Amid Houston’s Problems, Yordan Alvarez Is Launching Baseballs Again

These are not good times for the Astros. The team has stumbled to an 8-15 start, and while slow starts themselves are nothing new for Houston, this Astros’ roster has been particularly depleted by injuries. Including All-Stars Hunter Brown, Josh Hader, and Jeremy Peña, they currently have a major league-high 14 players on the injured list. In the grand scheme, one of the few thing going right for the club is the return of Yordan Alvarez, who’s back to being healthy and unstoppable. Limited to just 48 games by injures last year, the 28-year-old slugger has not only played every game, but has hit a major league-high 10 homers.

During Sunday’s game against the Cardinals at Daikin Park, the Astros trailed 4-1 with two outs and nobody on when Alvarez stepped in against lefty JoJo Romero in the eighth inning. In running the count to 2-2, he fouled off three pitches, including a sweeper that was well off the plate. Romero then threw him a changeup that sank below the bottom edge of the zone, and Alvarez went down and got it, hitting a towering solo homer to right field:

The Astros then added two more runs in the inning as Jose Altuve and Isaac Paredes sandwiched singles around a Christian Walker walk and a wild pitch from incoming reliever Riley O’Brien. That tied the game, which went to extra innings, where the Astros couldn’t do enough to counter the three runs the Cardinals scored against reliever Bryan King; they lost 7-5.

It was the Astros’ fourth straight defeat and their 12th in their last 14 games, a skid that’s more than offset their promising 6-3 start; they now have the American League’s second-worst record, sandwiched between the White Sox (8-14) and Royals (7-15). Alvarez has hit seven homers during this slide, including one apiece in each of Houston’s three losses to St. Louis; he hit solo homers off Kyle Leahy on Friday and Andre Pallante on Saturday as well. Only one of Alvarez’s seven homers within that span happened in a victory, his solo shot off the Rockies Jose Quintana on Wednesday.

Alvarez has hit in the number two spot in the lineup in every game, but despite the team’s leadoff hitters — Altuve (11 games), Peña (10 games), and Carlos Correa (two games) — combining to produce a respectable .345 on-base percentage in that capacity, his last five homers, and seven of his 10 overall, have occurred with nobody on base. Somehow, the team is just 3-7 in games when he leaves the yard, though it’s not like the Astros’ offense is otherwise decrepit. Even with three members of their starting lineup — Peña, left fielder Joey Loperfido, and center fielder Jake Meyers — now on the injured list, the Astros have scored 5.26 runs while hitting for a 122 wRC+ (.255/.348/.429), both tops in the AL. Unfortunately, they’ve also allowed an AL-high 6.09 runs per game and are dealing with injuries to Brown, Tatsuya Imai, and Cristian Javier as well as Hader.

So far, Alvarez is hitting .333/.471/.790 for a 238 wRC+. All of those numbers except his batting average rank second in the majors behind the Yankees’ Ben Rice, who was already off to a torrid start before homering in each of his past four games; he’s now hitting .338/.476/.800 (245 wRC+). For as disheveled as the lineup may be, Alvarez’s return is a reassuring one after what was essentially a lost season. The slugger struggled out of the gate in 2025, batting just .210/.306/.340 (74 wRC+) before landing on the IL on May 5 with what was originally diagnosed as a muscle strain in his right hand but was later discovered to be a fractured fourth metacarpal. After suffering a setback while rehabbing in early July, he didn’t return to the lineup until August 26, and while he quickly caught fire — going 21-for-40 during one stretch — he sprained his left ankle on September 15 and was done for the year.

That injury also proved season-ending for the Astros, in a sense. The team went 5-6 after he went down, finishing 87-75 while frittering away a three-game cushion for the final AL Wild Card spot, which they lost to the Tigers on the basis of a season series tiebreaker. Shortly after Alvarez got hurt for the second time, Dan Szymborski estimated that his hand injury was the majors’ single most impactful outage in terms of 2025 projected WAR lost (3.3), while the team’s 17.6 WAR lost to injuries overall led the majors to that point. Alvarez finished with an uncharacteristically light .273/.367/.430 (118 wRC+) line, though even that performance would have helped if spread over more than 48 games given the team’s subpar DH alternatives.

