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.
