Willy Adames is back in Milwaukee, and this time he is wearing Giants orange. The Brewers opened a four-game series against San Francisco on Monday night, June 1, 2025, giving Adames a quick return to American Family Field after the club that drafted part of his career moved on without him.
That return comes with timing that makes it matter now. Adames homered in the Giants' 19-6 win over the Colorado Rockies on May 31, a grand slam that helped snap a five-game losing streak and capped a May in which he batted.292 with an.829 OPS after opening the season at.197 with a.593 OPS in March and April. Milwaukee has seen this version of him before. The Brewers acquired Adames from Tampa Bay midseason in 2021, kept him for three more seasons, and watched him grow into a central piece of the lineup before he left for a seven-year, $182 million contract with San Francisco before the 2025 season.
The bat has come around, but the rest of the profile is less tidy. Adames is hitting.707 with eight home runs, 23 RBIs and a.281 on-base percentage this season, a step down from the.740 OPS, 30 homers and 87 RBIs he finished with last year. His defense has also slipped by the numbers. He was at minus-8 Outs Above Average this year after posting plus-10 with Milwaukee in 2022 and plus-16 in 2023, with Fielding Bible still ranking him at plus-2 defensive runs saved. At 31 in September, he remains one of the series' most watched players because his return mixes old Milwaukee familiarity with a current stretch that has finally started to look like the one the Giants expected when they paid him.
Adrian Houser gives the series a second layer of Milwaukee history. The right-hander made his Brewers debut in 2015 and worked regularly for the club from 2019 through 2023, finishing his run there with a 4.00 ERA before Milwaukee traded him after the 2023 season in a deal that brought Coleman Crow back. Houser's path since then has been unsettled, from a 5.84 ERA in 2024 with the Mets to a 2.10 ERA in 11 starts with the White Sox this year, before he was moved again and ended up with San Francisco on a two-year, $22 million deal signed in December.
His numbers in San Francisco have been uneven. Houser made 11 starts this year and carried a 5.59 ERA with a 1.562 WHIP, allowing nine home runs in 56⅓ innings while striking out 35 and walking 21. He was scheduled to face the Brewers in the series finale on Thursday, June 4, though the opposing pitcher had not yet been set. For Milwaukee, that left the week with a familiar shape: one former player back in town for the final leg, another using the same ballpark to show how far his game has shifted since he left it.