Alvarez actually hit the ball hard enough to merit better results than his 2025 numbers, and he’s hitting it quite hard in this young season as well:

Seventy-one batted balls isn’t a lot, but it’s past the point where exit velocity and barrel rate start to stabilize. Alvarez is hitting darn near everything in the air (23.9% groundball rate), and especially to his pull side; his 33.8% pulled air rate ranks fourth in the majors and is well beyond last year’s 20.8%. His average exit velo and barrel rate are both near the top of the leaderboards, while his expected stats rank either first or second behind only Aaron Judge. This is par for the course for a healthy Alvarez; from 2022–24, he placed in the 99th percentile for that triumvirate of expected stats four times, in the 100th percentile (either first or second alongside Judge) three times, and in the 96th and 97th percentiles once apiece.

I didn’t shoehorn it into the table above, but one other note about Alvarez’s Statcast numbers. On Saturday, in his next encounter with Pallante following the homer, he teed off on a sinker, ripping it 117.8 mph into the right-center gap for a double:

That was Alvarez’s highest-ever exit velocity on a base hit; he reached 117.9 mph on a groundout in 2019, and did have a 117.7-mph home run off Paul Blackburn on September 13, 2023. Quibbling over decimals isn’t the point — it’s that he’s back to producing some of the best contact of his career.

And the man is absolutely locked in. He’s got an 18.3% walk rate and just a 10.6% strikeout rate. He’s swinging at just 41.4% of his pitches, down from 43.8% last year and a high of 47.7% in 2024, and he’s chasing just 25.6%, similarly down from 26.7% last year and a high of 30.6% in 2024. He’s got a swinging strike rate of just 6.8% — over three percentage points below his career norm of 9.1% — and a whiff rate of just 19%.

This scatter plot will prove rather fleeting, particularly since Alvarez won’t slug .790 forever, but so long as it’s playing in small-sample theater, it’s worth a view:

Alvarez is the red dot, combining an absurd slugging percentage with a ridiculously low swinging strike rate for such a thumper. Rice is the dot above him and slightly to the right; he’s got a 9.1% swinging strike rate, though he’s struck out in 25% of his plate appearances.

Back to the homers. Ten in a team’s first 23 games is a 70-homer clip — impressive, but hardly unprecedented, and not even likely to produce a record-challenging pace. Consider the fates of the 14 other hitters who reached 10 this early since the start of 2015:

Six of the 14 players preceding Alvarez went on to hit at least 40 homers, but only one, the rookie Judge, reached 50. Dial back further and the list would include a 54-homer season from Alex Rodriguez (14 through 23 games in 2007), a 57-homer season from Luis Gonzalez (13 through 23 games in 2001), a 49-homer season from Albert Pujols (13 through 23 games in 2006), and a 73-homer season from Barry Bonds (10 through 23 games in 2001) — just to cherry-pick a few of the more eye-catching totals — but those were different times. Last year, Cal Raleigh hit nine homers in the Mariners’ first 22 games but didn’t add his 10th until their 28th game. In 2022, the year Judge hit 62 homers, he had eight through 23 games, but needed 28 games to reach 10. While he’s topped 50 homers twice since then, he hasn’t come out of the gate nearly as quickly.

If you’re wondering about the March/April record for homers, it’s 14, shared by A-Rod, Pujols, Bellinger and Yelich (recall that fun MVP race between the last two). As for Alvarez, while he’s averaged 42 homers per 162 games in his career, he’s never hit more than 37 in a season. That’s mainly because he’s been unable to stay on the field even while at his best; he hit those 37 in just 135 games in 2022, and when he played a career-high 147 games in ’24, he hit 35 homers.

Maybe this is his year to put up a big number, but things aren’t looking so good for the Astros. While they overcame a 12-24 start to win the AL West at 88-73 in 2024, that team had far more depth in both the rotation (including workhorse Framber Valdez and the surprising Ronel Blanco) and the lineup (including the now-departed Alex Bregman and Kyle Tucker). Brown and Javier are both out until at least late May or early June as they recover from Grade 2 shoulder strains. Imai is dealing with arm fatigue, as well as some cultural acclimation issues. Meyers, who has a Grade 2 oblique strain, has no timetable for return. Manager Joe Espada and general manager Dana Brown are both reportedly on the hot seat after last year’s playoff miss; each is in the final year of his contract, and owner Jim Crane isn’t exactly known for his loyalty — just ask Dusty Baker and James Click. But for now, at least Alvarez is in working order, and that’s something to behold.