Is the Offense Really This Bad?
The Bats Have Been Cold, but a Deeper Dive Into the Numbers Shows They are Hitting the Ball Hard and Making Good Swing Decisions.
Good news. Jeremy Pena is very cool, especially when he’s hitting the ball 425 feet in the bottom of the tenth. And Pena’s home run capped a good offensive day for the Astros, as they belted out 11 hits and walked 5 times in scoring 6 runs in regulation and 2 in extras to salvage a game from the Blue Jays.
Bad news. That offensive outburst was an outlier. Outside of yesterday’s game, the offense has been bad.
The team has a losing record so far (7-8) and the offense is a big reason for that. In the first two games of the Blue Jays series, the Astros offense scored 3 and 2 runs respectively, producing one run losses in both games.
Want more evidence this fact? Check out this chart below, which shows the Astros totals in a number of results-based team offensive measures (recorded before Sunday’s games). I also included the Astros rank among the 15 American League teams for context.
To repeat what I said earlier, these numbers are bad. The team is averaging only 3.3 runs per game, and are in the bottom third of the American League some of the most important offensive categories—on base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS (On base Plus Slugging), weighted On Base Average (wOBA). The one bright spot is home runs, where the Astros are 4th in the AL with 15—over one per game.
But notable is the Astros BABIP, which stands for Batting Average on Balls In Play, which is last in major league baseball. Sabr-metric analysts have found that players and teams don’t have much control over BABIP. And over the long term, BABIP tends to move toward the league average, which is .279 across the American League so far this season. Fluctuations in BABIP are explained predominantly by chance. And this raises the question, how much of the Astros current offensive slump is just a matter of bad luck?
To answer that question requires one to move beyond the output-based stats shown in the in the chart above. The BABIP numbers show that Astro batters have not found holes in the defense. Is that due to hitting bad pitches? Are they chasing pitches that they cannot do much with?
The evidence suggests no. The Astros are, for the most part, making good decisions about when to swing the bat an when to take a pitch. Their chase rate—that is their willingness to swing at pitches out of the strike zone—is 2nd lowest in the AL. Their whiff rate (i.e. swing and miss) is similarly good, at 14th lowest in the AL. They are forcing pitchers to stay in the strike zone. Though the numbers show that one weakness is their willingness to take strikes. They are 2nd in taking called strikes in the AL.
Putting all of these together, the Astros stand near the middle of the American League in swing decisions. They are 5th in the AL strikeout percentage, down from first last year, but still a good number. They are in the middle of the pack in their rate of taking walks. None of these are great numbers, but they do not suggest that Astros issues is chasing bad pitches. They may take too many strikes, but when they swing, they hit the ball.
So how are they hitting the ball? Thanks to Statcast, we know how hard each ball is hit. So we can know how well a team (or player) is hitting the ball. And the data show that the Astros are hitting the ball pretty hard.
The Astros are 4th in the American League in the percentage of hard hit balls.1 They are 6th in barrel percentage and barrels per plate appearance. A barrel is the defined as the ideal combination of exit velocity and launch angle. Barrels are good, and the Astros barrel numbers show they are hitting well. They are also relatively low in their share of “soft hits,” ranking 9th in the American League.
The average exit velocity of the balls struck by Astro hitters is relatively low at 10th best in the American League. They are not crushing the ball, but they are hitting the ball well enough to score more runs than they actually are.
And that is reflected in the numbers we should expect from Astro hitters. Statcast examines the “exit velocity, launch angle and, on certain types of batted balls, Sprint Speed” to determine how often a ball is a hit, and what type of hit is usually is. From this, they can determine an expected batting average, expected slugging, and expected weighted on base percentage. The chart below shows the actual batting average, slugging percentage, and weighted on base average for the Astros and compares it to the expected number.
Each of the numbers shows the same theme. The Astros are hitting the ball well enough to do better than they have actually done. The Astros have a batting average of .203, but an expected batting average 47 points higher at .250. The Astros have an actual slugging percentage of .344, and an expected slugging percentage a 100 points higher at .444. As big as these differences are, it’s notable that these are not the highest in the AL; they are both the 4th biggest difference.2
And these differences are also reflected in weighted on base average, which is a comprehensive stat that combines getting on base with power. The Astros have an actual wOBA of .282, but an expected wOBA of .331.
The most important conclusion from this dive into the numbers is that the Astros are indeed hitting in bad luck so far this season. They are hitting the ball pretty hard, but the ball is not finding holes in the defense.
The good news is that these trends should even out over a larger sample of games. We saw some of this on Sunday. Chas McCormick had an RBI single when his grounder was too far in the hole for Blue Jays shortstop Bo Bichette to field cleanly. Or in the 7th inning, when Aledmys Diaz’s soft liner eluded the grasp of a drawn in Blue Jays infield to tie the game at 6. The breaks tend to even out over a long period of time, and that started happening some on Sunday afternoon.
But these data are not all ice cream and cherries. The Astros are hitting near the middle of the pack in the American League in expected categories and in the categories around strike zone judgment. Last season, the Astros score the most runs in the American League. This season, there are clear signs that the Astros offense have regressed from that peak. Again, they are likely to improve on their bad numbers so far this season, but they seem to have taken a step back from the juggernaut offense we say in 2021.
But regardless of that step back, we can expect the Astros to get out of their current funk. They are hitting worse than they should so far this season. That should not last.
There are two measures of hard hit balls. I used the measure listed on Fangraphs (and recorded under a proprietary method from Baseball Info Solutions) over the one listed on Baseball Savant, which uses Statcast data.
Overall, hitters are below their expected numbers across baseball this year, which we see reflected in the overall numbers for hitters this year. For example, the league batting average so far is .232, one of the lowest numbers in decades.