The Defense Has Declined Even More This Season

The Astros rate of getting outs in the field is one of the lowest in the majors this year. It's a big decline from the team's best seasons, when they had one of the best defenses in the majors.

Last night, the Astros played excellent infield defense in the 7th inning. Jonathan Singleton made a diving stop of a hard hit grounder at first base. Jeremy Pena went deep in the hole and made a jump throw to retire Gabriel Arias.

In the 3rd inning, it was a different story for the Astros defense. A catchable fly ball from Brayan Rocchio landed between centerfielder Jake Meyers and rightfielder Kyle Tucker, which allowed the Guardians to start a rally that led to an early 2-0 lead.

This season, the Astros defense has so far looked more like what we saw in the second inning than in the sixth. The defense has been unable to make plays that other teams can make. That has led to more baserunners and more baserunners have led to more runs.

The table below shows the Astros team defensive numbers across a number of different metrics through the first 31 games of the season. Defensive metrics are notoriously noisy and contradictory, especially in relatively small samples like 31 games. And you can see that in these numbers.

Yet, despite the contradictions, there is little good news for Astros fans. Among the most respected defensive metrics—Defensive Runs Saved, Outs Above Average, and Fielding Runs Above Average—the Astros are in the bottom half of the league. They are well rated by Ultimate Zone Rating, and the team is relatively sure-handed, as the number of errors it has committed is low.

Perhaps the easiest defensive metric to understand is Defensive Efficiency, which is the percentage of batted balls in fair territory on which a team records outs. So far this season, the Astros have turned only 67.7% of batted balls into outs. As you can see, that’s 27th best in the majors so far this season, and below the league average of .699.

One of the secrets to the Astros success in the team’s Golden Years is its excellent defense. The line graph below shows the Astros Defensive Efficiency numbers since 2011. You can see that the team had a poor defense in the nadir years from 2011 to 2014 and then the defense improved in 2015, and crested between 2019 and 2022. The 2019 team led the majors in defensive efficiency, and the 2022 team set the team high for this measure, though they were the third best in the majors.

You can also see that the Astros defense declined in 2023 to 69.7%, 10th best in baseball. But the decline so far this season has been quite sharp.

The second thing to note is the tight correlation between winning and defense for the Astros. When the Astros were in their nadir in the early 2010s, their defense was poor and they had a low rate of converting batted balls into outs. That improved in 2015 and was a key to that year’s surprise playoff run. And the team rose to the top of the league in defense from 2019 to 2022, which were among the best seasons in team history.

The range of defensive efficiency is relatively narrow. There is a 5% point difference in outs recorded on batted balls so far in 2024 as compared to the high-water mark of 2022. Over a single game, that results in basically one more batted ball producing a hit each game this season as compared to 2022.

But baseball is played over the long run, and an extra hit each game adds up over the course of a season. More baserunners leads to more runs, as we saw in the 3rd inning yesterday and more outs leads to fewer runs, as we saw in the 7th last night.

The defensive decline is another area of worry for the Astros as they try to climb out of the hole they have dug themselves in the opening month of the season.