Alex Bregman went 1-for-3 in Sunday’s 2-1 walkoff victory over the New York Mets, and his lone hit was an infield single. It was another small step in a start that has been defined more by adjustment than production, with Bregman sitting on 20 hits in 86 at-bats and a.233/.309/.314 line.
The bigger number is the one he keeps trying to erase: a 47.8 percent groundball rate, nearly a dozen points above his career norm. When that was raised after the game, Bregman did not dodge it. “Way too high,” he said. “Get the ball off the ground! Disconnected, bats being left behind me, contact point is deep. When I’m good, I get the ball out front. It’s poor mechanics right now that I’m working through. But I’m going to get it.”
That diagnosis has been consistent for weeks. Nearly two weeks before Sunday’s game, after a three-hit night against the Tampa Bay Rays, Bregman said he still had things to clean up. “You take it one at-bat at a time,” he said then. “Try to get a good pitch to hit and hit it hard. I feel like there’s stuff that I still need to clean up. I’ve been hitting the ball hard, but I feel like the bat path can be improved a little bit.”
The underlying process has not been empty. Bregman is not chasing much, he is not swinging and missing at an elite rate and his hard-hit rate is the highest it has ever been. But the contact has been too chopped up. The groundballs are swallowing the quality of the contact before it can turn into better results.
Dustin Kelly said the same problem keeps showing up in different ways. “A lot of this is he feels like his hands are getting pretty far away from his body and working uphill,” Kelly said. “When he’s at his best, hands stay tighter to his body and it’s a direct, straight path inside the ball. He wants to feel like he’s throwing a jab, not an uppercut.” Kelly added that the contact point has been pushed back a little, that Bregman is not getting to the balls where he wants to, and that the work is tightening up. The pitching machine, Kelly said, is being set up so it is almost directing balls at Bregman’s back hip.
That is the friction point in Bregman’s season: the at-bats have not collapsed, but the shape of them has been off. Craig Counsell said after Sunday’s game that the breakthrough had been building. “There was no question it was coming,” Counsell said. “Bregman needed it, but it was coming.” For now, the Astros’ infielder is still trying to move the ball from the back hip to out front, and the difference between those two points has been the difference between loud contact and outs on the ground.
