The Astros Stars Are Not Playing Like Stars.
Kyle Tucker is having a great year. But the team's other stars--Altuve, Yordan, Bregman, Framber, Verlander, Bryan Abreu & Ryan Pressly--are playing worse than in 2023.
On Wednesday in San Francisco, Framber Valdez has a bad game, giving up 8 hits and 5 runs and striking out only 1 batter in just 4 innings as the Astros lost 5-3 to the Giants.
On Sunday in Anaheim, Justin Verlander had a bad game, giving up 7 hits and 4 runs while striking out 3 in 5 innings. It contributed strongly to the Astros 9-7 loss to the Angels.
On Monday, the offense had a bad game, scoring only 1 run in regulation. The top three in the order (Altuve, Bregman, and Alvarez) went 2 for 12 in the first 9 innings, again contributing to an eventual loss.
These are the Astros star players. And their performance in the team’s 3 losses on their most recent road trip are all too representative of how the Astros stars have played this season—they’ve played below their usual level. And it has cost the team.
The obvious player missing from the paragraphs above is Kyle Tucker, who has a leg injury and was on the IL for this road trip. Tucker has improved on his performance in 2024 from last season, and that has helped the team. But he’s the exception among the team’s stars.
Tucker Improved, But Altuve, Alvarez, and Bregman Have Declined
Evidence for this is show in the chart below, which lists the OPS for each of the Astros top 4 hitting stars in both 2023 and 2024.
You can see Kyle Tucker’s improvement this season, as his OPS has gone up 93 points from the impressive .886 he had in 2023. But each of the Astros other 3 star hitters—Jose Altuve, Yordan Alvarez, and Alex Bregman have each declined in OPS by over 100 points this season.
Or to put it another way, in 2023, the Astros 4 star hitters had a .886 OPS across 2304 plate appearances. This season, in 1130 plate appearances, these same 4 Astros stars have a combined OPS of .830—56 points fewer.
Pitching Stars Are Doing Worse, Too
The decline from the Astros stars is not limited to the hitters. The Astros best pitchers have all pitched worse this season than in 2023.
Since pitching statistics are more complicated than hitting statistics, I broke these out into a table with three different statistical measures of pitching performance—ERA, Strikeout rate (K%) and Walk rate (BB%). I included not only Valdez and Verlander, who I mentioned in the introduction, but also star relievers Ryan Pressly and Bryan Abreu.1
I include ERA on the left hand side and you can see that the Astros two starters have ERA over half a run greater than what we they did in 2023 in an Astros uniform. The two relievers have ERAs over a run greater than what we saw in 2023.
While ERA tells us whether runs scored, it does not do a good job of telling us why runs scored. To help explain that, I included the strikeout and walk rates of each of these four pitchers.
They tell different stories for each pitcher. In the case of Framber Valdez, he is suffering from a reduced ability to strikeout batters. His 18.6% strikeout rate this season is well below the major league average of 22.2%. To improve, Framber needs more bite on his pitches to get more swing and miss.
In Verlander and Abreu’s case, it’s a little bit of regression in both measures. They are striking out about 1% fewer batters in 2024 and walking over 2% more. In Verlander’s case, it is likely the result of age catching up to him after dodging Father Time for so many years. In Abreu’s case, it is mostly that he was at such a high level last season that regression was almost inevitable. He is still posting outstanding numbers this season.
Ryan Pressly has taken the brunt of Astros fans frustrations with the team’s performance in one-run games, but his fundamentals have not declined. He is actually striking out more batters this season, though his walk rate has increased. The biggest difference for Pressly this year is that more balls are finding holes when they are hit. He has a .411 batting average on balls in play this season after a .272 number in 2023.
But regardless of the reason for the underperformance in 2024, these pitchers aren’t keeping runs off of the board as well as they did in 2022. In 403 innings for the Astros in 2023, the combination of Valdez, Verlander, Abreu, and Pressly had an ERA of 3.15. This season, in 185 innings, their collective ERA is 3.94.
The strikeout rate has declined from 26.5% in 2023 to 23.9% in 2024 and the collective walk rate has increased from 7.2% to 8.3%.
The Astros are getting worse performances from their best players and its a big reason why they are winning fewer games.
Wait for Regression to the Mean
What can the Astros do about this? The answer is, well, nothing. That’s not entirely true as there are likely some swing adjustments that the Astros hitting coaches can suggest or mechanical adjustments that pitching coaches can introduce.
But these are the Astros best players. And despite their underperformance this season, they have better numbers than the other 18 players on the active roster. You want to see these players in the lineup and on the mound and Joe Espada should keep using them as much as possible.
The hope is that this set of star players are just going through a tough stretch and over the course of the season, their performance will improve back to expected levels. But the Astros, whose are 31-38 on the season, need this happen to get the team back over .500 and into playoff contention.
The sooner. The better.
Since star reliever Josh Hader was on the Padres in 2023, I chose to exclude him from this analysis.