Jose Altuve, or an Impostor Who Looks Just Like Him, Is Wrecking House

It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Jose Altuve is at it again. The man is running a wRC+ of 160 or better for the third time in his career; in one of those seasons, 2017, he was voted AL MVP. The other was just last year. Rumors of his demise, which circulated throughout a disastrous 2020 season, have long since subsided.

And not a moment too soon, I might add. The Astros, held in check by the Rangers most of the season, are back on their heels after a three-game sweep at the hands of division rival Seattle over the weekend. The pitching staff has taken a step back from its unhittable late-2022 apotheosis. Primary offseason acquisition José Abreu was hitting like a utility infielder before a back injury put him on the shelf. Jeremy Peña’s power stroke has deserted him, as has Cristian Javier’s unique brand of fastball-heavy trickeration.

Houston looks a little wobbly, for the first time since at least 2020; setting aside that season’s unique circumstances (and the Astros made it to Game 7 of the ALCS anyway), the team has not wobbled this much since 2016. But Altuve, hitting .327/.420/.529 since his return from a broken thumb suffered during the World Baseball Classic, has held things together.

If that really is Jose Altuve.

What do we know about Jose Altuve? I may not have read Marcus Aurelius, but I’ve seen The Silence of the Lambs enough times to know about first principles. What is Altuve’s nature? He’s short. (“No! That is incidental!”) He’s a contact hitter — a contact hitter of such quality that we’d be talking about him having one of the best hit tools of the 21st century, had Ichiro Suzuki not come along and taken all the fun out of that conversation.

Altuve came into the league a gifted but undisciplined hitter, evolving his approach over time to worry less about hitting the ball for its own sake and more about hitting the ball hard when that was a possibility.

The Statcast era doesn’t really do this transformation justice, since Altuve really took the leap in 2016, but as he learned to access his power, pitchers started to fear him and threw him fewer pitches in the zone.

So we eventually got used to an Altuve who walks 8–9% of the time. But through 54 games this season, he is walking 13.9% of the time. The young Altuve’s profligacy places him in a unique position now. There are 14 active players to have walked 2.5% of the time or less in a season of 200 plate appearances or more, and 74 who have posted a walk rate of 13.5% or more in a season of equivalent length. Altuve is the only one who’s done both.

Some oddities remain. Among position players with at least 200 PA this year, Altuve is in the 14th percentile for in-zone swing rate and the 58th percentile on swing rate outside the strike zone. So he’ll still chase a little, but the results are elite wherever the ball comes to him. Here’s his wOBA, broken down by position regarding both the strike zone and Baseball Savant’s attack zones:

Using that 200-plate appearance threshold, Altuve is tied for fourth in the league in wRC+ and 18th in slugging percentage. It’s been a while since he was a scrappy spray-hitting punch-and-run guy, but never before has he been an elite on-base guy because of his selectivity and walk rate. This isn’t Altuve; this is Mookie Betts. It’s the middle ground between pre- and post-elbow injury Bryce Harper. It’s Lars Nootbaar, plus 50 points of batting average. This feels like the kind of thing Joey Votto would do as a bit.

But walk rate notwithstanding, this season is very Altuve in one key respect. After his awful 2020 campaign, Altuve — previously a groundball-heavy hitter his whole career — belatedly joined the swing plane revolution. Having previously done his best work with a GB/FB ratio of around 1.4, he went about even in 2021 and ’22, and he made those fly balls count, with the second- and third-highest HR/FB percentages of his career to that point. In 2021, he matched his previous career high of 31 home runs and set both a new career full-season low for batting average and a new career high in ISO. The two-time AL stolen base champ’s abandonment of the running game continued, too, as he stole just five bags in 146 games that year.

This season, Altuve’s batted ball profile has returned to something approaching his career norm:

It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Altuve is hitting the ball hard, because he’s never really done that. Baseball Savant’s expected stats are running behind him hitting sirens and flashing emergency lights. His wOBA is 63 points higher than his xwOBA this season, which is no. 1 among the 322 hitters with at least 200 plate appearances this year. So by that standard, this looks like a fluke, especially considering that he’s played only a third of a season so far; most of the league is more than three-quarters of the way done.

But if Altuve’s ability to overperform is xwOBA is a fluke, it’s a fluke that’s sustained the fat part of a Hall of Fame career. (At least statistically speaking; I was relieved that the PED era logjam cleared before I was up for a Hall of Fame vote, but I fear that Banging Scheme Hall of Fame discourse is going to make the Roger Clemens discourse look like Mariano Rivera discourse.) Altuve has always excelled at conjuring hits from unusual places: his career wOBA on grounders is ninth-best among the 325 players who have hit 500 or more groundballs since 2015. In that same time, he has gotten more out of his launch angle and exit velo than he has any right to:

This is hilarious. (The all-time king of outperforming expected stats: Scooter Gennett, in case you were curious.) So maybe I was too hasty when I doubted Altuve’s authenticity based on walk rate alone. He hasn’t been so himself since before the pandemic; it’s just been a while since we’d seen it.