Why Are The Astros Striking Out So Much?

Young guy struggling. Good contact hitters injured. Swinging and missing more on pitches out of the strike zone. Opposing pitcher quality. And It's Early

The 16 strikeouts on Friday seemed bad. The 17 strikeouts yesterday were definitely worse. Yep, it wasn’t good.¹

And that fits with a key story of the season so far. The Astros are striking out a lot. A whole bunch, in fact.

The good news—I guess—is that Michael Schwab’s tweet is no longer true. After the rest of the games yesterday, the Astros were passed for the most strikeouts by the Giants. They are now second.

And more context is useful, the Astros have played nine games while most major league teams have played eight at this point. By rate stats, the Astros are 6th highest in strikeout rate at 25.2%.² So it’s not quite that bad.

But yeah, it’s definitely not good. As Schwab notes, it is uncharacteristic of the Astros to strike out so much. In 2022, the Astros struck out 19.5% of the time, good for 2nd lowest in the majors. In 2021, the Astros were even better; their 19.4 K% was the lowest in the majors.

We are not used to seeing the Astros strikeout a lot less than we have this season. In today’s post, I’ll explore some of the numbers around the Astros early season strikeout spike to identify why they are striking out so much.

The Young Guys Are Striking Out

The players who are striking out the most tend to be the young players on the team. Take a look at the team leaders in strikeout rate so far on the young season:

• Jake Meyers 40.0%

• Yainer Diaz 40.0%

• David Hensley 40.0%

• Corey Julks 35.0%

• Jeremy Pena 30.2%

Some of that list is surprising—Diaz had low strikeout rates in the minors. Some of it is not—even the best versions of Pena and Meyers will strike out at a rate higher than league average. Some of that for the rookies is undoubtedly adjusting to better pitching.

But the pattern is clear, the biggest spike in strikeouts is coming from the youngest players.

Altuve and Brantley are out.

The Astros are down two players in their starting lineup—Jose Altuve and Michael Brantley. And one elite level skill that both of these players have is making contact.

Altuve had the 29th lowest strikeout rate among major league hitter with 250 plate appearances or more in the 2022 season. Brantley was even better; he had the 7th lowest strikeout rate.

And many of their plate appearances have been taken by Hensley and Julks, who have recorded very high strikeout rates this season. The increased strikeout rate is one area where these injuries have hurt the Astros.

They’re Making Less Contact on Pitches Out of the Strike Zone

What do the numbers tell us about why the Astros are striking out so much? To get a better answer on this question, I looked up the plate discipline numbers posted at Fangraphs and compared them to 2022. They are posted in the table below.

There are relatively few differences here. For example, the team is collectively swinging at fewer pitches out of the zone in 2023 than it did last season, but the difference is small, and probably not meaningful.

But when the Astros do swing at those pitches, they are making a lot less contact. In 2022, they made contact with 65.5% of the pitches they swung at out of the strike zone. In 2023, they are only making contact with 58.6% of those pitches.

The team’s swinging strike rate has increased from 10.2% to 11.6%, and the reduced ability to get a bat on a ball out of the strike zone explains most of that difference. The swing decisions seem to be on par with what we saw last season, but the results of those swings are not.

The Opposing Pitchers Are Good

Dylan Cease struck out 10 Astros in 6.1 innings on Opening Day. But that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Cease finished second in AL Cy Young Award voting in 2022 behind Justin Verlander. He’s a really good pitcher.

Sonny Gray is usually not the quality of Dylan Cease. But he has pitched well in both of this starts this season, and showed increased spin and movement on his pitches, especially against the Astros on Friday, when he struck out 13.

Joe Ryan is an emerging young pitcher who showed a big increase in spin on his pitches yesterday, especially on his 4-seam fastball. That fastball is also a pitch with deceptive shape (similar to Cristian Javier’s). He struck out 10 Astros yesterday.

In short, one reason to think that the Astros have struck out so much is that they have run into a tough set of starting pitchers. And if that is the case, the strikeout rate will come down as the quality of opposing pitches declines.

It’s Early

It’s been 9 games. We are barely into the second week of the baseball season. As such, some thing are out of whack right now due to the small sample size.

If you picked a random nine game stretch out of the 2022 season, you would be most likely to get a stretch in which the Astros had a winning record. But if you happened to pick out the stretches from April 13-25, from June 4-13, or from July 25-August , you would have picked out a really bad stretch.

This could just be a bad stretch of games for the Astros, in which they faced some starting pitchers who were especially good and or sharp. We don’t know any of that yet due to the small sample of games played so far.

Yainer Diaz, for example, is one of the co-leaders in strikeout rate at 40.0%. But that is 4 strikeouts in only 10 plate appearances. He is unlikely to sustain that high of a rate as he gets more plate appearances. Again, his minor league strikeout rates were always lower than league average.

There is a reason they play 162 games. And it is because no 9 games tells the story of a baseball season.

For example, that June 4-13 stretch last season included a 4 game losing streak, including losing a series to the woeful Marlins. Frustration with that series from Astros fans on social media prompted me to write an article titled “Shake It Off.”

In in, I wrote

The 4 game losing streak will certainly not be something we remember fondly when we look back at the Astros 2022 season. But odds are we will not remember it at all when we do remember the season.

That held up, obviously. That bad nine game stretch was not representative of the quality of the 2022 Astros. They played poorly and it was unpleasant to watch those 9 games. But that happens in a baseball season.

Here’s to not remembering the first 9 games of the 2023 season when we look back on it at the end of the season. And here’s to all of the strikeouts in the first nine games being a sign of nothing as the team finds its actual level. They have 153 games to do it in. I like their chances.

1. You can no longer embed a tweet in Substack because Elon’s gonna Elon. But as a workaround, I have screenshotted these tweets. The only downside is that you if you click on the screenshot, you do not get to that tweet on a new screen. Instead, nothing happen. I’m open to other ideas, but I think more of you come from Twitter to here than from here to Twitter.

2. You can find a glossary of Sabr-metric statistical terms at this link: https://library.fangraphs.com/offense/offensive-statistics-list/. For example, it defines strikeout percentage as “Frequency with which the batter has struck out, calculated as strikeouts divided by plate appearances.”