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:

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:

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.