Astros lineup and hitting the ball hard

Do Astros batters’ hard hit rates and statcast metrics tell us anything about who may perform better in 2025?

With the 2024 season complete, we can look back at the Astros batters’ “quality of contact.” The statcast metrics provides information on the exit velocity and elevation of batted balls on contact. Hard hit balls are defined as events with 95 mph or higher exit velocity, and Barrels are defined as batted balls with a combination of exit velocity and launch angle which are likely to produce more than a .500 batting average and 1.5 slugging.

The decline in power is a running theme for the Astros’ offense this year. The offense ranks highly in batting average and wRC+ with rankings of 3d and 5th, respectively. But the ranking for Isolated Power (ISO) is 15th. The statcast measures of quality of contact are strongly related to extra base power.

Based on the R-squared statistic, teams’ hard hit percent, exit velocity, and barrel percent explain approximately 50% of the variation in team ISO. (R-square ranging from 0.47 – 0.49.) Launch angle explains only 18% of the variation in ISO. Hitting the ball hard isn’t the only reason for extra base hits, but it is a strong determinant.

The Astros batters ranked 15th in Hard Hit percent and 16th in Barrel percent. The Astros were also ranked 14th in Launch Angle (LA). The Astros are around average in these determinants of contact quality which also matches the team ISO ranking of 15th.

Expected Stats

The contact quality data also is used to produce statcast’s “expected” stats. The expected batting average (x-BA), slugging (x-SLG), and OBA (xwOBA) shows the offensive production which should have resulted from a batter’s contact quality. The difference between actual batting stats and the “x” stats may indicate whether a player’s offensive stats are influenced by luck.

The Astros’ top ten leaders in Barrel percent are shown below:

1. Cabbage
2. Alvarez
3. Tucker
4. Heyward
5. Dezenzo
6. Gamel
7. Singleton
8. Diaz
9. McCormick
10. Meyers

Potentially, Astros’ batters who “under performed” their actual power stats, according to the expected or “x” metrics, could see improved offensive stats due to regression or reversion next year. If their actual power stats in 2024 reflected some degree of bad luck, the improvement in 2025 would simply reflect better fortune as actual stats move more in line with the hard hit metrics.

So, let’s examine Astros’ batters who produced x-SLG and xwOBA higher than their actual SLG and xwOBA. The listing is ordered by number of balls in play by the Astros hitter.

Data from Baseball Savant

• Alvarez, McCormick, Gamel and Dezenzo show the greatest margin of x-SLG over actual SLG.. As expected this margin carries over to the differences between their wOBA ans xwOBA.
• The fact that Pena, Alvarez, and Diaz all produced higher expected stats is encouraging news for 2025. All three hitters put a lot of balls in play in 2024, suffered some bad luck on the balls hit with power, and each is capable of hitting with good power. Yordan hasn’t posted SLG higher than .600 since 2022. Thus, his x-SLG of .608 in 2024 could foreshadow a return to that elite level.
• Yainer Diaz’s experienced almost a 100 point decrease in actual SLG between 2023 and 2024. However, his x-SLG of .468 indicates that only part of that decrease was deserved, given some bad luck outcomes. But in order to return to his 2023 power numbers, Diaz needs to work on elevating the ball more.. Diaz’s launch angle declined from 11.5 in 2023 to 8.9 in 2024.
• Ben Gamel’s x-stats are surprisingly good. (And, yes, it is a small sample.) His x-BA is .263 and his xwOBA is .347, which is third highest on the team (behind Alvarez and Tucker). He also had some bad luck on his power outcomes in 2024. I don’t know if the Astros are interested in bringing Gamel back in 2025. But he signed on a NRI with the Mets in 2024, and if he is available for that kind of signing in 2025, perhaps the Astros should give him consideration.
• The young call ups from Sugar Land experienced “small samples” of major league ball. But all three—Cabbage, Dezenzo, and Whitcomb—experienced some bad luck on power outcomes. As noted previously, Cabbage was a leader in barrel percent, which may indicate that he could show more HR power in the future. But Cabbage has shown himself to be a low batting average power hitter in the majors so far. Unfortunately, Whitcomb didn’t receive many batting opportunities, but Statcast indicates that his expected batting line was very good: x-BA .276, x-SLG .423, xwOBA .343. Dezenzo’s power plays well on the x-stats, given his x-SLG of .444 and 40% hard hit rate. But a question remains as to whether he will exhibit an acceptable batting average in the future. His x-BA was .222 in his introduction to the majors.
• The three young players, above, all under performed their “x” stats, which may indicate that they will show improvement next year. It will be interesting to find out if one or more of the three (Cabbage, Dezenzo, Whitcomb) will bat well enough in 2025 to earn a role on the major league team.

Thoughts?