Five splashy trades the Brewers could make to fix their infield

We are now over 40 games into the 2025 season, and I think it’s officially okay to panic about the state of the Brewers’ offense. Milwaukee has simply looked punchless at the plate, and it’s the sheer number of underachievers that’s killing the Brewers: yes, third base is a giant black hole, which many of us saw coming. But Christian Yelich and William Contreras both have OPS+ marks in the 80s. Jackson Chourio has been the team’s most dynamic hitter, but he’s been prone to extreme streakiness and has had some major problems in his approach. After nice, encouraging starts, Brice Turang and Sal Frelick have come back to the pack. Garrett Mitchell never got things going before his injury. Joey Ortiz has been an unmitigated disaster at the plate.

Really, only Turang and Rhys Hoskins — who appears to have returned to the reliable offensive form that made him a staple in Philadelphia — have performed at or above their expected output among regular starters, and with the stars (Yelich and Contreras) struggling, it has exposed how flawed the team’s lineup is.

Whether the Brewers even should try to make a major move this season is a conversation worth having. They’re now 21-23, firmly in third place in the division, and they have one of the worst offenses in baseball. But the optimist would say that there is still plenty of time to make a turnaround, and just one big change to the infield could have a domino effect that gets this team turned around.

In 2021, when the offense was sputtering badly, the Brewers lost on May 21 to drop to 21-23. That day, they made a trade that brought in Willy Adames, who served as a catalyst to that offensive group, and the team went 74-44 the rest of the way and won the division. Is there an equivalent trade that could be made in 2025? There are definitely some more realistic, more moderate moves that could be on the table (Luis Urías renaissance, anyone?), but I’m here today to make waves. Here are five big, splashy trades the Brewers could make to kick-start their offense.

Jordan Lawlar, ARI

Might as well go big right off the bat. This would be a huge trade, and the cost would be enormous. But Geraldo Perdomo, the Diamondbacks’ shortstop who killed the Brewers in their series in Phoenix earlier this season, is off to a fantastic start — he’s been one of the best players in the National League. Perdomo is a former top 100 prospect who made the All-Star team in 2023 when he was only 23, so it’s not like this came out of nowhere, but he’d also been a below-average hitter for his career coming into this season. So far, that’s a thing of the past: Perdomo is hitting .291/.395/.450 with nine doubles and five homers, he’s walking almost 15% of the time, he’s knocked in 31 runs, and he’s 9-for-9 in stolen bases.

Lawlar has been a megaprospect since getting taken sixth overall in the 2021 draft (he’s been a top 30 overall prospect each of the last four years on both Baseball America and MLB.com, coming into this season at #13 and #11 on those lists, respectively). But a brief debut in 2023 went poorly, and injuries to his thumb and hamstring limited him to just 23 games (all in the minors) in 2024.

But Lawlar’s minor league track record has done nothing to dissuade anyone that he’s not still a top-level prospect. Now 22, he was just called up to the Diamondbacks on Monday, but with Perdomo, Eugenio Suárez, and the recently-returned-from-injury Ketel Marte all in the fold, it’s unclear where he’ll get most of his playing time. (In his first start on Tuesday, he played shortstop while Perdomo got the day off.) This could just be a move to transition Suárez — who is not a very good defensive third baseman — to more designated hitter duties, but there are definitely some questions about who will play where in this infield.

The cost would be extreme. Lawlar is a top prospect with six years of team control. Milwaukee might be able to get it done with a combination of Jacob Misiorowski and a younger, high-level prospect (maybe someone like Luis Peña, but Arizona might hang up if Milwaukee said no to Jesús Made), but the cost might be too much for Matt Arnold and company to stomach. If that’s the case, the Brewers could poke around the others in this crowded infield: Perdomo would be the bigger move, but Suárez’s cost would be more palatable as he is a free agent after the season.

The Diamondbacks may also just have no interest in trading any of these folks, given that they’re a team that very much expects to be in contention this season. But if you could offer some pitching that would help this year (which is why I expect Misiorowski would need to be in the deal), it might be doable.

Zach Neto, LAA

Do I think the Angels will trade Neto? No, I don’t. Should they consider it? Yes, absolutely.

Neto is a really good player — he was the 13^th overall pick in 2022, and, because he’s on the Angels, he debuted with 84 games in 2023, after only 61 minor league games. Last season, he was a solidly above average hitter (112 OPS+) and played excellent defense to the tune of 5.1 bWAR, and this season, in 23 games (he missed the start of the season due to a shoulder injury sustained at the end of last season) he’s been even better, with a .278/.330/.533 batting line (139 OPS+) and the same good defense. It’s a small sample, but he’s on about a 10-WAR pace over a full 162 games.

