EXALTING ALTUVE
He’s clearly the best Astro standing and the most underrated player in MLB.
We take him for granted. We still underestimate him. He should fall just below J.J. Watt and James Harden among Houston’s largest sports heroes. But we see the one athletic trait he lacks, remind ourselves he really is just 5-6 up close, and wonder how he can do everything he does instead of just appreciating him for who he is. It’s time to stop taking Jose Altuve for granted.
He’s clearly the best Astro standing. He’s one of the greatest overall hitters in the modern game. And if you ask yourself who is the most underrated athlete in Major League Baseball — or all professional sports, for that matter— No. 27 deserves the vote as much as anyone.
The Astros have let us down in 2016. Altuve? Are you kidding me? He’s playing the same game on another field.
Altuve pulled off the “routine” Saturday in Boston: 2-for-3 with three walks, including an intentional pass in the 11th inning as he earned the Bryce Harper treatment. Through 38 games, a 26-year-old who weighs just 165 pounds is pounding the ball harder than almost everyone else in The Show. As the Astros fell 6-5 to the Red Sox in 11 innings, Altuve’s batting average rose to third in the American League (.345), his OPS (1.079) was second only to Astros killer David Ortiz, and the sixth-year second baseman led the AL in runs (35), doubles (17) and stolen bases (13).
Altuve is on track for the finest year of his career and is doing things he has never done before at the plate. Which is remarkable considering that the 2007 amateur free-agent signee led the AL in hits the last two seasons and claimed MLB’s batting title in 2014.
“What we’re seeing is a more complete hitter that is maturing in front of our eyes that we thought was already mature, despite the really unnecessary stereotypes that come with being a smaller player,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said.
How special is Altuve? How good has he truly become? How much does he bend physics? Consider this: Pete Rose is baseball’s all-time hit king and was obviously one heck of a player during his era, bad bets aside. Altuve still has 18 years to go to match Rose’s longevity, and small sample sizes can be terribly misleading in this obsessive age of crunched numbers and inside stats. But after 706 career games for each, guess who leads these key categories: hits, batting average, doubles, stolen bases and OPS.
One of the legendary cogs of the Big Red Machine?
No way, Jose. It’s all Altuve. And another reminder that we need to start looking at the Astros’ primary on-field link to their abysmal rebuilding years in an entirely different light.
“It’s really amazing when you think about a guy who just a few years ago was a singles hitter who didn’t draw a lot of walks — good player on bad team sort of thing,” Astros radio broadcaster Robert Ford said. “Whereas now … he can start for a World Series-winning team at second base and be the leadoff hitter and one of your best players on a really good club. And I don’t know that you could have necessarily said that about him four years ago.” Ford nailed it. I was around Altuve almost every day for seven consecutive months during the worst season in Astros history. He hit .283 on a club that stomached 111 losses. He also struck out a career-high 85 times, led the AL in times caught stealing (13) and posted a meager .678 OPS, which doesn’t exactly have potential Hall of Fame path written all over it.
As the year closed, there were internal frustrations about Altuve. Could he become a complete hitter? Would he adapt, evolve and mature at the plate?
“He got up here at such a young age, and he got some success. He’s an exciting player, he got a lot of hits, yet he was an unfinished product,” Hinch said. “That’s difficult to tell someone when they’re having as much early career success as they’ve had … and there were still ways for him to get better.”
Coaches Dave Hudgens and Rich Dauer aided Altuve in the batter’s box and with the glove. But the real surge came from within. Plate discipline, driving the ball with runners on, opposite-field power and turning his defense into an asset — areas where Altuve was knocked in his early 20s — have become some of his greatest strengths in 2016.
“It’s fun to watch someone so hungry be great and not just be content being good,” Hinch said.
There’s the word we got so used to with the 2015 Astros: fun.
With his leadoff long balls, near-daily two-baggers and barehanded stabs, Altuve has been one of the few addicting aspects of the ’16 club. He also does everything we unsuccessfully begged the Rockets to do from the start of their recent lost season. Altuve plays his butt off, goes through his workday with a constant smile and actually enjoys getting paid to beat the best in the world at a kid’s game.
Speaking of underrated … do you know how much Altuve is making this year? An insanely affordable $3.5 million, which makes tight-walleted owner Jim Crane look like a cheap landlord and turns No. 27 into one of the biggest financial bargains in the game.
In baseball cash, Altuve is basically playing for free. Like Watt, he probably would if the world was right and sports really was just for fun.
If Altuve put up the equivalent of these numbers in the NFL or NBA, we’d absolutely adore him and be fascinated with everything he does.
If the Astros had their act together, we’d already be hearing MVP talk in mid-May.
The stats are for real. So is Altuve. It’s time to start appreciating the greatness that’s right in front of our eyes.