Anatomy of a disaster
A full month of season has gone by and, lo and behold, the Astros are once again hovering around .500 at 16–14, like they always tend to do in the 20s if you can kindly forget whatever 2024 was.
That’s to say, you can’t really judge much about a team after 30 games, as much as a fan tends to do, it’s a bit too early to call this a Playoff team and on the other hand, there’s a shot this is 2022 all over again, you can’t dismiss it yet.
What one can do is acknowledge what’s good and what’s bad, and that I’ll do, focusing on the bad, particularly on why the bad is indeed bad, because frankly there’s not much else to say about the good that hasn’t been discussed already.
Astros pitching is fenomenal, more at 9.
On a rotation that lost Spencer Arrighetti due to a freak accident, catch be damned, and with Framber Valdez all but reeling due to poor command, there’s no shortage of greatness.
Hunter Brown is the ace that was promised, the JV renaissance that had to wait a sinker to come into existence, he’s got the stuff and the moxie of a #1, bulldog mentality, a heater up to 99–100, turbo cutters and a disgusting knuckle curve, he’s almost unhittable and a lock to the CY race if he keeps it up.
Ronel Blanco started off slow but is back on track, his slider still great, his FB command not so much. Rookie Ryan Gusto is surviving through gas, elite fastball shape and mediocre secondaries, which is the exact opposite of the Hayden Wesneski experience, a lot of quality junk and bad fastballs for homers.
Hyped prospect AJ Blubaugh had a nice debut, although he somehow gave up a Javier Baez grand slam, with 16 whiffs, a solid sweeper and a terrible sinker he needs to dial down on usage for more 4 seamers up. And, if all of that wasn’t enough, the myth that is Lance McCullers Jr is coming back from his burial in the H on Sunday.
A good rotation, a better bullpen.
Dusty Baker must be seething drinking his wine because finally the Astros have a lefty in the pen, rather four, FOUR, of them!
Bryan King is holding down the 7th great with a low 90s fastball no one hits and a slide piece, Steven Okert is getting mid to late relief spots with a low 90s fastball and a slider no one hits, Bennet Sousa throws harder and…has a slider no one hits, you got the gist.
Also, Josh Hader is closing for his money’s worth, perfect in save situations, creating them when he feels like, throws a sinker that somebody hits and a slider absolutely no one hits, man this bullpen is so weird…
Bryan Abreu just had a son, congratulations! He needs the rest because he’s in a game or the other, walks are up, stuff is there, rock unsteady. If the worst Joe Espada can call upon is a diminished Taylor Scott, FB command all but off, a returning Kaleb Ort, never below 92, and the ghost of Forrest Whitley, unlucky might be an understatement, you are eating good.
Pitching is carrying this team, and that brings me to the bad stuff, the offense.
In the fewest words possible, the Astros lineup sucks.
They are bottom 10 in almost every statistic, expected, perceived, real and false, known to man, unknown, you name it. They can’t hit with RISP yet again, bases loaded even worse, they have zero power across the board, a player best 4 HR when Eugenio Suarez got to that in a single game.
They are still chasing, whiffing more, hitting a truckload of groundballs and collecting singles like cards, there’s not really a lot of positives to find on them as a collective, though they are walking more than the past two seasons and running the bases much better, getting on base…that’s another story.
On an individual analysis, there are few bright spots but hey, there’s a couple!
Altuve is still Altuve, always overperforming his peripherals, he seems to have got a kick out of playing LF, legs are fresh, he even volunteered to step down to the second spot in the lineup to “preserve” his old bearings and get more ABs to the other positive surprise, a Jeremy Peña anew.
Less chase, more walks, many more flyballs and better defense, he’s hitting the ball hard but finally not on the ground so much while providing positive returns on the field and on the bases, might this be the season we see that 2022 Postseason JP comeback?!
God bless Isaac Paredes. His ABs are a work of art, endless battles, spoiling pitches, foul balls to his pull side like clockwork, walks aplenty, line drives to the Crawford Boxes, he’s exactly what you expected him to be with even better prowess at third, he ain’t Bregman, who’s dominating in Boston, but he’s been the best Astro hitter in April, no less.
