How Worried Should We All Be About Joey Ortiz?

It's too early in the season to totally freak out about a hitter who simply isn't having success. As frustrating as it inevitably is, a hitter producing a .213/.304/.230 line over their first 61 plate appearances isn't necessarily a death knell. The sample is too tiny; the confounding factors and the perfectly legitimate excuses are too great in number. That Joey Ortiz is taking over the most important (non-catcher) defensive position on the diamond only makes it easier to understand why he'd run into this kind of trouble.

Long gone, though, are the days when we would only look at topline outcomes to evaluate a player's performance or project their near future. We can now check in on things like approach and bat speed, to tell not only whether a hitter is suffering from bad luck, but where their process has gone off course. To be clear, that doesn't mean that any hitter should be expected to look really good under the hood when their numbers are bad. If you're posting a punchless .534 OPS, it probably means something is off, so it would be shocking if the data didn't contain some negative feedback. In other words, not every ugly number we encounter when we dig beneath the surface on Ortiz should be interpreted as a red flag. Some of them are just telling us what we already knew—that he's struggling—in greater, even helpful detail.

For example, Ortiz's strike zone is extremely disorganized right now, after being very well-organized for most of 2024. He wasn't just patient last year; he also had a specific plan. Much of the time, he was cutting the plate in half, trying to attack the ball inside and let pitchers nibble away on the outer edge as much as they wished.

There were problems with that approach, as Jack Stern discussed over the winter. On balance, though, it made him successful in his first full season in the majors. He might have been too stubborn about it, but you knew he knew what he was looking for.

This year, he doesn't seem to know what he's looking for at all.

This, to me, is not a big deal. We knew Ortiz would need to update and modify his approach this year, and that's what he's doing. He can still tell balls from strikes. He's just not tightly focused on the specific pitch he wants, so far, because he's shifted too much of his focus to covering the whole plate. That does need doing. It's just a process that requires some pain. He'll feel his way to a more coherent plan of attack.

On the other hand, there's his swing speed. Ortiz is down 1.7 mph of bat speed this year, from a robust 73.4 last year to a merely average 71.7 mph this spring. Nor is that about swinging slowly more often, to adjust to certain pitches and avoid striking out. He's lost, so far, the top end of his bat speed range from last year.

This isn't necessarily any more sticky than the approach snafu, because it could stem from that very problem. Maybe, as he tries to cover the whole zone and loses a bit of his focus on a particular pitch he wants to punish, Ortiz is just not feeling the conviction required to get off his best swings, even on the balls that are in his old wheelhouse.

Unlike the approach problem, however, I feel like a more worrisome explanation prevails here. Ortiz might be dealing with a minor but important injury through which he's attempting to play, or he might be having a hard time with some more proactive mechanical changes, but either way, he's not currently in touch with the most dangerous version of himself, because he doesn't have his driver in the golf bag. His 'A' swing is not there.

Again, that could change relatively quickly. Players will tell you, though, that it's always harder to make a major mechanical fix within a season, even relatively early. If he's simply down 1.5 or 2 mph in swing speed for the balance of this season, we have to revise our projections of Ortiz's offensive upside downward. That would be bad news for the Brewers, even for a hitter who slots into the lower third of the lineup. They need the more powerful version of Ortiz back, and that return doesn't feel imminent.