This struggling Brewer has surprisingly been the team's "clutchest" hitter in 2025

The term “small sample size” should be used at least five times throughout this article, as the storyline is entirely based on a small sample size. That’s two already. However, small sample sizes (three) allow for fun storylines that can reveal more about a player's early-season production than their slash line.

For example, prior to Tuesday and Wednesday's games against the Detroit Tigers, most Milwaukee Brewers fans would have agreed that Christian Yelich was off to a slow start based on his batting average and high strikeout rate, but a closer look at his underlying metrics revealed that Yelich was still frequently hitting the ball hard, as evidenced by his above-league-average hard-hit% and average exit velocity, detailed clearly on Baseball Savant. What happened next, after some Brewers fans overreacted to Yelich's day-off on Monday? The former-MVP collected three hits of 100 MPH exit velocity or higher (technically one was hit at 99.9 MPH, but you get the point) over the next two games, including a towering home run on Wednesday afternoon that traveled 404 feet.

In this case, underlying metrics served as a better indication of Yelich's start to the season than the stats that show up in the box score. With that in mind, let's take a look at another Brewer whose early-season numbers don't look great, but is overperforming in one specific metric similar to how Yelich was in regard to his hard-hit% and average exit velocity.

Joey Ortiz has been the Brewers' most clutch hitter according to one metric

In almost any sport, being "clutch" is a coveted attribute. It means that a player rises to the occasion in big moments, rather than shying away from it. To measure a player’s "clutchness," stat-makers will often look at how they perform late in games when the score is close.

However, "Clutch" (with a capital "C"), a stat created by the brilliant minds behind FanGraphs, takes into account more than just those at-bats that happen in the later innings of close games. Rather, as outlined by FanGraphs contributor Eric Seidman, Clutch simply compares how well a player hits in high-leverage situations compared to how he hits in normal situations, regardless of when in the game those situations occur. In Eric's words, "A player with a .200 BA that hits .300 in crucial situations is, and should be, considered more clutch than someone with a .333 BA in all situations. The .333 is a better BA but it is not clutch because it did not constitute a raising of the game." The statistic, which generally produces a "score" between -1.0 and 1.0 by the end of the season, is simply calculated by taking a player's Win Probability Added (WPA) in high-leverage situations and subtracting their WPA in neutral situations to determine how much better they perform when the stakes are high.

Looking back to 2024, the Brewers’ two leaders in the FanGraphs Clutch statistic were Jackson Chourio and Willy Adames. That passes the sniff test, so to speak, as it's very plausible the average fan would come up with one of those two names when asked who the Brewers’ most clutch hitter was in 2024.

However, if you were to ask yourself or one of your fellow Brewers fans who the most clutch hitter to start the 2025 season has been, it's unlikely that either of you would say Joey Ortiz, but Ortiz currently leads the team with a Clutch score of 0.37 in 2025.

While part of this is due to Ortiz underperforming in normal context plate appearances, it’s also due to the Brewers not experiencing many high-leverage situations so far in the 2025 season because of the many blowouts the team has been involved in. This lack of high-leverage situations is portrayed by another metric that FanGraphs generates: average leverage index (pLI), which is involved in the equation used to calculate Clutch. Ortiz, who ranks 18th in all of baseball among qualified hitters in Clutch, has the lowest pLI of the top 40 most clutch players. As a team, the Brewers have five of the lowest 10 pLI scores, offering a further indication that the team hasn't experienced many high-leverage moments to start the season.

In other words, while Ortiz and the Brewers as a whole haven't experienced many high-leverage situations to start the 2025 season, Ortiz has made the most of his opportunities, despite his otherwise slow start to the year. As the season goes on, keep an eye out for Ortiz's performance in big moments to determine whether this early-season abnormality becomes a trend or if it is just another small-sample-size anomaly.