In The Lab: What Does BPO Say About Our Hitting Coaches?

One of the benefits of waiting until late May to look at statistics is that individual games have less of a difference on overall numbers. In April, it looked like the Astros hitting coaches were the toast of the town. The team was leading the American League in runs scoring.

They were taking more pitches. They were taking more walks. It felt like there was a new message being delivered to hitters and they were listening.

Of course, not we have gone most of the way through May (May 19th as of these numbers) and those gains may have slowed. We have been looking at bases per out now for a couple of different articles. We looked at the catchers and we will look at the infield and outfield eventually, but this time we are looking at the offense as a whole.

For comparisons sake, we will take a look at the 2025 numbers since those numbers were probably the numbers that got the past two hitting coaches sent out of town. Now that the offense has seemingly come back to earth it bears asking whether there were any meaningful and lasting changes in the Astros offense. With one very notable exception, the players are basically the same.