Jose Altuve, frustrated and ‘pissed,’ has 2 big swings while trying to revive his season – The Athletic
HOUSTON — Jose Altuve is not demonstrative. He did once remove his sock in protest of a call, but otherwise he prefers to play with poise. Scandal, scorn, seminal moments and storybook endings haven’t altered Altuve’s abiding stoicism.
A strikeout in mid-June of his 16th major-league season did. After Altuve swung through a fastball above his eyes, he spiked his batting helmet with such force that it created an audible crack. Altuve flung his bat and began a slow trudge toward second base.
“He’s pissed,” manager Joe Espada said after the eruption. “He knows he’s better than what he is showing right now.”
The outburst is so out of character that it could conjure concern, both for Altuve’s psyche and a path forward from this dismal start. He sports a .715 OPS after 230 plate appearances and is anchored in the five-hole of the Houston Astros’ batting order. Before this season, Altuve had never batted fifth in his major-league career.
Altuve throwing a temper tantrum is always cute. pic.twitter.com/hr8txyS2uE
— one cleveland baseball fan (@1CLEbaseballfan) June 20, 2026
Altuve’s 22.6 percent strikeout rate is almost 10 points higher than his career average. He is a lifetime .301 hitter staring at a .234 batting average. According to both Baseball Reference and FanGraphs, no Astros position player with at least 200 plate appearances is worth fewer wins above replacement than the face of this franchise.
“I just have to do better,” Altuve said. “I have to swing at better pitches. I have to hit the ball hard. I’m working on that, but I just have to be better and help this team win.
“Obviously I’m a little frustrated in how my season’s going.”
There is danger in trying to dismiss a man who has defied logic and reason since the day Astros officials sent him home from his first professional tryout.
Altuve’s go-ahead, three-run home run in the sixth inning of Friday’s 9-3 win over the Cleveland Guardians proved it. So did turning on a 98.4 mph fastball for a seventh-inning double that traveled 385 feet to left-center field. Altuve had put only three harder pitches in play all season.
“Hopefully tonight, two big swings, I can show up tomorrow and do similar things and I can turn my season around,” Altuve said.
Altuve may no longer be a lineup linchpin, but he remains this team’s heart and soul — someone it can’t survive without. Yordan Alvarez authoring a season worthy of American League MVP honors masks some of Altuve’s malaise. So does Christian Walker’s resurgence and Jeremy Peña’s power atop the order.
That Houston boasts one of baseball’s worst-performing outfields, coupled with the club’s complete absence of position-player depth, still makes it mandatory for Altuve to manufacture a resurgence. He took early batting practice in a T-shirt and shorts before Friday’s game.
“It’s a little bit of everything,” Altuve said. “It can be a little bit of your swing, pitch recognition and all the stuff mixed together. Hitting is hard. If you make it harder, it’s going to be impossible.”
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Altuve turned 36 last month. This slump and subsequent ones to come during the next three seasons of his contract will always prompt wonder about whether aging is affecting him. Altuve’s 69 mph average bat speed is his lowest since Statcast started measuring it in 2023. In 2024, though, Altuve won a Silver Slugger and made an All-Star team with bat speed that averaged 69.4 mph.
Altuve entered Friday with a 25.7 percent whiff rate. He’s never finished a season with one higher than 22.2 percent. At times, Altuve has bemoaned becoming too pull-happy, but he’s on pace to finish with his lowest pull rate since 2019. His groundball rate is elevated, and he is averaging just a 7.8-degree launch angle on the contact he makes. Altuve is a master of manufacturing infield hits, but doing so routinely at 36 is a different story.
Straining his oblique in May didn’t help, but even across the 185 plate appearances before he did, Altuve sported a .706 OPS.
Since coming off the injured list on June 5, Altuve is 8-for-42. He has struck out 17 times, including twice more Friday. He refrained from throwing anything after his second strikeout, but he did slap himself in the helmet and throw a hand up in disgust before reaching the dugout.
Altuve did not go on a minor-league rehab assignment before returning from his oblique injury. Asked whether that is a factor, Altuve interrupted the premise and proclaimed, “That’s just excuses.”
“That guy,” Peña said with a smile, “you call it a slump and then he has a week where he hits 10 home runs and he’s right back to normal. He’s a special player. He’s been doing it for so long. He knows how to get himself back in the game.”
Peña’s faith permeates the clubhouse. Altuve is often last on the Astros’ list of worries, even when his woes appear at their worst. He is one of the sport’s streakiest hitters, someone who always seems one swing away from a breakthrough. It is what made his final two at-bats Friday feel so consequential.
“He’s getting to that point where he wants to come through (for) the team, and we know eventually that’s going to happen,” said Espada, an eternal optimist who has witnessed the past nine years of Altuve’s career and can tell when things are about to turn.
“I love the fact that he threw his helmet,” Espada said with a grin. “That really fired me up.”
