Sometimes They Come Back

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Welcome to the On Deck Circle, Brewers writer Kyle Lobner's weekly preview of the team's week to come and beyond.

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: The MLB non-waiver trade deadline is later today, and there’s still a lot the Brewers could do within the next few hours to significantly alter their big league roster. As such, there’s not a lot that can be done to preview the week ahead that might not become moot before the ink is dry on this digital page.

Instead, I’d like to take a moment to highlight something relatively noteworthy that happened last week and, in my opinion, went somewhat underreported: On Thursday, for the first time since 2014, Rickie Weeks was in the starting lineup at Miller Park. He played left field, went 2-for-4 with an RBI, and was just the sixth player ever to appear in 1000 games for the Brewers and later return to Milwaukee as a member of a visiting team.

Weeks’ career as a Brewer was as polarizing as it was long: Earlier this season I included him on the list of most frustrating Brewers in recent memory. Reaction to his return was somewhere between “mixed” and “silent” at Miller Park last week, perhaps due to the fact that it’s been more than a full year since the expiration of his ill-advised four-year, $38.5 million at the end of the 2014 season. Or maybe it was because he goes by Rickie Weeks *Junior* now, so fans thought it was a different guy. Either way, if you missed the opportunity to appreciate or at least acknowledge his Brewers career last week, perhaps you should take a moment to do so when the Brewers head out to Arizona to see him again this weekend.

If nothing else, by being such a significant part of Brewers history and then returning to Milwaukee in different colors, Weeks joins some pretty interesting company:

Gorman Thomas, June 24, 1983

Of the six players who meet the criteria outlined here, Thomas had the shortest turnaround between his departure from and return to Milwaukee: He was traded to Cleveland on June 6, 1983 and returned to Milwaukee County Stadium less than three weeks later with his new team. At the time he was still the Brewers’ all-time leader in home runs (202), RBI (595), walks (470) and strikeouts (983), so his trip back to Milwaukee was pretty newsworthy.

With that said, Thomas had a quiet day in his return to his former home, going 0-for-3 with a walk, a stolen base and three strikeouts, including the 3001^st of Don Sutton’s MLB career. He went on to go 1-for-10 with a solo home run in the series as the Brewers swept the Indians. All told, Thomas faced the Brewers 34 times as an opposing player between his 1983 trade and his 1986 return to the Brewers at the end of his career.

Charlie Moore, June 26, 1987

For a period of time it looked like longtime Brewers catcher Charlie Moore’s record might be in jeopardy, but it appears the risk has passed: Moore caught 850 games over 14 seasons as a Brewer, the most in franchise history (Jonathan Lucroy is second with 725). In fact, if you were to pick a random game from the Brewers’ 48 seasons as a major league franchise, there’s about a one-in-nine chance you’d find Moore behind the plate.

As such, it must have been pretty surreal for Moore to be sent to the plate as a pinch hitter for the Blue Jays in the ninth inning of a 10-5 loss to the Brewers at County Stadium. He reached on an error in that plate appearance, and went 1-for-3 as Toronto’s starting catcher the next day.

1987 was Moore’s final big league season and he played in just 51 games for Toronto, but ten of them were against his former team.

Paul Molitor, June 25, 1993

Molitor is easily the best player on this list and had easily County Stadium’s most notable return, coming back as a member of the defending World Series Champion Blue Jays just a few months after an ugly contract dispute with the Brewers at the end of his 15-year, 1856-game tenure in Milwaukee.

Molitor was second only to longtime teammate Robin Yount on the Brewers’ career leaderboards at virtually every offensive counting stat at the time, and not much has changed since. He went 1-for-4 in his first-ever game in Milwaukee as a visitor, and picked up a single hit in each of the three games in the series en route to an American League-leading final total of 211.

All told, over three seasons with Toronto and three more with Minnesota, Molitor faced the Brewers 56 times and hit .330 with a .383 on-base percentage and .496 slugging, the best mark of his career against any AL opponent.

B.J. Surhoff, May 10, 1996

The #1 overall pick in the 1985 June Draft, Surhoff spent most of his first nine MLB seasons behind the plate in Milwaukee. His best seasons, however, largely came after he had moved on to Baltimore and given up catching.

Surhoff was batting .315 with a .370 on-base percentage and .605 slugging when he returned to Milwaukee for the first time with the Orioles and started at third base in a wild 10-7, 12-inning win. He went 2-for-6 with a walk in the contest.

Of the players on this list, Surhoff had the longest career after leaving Milwaukee: He went on to play 1001 games over eight seasons with Baltimore and 210 over three years in Atlanta before calling it a career, making the postseason five times over that span.

Geoff Jenkins, April 23, 2008

Before Rickie Weeks did it last week, only one other player with over 1000 games as a Brewer had returned to Miller Park, not County Stadium, for his first game as a visitor.

Another one-time first round pick (#9 overall in 1995) Jenkins spent ten of his eleven MLB seasons in Milwaukee and hit 212 home runs, which at the time was the second-most in Brewers franchise history and is still fourth on that list. He also was and still is second on the franchise’s all-time list with 1118 strikeouts, despite playing in less than half as many games as franchise all-time leader Robin Yount.

Jenkins went 0-for-3 with a walk and a strikeout in his aforementioned first return visit to Milwaukee, and 0-for-7 with two strikeouts in his two games in the series. Those were the only two times he faced the Brewers during the 2008 regular season, his only year with the Phillies and his last in the majors.

Jenkins is also the only player on this list to face the Brewers in the postseason: He played four innings in right field to finish off a 4-1 win over the Crew in Game 3 of the 2008 NLDS.