Christian Yelich became one of the biggest stars in baseball at the end of the 2010s. But even quicker than he rose to prominence with a pair of top-two finishes in the NL MVP race (winning it in 2018), the Milwaukee Brewers outfielder fell out of the spotlight.

Yelich didn’t regress into being a bad player but he did shed his superstar status and has been merely a solid-to-good player since the 2019 season. After two straight seasons of posting over seven bWAR, he posted 4.4 over the following three years. Across 117 games his season, though, he's already up to 3.2, the most of any Brewers player this season.

This season, Yelich has an OPS of .831, his highest since 2019. His strikeout rate is down to 20.7 percent, which is roughly where it was during his superstar seasons. The Brewers outfielder isn’t being bogged down by what he used to be and is simply looking to produce for his team, as he told Sam Blum of The Athletic.

“You can still be a good player,” Yelich said, via The Athletic. “Obviously everyone’s always going to compare your best career seasons. You can do that with any player. You can take any guy’s best season…I know that you’re going to be compared to those seasons sometimes, but I think I’m pretty capable of having productive years. Which I’ve done this year and continue to do.”

Yelich has been the most important hitter for the Brewers this season as they pursue an NL Central title. He leads the team in a number of categories, including RBI, hits and each triple-slash figure. With some of their elite pitching arms banged up, the Brewers have relied on Yelich to lead the team forward. They’ve really needed it with the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds emerging as potential playoff teams.

In the grand scheme of MLB history, Yelich has had one of the best careers of anyone ever. He has several accolades — three Silver Sluggers, a pair of All-Star teams and a Gold Glove to go along with his MVP — and stats that paint him as one of the better players of his era. That body of work and drive to continue improving have given him a stable mindset that will carry him for the rest of his career.

“If you try and chase years prior, it doesn’t really work that way,” Christian Yelich said, via The Athletic. “You kind of just have to start everything new. When you’ve played a lot of games and taken a lot of at-bats — you never have it figured out, by any means, in baseball. But you definitely had good times, had bad times. You learn from it.”