And that’s it for the positives…yeah 3 out of 9 doesn’t bode well.
Some of the underperformances can’t be really unexpected if you had to be honest from day one: you knew 2B without Altuve was going to be rough and rough it is, whether you have Mauricio Dubon making a lot of horrid contact or Brendan Rodgers making few hard contact on the ground while striking out more than a third of his ABs.
Cam Smith struggling is no surprise though he looks a great RF with a month of practice thanks to elite athleticism. The outfield as a whole has been poor, outside of Altuve: Jake Meyers had a nice start but he cooled off since, his defense still A+; Chas McCormick looks decent though he’s having his playtime stolen by Cam and Zach Dezenzo, the latter more disciplined but still missing too many pitches in the zone.
The last three pieces of the puzzle are the picture of what is wrong with the Astros offense, each with his own troubles, together along many others on discernible patterns and flaws.
Yordan Alvarez is not performing as his usual self.
He’s being unlucky, he still destroys baseballs, takes his walks even though he’s chasing a tad too much.
His problem is not related to plate discipline, rather to his timing and barrel control: for almost all of April he ran an Under% over 40, popups and warning track shots reminiscing of Bregman slumps, he’s been struggling mightily on balls up and down the zone, scooping them up instead of hitting them fair and square, allowing the natural loft of his swing do the trick.
Should you be worried about him? Not really, as long as his knees are fine he should be back though, thanks to the new Bat Tracking info on Savant, is notable to see he’s standing an inch closer up the box, maybe trying to get to the spin before the spin gets to him. That could explain in part his troubles along with a longer swing he needs to harness.
Should you be worried about Yainer Diaz channeling his inner Martin Maldonado with the bat and behind the plate? You should.
As undisciplined and free swinging as always, Yainer is making less and lower quality contact, more flyballs but with less authority, therefore popups and lazy outs instead of barrels and line drives.
What concerns me the most is his physical attributes: he got slower on the bases and on the exchange, his arm looks fine but bat speed is down, his swing is a smidge longer and he’s also standing up higher on the box, closer to the pitcher.
The latter is something that has been true of many Astros hitters and a clue that might explain a crucial weakness of this lineup as a whole: a lack of slug against fastballs.
The idea behind standing far up in the box, nobody does it like Altuve, is trying to catch breaking balls and offspeed before those pitches complete their trajectory, cutting off their movement, getting out in front of them to avoid those horrible swings on pitches in the dirt and pull balls in the air more.
That’s a good idea, but while it works for Altuve, it’s not something every hitter should adopt.
Standing closer to the pitcher means you have less time to react to his hardest pitches, fastballs sinkers and cutters, and requires a hitter to recalibrate his timing against the heat.
If you keep the same motions and rythms you are bound to be late, get jammed and roll those fastballs you once crushed onto the ground, that’s what’s happening to Yainer and even more so to the prized FA addition of the Astros offseason, Christian Walker.
Behind a veil of uprising Chase%, pressing to get results, there’s a higher Whiff% both in the zone and out, a glaring sign of timing issues, as is a dishearteningly low LA-SwSp%, a measure of how well you’re hitting the ball in the EV-LA sense.
Walker is not squaring up many balls but he’s somehow getting decent results on breaking balls: a 93 mph avgEV, 20° avgLA and a .455 SLG, he has never been better against sweepers.
Look at his results against fastballs though: 91 mph avgEV and a miser 4° avgLA with a .300 SLG, he’s getting eaten alive by the heat and a good amount of in zone sinkers he’s not able to elevate.
Why is that? Timing and you guessed it, stance in the box.
As Yordan and Yainer, he’s also closer to the pitcher, by half an inch so nothing major but enough to change a swing geared to barrel hard stuff into mishits and groundballs galore.
I don’t despise the idea of hitting breaking balls before they break but you need a quick bat and/or elite bat to ball skills to make it work, so while Altuve and Yordan, whose bat speed is on par with his career norm, get the pass, both Yainer and Walker losing 1 mph worth of bat speed makes it even more difficult for them to adjust their swings to fastballs coming in fractions of a second before they were used to.
