Wong's 2023 option picked up by Brewers

MILWAUKEE -- As the 2022 Brewers prepared to play their final game, second baseman Kolten Wong was asked to assess the plusses and minuses of his second season in Milwaukee. He started with the latter.

“Obviously the defense is a minus,” Wong said. “I have to get that cleaned up.”

Wong will get a chance to clean it up during another season in Milwaukee. The Brewers exercised his $10 million club option on Tuesday and are bringing Wong back for a third season. The club would have owed a $2 million buyout had it declined.

"I'm actually surprised that it would be considered a surprise," Brewers GM Matt Arnold said. "He's been a really good player here for a number of years. We felt like this is a championship-caliber player who can be part of a really good team here."

That decision left one more club option to decide. The Brewers have until Thursday to bring back reliable reliever Brad Boxberger for $3 million or pay a $750,000 buyout.

Milwaukee, which signed Wong following the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and moved defensively deficient Keston Hiura off second base, has yet to get the level of defense that led the former St. Louis Cardinal to back-to-back Gold Glove Awards in 2019-20. In ‘21, Wong ranked in the middle of MLB second basemen at zero outs above average, then fell to 38th of 39 ranked players at -9 OAA in ‘22. In FanGraphs’ measure of defense, Wong ranked 27th of the 29 second basemen who played at least 500 innings in the field in 2022. By defensive runs saved, he was 18th of the 29 at -1.

But Wong, who turned 32 shortly after the regular season ended, is optimistic about next season.

“I think without the shifts is going to help me a lot,” he said, referring to defensive restrictions coming to MLB in 2023. “When we started shifting a lot more, I started to get a lot more timid and looking at the player next to me more than the ball. It put me in bad situations with my feet and the angles that I usually take. It just wasn’t a proud year for me. No excuses. I just have to get better.”

Better health should help. Wong said he battled lower body issues throughout the season, including a right calf injury from a hit-by-pitch in June that lingered despite treatment and experimentation with footwear.

Beyond that, it’s a matter of starting fresh.

“Last year, I had a lot of moving parts with my personal life and my baseball life and the lockout; it just threw a wrench in how an offseason usually goes for me,” Wong said. “I’ve looked at enough video to understand where I was and the mistakes I was making. A lot of it is angles and how I’m attacking the baseball. I’m usually very direct with my angles, which allows me to get to the [preferred] hop. This year, I was rounding off a lot of ground balls and trying to get in front of too many ground balls, which was causing me to boot some and putting me in the wrong position to make throws. I just have to clean that up.”

Said Arnold: "Look, a lot of what we saw was in the first half. I think there are a number of different reasons you could explain that away, but he got really good in the second half. That's the standard he set. That is a credit to him because he is a really good worker. To have him back [after] what we saw in the second half, we're really excited about it."

On the positive side, Wong is coming off arguably his best season at the plate. His 118 OPS+ and 116 wRC+ were career highs as Wong slashed .251/.339/.430. By wRC+, Wong was seventh of 32 second basemen who had at least 400 plate appearances.

“I used to be a guy who prided myself on having a high average, trying to play the old school game,” he said. “Nowadays, the way the business is ran, you have to follow the trends. It’s OPS and slugging and on-base percentage. You just have to follow it.”

Baseball hopes the rule changes coming next year -- from banning the shift to instituting a pitch clock and limiting the number of times a pitcher can throw over to first base -- revive some of the “old school” action Wong was talking about.

“I hope so, just for the sake of baseball fans, for the kids who are coming up," Wong said. "Stuff like OPS and slugging and all of this, I feel like it really hurt a lot of kids who don’t necessarily have the power other kids have. That was the whole thing with baseball before: Anybody could play the game as long as you knew how to play the game the right way. If you had a good batting average, you could stick. If you were a guy who hit a lot of homers, you were going to stick, too. It gave everyone an opportunity.

“Now, it’s kind of shrinking down to a certain few. I think [limiting] shifts is going to change that.”

As the season ended, he wasn’t sure how the Brewers would approach his option. Now he has the answer.