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Want to know how good Jose Altuve has been this season? If you take what he has done through the first 39 games and extrapolate over a 150-game pace, here's what his numbers look like:
201 hits, 66 doubles, 35 home runs, 89 RBI, 143 runs, 58 steals, 4 caught stealing, 85 walks, 73 strikeouts
That would be one double shy of the single-season record. It would also be the most runs scored in a season since 2007. It would also make him just the sixth player ever to steal 50-plus bases while being caught stealing five or fewer times. And he's hitting .340, leading the AL in on-base percentage and sporting a 1.058 OPS. There are obviously all kinds of issues with citing "on-pace for" statistics after a quarter of a season, but the point is, he has been really good.
A few weeks back, Heath Cummings said he was ready to move Altuve into his top-three players overall. Ahead of the likes of Paul Goldschmidt, Josh Donaldson, Nolan Arenado and Carlos Correa among others; I didn't even have Altuve in my top five.
As Altuve continues to clobber the ball all over the field and shows no signs of slowing down, that is becoming harder to justify. Altuve is the No. 1 hitter in both Rotisserie and H2H scoring formats, and he is 21 percent ahead of the No. 2 scorer in points leagues.
Altuve almost certainly can't keep this pace up moving forward, but it would be foolish to just write off this quick start and assume he is the same player he has been in the past. It has been 11 days since Altuve's last homer, but he hasn't slowed down in that span; he is still hitting .368/.468/.447 over his last 10 games.
So, how is the new-and-improved Altuve doing it? Well, at the risk of oversimplifying, Altuve is hitting the ball a lot harder a lot more consistently. Altuve showed some burgeoning power last season when he clubbed 15 homers but sported just a 25.9 percent hard-hit average, per FanGraphs.com. Among 375 players with at least 100 batted balls tracked by Statcast at BaseballSavant.com, Altuve ranked just 318th in average batted-ball velocity, at 86.2 MPH.
Even those 15 homers didn't exactly rocket out of the park; his average home run distance was just 386 feet, good for just 279th in the majors. Altuve was a tremendous hitter, but he wasn't driving the ball consistently.
All that has changed so far in 2016. According to HitTrackerOnline.com, each of Altuve's nine homers has been classified as either "Plenty" or "No Doubt"; that means they have cleared the fence by at least 10 vertical feet. His average homer has traveled 401 feet, a 15-foot increase from last season, and his other indicators are up as well. One of his homers traveled 443 feet, his longest home run by 15 feet.
Altuve's hard-hit average is up from 25.9 percent to 34.1, and his averaged exit velocity is up to 90.0 MPH, a sizable increase that puts him closer to the major-league average. Altuve isn't just racking up a bunch of cheap extra-base hits, then.
Of course, that's an answer for what Altuve is doing. The how is a lot tougher to pin down. Altuve has likely added strength in his age-26 season, which helps, but this is a pretty dramatic improvement for any player at any age. The answer might lie, then, with which pitches Altuve is connecting.
Always an aggressive hitter at the plate, Altuve swung at a career-high 52.7 percent of pitches last season. He went after pitches in the strike zone early and often, with an emphasis on just putting the ball in play and making things happen with his speed. This season, however, Altuve has grown much more deliberate at the plate, swinging at just 41.7 percent of pitches, by far a career-low rate. If Altuve is identifying pitches better, that could help explain why he is hitting the ball better, too.
Altuve isn't being pitched particularly differently, either. Roughly the same proportion of pitches thrown his way have been in the strike zone, and he isn't seeing a significantly different pitch mix, overall. However, while pitchers were able to throw Altuve fastballs without much concern about him punishing them for extra bases in the past, that simply isn't the case these days; Altuve has seven of his nine home runs on fastballs, with 14 extra-base hits in 88 at-bats total, according to BrooksBaseball.net.
It turns out, in Altuve's case, it might be as simple as, "he's hitting the ball harder." Or, at least, he has been; as with all things a month and a half into the season, what a player has done is not necessarily a guarantee of what they will do in the future. Altuve's ISO this season is already twice his career high, at .288, and though he won't be able to keep an elite rate like that up long term, we clearly need to start increasing our expectations and projections for him.
It has come in an unlikely frame, but Altuve really does seem to be a power hitter now. At this point, 20 homers seems like a pretty easy mark for Altuve, and the more important question might be whether he can become just the eighth player in MLB history to hit 25 homers and steal 50 bases. Add in the fact that Altuve might just keep hitting .340, and it's hard to argue he doesn't belong in the same air as the likes of Bryce Harper and Mike Trout.
