Turang almost certainly will not win the MVP, but he’s deserving of a third-place vote for MVP, and one could even make an argument that he should finish higher than Ohtani if he doesn’t pitch anymore this season. The history books don’t exactly spend a lot of ink on players who finished third place in MVP voting, but it would be a major accomplishment: in the nearly 57-year history of the Milwaukee Brewers, only six players have ever had a top-three MVP finish (Yelich in 2018 and 2019, Ryan Braun in 2008, 2011, and 2012, Prince Fielder in 2007 and 2011, Robin Yount in 1982 and 1989, Rollie Fingers in 1981, and Larry Hisle in 1978).
Turang deserves to be added to that list. In a season when the offense’s two biggest leaders are both struggling to be productive, someone needed to step in. Turang has done so, during a season that will go down as the best ever by a Brewer second baseman. (At least until next year, right?)
