The Astros at Memorial Day. Theme #3: The Offense Has Struggled
The Astros are 21st in the majors in scoring runs. Obviously, that's below average. I run through the numbers and find reasons to be optimistic that the offense will score more runs moving forward.
In this series examining the Astros at Memorial Day 2025, I examined how the bullpen has been the backbone of the team (it was again yesterday, with 4 shutout innings despite the A bullpen being down). And how the team has hovered around .500 all season.
If the bullpen represents the strength of the Astros, the offense is the clearest weakness. The bullpen has allowed an ERA of 2.75, keeping runs off the board. This has been essential, because the offense is not doing a good job of putting them on the board.
Astros bats have averaged 4.04 runs scored per game this season. If that does not sound like a lot to you, you are correct. It’s the 21st highest in baseball. The official term used in sabermetric analysis for that kind of performance is “not good.”
Today, I’ll dig into the numbers on the Astros offense. My digging through the numbers indicates to me that there are reasons for cautious optimism for the Astros offense. They “should” be scoring more runs, which indicates they will do so over the rest of the season.
Average Performance
Earlier, I described the Astros run scoring performance as “not good.” And that is accurate. The average MLB team is scoring 4.33 runs per game. The Astros are scoring nearly a third of a run less per game.
But as the table below shows, the rest of the Astros offensive numbers are much closer to league average. Astros hitters are slashing .254/.323/.386. That is a higher batting average and a higher on base percentage than the MLB average.
They have not hit with a lot of power this season, which is demonstrated by the team’s below average slugging percentage. Overall, the Astros have an OPS of .709, just a hair off of the MLB average of .711.
Modest Improvements in Swing Decisions
In a press conference at the end of the 2024 season, Joe Espada said that “we kind of got way from our offensive identity” and that his team needed to “get back to having quality at bats.”
I analyzed the Astros offensive performance in 2024 and found that the team “swung more often in 2024 than they had in previous seasons and it lead to less contact.” In short, the team was swinging more often, often at pitches out of the strike zone. I also noted it would be difficult to change that—the high contact, low walk approach was pretty ingrained in the Astros offense over the last 7-8 seasons.
Have the Astros made any improvements in their swing decisions in 2025? The chart below shows the differences in the Astros performance at the plate between 2024 and 2025. Broadly, it shows the Astros have made modest improvements this season. I also included the Astros rank in the MLB for context.
Astros hitters are chasing fewer pitches in 2025, swinging at fewer. The still do all of these things at an above average rate for major league teams. That is, they chase and swing more often than the average MLB team.
Yet, they whiff less often. And that rate has improved a slight bit. In 2024, the Astros swung-and-missed at 10.3% of all pitches they saw, the 18th highest rate in baseball. This year, they have reduced their rate of whiffing slightly, to 10.3%, 21st highest.
As a result of chasing and swinging less, the Astros have improved their walk rate nearly 1 percentage point. But the tradeoff is that they are striking out more often, increasing that rate by 1.3% this season. The Astros remain a low walk, low strikeout team, but both of these measures have moved closer to league average this season.
Overall, the Astros seem to have made most improvements in their swing decisions. Chases are bad and it is hard to make good contact on those pitches. Walks are of course good. Strikeouts are not desirable. The improvements may be modest, but they have not produced a better offense yet.
Who Has Improved and Who Has Declined in 2025?
The Astros average 4.60 runs per game in 2024, so the decline to 4.04 this season is quite notable. What is causing the decline?
One answer is provided in the chart below, which looks at the 4 key members of the Astros whose offensive performance has declined this season. This chart used weighted Runs Created plus (wRC+), which has two advantages. It is a comprehensive measure of offense (that’s what weighted means), so it includes things like power, patience, and batting average together in one metric. It is also scaled so that 100 is league average. For every one point above (or below) 100, that means the player is one percent better (or worse) than a league average hitter.
The Astros have four notable hitters who were well above league average in 2024, and who are below league average in 2024. These are Jose Altuve, Yordan Alvarez, Christian Walker, and Yainer Diaz. I write them here in this order because that is the order that Joe Espada put them in the lineup on Opening Day. They hit 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th respectively.
Of course, your 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th hitters are pretty important to a team’s lineup. The fact that such important lineup cogs are hitting so poorly this season—with Diaz, Alvarez, and Walker all hitting at least 20% worse than league average—makes it easy to understand why the Astros are scoring so few runs.
In short, the Astros offense has declined this season because its most important hitters have declined.
It is not all bad news. Just as four hitters have declined this season, one can note four hitters who have made notable offensive improvements.
Jake Meyers was a below average hitter in 2024, and really, throughout all of his career. But he’s off to a hot start. Similarly, Jeremy Pena has improved from a league average batting performance over his first three seasons to a 129 wRC+ so far this season. Isaac Paredes has been the team’s best hitter, and Victor Caratini has jumped up to a 124 wRC+.
These players have taken up some of the slack created by the poor seasons from Alvarez, Altuve, Diaz, and Walker.
Reasons for Optimism
On Memorial Day, the Astros stand just 3 games above .500 and in second place in the AL West. The biggest reason this team is not currently in playoff position right now is because of the struggling offense. Being 21st in scoring runs is not conducive to winning baseball games.
My review of the numbers in this article leaves me reasons to think that the offense will improve and score more runs over the next 100 or so games than it did in the first 50.
I will start by noting that the Astros offensive numbers are right around league average in everything but scoring runs. They should have scored more runs this season than they have. And while one cannot get into a Delorean and give the Astros the runs they should have produced, such numbers are predictive. The Astros are likely to score runs closer to their OPS over the long run.
These numbers suggest that the Astros are an average offense and thus, they should improve their below average run scoring over the long run of the season.
Why are the Astros not scoring as many runs as they should? One may think the answer is poor performance with runners in scoring position. But that is not the case. The Astros are slashing .248/.321/.406 with runners in scoring position, right in line with the league average in that situation: .249/.328/.395.
The Astros broadcast often brings up their poor numbers with the bases loaded, and those are correct. But they rarely bring up the Astros performance with 2 outs and runners in scoring position. They have a .704 OPS in those situations, above the MLB average of .690. My best explanation of these discrepancies—variance swamps everything.
A more important reason to think that the Astros will improve offensively is that their decline is mostly caused by their best hitters. Or to put it another way, do you think that Yordan Alvarez and Yainer Diaz will continue to be well-below average hitters all season, or do you expect them to return to the performance levels we have seen from them across their careers at the plate.
Certainly this is true the other way as well. I do not expect Jake Meyers and Jeremy Pena to hit so much above their career highs. But both players are in their prime, so performances above their career numbers are certainly a reasonable expectation.
The big concern for me is the performance of older hitters in Jose Altuve and Christian Walker. Both are in their mid-30s, so larger declines may be happening. But even with that, both are so below their career averages that positive regression seems likely.
Astros hitters have not produced enough runs this season. I think there are good reasons to believe they will produce more over the rest of 2025.