Between him and Altuve, they’re a perfect pair to juice up a homer-happy team. With all the athletes on the Astros, his spray-it-around hitting style puts pressure on the defense and has made for a very dynamic team. It’s what makes him so much fun to watch. He’s a metronome, just knocking liners and groundballs and making contact 90 percent of the time, all the time. We are so enamored of players like Willains Astudillo and his success at the plate despite a lack of walking- and striking out- and call Jeff McNeil and his 5.1 percent walk rate a total throwback, but that’s been Brantley for 10 years. It’s things like that which make him a slightly curious outlier for the Astros. That strikeout-to-walk ratio of Brantley’s is very good- 11th best in baseball along with second on the Astros- but it doesn’t tell the same story as, say, Alex Bregman’s top ranked 1.30. However, as was likely written before the season and is so obvious now, the front office method of “get great hitters” seems to be a path to winning that never gets old. He’s not a launch angle guy, he’s not a “pull the ball over the fence all day” type of hitter. For a team that is supposed to be on the cutting edge of baseball, you’d think he wouldn’t fit in. In counting stats, he’s 4th on the team in home runs with 16 and leads the team in doubles with 28, because that’s who Michael Brantley is. Michael Brantley’s Astros offensive rankings Stat For as stacked a team as they are, and with more well-known stars who already own rings, it’s amazing where he stands in their offensive rankings: They staked their claim and he’s responded in kind.
That’s what the Grienke or Sanchez deals were, and that’s what signing Brantley was. When a team sees its window so obviously wide open, the short-term moves are designed to make it a blown out greenhouse of an opportunity. In fact, Brantley has been about as perfect for the Astros as a free agent- or even any addition- could be. As the third-highest paid Astro this year and really their first big free agent pickup in this run, Brantley represents a real divergence from the path Jeff Luhnow laid out. Whether drafting smart with Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman or trading deftly for Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole, they’ve used the resources they gathered during the rebuild to forge a title contender. The through-line of the Astros’ run at the top of baseball is organic growth and front office finesse.
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