Getting Hot, Then Cold, Then Hot Again with Joey Ortiz

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Joey Ortiz - Milwaukee Brewers

Milwaukee Brewers third baseman Joey Ortiz (September 2026).

The mathematical midpoint of the MLB season comes well before the actual All Star break. This year it came right about the time everything changed for Joey Ortiz.

This season the Brewers played their 81st game of the year on June 28, and Ortiz went 0-for-1 to drop his batting average for the season to an even .200 with a .282 on-base percentage and .248 slugging. Since then, however, he’s batted .314 with a .357 on-base and .538 slugging and been one of the most productive hitters in baseball during a stretch where the Brewers have gone 32-21 to all but put away the NL Central.

If Ortiz had hit like this all season, he might have been one of baseball’s biggest stories. One of the only hitters that has outperformed him over the last two months is Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, the likely National League MVP. And, like Crow-Armstrong, Ortiz is also regularly praised for his work on defense.

Career Extremes

The fact remains, however, that Ortiz has been either extremely hot or extremely cold for virtually all of his MLB tenure:

• During his first season as a Brewer, in 2024 Ortiz looked like a near lock to be a future MLB star, batting .290 with a .398 on-base percentage and .533 slugging in his first 56 games. He followed that up, however, by hitting .222/.305/.354 across the same three statistics from the end of May through October.
• In 2025 Ortiz had a 57-game stretch from early June to mid-August where he batted .288/.317/.424 and, likely not coincidentally, the Brewers went 43-14 during that run. That performance was largely overshadowed, however, by the .181 batting average he posted before that and the sub-.500 on-base plus slugging he had in the month and a half after.

Nearly every player has better statistics in his team’s wins than their losses, of course, but Ortiz’s hot and cold streaks correlate extremely well with the Brewers’ performance as a whole. During the hot streaks mentioned above (56 games in 2024, 57 in 2025 and 53 in 2026, through Monday) the Brewers have a 109-57 record, good for a .657 winning percentage. In all other games across those three seasons they’re 170-133, a .561 mark.

Defensive Skills

Despite extended stretches where he’s struggled at the plate, however, the fact remains that Ortiz’s hot streaks and defensive skills have made him a valuable player on the whole for the Brewers over his time in Milwaukee. Baseball Reference estimates that Ortiz has been worth about five wins above replacement across the last three seasons and FanGraphs is even a bit higher than that at just under seven. By the latter Ortiz is one of the top 100 position players in baseball over the last three seasons, in roughly the same territory as Padres $280 million shortstop Xander Bogaerts.

It’s worth wondering, however, if Ortiz’s extended hot and cold streaks distort his overall value in a way that his numbers don’t capture. His overall offensive numbers might be strong enough for a defense-first infielder but they rarely reflect the way Ortiz is performing at any given moment. His offensive struggles are also magnified by the fact that he seems to come to the plate constantly in key spots: During his three seasons as a Brewer, he’s batted more often with the bases loaded than Christian Yelich and William Contreras combined.

For some time now as Ortiz has struggled and surged the question has been “Who is the real Joey Ortiz?” It may very well be that the answer to that question varies week to week or month to month, and with several top prospect infielders in the upper levels of the minors the Brewers are going to have to make a determination soon on whether the stretches where he’s a big part of their success make him valuable enough to weather the stretches where all the arrows point the other way.