Jeremy Peña’s slump has become impossible for the Astros to ignore, and it’s landing at the worst possible time for a lineup that already leans hard on its stars.
When Houston was without Yordan Alvarez on Friday night because of right ankle soreness - and likely some wear after a season in which he’s already logged a career-high 637 plate appearances - manager Joe Espada still kept the same basic idea in place. The Astros’ most dangerous bat usually belongs in the two-hole, and in Alvarez’s absence, Peña got the assignment.
That’s where the pressure lives now. Peña has to be more than steady; he has to help make the whole offense work.
He hasn’t done that for most of the past month and a half. Since Aug. 1, only 12 American League hitters have posted a lower OPS than Peña’s .602, and two of them are his own teammates, Christian Walker and Daulton Varsho. That tells you plenty about Houston’s imbalance, and just as much about how badly the Astros need Peña to snap out of this.
After another rough night in a 3-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays - two more strikeouts and two runners left on base - Peña talked like a player trying to stay even while the results keep slipping away.
“This league is always going to adjust, and you have to adjust with it,” Peña said. “When you get up there, of course you want to be the guy, but our lineup is deep.
You don’t need to be the hero. You can just pass it off to the next guy.”
That sounds fine in theory. In practice, Peña is one of only four qualified Astros hitters with an OPS above the league average, and one of just three position players on the 26-man roster worth at least two wins above replacement, according to both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference.
Houston can survive contributions that come and go. It can’t really afford to go without Peña.
The numbers since Aug. 1 underline the problem. The Astros have averaged 3.9 runs per game in that stretch, and Peña’s own line has taken a hit along the way.
His OPS has fallen from .879 to .776 over his last 145 at-bats, and his .240 on-base clip since Aug. 1 has kept him from using the speed that makes him so dangerous. He’s the club’s fastest average sprint-speed player, and on a roster full of older pieces, he’s one of the few who can change a game with athleticism alone.
Instead, the swing decisions have gotten messier. Peña said he tries to keep in-season adjustments small, and if he does make changes, they’re usually minor. The bigger-picture check he uses came from his college days at Maine: first look at pitch selection, then timing, and only after that think about mechanics.
“If it was a good pitch and I was on time and I still missed it, then something must be off,” he said. “But if I’m swinging at bad pitches, then you can’t go to mechanics when you’re swinging at bad pitches.
“I have to get better pitches first, before I start tweaking everything else. If I’m getting good pitches and I’m missing them, then I have to find a way.”
Right now, the issue starts with the chase. Peña finished August with a 45.4 percent chase rate, which was the highest monthly mark of his major-league career.
He had never finished a month above 42.4 percent before. The aggressiveness has been there all along - Peña chased 35.5 percent of pitches outside the zone last season, then finished 10th in MVP voting - but this stretch has mixed more swing-and-miss with a higher swing rate, and the results have snowballed.
“I feel like I’m trying to do damage with bad pitches, and that doesn’t go hand in hand,” Peña said. “It’s a matter of getting good pitches to hit and staying aggressive.
“When I say ‘do damage,’ I don’t mean like trying to hit home runs. … It’s get barrel on the ball.
If I do that, I’m strong enough to where the ball is going to go. It’s a matter of getting good pitches.”
The strikeouts have piled up too. Peña struck out at a 31.8 percent rate in August, the highest monthly mark of his career by 5 percent. When he’s not putting the ball in play, Houston’s offense gets even more lopsided, and Alvarez ends up facing more of the kind of empty bases that let pitchers work around him.
Sliders have bothered Peña before, and they’ve been part of the problem during this stretch, but Espada said the fix is not as simple as identifying one pitch type. Pitchers are going to keep testing him.
“I think there’s times where pitchers try to go further out to try his patience,” Espada said. “He just needs to be a little more patient and try to get the ball closer to him. But what makes him good is the fact that he’s always ready to hit, and when they make mistakes, he’s ready to hammer them.”
Peña showed exactly that against Tampa Bay reliever Tyler Wells in the eighth inning Friday, when Wells left a slider up and Peña crushed it into the left-field corner for a single.
For now, the Astros don’t have much choice but to keep writing Peña’s name near the top of the order. The roster demands it, and his track record does too. Peña has not let the slump spill into his demeanor, and he said he’s keeping the same steady approach.
“Today, we analyze what happened, take it and learn from it,” Peña said Friday. “Tomorrow is a new day.”
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