Three Astros Things

Alvarez, Brown, and Hitters On Upswing

Let’s start the week with three things about the current Astros.

1. Yordan Alvarez

As you probably know all too well, Yordan Alvarez has started the season with unaccustomed batting results. His batting average is .210 with a 79 wRC+. However, Alvarez’s statcast “expected” stats are better. His xwOBA (.364) leads the team. On the surface, improvement seems likely because he should have produced almost a 100 point higher wOBA.

A recent article by Fangraphs (“Yordan Alvarez and the Replacement Level Bunch”) tried to explain why one of the most elite hitters in baseball had started the season so poorly. As the article noted, Alvarez is hitting the ball harder this year as measured by average exit velocity; yet his wRC+ has taken the 4th largest decline among qualified major league hitters through the first 28 games. As the article reveals, his barrel rate has dropped from the 92nd percentile to the 73rd, and his hard-hit rate from the 93rd to the 65th. These are still good numbers, but his average exit velocity isn’t telling the full story.

EV50, a stat based on the average of 50% highest EV batted balls, conceptually is a better measure, since it is more highly corrrelated with wOBA. Yordan’s EV50 was 12th best in 2024, but is now 45th best so far through 2025. Again, still well above average, but not in the previous elite range. Christian Walker is 40th on the EV50 list and leads the Astros with 102.7 mph.

The Fangraphs article suggests that Alvarez’s launch angle hasn’t always helped: “one thing that particularly stands out is that while his average launch angle and groundball and fly ball rates have hardly budged from last year, he’s gotten under 37% of his batted balls, hitting them at launch angles too high to be productive. That rate is 10th among all qualifiers,”

Relying on a Baseball Prospectus metric, the article also suggests that the quality of Alvarez’s swing decisions are significantly worse than prior seasons. In effect, he isn’t showing his typically elite ability to swing at the pitches which enable him to do damage.

Yordan Alvarez also has exhibited a decline in bat speed so far this season. (No. 46 on the bat speed list for decline since 2024.) But this may not be meaningful, since short term bat speed fluctuations don’t seem to be well correlated with wOBA. As evidence of that, Aaron Judge so far exihibited a larger decline in bat speed than Yordan.

Alvarez was kept out of the lineup for Saturday and Sunday games in Chicago due to hand inflammation. Manager Joe Espada said Alvarez has felt this inflammation for a period of time this year, and supposedly is day to day for returning to the lineup. An obvious question is whether the hand inflammation has affected his poor statistical start to this season. And this isn’t the first time Alvarez has taken time off due to wrist/hand inflammation issues. By my count, Alvarez has six visits to the IL for wrist or hand issues since 2021.

Obviously Yordan Alvarez’s performance is critical to improvement in the Astros’ team hitting. With the trade of Kyle Tucker, the Astros lost one half of their elite hitting tandem, which leaves Yordan as the only LH batter. This intensifies the importance of Yordan returning to his usual form in the Astros’ lineup. Hopefully, his hand inflammation recedes, and he gets his timing down to improve his launch angles and swing decisions.

2. Hitting Improvers

Statcast uses rolling average windows which can tell you which batters are on the upswing. The rolling window compares xwOBA over the most recent 50 plate appearances to the average over the previous 50 plate appearances. Examining the change in xwOBA is appropriate because the measure excludes luck from the small samples. So here are the top xwOBA “imrpovers” in the Astros lineup over the last 50 PA.

(current xwOBA / Percentage Point Improvement

Meyers .386 +.115

Diaz .361 +.111

McCormick .343 +.109

Paredes .361 +.085

Caratini .319 +.084

Dezenzo .340 +.041

Dubon .298 +.024

Rodgers .321 +005

At least in the short term, these Astros hitters are on the upswing. Let’s see if the gradual batting improvement continues.

3. Hunter Brown

Currently, Hunter Brown is one of the best starting pitchers in the MLB. And his outstanding performance so far has garnered him attention across the league. Baseball Savant included a trending article about the reasons behind Hunter Brown’s improvement this year. It’s a nice article and I recommend that you read it, particularly if you are a Hunter Brown fan.

But I want to focus on an interesting point made by the article. Brown combines improved velocity and stuff with precision in pinpointing pitches on the edge/shadow zone. “Most pitchers living on the edge of the zone do so because they’re control-over-stuff guys who have to command the baseball to survive. That’s not the case for Brown, who is top 10 in edge rate but also has much better stuff than those around him,” according to the article. Brown is 7th in “edge” pitches, but his 95 mph average velocity on 4 seam FBs and sinkers is significantly higher than the 86 – 91 mph range of edge leaders such as Nola, Mahle, and Hendricks.

For the combination of precision and stuff, look at Brown’s pitch below

As the article shows, Brown is No. 2 behind only Tarik Skubal in the combination of Stuff+ and Location+.