It has been a roller coaster offseason at the hot corner in Milwaukee. It was a big question at the beginning of last season, too, but Caleb Durbin quickly snagged the job once given an opportunity and put up a very nice rookie season in which he was about a league-average hitter, stole 18 bases, and played better-than-expected defense on his way to a third-place finish in Rookie of the Year voting.
Well, things change quickly sometimes in Milwaukee. Sensing an opportunity, the Brewers shipped Durbin (along with Andruw Monasterio and Anthony Seigler, who were the primary backups to all three of the Brewers’ non-first-base infield positions last season) to the Boston Red Sox for a pair of starting pitchers, Kyle Harrison and Shane Drohan, and utility infielder David Hamilton. The Milwaukee front office perhaps also felt a bit squeamish about some of Durbin’s underlying metrics — there are some definite parallels between Durbin’s 2025 season and Joey Ortiz’s 2024 season, and of course, we know what happened to Ortiz in his second year.
While the Hamilton part of the return from Boston surely answered some of the question of “who is going to play third base now that we traded our entire 2025 depth chart in one deal,” it did not answer them all. That led to a week of wild speculation: was Jett Williams going to start the season at third? Could we be shocked by an aggressive promotion of someone else, like Brock Wilken or Cooper Pratt?
Well, no. The Brewers signed a real, actual major league third baseman exactly one week after trading Durbin, and he tops the depth chart, even if he comes with some questions.
Rengifo comes to the Brewers after seven seasons with the Los Angeles Angels. Returns from Rengifo have been mixed, but he had three straight seasons from 2022-24 where he was an above-average offensive player, and he’s got two major league seasons on his record of more than 15 homers.
Those seasons are fading into the rearview mirror at this point, though: he last hit double-digit homers in 2023. While Rengifo is still in what we’d consider his “prime” based on his age, he struggled badly at the plate in 2025 after missing half of the 2024 season. I went pretty deep in the wake of the trade to try to figure out whether Rengifo’s bad 2025 was the new normal or whether we should expect him to return to the offensive levels of earlier in his career. (The conclusion there: if he can get his launch angle back up — it was around 9-10 degrees in 2022 & 2023 and around 6-7 degrees in 2024 & 2025 — then the homers might return, but we shouldn’t expect him to hit .300 like he did in 2024, a fluky BABIP year.)
Defense is a question with Rengifo, too. The advanced metrics, which should always be taken with a grain of salt, are all over the place. He’s played more second base than third in his career, and has sometimes graded out as a good defensive player and sometimes as a bad one.
The mathematician in me says that we should expect Rengifo to be about a league-average player on both sides of the ball (but please keep in mind that I haven’t had a math class since 2006). The Brewers can handle that. Rengifo is on a one-year deal, he’s not making a ton of money, and there are exciting reinforcements coming from the minor league system, maybe even this year. Rengifo should be able to handle things until the next generation is ready.
Here I am talking about David Hamilton, third baseman. Guess how many times Hamilton has played third base in a regular-season game as a professional?
If you said “one,” then yes, you are correct, even if one is generous: he played third base for 1 1/3 innings of a game last season. That’s it. Never once in the minor leagues, nor in college, nor in the Arizona Fall League, nor in summer ball in the Cape Cod League.
Hamilton is likely to replace Monasterio as Milwaukee’s true utility infielder this season — in Hamilton’s two-plus seasons, he’s appeared almost equally at second base and shortstop. The Brewers are pretty set at those two positions, barring a continuing collapse of Ortiz’s offense; if they feel comfortable keeping Ortiz’s bat in the lineup regularly, then Hamilton’s opportunities are going to come most often at third. Hamilton is quite a good defensive middle infielder, so there is no reason to think that he won’t take to third, where he has been playing almost exclusively this spring (six of his seven starts have been at third base).
There aren’t a ton of reasons for optimism in Hamilton’s offensive game — he was almost a league-average offensive player in 2024, but he was bad in 2025, and the biggest difference between those seasons was not in anything you’d see on Statcast but in BABIP (.316 in 2024, .234 in 2025). Hamilton is pretty good at not chasing bad pitches, something the Brewers surely liked about him, and there’s a little bit more power in there than you might expect (he has 14 home runs in 511 plate appearances across the last two seasons).
The other thing the Brewers can (and will) do to help Hamilton is to essentially never let him face a left-handed pitcher: for his career, Hamilton is a .200/.233/.257 hitter against lefties and .226/.291/.376 against righties. Rengifo, a switch-hitter, has a career OPS that is 84 points higher against left-handed pitching, so a soft platoon is certainly in play (though it should be noted that Rengifo’s .665 career OPS against right-handed pitching is essentially the same as Hamilton’s career .667 OPS against righties). Regardless of how much platooning happens at third, Hamilton will never start against lefties.
Hamilton should function well as an occasional starter against right-handed pitching at third while backing up both Ortiz and Brice Turang in the middle of the infield. If he has to do more than that, the Brewers will likely be asking too much of him.
I mentioned earlier the people who were being speculated about as being in the mix after the Brewers traded Durbin: Jett Williams’ future probably lies in the outfield, but he’s certainly capable of playing in the infield somewhere, and he is the furthest along of any of the Brewers’ big infield prospects. I went more in-depth on Williams in our second base preview, but I expect he’ll play somewhere (or, maybe, everywhere) in Milwaukee before the 2026 season ends.
I also mentioned Eddys Leonard in the second base preview. He’s played more at second in his career, but he’s appeared often at third as well. We’ll see if Leonard is even still in the organization when the season starts — there probably isn’t a place for him on the Brewers’ major league roster, and he’s an accomplished enough minor leaguer that he might be someone who can get a better opportunity elsewhere.
As far as prospects, Dave also looked at Brock Wilken as a long shot to get the job after Durbin was traded and before Rengifo was signed. Wilken has never played above Double-A, and while he’s probably okay as a defensive player, he’s not going to be nearly as good as Hamilton and likely not as good as Rengifo. Wilken has shown real power and patience in the minors, but he likely needs more seasoning.
Long term, the most likely answer here is that one of the Brewers’ big shortstop prospects ends up at third base. Who will that be? The consensus at this point seems to be that between Cooper Pratt, Jesús Made, and Luis Peña, Pratt is the best defensive player (though some think Made could get there). And while we’ve gotten used to the rocketship trajectory of Made and Jackson Chourio the last couple years, Peña is very young, and while he has shown some advanced offensive skills, if you say he won’t make the majors until he’s 22 — still young! — that still pushes him back to 2029. That puts this question off for a while, at least for him.
Maybe the 2027 Brewers have some sort of Turang-Pratt-Made alignment. Maybe Ortiz is still in the picture. Maybe Pratt gets traded. This will work itself out, but I don’t think we need to give a whole lot of thought to Pratt or Made as it relates to the 2026 Milwaukee Brewers season.
Expect to see Rengifo most often, with Hamilton starting a couple of times a week against right-handed pitching. I’m hopeful that Rengifo’s production will bounce back to about league average. Hamilton will likely not get there, but he can run into them occasionally, and he’ll be a good, reliable defensive player.
If Rengifo continues to struggle as he did in 2025, especially if he’s not playing high-level defense, Milwaukee will start looking to their minor league system for alternatives, but I think we’d need to get close to two full bad months from him before that happens. Hopefully, though, his bad BABIP luck from last season turns around and he starts hitting fly balls again, giving the Brewers a credible power threat in the lower part of their batting order.
