Andrew Fischer just keeps climbing the Minor League home run chart, and Saturday brought another big jump.
The Brewers’ No. 5 prospect crushed his 45th and 46th homers of the season in Double-A Biloxi’s 8-5 win over Birmingham in Game 2 of their doubleheader at Keesler Federal Park. Those two blasts stretched his lead atop the MiLB home run race to eight over Lazaro Montes (SEA No. 5 / MLB No. 56), who is now in the big leagues, and nine over the next-closest Minor Leaguer, Easton Shelton of the Dodgers.
The 45th homer was the bigger historical marker. Fischer unloaded a three-run shot off right-hander Juan Carela of the White Sox, and that blast moved the 2025 first-round pick past Phil Hiatt’s 2001 total and Greg Brock’s 1982 mark on the Minor League single-season home run list.
Then came No. 46, nearly the same kind of drive, pulled down the line off right-hander Garrett Wright. That one tied Fischer with former National League MVP Ryan Howard, along with Chris Hatcher (1998), Ken Phelps (1982) and Dave Duncan (1966) for fourth place over the past 60 years.
The power binge has been relentless. With the two homers, Fischer has now gone deep eight times in his last nine games.
Howard is the obvious name attached to Fischer’s season, and not just because of the home run pace. Howard followed his 2004 Minor League destruction with NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2005 and an MVP award in 2006. That’s a high bar for Fischer, but his numbers this year look plenty loud in their own right.
Howard finished that fourth pro season with a .291/.380/.637 line. Fischer is sitting at .273/.409/.662. Their OPS figures are separated by just 54 points: 1.017 for Howard and 1.071 for Fischer.
Even with that production, Fischer remains outside MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 prospects, and the issue is clear. The bat speed and raw damage are real, but the swing-and-miss is heavy. He leads the Brewers’ system in RBIs (110), slugging (.662), extra-base hits (66), total bases (274), runs (100) and home runs, but he also leads the organization by a wide margin in strikeouts with 178.
Only five Minor Leaguers have struck out more often than Fischer this season.
“It’s all about the K's,” MLB Pipeline’s Jonathan Mayo said earlier this week. “I know a certain amount of strikeouts is perfectly acceptable, especially in today's game. His power is impressive, but with a strikeout rate over 33 percent in the Minors this year, I'm a little concerned about him getting to it once he's facing big league pitching.”
That’s the tension with Fischer’s profile. The power plays anywhere, but the question is how much of it survives against better pitching.
He’s shown he can punish Minor League mistakes in a hurry. The next test is whether the swing can hold up when the holes get exposed.
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Andrew Fischers Power Surge Comes With One Big Brewers Question
Andrew Fischer has forced his way into the conversation with one of the loudest seasons in the Brewers system, crushing 44 home runs at Double-A while posting a .270/.402/.647 line. The power is impossible to miss, and for a player in Milwaukees pipeline, that kind of production naturally gets attention from a fan base always looking for the next impact bat.
The bigger question is whether the rest of Fischers game is ready to travel with him. He has struck out 177 times, a 34.2% strikeout rate that has plenty of evaluators wondering how much of that pop will hold up against big-league pitching, which helps explain why he has not yet been promoted or landed on MLB.coms top-100 prospects list. Fans can see the obvious upside, but the Brewers appear content to stay patient and let their development plan answer the hardest part of the scouting report. [Read more 🡒]