ATLANTA -- For nearly seven months, through the regular season and the early rounds of the playoffs, the Houston Astros featured the best offense in baseball. It was the highest-scoring, best-balanced, most unsolvable attack in the majors.
The Astros hit for power. They hit for average. They walked the fine line between discipline and aggression: They were the best two-strike hitting team in the big leagues. In an era when so much of the battle is decided by the team that wins the strike zone, the Astros' batsmen generally won the strike zone.
That was the state of things at the outset of the World Series, when Houston's prolific lineup got ready to square off against the Atlanta Braves. Since then, over four games that have left the Astros on the brink of elimination, the Houston offense has transmogrified from prolific to horrific.
The struggles are up and down Houston's deep lineup. Alex Bregman looks lost at the plate, with a lone single to show for his 14 at-bats in the Series. Jose Altuve has two homers, but he's 4-for-18. Yordan Alvarez has taken walks but is 1-for-11. Carlos Correa is 2-for-14 with two singles. And those two-strike hits have mostly dried up (.092 two-strike average, down from .195).
The Astros' cumulative slash line sits at a resoundingly poor .206/.291/.298, and they exited Game 4 with an active streak of 17 straight hitless at-bats with runners in scoring position. Houston, simply put, isn't hitting.
At least that is one way to look at where the World Series stands, after two games on cool, damp nights in Georgia, when the Astros have accumulated two runs in two nights, leaving runners stranded everywhere from the Waffle House to the Battery.
That's one way to look at it. The other one is this: The Atlanta Braves have pitched their asses off.
"I've said it many times," Astros manager Dusty Baker said about the thing he was about to say yet again. "They say good pitching beats good hitting. And then when you don't hit, they say, 'What's wrong?' They've been pitching good against us. They've been pitching great against us."
So which is it? Are we talking about Houston's failings or Atlanta's triumphs?
The first thing we want to look at is whether Braves pitchers are getting the Astros to do things they don't normally do at the plate, at least collectively. To cut to the chase -- an operative word -- the answer is yes.
During the World Series, the Astros have chased more pitches out of the strike zone than they did during their seven-month reign as MLB's top offense (31%, up from 26%). They are swinging earlier in the count (3.76 pitches per plate appearance, down from 3.90). They are swinging at more pitches (47% versus 45%) even though the Braves have thrown fewer pitches in the strike zone (48%, down from 49%). And they are missing on more of those swings (27% to 21%).
"They have good pitchers, and they've been executing every pitch," Altuve said after a game in which he knocked two hits (of four total in the Series) and moved into second place all time in postseason homers. "They're not giving us a lot of pitches to hit. We're trying hard as hitters. We've got a good lineup, we know, but sometimes you have to give credit to the other team as well."
Altuve wasn't in the room when Baker offered his assessment, but the two responses side by side almost sound like a party line. Yet, the similarity does suggest that despite all the analyses you might read about the Astros' clutch failings, the real story might be from the Atlanta point of view.
Let's consider the idea of "not many pitches to hit." Not all hitters' pitches are necessarily middle-middle (middle of the strike zone both horizontally and vertically), and not all middle-middle pitches turn into extra-base hits, but generally it's not a region where many hurlers want to reside.
According to TruMedia, during the regular season, 7.7% of all pitches thrown were charted as middle-middle. That also happens to be what the Braves posted during the regular season and what Astros pitchers have done during the World Series. But over the past four games, Atlanta pitchers have thrown just 5.2% of their offerings in the middle-middle part of the plate.
So the Braves have indeed left the ball over the meat of the strike zone relatively infrequently. But that's not the most eye-popping middle-middle stat from this Series. Astros hitters have seen 29 pitches in the middle-middle zone. They have two hits on those pitches, both singles, for two total bases and a .333 OPS. By contrast, the Braves have seen 45 middle-middle pitches and have 12 total bases with a 1.308 OPS.
Yes, the Braves have pitched great. But the Astros' hitters have, at the same time, failed to put up the results we could have expected based on seven months of dominance. There are two things happening at the same time.
There's not a lot of solace in the tracking numbers from Statcast. The Astros have that .206 batting average. According to Statcast, the quality of the balls in play have resulted in an expected average of .213. If the latter number were 50 or 75 points higher than Houston's batting average, that would be heartening for the Astros. Bad luck could be cited. But this is not that. It's not a luck thing. It's is a getting-good-contact-on-the-pitches-you-can-hit thing. This is about execution.
And there's a reason that the stories about Houston's dip from 6.7 runs per game during the ALDS and ALCS to 2.8 runs per game during the World Series tend to hammer on the Houston offense more than they glorify the Atlanta pitching staff. It's an incomplete description of what we've seen -- but an understandable one.
That's in large part because there is not one pitcher doing the damage for the Braves, to whom we can point and understand why the Astros are struggling so much. There is no Sandy Koufax, circa 1965, or Bob Gibson, circa 1967, or Randy Johnson, circa 2001. Instead, the Astros have been overwhelmed by a mob of Braves hurlers working in short stints.
This is a pitching staff that lost its Game 1 starter, Charlie Morton, 10 batters into the Series. It is a pitching staff whose current ace, Max Fried, is the one pitcher against whom the Astros have strung together hits and runs (though much of that contact was soft). It is a bullpen that had the 21st-ranked ERA (4.52) among relief staffs at the All-Star break. And yet the Astros' offense has been completely throttled.
Houston may want to credit the Braves, and Atlanta's pitchers indeed deserve much acclaim. But the bottom line is that even during a World Series when their opponent is averaging just 3.3 runs per game, the Astros have not scored enough runs to win more than one game.
Maybe the adage is true, that good pitching always beats good hitting, though the simplicity of adages rarely stands up to careful scrutiny. But moreover, for the Astros, the adage shouldn't apply: Houston wasn't just a good-hitting team for most of the season. It was the best-hitting team.
Getting back to the qualities that gave them that lofty status would make this series less about the Braves' surprising pitching and more about the dynamic attack of the Astros. But for Houston to do that, they must seize the narrative.
It can't be about the Braves. It's got to be about the Astros, about them returning to the form that terrorized pitching staffs of all calibers from April Fools' Day up until -- well, just about a week ago. It's about being the best, most dynamic offense in baseball again.
It's about the Astros getting back to what they've been all along. If they can't do that Sunday, then the Astros will be heading back to Houston and the Braves won't be going with them.