(3) Jackson Chourio 2023 Bowman Chrome Draft Refractor Rc Lot #Bdc-156 Rookie

"The pitcher was throwing hard, and Jackson Chourio  wanted some.

It was the fifth inning of a mid-August game when the Brewers  prospect leaned over to High-A Wisconsin manager Joe Ayrault for a quick scouting report. On the mound, mowing down Chourio’s teammates, was South Bend Cubs fireballer Yovanny Cruz . “How hard is that?” Chourio asked his skipper. The answer: 102 mph. It should have been intimidating, but a few months into his first full professional season, little had cowed Chourio so far.

“I want to face that guy,” the prospect replied.

It took two more games, but Chourio got his chance. Cruz entered the game in the seventh and rocketed a first-pitch fastball to the top of the zone. Chourio whipped his bat around, shooting the ball into left field for a single. The hit was Chourio’s fourth of the day, and the first of them had been even more impressive. Facing Cubs  starter Danny Palencia, Chourio  had turned around 100 mph for a two-run homer.

“Some young hitters, they work themselves into a good hitter’s count and they just get big and they swing and fall down,” says Ayrault. “This was a perfect swing, smooth and effortless. I was like, ‘Wow.'”

Clobbering triple-digit fastballs with regularity is a remarkable feat for anyone, but when Chourio does it, it’s all the more amazing. When he smoked those heaters against South Bend last year, he was just 18 years old. The media guide listed him at 165 pounds. He may have been a wunderkind, but he was not a man-child. “Baby-faced,” says Brewers hitting coordinator Brenton Del Chiaro. “Long and lean.” On average, Chourio was more than four years younger than the rest of the Midwest League. He was the only player in the league born in 2004.

That he can do that,  that he can leverage so much power from his still-maturing frame and lightning-quick hands, is exactly what makes Chourio the pride of the Brewers’ system and one of the best prospects in baseball. The Brewers saw a future star in Chourio first, but like the young outfielder facing 100 mph gas, everyone else has caught up quickly. Chourio started last year in extended spring training and didn’t make his full-season debut until May. After destroying the Low-A Carolina League for two months — Chourio hit .324 with a .973 OPS and 12 home runs — the Brewers jumped him to High A. By the end of the year, he was patrolling center for Double-A Biloxi. Ascents that rapid can give one the bends. Entering last year, Chourio was not listed among The Athletic ’s Top 100 prospects. Going into this season, he’s No. 3 .

He’s a known quantity now, but familiarity breeds only further appreciation when it comes to the young Venezuelan. Now barely 19, he is only marginally taller and slightly more muscular than he was a year ago. His smile now beams with the glint of braces, underscoring his youth. Yet, despite outward appearances, he has matured. He still has those quick hands and that efficient swing, but he also has a better idea of how to deploy them. He is learning to attack his at-bats with precision, hunting for pitches he can destroy. Even pitches over 100 miles an hour.

He is on a startlingly straight trajectory — few peaks and valleys, says Brewers farm director Tom Flanagan, “more arrows pointing up” — and Chourio is rapidly approaching its terminus. He climbed three levels last year, and while the journey will get tougher, little has seemed difficult for him to this point. He should reach majors before his 21st birthday, and possibly before he leaves his teens.

Baseball, most experts agree, is supposed to be hard.

It often seems as if Chourio didn’t get that memo. A different Chourio exploit sticks in the memory of every Brewers staffer, although they’re all connected by a common thread. Pitches he shouldn’t have barreled, not at those velocities and in those locations. Balls that shouldn’t have traveled that far, not at his age and with his frame. The fullest picture of Chourio combines all of them, and the young slugger has a knack for presenting them in tidy packages. In his first spring game with the big-league club earlier this month, Chourio hit balls with exit velocities of 104, 108 and 111 mph — two went for doubles — and cut down a runner at the plate. Two weeks later in a back-fields game, he smoked a hit at 108 mph and nailed a runner at home again.

“You just start to stack all these things up,” says Cam Castro, the team’s vice president of player development, “and you’re like, ‘It should take more than four innings to see all of that from one player.'”

