We usually don’t do labs over the weekend, but with the trade deadline looming it seemed like a good time to put the Astros offense under the same microscope that we put the pitching. It is one thing to look at overall numbers and it is something else to break it down further to see exactly what we are looking at. The numbers you will see are up to the minute numbers through Friday night’s schallacking of the Texas Rangers.
We will also put one player under the microscope as well. It isn’t the most
pleasant of news, but we have to face some pretty grim things before the deadline when we are deciding whether to add more pitching or whether to add more offense. First, let’s break down the overall offensive numbers the same way that we broke down the pitching.
More than one thing can be true at the same time. The Astros offense can both be better than last season and also not quite as good as it looked early in the season. The team had a collective .802 OPS in March and April. There was no way they were going to keep that up. All of the gains they made in April they nearly gave back in May. That is one of the reasons why they reached their low mark in May 20th. It was a perfect storm of historically bad pitching and then matched with historically bad offense.
The team has stabilized since then to be better than they were in 2025 but not quite as good as they were in March and April. If we agree that the hitting is a mirror image of the pitching then we would also surmise that we could look at March and April and compare it with May on to see what the Astros offense actually is. We could then compare that with the MLB average.
Just like with the pitching, we have to look at the offense in the way it is producing right now. The months of March and April were unique for both the hitters and the pitchers and they don’t accurately reflect who they currently are. Make no mistake, the offense is still okay when you factor in that May was an unusually bad month offensively. As we saw with the pitchers, a .720 OPS is the league average OPS. The Astros offense has been producing at that clip from May 1st forward.
A large part of the offense and the fluctuating numbers are the individual components. We have seen an uptick in July as Jeremy Pena and Isaac Paredes have gotten hot. However, there is one key figure that has fallen off since March and April. In order to soften the blow I will utilize the Player A and B test. However, this one is a trick question.
This is a trick question. Both players are Jose Altuve. The first is Jose Altuve from his disastrous 2020 season. The second is Altuve from May forward this season. Obviously, there are a different number of games involved, so we did most of the numbers projected out to 150 games played. Make no mistake, that 2020 season was a special kind of awful for Altuve and might be the main thing that keeps him from getting to 3000 hits if he does fall short.
However, the 2026 season has been nearly as rough in many ways. In particular, the lack of patience has been glaring and that is especially true considering how the year got started. When one major cog in the system falters then that can explain an overall drop in production for the lineup. Fortunately, Altuve’s play has been covered up by Pena and Paredes resurgence, but if we include what Christian Walker has done the last couple of months then we can see the push and pull factors that impact an offense.
Essentially, Jose Altuve has been the same player as Cam Smith since May 1st. Couple that with the overall production at catcher, left field, and center field since that time and you can see why the Astros offense sometimes sputters. On some days it looks like it did last night when the hitters at the bottom of the order come through. On other nights it can look bleak. The Astros can’t really replace Jose Altuve, but they can cover him up by improving elsewhere. The need for hitting might be more acute than the need for pitching. That especially depends on how everyone feels about Ronel Blanco and Hayden Wesnescki.
