The last time the Houston Astros were 11 games below .500, the world was captivated by the death of Harambe the gorrilla, “One Dance” was at the top of the charts and future World Series MVP Jeremy Peña was a freshman at Maine. The way things were going for the past decade, it sure seemed like they'd never be back in the cellar, but here they are nonetheless.
Countless things have gone wrong for the Astros this year, now 7-18 and losers of four straight, but we're here to focus on four players in particular. For all the talent this team has, they could be in the process of putting themselves in a hole they can't escape and when combining expectations with results, these four are the biggest culprits.
Without further ado, then, here are the four Astros most responsible for the team's shocking and deplorable start to the 2024 season:
José Abreu
Maybe it's not the biggest surprise of all time to declare that the worst overall hitter in Major League Baseball so far ranks high on the list of disappointments. But it's worth discussing just how bad José Abreu has really been, because it's more shocking and abhorrent than even the most pessimistic of predictions could have ever built into the range of outcomes.
Andrew Benintendi has the lowest OPS among qualified hitters at .395, which is about what you'd expect from your average pitcher in the years before the National League adopted the DH. Abreu just misses out on qualifying by a few plate appearances, but his OPS is an astonishing .213, with just three single and a double in 62 at-bats.
And the results have been bad without an element of chance or bad luck either. Abreu is the only qualified hitter in the bottom 1% of expected batting average, expected slugging percentage, wOBA and xWOBA. There's not a single advanced metric in which he ranks even near the middle of the pack.
Abreu turned it on after a slow start last season but this start is so slow that even drastic improvement would leave him as a below average player. Forget his contract, his past achievements or his strong 2023 postseason. He's unplayable right now and whether the Astros decide to stick with him or not is akin to a game of roulette no one would ever envy.
Alex Bregman
Although Astros fans are well aware Alex Bregman is struggling, the historic nature of Abreu's slump and the putrid pitching might be allowing the third baseman to slide under the radar in terms of national attention. But he's rarely scuffled harder, one of just 24 qualified hitters without a homer this season.
Knowing that this is a contract year, Bregman has to be putting more pressure on himself than ever before. The team is struggling, his future is uncertain and the best way to get what he wants is to play well on a team with incentive to keep him. So it's natural to press and it sure seems like that's what Bregman is doing.
The good news is that although any objective stats Bregman has are bad, he's still going about his business in the box. He's got very solid chase, walk and whiff rates, so although he's not hitting the ball as hard as usual, there's hope that could change if he gets a few mistake pitches to hammer.
Hunter Brown
The Astros have had some of the worst injury luck imaginable within the starting rotation. Already without four past starters at the start of the year, the team lost its top two in the Opening Day rotation when Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier hit the IL. And the guy who was supposed to take a big step forward, Hunter Brown, has cratered.
Brown has a 9.68 ERA, a 2.49 WHIP and an 0-4 record in his first five starts. After a promising rookie season that tailed off somewhat towards the end of the summer, Brown seems to have no feel for the electric stuff that earned him a spot in the rotation for the first place. His fastball velocity is down, he's lost the location on his curveball and everything is getting tattooed.
It's only five starts for a second-year player, but Brown was supposed to be the guy the Astros could depend on this season. Instead he's become a loss on the schedule every five days and the Astros can't afford to keep trotting him out there if this continues much longer.
Josh Hader
The entirety of the Astros' bullpen deserves a large share of the blame, but Josh Hader gets singled out for 19 million reasons, each of them a dollar in his contract for the 2024 season.
With an 8.38 ERA, two losses and a blown save in his 11 appearances, this has been a nightmare start to Hader's Houston tenure. Unlike the 2022 season, where he struggled with command but retained his electric stuff, hitters are teeing off against the two-time Reliever of the Year.
Hader's bread and butter is his sinker, which he's thrown close to 70% of the time for most of his career. In 2023, hitters were helpless to its powers, with a .190 batting average allowed. This season, it's a .375 average and a .458 slugging percentage, which both appear due for regression, but have done enough damage already.
The disappointment of Hader projects so heavily onto the rest of the team because Hader was a luxury signing, strengthening a part of the roster already perceived as a strength so that the team would be more invincible once they inevitably got to the postseason. But Hader himself is drastically underperforming and if they miss the postseason, he'll just be sucking up payroll the team desperately needs to allocate elsewhere.
Follow Us
Subscribe