The Brewers can’t claim to have seen all  of this coming, at least not with this kind of speed and ferocity, but Chourio’s breakout last year wasn’t a complete shock. They’ve known about his finer qualities for a while. Chourio was hardly a secret as an amateur in Venezuela, and his strength, speed and willingness to shoot balls to the opposite gap led the Brewers to lavish him with a $1.8 million bonus three years ago. He was the star of Milwaukee’s international class, but the light from stars usually takes a long time to reach Earth. What has surprised the Brewers is how Chourio put all of his various tools together so quickly.

Chourio debuted in 2021 as a 17-year-old in the Dominican Summer League, where he experienced one of his very few periods of struggle. “I didn’t start too well,” the outfielder notes through interpreter Carlos Brizuela. “I was almost 0 for my first 20 at-bats.” He finished batting .296 with an .833 OPS. The next step usually is the Arizona Complex League, although Chourio skipped that level entirely. The only thing that held him back was Milwaukee, not because the Brewers weren’t hip to his talent but because they were hyper-aware of it. Knowing that Chourio was destined to jump to a full-season affiliate from the DSL, the Brewers held him in extended spring training last year not for the extra at-bats but to work on the life skills he’d need once he was out on his own.

Chourio torched extended spring training, seeming to homer at an every-other-game pace and likely speeding his planned promotion to Low A. It was a challenging assignment for an 18-year-old, and while the Brewers didn’t think he’d fail, says Del Chiaro, “I don’t think we expected him to go nuclear like he did.” As the youngest player on the Mudcats, Chourio turned in more multi-hit games (21) than hitless ones (13). Despite not having faced anything much harder than 92 mph as an amateur, he had virtually no trouble with pitches coming in nearly 10 mph harder. The reason for that, Brewers folks say, is Chourio’s incredible bat speed.

Until last year, bat speed was an anecdotal metric, something largely in the eye of the beholder. But with Hawk-Eye tracking systems abounding in baseball, bat speed can be measured with precision. Average major-league bat speed is between 81-83 mph, Del Chiaro says. (That roughly matches findings by MLB.com’s Mike Petriello  last July.) The hitting coordinator says that Chourio’s average bat speed is 85 mph. That’s how he generates so much power despite his still-youthful build. Chourio’s 90th-percentile exit velocity — essentially, chopping off the top 10 percent of his batted balls — is 102 mph.

Chourio’s slugging percentage with Carolina was .600, second highest among any hitter in the league with at least 250 plate appearances. The hitter ahead of him, Boston prospect Niko Kavadas , was five years older. Chourio also clubbed 12 home runs with the Mudcats, and “he could have had eight more,” Del Chiaro thinks, if not for the high outfield fences at Carolina’s Five County Stadium.

That’s the stuff — the whip of his bat through the zone, the crack of the ball off of it, the way balls tend to come in at 100 mph and leave even faster — that catches the eye. But the Brewers are excited for Chourio not just because he can slug.

They’re excited because he can hit.

It’s the first day of minor-league camp when Chourio ducks into the outdoor batting cage at Milwaukee’s spring training complex in Phoenix for a warm-up session. A tune is blaring through a speaker, but the young phenom isn’t feeling it. “Next!” he says, shaking his head. A press of a button produces the El Farsante remix by Ozuna and Romeo Stantos, drawing a nod of his head. He then steps into the batter’s box and soon the whack of his bat against the ball is echoing across the cage.

Chourio is just as discerning when it comes to pitch selection, it turns out. Watching him take a pitch is almost as entertaining as watching him hit one. He’ll nod vigorously when a close pitch is called a ball, and will shake his head when it’s not. Every so often, you can hear an exhortation as the ball crosses the plate. “No!” he will yell. This is Chourio’s internal dialogue leaking out for all to hear — sometimes loud enough last year that it’d be picked up on the game broadcast.

“That’s something I’ve always said in my head. Sometimes, I’m just too into the at-bat that it just comes out,” Chourio says. “It’s me talking to myself.”

Swing decisions have been a frequent area of emphasis with Chourio, but it makes for a good foundation that he’s this engaged in his plate appearances. In the cage, the Brewers run a drill to work on laying off pitches outside the zone. It’s conducted in short bursts, and with consequences. “If you chase one,” says Del Chiaro, “the round’s over.” Another turn will come around, but the time in between is inevitably spent reflecting on that last, ill-advised swing. Del Chiaro says Chourio “was always the first one to adapt.”

