Alex Bregman’s Struggles Have Continued Into the Postseason
The Astros have powered their way into their third World Series in the last five years without the offensive contributions of one of their key players. In Houston’s 12 postseason games this October, Alex Bregman has hit a paltry .239/.308/.326 (.273 wOBA). He fared well against the White Sox in the ALDS, collecting six hits and two walks in those four games, but has just five hits in the eight games since and has been held hitless so far in the World Series. When your lineup is as deep as Houston’s is, you can survive a prolonged slump from one of your stars because there are so many other good hitters who can pick up the slack. Still, the Astros would rather Bregman hit than not.
These postseason struggles are just a continuation of a rough end to the regular season for the third baseman. He lost over two months of the season to a quad injury, keeping him sidelined from June 17 to August 25. After being activated from the injured list, he collected hits in 16 of his first 18 games back, but ended the season with just six hits in the team’s final 14 games. If you tack his postseason performance on to the end of his regular season, he’s hit just .200/.293/.313 (.269 wOBA) over his last 30 games. That late season swoon brought his wRC+ down from 130 on September 16 to 115 just 14 games later.
Bregman started his major league career with just two hits in his first 10 games, but pushed his wOBA up to .315 by his 30th game in the bigs. He’s had some slumps over the years — notoriously starting off each season slowly — but there’s never been a 30 game stretch where his wOBA has fallen as low as it is right now. Just looking at some of his peripheral stats during this stretch reveals where most of Bregman’s problems lie:
| PA | K% | BB% | ISO | BABIP | wOBA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 133 | 13.5% | 11.3% | 0.113 | 0.200 | 0.269 |
Between 2018 and ‘19, Bregman blasted 72 home runs, and posted a .270 ISO and a phenomenal 162 wRC+. In the two seasons since, his power output has dropped off significantly. His ISO dropped to .209 last year and fell even further in 2021.
Bregman’s batted ball peripherals have never been outstanding. His career barrel rate sits at just 5.3% and his hard-hit rate at 37.0%, both of which are below league average and curiously low for someone with his home run totals from a few years ago. The key for him has been a batted ball profile that is heavily optimized for pulled power in the air, and with the Crawford Boxes’ extremely short porch in Minute Maid Park’s left field, he’s been able to rack up plenty of wall-scraping home runs that might not have gone out in another ballpark. Based on Statcast’s expected home run metric — which accounts for batted ball quality, distance, and stadium dimensions but not environmental factors — he hit 13 more home runs than expected in 2019, the biggest difference in baseball. If he had played all of his games in Minute Maid Park this season, he would have had 19 home runs rather than the 12 he actually accumulated.
A deeper look at his batted ball stats shows some encouraging signals from the regular season and the root of his struggles in the playoffs:
| Year | Barrel% | Hard Hit% | Air% | FB+LD Avg EV | FB+LD Pull% | FB+LD xwOBAcon |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 7.4% | 39.6% | 65.4% | 91.0 | 39.7% | 0.444 |
| 2019 | 4.6% | 37.2% | 68.4% | 89.8 | 40.1% | 0.397 |
| 2020 | 3.9% | 33.6% | 66.4% | 88.9 | 36.5% | 0.391 |
| 2021 | 6.4% | 38.1% | 59.2% | 90.0 | 44.0% | 0.392 |
| 2021 Postseason | 0.0% | 33.3% | 50.0% | 88.6 | 41.2% | 0.324 |
During the regular season, Bregman was pulling his air contact more often than ever and enjoyed the second highest barrel rate and hard hit rate of his career. It’s unfortunate that his results didn’t follow the improvements in contact quality underlying his performance during the spring and summer. One of the biggest issues was a groundball rate that crept up over 40% for the first time in his career. In the playoffs, exactly half of his batted balls have been put on the ground. His contact quality has also taken a major hit during October; a third of his postseason batted ball events have been hard hit, but just five of those 12 have been put in the air. He’s still pulling a bunch of that air contact, but it’s just not being hit with any authority.
Because he missed so much time earlier in the season, it’s possible Bregman is pressing a bit at the plate. Over the last three seasons, his swing rate has sat around 36%; his approach was focused on selectively picking pitches he could handle while doing a fantastic job of laying off pitches located outside of the zone. This season, his swing rate jumped up to 41.4% and it’s up to 42.7% in the playoffs. That more aggressive approach didn’t really affect his strikeout rate during the regular season, but it has spiked to 21.2% in the postseason.