Neto has four more years of team control after this one (he qualifies as a super-two player, so all four are arbitration years). He’s probably a star. The Angels are terrible and should be selling. Will they? I doubt it, not with Mike Trout on the team, no matter how little sense it makes to keep trying to sign the Jorge Solers of the world to make a push at … 80 wins? The Angels probably couldn’t get out of the Trout contract if they wanted to, and as long as he’s on the team, I expect Arte Moreno — the owner with the worst baseball acumen outside of Denver — to keep “trying” to win. If the Angels were open to discussing Neto, they should be trying to get as many good young prospects as possible, and they’d undoubtedly get a haul. The Brewers could hypothetically meet that price if they were willing.

Jordan Westburg, BAL

Baltimore’s season is quickly derailing. They’re just 15-24 and in last place in the AL East. Their pitching is bad. Things are getting desperate. Desperate general managers make the best trade partners.

You could look at a more realistic trade target here in Baltimore’s veteran third baseman (and Luis’s brother) Ramón Urías, who has one more year of arbitration next season before becoming a free agent. He’s played well this year, with a 120 OPS+ in 22 games (he just returned from the injured list this week), and while he doesn’t hit right-handed pitching well, he does it a lot better than any of the Brewers’ current left-side infielders. He wouldn’t be the most inspiring addition, but he’s steady and would be an improvement.

But I’m thinking bigger, so let’s talk about Westburg. The Orioles, it is well known, have too many position players for their own good, and it’s been mildly shocking that they haven’t moved any of their top-end prospects for starting pitching. (Joey Ortiz and Connor Norby did go out in separate deals, but they were the No. 8 and No. 9 prospects in the Orioles system at the end of the 2023 season, before they were traded.) Westburg debuted in 2023 and played well in 68 games, got off to a great start in 2024, and made the All-Star team before a broken hand on a hit-by-pitch cost him all of August and most of September. He finished the season with 2.4 bWAR and a 127 OPS+ in 107 games.

Now, Westburg is currently injured, and just Wednesday, there was news that he had a setback in his recovery from a hamstring strain — he had been set to begin a rehab assignment, but that has now been delayed, and that complicates things. But he’s got four years of team control after this one and presumably should be back relatively soon. There would be the disadvantage of not knowing exactly how long he’ll still be out, but it’s something to consider.

The Orioles likely want to hold on to Westburg, but given that Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday are already taking up two infield spots and the 23-year-old Coby Mayo, who hit .287/.364/.562 in 89 games at Triple-A Norfolk last season, waiting in the wings, they’ve got the infield prospect depth that could make a deal like this possible.

Trevor Story, BOS

There’s still a lot of money on the seven-year deal that Story signed with the Red Sox before the 2022 season; he is making $22.5 million this year and has two more years guaranteed at $25 million, plus a team option (also at $25 million) with a $5 million buyout in 2028. If this were to happen, Milwaukee would need Boston to eat a LOT of money, easily half of the remaining $70 million or so.

Story is also a huge injury risk. After a more-or-less healthy six-year run in Colorado, Story hasn’t played more than 94 games in any of the three full seasons he’s spent in Boston. He’s been healthy so far in 2025, though the injuries he struggled through, particularly the last two years, seem to have taken a toll on his production: he’s hitting only .234/.277/.353 (an 80 OPS+), though he’s still a threat on the basepaths (8-for-8 in stolen bases) and has some pop (six homers).

The risk here is almost certainly not worth it to a team like the Brewers, but if you could convince Boston to eat a bunch of the contract, the cost in prospects probably wouldn’t be all that high. Boston not only has Kristian Campbell in the majors already, but they’ve also got Marcelo Mayer — the current No. 8 prospect on MLB.com — waiting at Triple-A. They don’t really need Story, and if they view him as a sunk cost, you might as well try to convince them to lower that cost a bit.

On the other hand, Story might just not be good anymore.

Brett Baty, NYM

Baty’s starting to hit! After a disappointing start to his career, the 25-year-old third baseman is finally showing some of the promise that made him a top-25-ish prospect heading into the 2023 season. He’s still only 25 and won’t be a free agent until after the 2029 season. There are some questions about his defense, but he should be able to at least hold his own at third base, and he’d certainly be an offensive upgrade.

The cost here is the question. Baty has a big-time pedigree (12th overall pick in 2019, a prospect ranking as high as No. 13 via Baseball Prospectus in 2022), but his major league results have been poor, and he’s now up to almost 700 plate appearances as a big leaguer, so it isn’t a tiny sample. Still, I wouldn’t expect David Stearns and company to part with him easily, even if he’s basically just filling a utility role with the Mets this season.