Altuve Battling Father Time and Breaking Balls
Breaking pitches vexed the Astros team leader in 2024, but history offers hope
In many ways, Jose Altuve’s 2025 season mirrored those of the past, where the Astros’ leader provided energy, smiles and a whole bunch of plate appearances.
But there were also plenty of changes, like 371 innings spent as a left fielder and a lot less time spent on defense in general (870.1 defensive innings in 2025 after 1262 in 2024), 49 games at DH, and no October baseball.
It’s no secret that Houston struggled at the plate and Altuve’s batting average dipped 30 points year over year. While we’ll delve into the “why” momentarily, Altuve still performed over expectations average-wise as he has every season, with the pandemic season the only exception.
A .265 average is above league-average, but it’s a notable drop from previous seasons and the lowest of Altuve’s storied Houston career, again, except for the pandemic-marred 2020 season.
Altuve was also above average in all of the offensive plus stats and remained the engine that powered the Astros’ offense, especially with the absence of Yordan Alvarez for a long stretch due to injury.
It’s easy to see what happened to Altuve in 2025 with a little digging, and I’m sure many of you are already aware: He didn’t hit breaking balls like he did in 2024 and certainly nowhere near what he did during his and the Astros’ heyday.
Baseball-Savant says Altuve saw 800 breaking balls, defined as curves, sliders, sweepers, slurves and knuckleballs, in 2025 and hit .224 and slugged .342 on those pitches.
Altuve saw a similar number (816) of breaking pitches in 2024 with markedly different results, hitting .287 and slugging .426.
Given the number of at-bats against breaking pitches (228), Altuve would have needed 14 or 15 more hits against breaking pitches to approach or pass 2024’s average on those pitches.
That’s significant and should be a warning sign of what’s ahead.
The 2025 breaking ball numbers are the lowest for Altuve since, you guessed it, the 2020 pandemic season.
It’s not surprising Altuve’s ability to hit breaking balls has decreased, given his age and miles on his tires, but, as pointed out above, the fall off was precipitous - 63 points on average and 34 on slug from one season to the next.
Altuve still crushed fastballs (.305 average and .543 slug), despite his exit velo dipping, too.
Again, none of this is unusual - older player no longer reacts to the breaking pitch - but it is reality for Altuve, the Astros and fans.
It’ll be a fascinating watch in 2026 and beyond as Altuve plays out his contract and pursues the final 612 hits needed to reach 3,000.
After dipping a bit from 2023 to 2024, the percentage of breaking balls Altuve saw reached a career high this past season at 34.6%.
I would expect it to be higher next season.
Altuve has defied the odds throughout his career, and I wouldn’t bet against him regaining at least some of his ability to hit breaking pitches as he’s done in years previous.
There is reason to be optimistic based on his history.
In 2021, Altuve hit .268 on breaking balls before improving to .291 in 2022.
In 2023, he hit .266 against breaking pitches, before jacking that up to the .287 of 2024.
Maybe 2026 will be a year of resurgence, at least to some degree, for Altuve.
He’s never had to climb this far at this age, though, and as the old saying goes, Father Time is undefeated.