Even a Homer Can’t Offset Bregman’s Bad Night and Bad Luck

With one swing of the bat, it appeared that Alex Bregman and the Astros had turned a corner. In the bottom of the first inning of a World Series Game 2 in which his team already trailed the Nationals 2-0, the 25-year-old third baseman pounced on a poorly located Stephen Strasburg changeup, sending it into the Crawford Boxes for a game-tying home run. The shot offered the promise of a fresh start — the superstar snapping his slump, and the powerhouse club washing away the memory of its opening night loss, if not the unending debacle that is the team’s handling of the Brandon Taubman case.

The rest of the night did not go so well, either for the Astros, who only managed to score a single run more, or for Bregman, who did not collect another hit and whose suddenly shaky defense figured prominently in a six-run seventh inning rally by the Nationals. The Astros now trail the Nationals two games to none as the series heads to Washington, and Bregman, whose play during the regular season might well garner him the AL MVP award, is still among the Astros whose offensive output this postseason has left something to be desired.

Bregman spent the past six months as merely the AL’s best player this side of Mike Trout, and thanks to the combination of his durability and versatility — he played 156 games overall, including 65 at shortstop while Carlos Correa was on the shelf — as well as the Astros’ success relative to the Angels, he may take home MVP honors. In his fourth major league season, he set across-the-board career bests with a .296/.423/.592 line, a 168 wRC+, 41 homers, an 8.5 WAR. Among AL qualifiers, his on-base percentage, wRC+, and WAR all ranked second, his slugging percentage and home run total third; he also led the league with 119 walks. While he started the postseason on a tear, hitting .353/.450/.647 with a homer in 20 PA against the Rays during the Division Series, he slipped to .167/.423/.222 in the ALCS against the Yankees, walking a series-high seven times but doing little else.

In Tuesday night’s World Series opener, Bregman went 0-for-4 with three strikeouts, two against Max Scherzer and one against Sean Doolittle, plus a walk against control-challenged Tanner Rainey. “I’ve got to be better,” he told reporters after the game. “Starts with me. I was horrible all night.”

Bregman certainly looked better during his first plate appearance on Wednesday. By the time he came to bat — hell, before Astros starter Justin Verlander even recorded an out — the Nationals had scored a pair of runs on a Trea Turner walk, an Adam Eaton single, and an Anthony Rendon double. With two outs and Michael Brantley on first, Bregman pounced upon a 2-2 changeup that Strasburg left over the plate:

Tie ballgame. Bregman had a chance to untie it with two outs and runners at the corners in the third inning, but he hit a one-hopper to Turner for a forceout at second base, and led off the sixth inning — at which point the game was still tied 2-2 — with a sharper (97.9 mph) but still routine groundout to shortstop. Then came the seventh inning, one that recalled the Astros at the franchise’s nadir, though their defensive follies were admittedly less slapstick. After Verlander served up a solo homer to Kurt Suzuki, and he and reliever Ryan Pressly collaborated to loaded the bases via walks (including the team’s first intentional one of the entire season, issued to Juan Soto) while getting two outs, Howie Kendrick hit a well-placed grounder to the left side on which Bregman simply couldn’t find the handle:

One run scored, and Kendrick was credited with an infield single, though the play could easily have been ruled an error — which would have been quite out of character for Bregman, who made just five at the hot corner during the regular season while playing defense that rated at 2.4 runs above average via UZR, and seven above average via DRS. He would get another chance. After Asdrúbal Cabrera slapped a single up the middle and plated two more runs to stretch the score to 6-2, and a wild pitch advanced the runners to second and third, Bregman charged a slow chopper by Ryan Zimmerman. It did not go well:

Both runners scored, and from there, it was all over but for the excited shouting within the Nationals’ dugout, though the team tacked on four more runs en route to a 12-3 win. Had Bregman made either play, the game might not have gotten out of hand — which isn’t to say that it’s all on him, but that’s baseball.

Bregman is now hitting .233/.400/.442 this postseason, which actually qualifies as respectable; among Astros regulars, only José Altuve has a higher OPS (1.131, via a .358/.414/.717 line). However, on a team that aside from Altuve has hit a combined .196/.276/.323, it hasn’t been enough, though to be fair, Bregman’s Statcast numbers make the case that he’s not that far off from his regular season performance:

Bregman is hitting the ball hard with greater frequency, but more of those balls are ending up on the ground. On those balls, his quality of contact hasn’t been as good, and he may have been a bit unlucky:

During the regular season, the gap between Bregman’s groundball wOBA and xwOBA was negligible, but he’s 74 points in the red in the postseason, that despite above-average speed (which can increase a player’s wOBA as he legs out extra hits and extra bases). He’s gotten more bang for his buck when he’s put the ball in the air, but he just hasn’t done so with the same frequency. What’s more, only on his two home runs (the first was in Game 2 of the Division Series) did the exit velocity of his fly balls reach 95.0 mph; nearly 40% of his flies during the regular season were hard-hit.

Bregman’s woes seem glaring in part because he’s just 1-for-12 with runners in scoring position, and while he’s walked four times in such situations, he’s also grounded out five times. His overall offensive output in October has been far better than that of, say, Correa (.160/.208/.320, with a 41.5% strikeout rate), George Springer (.167/.262/.352), or Yordan Alvarez (.213/.288/.277, including 1-for-16 with runners in scoring position), but for a team that now finds itself with about a one-in-four chance of coming back to win the World Series, that’s cold comfort.