Yelich's back surgery successful, should be healthy in spring

MILWAUKEE -- Christian Yelich was at home on Friday afternoon resting from what the Brewers characterized as successful back surgery while his team faced the reality of playing the rest of this season without him.

It helps to be 10 games up on the rest of the National League Central with 40 to play after the Brewers’ 5-3 win over the Guardians at American Family Field, with Aaron Civale pitching six scoreless innings against one of his former teams and Willy Adames providing early support with a first-inning home run -- the shortstop’s 10th three-run homer of the year.

The Brewers even got triples from Jackson Chourio and Joey Ortiz and RBIs from Brice Turang and Garrett Mitchell. They are all among the young players who will have to keep stepping up with Yelich down.

“When you lose a guy like him, it’s a big hole in the team, you know?” Adames said. “We just have to continue to grind and maybe we can make it to the World Series to make it worth it for him.”

Dr. Brandon Rebholz performed Yelich’s surgery -- “a discectomy of some kind,” according to GM Matt Arnold, who described an emotional meeting earlier this week with Yelich and Brewers manager Pat Murphy. By having the procedure now, Yelich should be healthy for the start of Spring Training next year.

“We’ve overcome a lot this year. We’re going to have to deal with more adversity and we’re OK with that,” Arnold said. “On the bright side, hopefully we get a really happy and healthy and pain-free Christian Yelich in the future.”

That wasn’t the case recently.

“I can tell you he was in a lot of pain,” Arnold said. “He had shooting pains through his leg and his back, and he was trying like crazy to come back. He’s worked incredibly hard.”

Much of the Brewers’ recent success -- five postseason appearances and three division titles in the past six years, with a good chance to add to both totals this year -- ties directly to the 32-year-old Yelich, who was leading NL qualifiers with a .315 batting average and a .406 on-base percentage, and was coming off an All-Star Game start, when he succumbed to back pain and landed on the injured list on July 24.

“It just got to the point where it wasn’t getting better,” Yelich said Thursday night in announcing that his comeback bid was over.

“He needed to do this,” Murphy said. “He’s got a lot left in his career, and I think this is going to really clear some things up. It’s been obvious that he’s had a back issue for a long time. It was inevitable that if you swing like that, with that much torque -- the biomechanics people will tell you that with that frame and his ability to rotate and his flexibility in that area, that it’s amazing that it lasted 12 years.”

Yelich is in the fifth season of the nine-year, $215 million contract extension he inked in March 2020, after winning the NL MVP Award in ‘18 and finishing runner-up in ‘19 despite missing most of that September with a fractured kneecap from a foul ball. He’s under contract until ‘28, with a $20 million mutual option for 2029, when Yelich will be in his age-37 season.

“I’ve said it for years, he’s already earned the money,” Murphy said. “This is the greatest era of Brewers history, and Christian Yelich is right in the thick of it if not the leading point of it. His temperament, the way he goes about his business, the way he affects others.

“We’re living it every day, so it’s harder to feel, maybe. I see it because I know. Taking on this position, you get an even more in-depth look at the inside of the engine, and Christian Yelich’s fingerprints are all over this team.”

One man who knows Yelich’s impact is in the other dugout for this series. Guardians manager Stephen Vogt is a former Brewer who described being “devastated” by the news that Yelich had been forced to abandon his comeback attempt.

“I texted him to see if he wanted to grab breakfast, and he was like, ‘I can’t, I’m going to be going into surgery,’” Vogt said. “This game is better when the best players in the world are on the field.”

With Yelich down, the only other Brewers outfielder who came into this season with more than one year of Major League service is center fielder Mitchell. Left field has been handled by 20-year-old rookie Chourio, and Frelick has been playing a lot of right field. Switch-hitter Blake Perkins is on the IL with a calf strain but is eligible to return beginning Aug. 22.

“It’s next man up,” Frelick said. “We just have to stick to our brand of baseball.”

And that means not trying to replace Yelich.

“For the rest of the guys in the locker room, it’s not like we have to change anything,” Frelick said. “The bunters on our team will still be bunting. We’re going to run and steal bases. We’re going to play defense. Everyone knows what their role is, and we can still win baseball games doing that.”