After they traded away their third base depth chart last week, it was widely expected that the Brewers would add someone to the mix in their infield. Without doing so, Milwaukee would enter the season relying on a whole bunch of promising prospects who have never played a meaningful number of games above Double-A. Remember, last season when the Brewers had questions at third, they started the season with a Vinny Capra/Oliver Dunn platoon at the hot corner. It wasn’t until that ran its course that Caleb Durbin entered the picture, about three weeks into the season.
Of course, the Capra/Dunn combo failed quite miserably. But the Brewers, by signing Luis Rengifo on Friday, have signaled that this year they’re going to start with veteran options at third — some combination of Rengifo and David Hamilton, who was also acquired in the Durbin trade. Milwaukee had very little money tied up in Capra and Dunn last year, so when that project went south, they gave up on it almost immediately. The Brewers are paying Rengifo at least $3.5 million in 2026, which suggests they have a little more faith that he’ll produce at an acceptable level. Meanwhile, the Jett Williams-Brock Wilken-Cooper Pratt-Eddys Leonard group will wait for an opportunity while getting reps in the minor leagues (where their service clocks will not run, which the team is certainly conscious of).
Is the Brewers’ faith in Rengifo misplaced? He had a rough year in 2025, but was a solid player in the three years prior to that. Let’s dig in and see if we can’t see what caused his problems last season, and whether or not we should expect a rebound.
In 2022, Rengifo had a breakout year. He’d played in parts of three seasons with the Angels going back to 2019, but had never really hit at all, and the results were, to be generous, mixed. (The Angels, never shy about promoting prospects, called him up to the big leagues just after his 22nd birthday, after a solid year in 2018, which he split between Anaheim’s High-A, Double-A, and Triple-A levels.) But after bouncing back and forth between the minors and the big leagues in 2021 (which he could not do in 2020, when the minor league season was cancelled), Rengifo earned a steady role with the Angels in 2022, in which he played most often as the second baseman but appeared also at shortstop, third base, and briefly at both corner outfield positions.
In 127 total games that year, Rengifo hit .264/.294/.429 (a 102 OPS+) with 17 homers and 22 doubles. While his defensive metrics took a step back in 2023, Rengifo’s offensive numbers jumped up, mainly due to a more patient approach at the plate, and he posted a 112 OPS+ with a .264/.339/.444 batting line, 16 homers, and 15 doubles in 126 games. In 2024, Rengifo was having arguably his best season when he injured his wrist in July; he played only nine more games after the injury and finished the season batting .300/.347/.417 in 78 games.
Rengifo had season-ending wrist surgery in August of 2024, but supposedly was fully healthy when he reported to camp in 2025. But the results at the plate told a different story. He hit just .238, had an OBP of just .287, and slugged only .335 — he hit just nine homers despite a career-high 541 plate appearances.
Here’s what we can learn by glancing back at the surface-level stats on Rengifo:
Let’s examine some “advanced” numbers from Rengifo’s last four seasons:
The first thing to look for are the outliers. There are a couple that stand out. First: Rengifo’s .339 BABIP in 2024, which is significantly higher than the other three seasons, and explains why his batting average that year was .300, 36 points higher than the previous two seasons. Given the decrease in expected slugging, this leads me to mostly disregard Rengifo’s 2024 season; not only do we have the outlier BABIP number, but it happened in far fewer plate appearances because of the injury.
Another “outlier,” or at least a change in trend: launch angle. In 2022 and 2023, when Rengifo was hitting homers, he was elevating the ball. In 2024 and 2025, when the homers dried up, he was not. That seems to be the only major difference; while he was making a little more good contact in 2023, he didn’t have a meaningfully better hard-hit percentage in 2022 than in ’24 or ’25.
Other than those things, there are a lot of fairly similar numbers here. The launch angle explains why Rengifo’s 2025 xSLG is lower than in 2022 and 2023, and the BABIP seems to show us that his 2024 season — in which he looked like a borderline All-Star through 70 games — was fluky, and probably should’ve been more like his 2025 season.
The question here is whether Rengifo can get his launch angle back up. Otherwise, I don’t see a whole lot to tell me that he can’t be the same hitter he was in 2022 and 2023. His 2024 wrist injury does not seem to be the culprit for why his power decreased in 2024 and 2025 — that change happened prior to the injury and is explainable by the launch angle. Rengifo’s plate discipline numbers, which you can dig into on Statcast, don’t show any alarm bells — he did a slightly better job at swinging at good pitches to hit in 2022-24 than in 2025, but for the most part, there are no major changes.
The Brewers value patience, so expect them to tell Rengifo to lean into that. He has shown the ability to take a walk; in 126 games in 2023, his 9.2% walk rate was 59th percentile in the league. That’s plenty good — and way better than 2022 (first percentile) and 2025 (24th percentile).
While Rengifo’s BABIP in 2025 was the worst of the previous four years, I’m not sure we should expect a meaningful bounce back here. His sprint speed, via Statcast, has been decreasing: from 2021 to 2025, he went from 77th percentile to 67th, 51st, 37th, and 38th, respectively. Speed plays a big part in BABIP, so if he’s just slower now than he used to be, that might explain the small decrease in BABIP between ’22-’23 and ’25.
The good news is that there’s nothing here that suggests that Rengifo cannot be the hitter he was when he was a solidly above-average hitter. Exit velocities and hard-hit percentage are largely the same. The big difference is just that launch angle, so expect the Brewer hitting coaches to tinker with Rengifo’s approach to try to get the ball back in the air a bit.
Rengifo’s 2022 and 2023 seasons, in which he had a 107 OPS+ over 956 plate appearances, were probably a little better than the underlying numbers say they should’ve been. His 2025 season, when he had a 73 OPS+ in 541 PA, was probably worse than the underlying numbers suggest.
He probably falls somewhere in between, and whether he’s good in 2026 will depend largely on launch angle. The projection systems listed on FanGraphs are not optimistic: none project him for more than 10 homers. The other big factor that will weigh on his success in 2026 is whether he’s more like the batter who walked 9% of the time in 2023 or the one who walked 3.3% of the time in 2022 (or 6.1% of the time in 2025).
It seems reasonable to expect that Rengifo will hit somewhere around .250-.260. But the next two numbers in his slash line could be pretty much anywhere. The tools seem to be intact, and it will be interesting to see how things play out.
