The Astros Hit the Ball Real Hard. My ALDS Game 3 Analysis
The Astros won on Tuesday because they were able to lift and drive the ball against groundballer Sonny Gray. Cristian Javier got swing-and-miss on his slider and Jeremy Pena was on point in the field.
I began my analysis of Game 2 by noting it happened to be a pretty easy game to analyze. And that such easy analysis was often unusual.
But for the second game in a row, I get to do some easy analysis of a playoff game. The Astros hit the ball well yesterday, and they hit the ball hard. It’s the reason they won Game 3 of the American League Division Series and sit one win away from another berth in the American League Championship Series.
The Astros banged out 14 hits to go with 3 walks in their 45 plate appearances on Tuesday afternoon in Minneapolis. Those 14 hits included a pair of doubles and of course, four home runs.
The screenshot below comes from the Baseball Savant page for today’s game. I sorted all of the plate appearances by exit velocity and here are the five highest in the game.
Four of the five are by Astros hitters, with three of them coming off of Twins starter Sonny Gray. They include four of the five extra base hits, including both of Jose Abreu’s home runs and the two doubles from Yordan Alvarez.
What’s notable on the home runs is the ability of Abreu to lift the ball against Gray. It was a similar story for Alex Bregman, who didn’t have huge exit velocity on his fifth run solo shot off of Gray, but got the ball up at a 39 degree launch angle.
Sonny Gray was one of the best pitchers in the majors this year, and he finished 3rd in ERA among all qualified starters. He succeeds by combining a whole bunch of average to above average metrics into a well above average complete package. But one thing he does well is get ground balls. His ground ball rate was in the 77th percentile of all major leaguers; it’s the most standout measure on his Statcast page.
Ground balls are good for pitchers because they are likely to become outs, and even if they don’t become an out, they can never turn into home runs. The Twins succeeded in Game 2 because they were able to lift and drive the ball off of Framber Valdez—a ground ball pitcher. Gray isn’t as extreme a ground ball pitcher as Valdez, but the same thing befell him today. His opponents were able to lift and drive the ball.
One of those drives—by Jose Abreu—drove in 3 runs and put the Astros up big in the first inning. The other—by Alex Bregman—extended the Astros cushion in the 5th inning.
In the conclusion to my Game 2 analysis, I wrote of Game 3 that “the Astros advantage is with their bats, so the most likely path to victory is for the Astros to slug their way to a win in Minnesota on Tuesday.”
That held up pretty well.
The Astros got an effective start from Cristian Javier. Javier has always had issues with control and those crept up again on Tuesday as he walked 5 Twins and hit another one. That wildness gave the Twins opportunities in the first (2nd & 3rd with 1 out), the third (1st & 2nd with 1 out) and the fifth (bases loaded with 1 out).
But the Twins never scored on Javier. The reason. He had swing and miss stuff on Tuesday. Javier struck out 9 batters, and 5 of them came with a Twin in scoring position.
Javier’s slider was especially effective. He kept it in the strike zone (only 10 balls) and off of the bats of the Twins. They swung and missed at 13 of the 32 sliders Javier threw. The Twins fouled off 2 others and watched another 6 land in the strike zone. They only put one of those sliders in play.
In short, the Twins could not touch Javier’s slider on Tuesday and that worked out very well for the Astros.
The Twins had one opportunity to get back into the game on Tuesday. In the sixth inning, 3 of the first 4 batters reached against Hunter Brown, who had relieved Javier. The next batter was Ryan Jeffers, and fi you look at the screenshot from Baseball Savant above, you can see Jeffers had the game’s second hardest hit ball.
Fortunately for the Astros, Jeremy Pena is a very good defensive shortstop. Pena dove to his left to corral Jeffers’ screamer. He quickly made a backhand flip to Jose Altuve to retire the runner at first base, and Altuve threw to first to retire Jeffers and complete the double play.
Matt Wallner, who was at second base, likely would have scored on the play which would have made the score 6-2. With one out and another runner in scoring position, the Twins would have more opportunities to cut into the Astros lead.
Brown is similar to Sonny Gray and Framber Valdez—he’s a ground ball pitcher (87th percentile according to Statcast). But over the second half of the season in particular, batters have done to Brown what the Twins did in Game 2 to Valdez and the Astros did in Game 3 to Gray. They have lifted and driven the ball. Jeffers may have hit the ball real hard against Brown, but he was not able to lift it. Instead, it was on the ground, giving Pena a chance to corral it before it got to the outfield.
Brown at least kept the ball down, which gave Pena a chance to make his big play.