Be advised, everyone else - Brandon Lowe is on a heater.

Every hitter in baseball is streaky. It is a strange sport in that, for all the importance any single at-bat can have - or indeed, any individual pitch within said at-bat - the best way of assessing a player's abilities in such scenarios is to use sample sizes of hundreds of plate appearances and thousands of pitches. Failure is built into the fabric of the game; even good major league hitters only succeed roughly a third of the time.

You as a hitter are supposed to fail, usually, and constantly. Ability in the batter's box is a measure of staving off failure. This is true in many spheres of life, perhaps, but it is starkly true in the case of hitting a baseball, where even successful at-bats often come after some foul-tips and swings-and-misses. Streakiness, then, is similarly endemic to the game. A sport with such a high luck factor built into it will never get away from that.

Even with all that said, though, Lowe is particularly streaky. The Tampa Bay Rays starting second baseman has gone through piping hot streaks followed by tough stretches of scuffling around, struggling to make any contact with the ball even when in the zone. Famously - or perhaps infamously - this includes his three postseason appearances thus far, where he has only a .115 batting average across 29 games.

But when he is good, he is elite.

Lowe's is not a complicated swing, nor is it an especially long one. Yet it is a powerful one, as it has to be for any 5'10, 185lbs player to be able to hit 39 home runs, as Lowe did in 2021. It therefore requires a healthy core to be able to generate that explosive power. And good health is not what Lowe has had since that 39-homer season. He missed the majority of the 2022 campaign with a back injury and was out of sorts in the time he did manage, recording only 8 home runs, a .221 batting average and a .691 OPS in 65 games.

To open 2023, though, he was as hot as his team. As the Rays stormed out to their historic 13-0 start to the season, Lowe was one of many Rays feasting, hitting home runs in four consecutive games in the season's second week. After the quagmire of 2022, it seemed as though 2021 B-Lowe was back.

And then he went again.

Lowe's hitting splits on the season to date adequately tell the bulk of the story, and it is perhaps no surprise that another trip to the disabled list accompanied that heavy May-June slump. His .869 on-base plus slugging percentage of the season's first month fell away to .571 in May; the innate inconsistency of this oft-injured frustrating All Star calibre player was on show once more.

Now, though, Lowe is back in the saddle yet again. And this time, instead of just being one of many players on a hot streak, he is now the sole Ray doing so. As his team lost their lead on the American League East with an unnerving 8-16 record in the month of July, punctuated by putting up the worst offensive month in franchise history, Lowe was the trend-bucker. It is he who has hit the big home runs, had the big at-bats, gotten on base and driven in those in front of him. Were it not for his performances the past couple of weeks, there would not even have been eight wins.

History suggests, or perhaps guarantees, that a slump will come. It always does, for everybody, and particularly for Brandon Lowe, whose frail build appears to need to be in something approaching optimal condition for his bat to truly come to life. But as frustrating to watch as the slumps can be, the ceiling Lowe has shown himself to have over the course of his career as a whole can be the difference between fighting for the wild card spot and fighting for the World Series.

Brandon Lowe at his apex can transform a team's entire season. One good postseason performance, and all the previous inconsistencies can be forgotten.