Despite the ongoing swoon, Astros manager Dusty Baker slotted Bregman into the third spot in the lineup during the first two games of the World Series. Still, his struggles have gotten bad enough that Baker might want to start thinking about dropping him in the lineup. He’s continued to work on his swing diligently throughout the postseason, but that work hasn’t paid off yet. In Game 1, he struck out twice and grounded out twice. In Game 2, his first batted ball of the game was a spark of hope — a 102.3 mph lineout to center field that brought home Jose Altuve from third base — but he grounded out twice more and added another strike out. Altuve broke out of a slump of his own with two extra-base hits on Wednesday night, but if the Astros really want to feel good about their chances of overpowering the Braves, they’ll need Bregman to start contributing at the plate.
Jake Mailhot is a contributor to FanGraphs. A long-suffering Mariners fan, he also writes about them for Lookout Landing. Follow him on BlueSky @jakemailhot.
He was looking great for almost a month after coming back from injury before the wheels fell off in mid-September.
He and Gleyber Torres have had extremely similar career arcs thus far (though Bregman is obviously a bit better than Torres). They’re both polished, professional hitters who have a good swing plane and make a lot of contact at an optimal launch angle, but they just don’t hit the ball hard at all. If not for the mega-juiced ball of 2018 and 2019, they would likely both have settled in to be the kind of above average, ~20-25 homer a year infielder who can carve out a nice 10-12 career for himself first as a solid role player and then as a veteran clubhouse presence. Instead both of them were saddled with the expectation of being a ~40 home run hitter because of external factors outside their control, so their true talent level at the plate will always seem like a disappointment to fans who were hoping for a superstar.
Solid role player? Bregman has real superstar potential, juiced ball or not
Respectfully, he’s going to be 28 next year and while he might have some good to even elite years left in him, his best years may have already passed. He’s not that big, doesn’t barrel up the ball, doesn’t run anymore and his BABIP suffers because he pulls the ball in the air and not every park has Crawford boxes. To me, this article describes everything that makes him fall just short of superstar potential.
Bregman has never posted more than a 125 wRC+ in a non-juiced ball year. The thing you have to remember about the juiced ball is that it didn’t affect players in the same way. It had an extremely minor benefit for people with extreme raw power (Stanton, Judge, etc) or people with high strikeout rates. It also benefited flyball hitters much more than groundball hitters.
Bregman is to a T the exact kind of player it benefitted the most – he doesn’t strikeout much and doesn’t hit the ball hard, but he does hit a ton of line drives and fly balls.
If I recall correctly, 2018 was a high drag year for the ball and he put up a 157 wRC+
Trash can.
Bregman had an injury… Torres might still have one. Either way, I’m not drafting Bregman. He looks like the most egotistical and least worthy of respect for contrition (that he’s never once shown,) for FBB in the wake of the scandal that proved he was one of the main recipients of the Trashstros’ scheme. I know we’re not in roto right now, but this guy is far-distant from what I think Chapman will be next season.
The assumption I’m making? The Legs. Hurt his legs, became conscious to not hurting them again, and may be afraid to plant harder to use his lower body to generate the power he’s wanting
It feels fairly obvious to anyone who watches the Astros nightly. His quad is clearly not healed (or some other leg issue) and his frustration is apparent. Frankly, he looks like he wishes he had done something else with his life at this point. It’s really hard to watch.
It’s GLORIOUS to watch for those that have watched his egotistical peacock-preening. If he didn’t know what was coming, he’d have been a normal player.
He’ll get a FA contract, somewhere, sometime, but it’s not gonna be like the mgr’s and such.
It’ll be a LOT of fun watching him and his teammates FAIL horribly in FA.
No one wants a clubhouse cancer.
It’s a good theory, but it is not supported by Statcast evidence. If you compare his 2021 full season batted ball data to his 2018 and 2019 batted ball data, it is almost identical. His average exit velo is within .4 MPH, and his max exit velo and barrel rate are both in between his 2018 and 2019 numbers. The quality of contact he is making is almost identical to the quality of contact he was making two years ago, he is just getting worse results after making that contact.
yeah, but he knew what was coming at him.
My pick to click the rest of the WS. He’s too good to keep down – similar to what Freeman did after the Dodgers got the ‘book’ on him.
My point is, we spend a lot of time talking about sample sizes, yet we act like they don’t matter when we want to point out something or need an article (to get some clicks). Maybe he will not do well the rest of the series, maybe he will, but what we have seen from him over the years would make me think he has a better chance of being good than not good. The Freeman article was the same type of thing only even smaller sample size. If this was written on May 1 and we would all say “April’. Why is it different now?
Because playoffs, and the Astros are on the wrong side of a 2-1 deficit. Everything is small sample size, and those small samples are weighed much heavier than in April when nobody’s been eliminated yet.
I’m not seeing any numbers for him. Just asterisks.