In Carolina, Chourio succeeded despite some swing-and-miss tendencies. His walk-to-strikeout ratio of 1-to-4 was ninth worst in the Carolina League, although his overall performance didn’t leave many teachable moments. The Brewers latched on to what they could, which was often a stray 0-for-4 night among his frequent laser shows. By the time he moved up to High-A Wisconsin at midseason, he’d become a more mature hitter. He improved his walk numbers and though he swung and missed with about the same frequency, his strikeout rate dropped eight points.

That’s thanks to a mature two-strike approach. Chourio already has a swing that helps maximize contact — he bridges the paradox of having great bat speed while keeping his barrel in the zone for a long time — and he tightens things up even more when he’s down to his last strike. He shortens his stride and is even more direct to the ball, and his incredible power allows him to still do damage. Nine of his 20 home runs came with two strikes last season, as did 25 of his 55 extra-base hits. He slugged .416 with two strikes in 2022. Last year, there were 90 hitters at the High-A level who didn’t slug that well no matter the count. Chourio also had an OPS of 1.000 or better in seven different counts, including 1-1 (1.256) and 0-1 (1.317).

Chourio got a bit swing-happy upon hitting Double A, but the Brewers felt he was a much smarter hitter by the end of the season than he was at the beginning. “He started funneling more pitches over the strike zone,” Del Chiaro says, an approach that Chourio confirms. “When I go up there early in an at-bat, I’m just looking for one pitch, trying to do damage for one pitch,” he says. “Once I get to two strikes, I’m trying to stay alive and put the bat on the ball and fight.” His numbers at High A were less superhuman — a .252 average and .805 OPS — but that might have been due to the rigors of a long season on a young kid. Cut out eight September games, and Chourio hit .269/.340/.538 with the Timber Rattlers.

The question now is: What will he do next? And where?

During an off day last summer, Chourio and a teammate decided to check out Milwaukee. They hopped in a car and made the roughly two-hour drive from the Timber Rattlers’ home in Appleton, Wisc., to American Family Field. He’d been to a big-league game before, in Miami, but he wanted to see his future workplace. It sparked a feeling in him that has lingered.

“As soon as I touched the warning track, you felt it. You felt it. You felt it was a different atmosphere,” he says. “You look around and you see the stands are a lot bigger, and you feel how special it is to be there.”

His true arrival in Milwaukee is eagerly anticipated. When Chourio was with Carolina, Flanagan would hear often from High-A Wisconsin staff asking when the phenom would be promoted. Fans would call the Timber Rattlers’ office begging for intel, and Carolina League coaches would call Ayrault hoping he could convince the Brewers to get Chourio out of there. And that was just buzz surrounding his eventual promotion to High A.

The road to the majors could start back there in 2023, or it could start in Biloxi, where Chourio wrapped up last season. When speaking about him, Brewers staffers leave room for both outcomes. Wherever he begins, he’ll spend the largest chunk of his season in the Southern League — unless, of course, he plays himself out of that level as quickly as he did all the others. “We’ve shown in the past we’re not afraid to challenge guys,” Flanagan says. “If he does what he did last year, the sky’s the limit.”

So will be the hype. Chourio is aware of the attention around him, although he shows few signs of being burdened by it. “As much as we think it’s the Chourio Show,” says Castro, “to him, it’s not.” His younger brother, Jaison, is a prospect with the Guardians , and when asked who is the better player, Chourio offers a skeptical “Me?” (There is another Chourio, an 11-year-old catcher named James, about whom Chourio is a bit blunter with his assessment. “He still needs a little strength,” he says. “He’s a little weak.”) His favorite player, Mariners  star Julio Rodríguez, is only three years older than he is. Chourio is on pace to beat Rodríguez’s blazing timeline to the majors by at least a year. Pretty soon, they’ll be peers.

But for now, Brewers fans can find Chourio on the back fields in Phoenix, putting on a show for Milwaukee staffers and a smattering of looky-loos and autograph hounds. In a matter of days, when camp breaks, the Chourio Show will hit the road, bound for the Midwest or the Deep South. Wherever the destination, spectators should get their tickets now."

                                                                                                                         -The Athletic, Written by Zach Bunchanan (3/23/23)