Interestingly enough, Jeremy Peña is standing further away from the pitcher, deeper into the box by an inch, giving him more “time”, milliseconds really, not to swing at chase and waste pitches while gearing up for juicy stuff in the heart of the plate.
The other part of the problem for Walker that can be traced to a team-wide approach rather than his individual proficiency is a lower Zone Swing%.
Not all strikes are good pitches to hit, but there’s something to be said about being too passive in the zone, and that’s what’s happening to this offense, leading to power outages and low scoring totals.
In the offseason, Espada and his hitting coaches recognized the Astros lineup was far too aggressive in 2023–24, a lot of early swings and low pitch counts for the opposing starter, and set “working the count” as a priority come 2025.
That’s music to my ears, but with a caveat: deeper counts shouldn’t come at the expense of better contact.
What the Astros are doing right now as a lineup is trying to concoct artificial discipline: many hitters are chasing less than their 2024 counterpart…but that’s not because they have become more disciplined!
They are just swinging less, unless your name is Altuve or Yainer, and that makes your Chase% look good while hiding the fact that for a couple breaking balls in the dirt you now take there’s also a fastball down the middle you are now taking and should swing at, and crush, instead.
A red flag in that sense is a much lower Meatball Swing%, the rate of swings on pitches right down Broadway, for power hitters: Walker is down to 73%, Altuve at a scary 61%, Yordan at an awful 50%.
Astros hitters are trying to be more patient, and they are doing so leading to more walks and 15+ pitch innings, but in the process they are losing on so many gopher balls they ought to destroy.
This happens when plate approach is not catered to the single hitter but to the lineup as a unit: telling everyone to just take more pitches is dumb because it’s a strategy that is easily exploitable by opposing pitchers just throwing more strikes, which is indeed true to reality.
A general passivity is as detrimental as the overt aggressiveness Astros fans got accustomed to in past seasons, and that’s on the coaches.
What should happen is a focus on each hitter being selective given his swing, his tendencies and who they are up against: you don’t tell Altuve to stop swinging at fastballs middle-up, he should sit on them early becasue that’s what he kills.
Yordan on the other hand should never lay off the offspeed and exploit his powerful lofty hack to crush everything mid to down in the zone while he should be the one to avoid high heat and anything in the upper third of the zone.
Looking at this lineup’s ABs is a tale of two sides of a coin: a good one, longer battles, foul balls, 3 ball counts; a bad one, looking at sinkers right down the pipe on 2–0, 3–1 counts, so many hittable pitches to do damage on getting the pass.
Are the Astros going to be better? Possibly, if not likely.
Schedule hasn’t been easy for Houston in April and May looks a bit softer with the White Sox and Cincinnati. There’s a long stretch of consecutive games against Seattle, TB and Texas that is going to test both pitchers and hitters.
Asking both rotation and bullpen to keep this up might be too much, asking more out of an offense that should never be around 20th in the league in production-related stats is a given.
What needs to happen to finally see this lineup click is going from a general passive-aggressive approach to the plate to a specific selectivity, each hitter having a tailor made plan to challenge the opposing pitcher as per count, pitch type and location.
The latter is crucial: Astros hitters have to swing at stuff right down the middle no matter the count because they won’t see much of that and those are the pitches you do damage on. Meatballs are meant to be eaten.
Striking the balance between working the starter and putting runs on the board is tricky, you need hitters to be ready and sit on early mistakes to punish, and for them to actually punish them, something that is evading this pitiful offense.
Situational hitting, having RISP or not, shouldn’t change such thinking unless there’s two strikes, at that point you’ll take the sac fly and oppo knock any day of the week.
Do I believe this lineup is going to be better? I have to, they hardly can be worse and Espada shuffling around 1–9 won’t matter much unless there’s real changes behind the scenes, on hitters finding their timing, strategists actually employing strategies and coaches trying their best to fix bat paths and stances.
If that’s not the case, it’s going to be a long, average, pitching-driven season.
And compared to 2024, it’s still something I guess.
