Welcome to Week 16 of our Patience or Panic series! Every week, we perform an autopsy on three underperforming players to see if there’s any hope of resuscitation. Or is it time to pull the plug?
Jose Altuve, 2B, Houston Astros
Every hero has his villain. Superman has Lex Luthor. Batman has The Joker. Spider-Man has The Green Goblin. For every equal, there is an opposite. The same goes for Paul Terry’s 1942 creation Mighty Mouse. Mighty Mouse has Oil Can Harry, a talking mustached gangster cat. These, though, are just stories. Fictitious creations. Reality seldom presents one singular villain designed for you. The closest we have is time. It vanquishes us all eventually.
Such might be happening to baseball’s own Mighty Mouse, Houston Astros second baseman Jose Altuve. The former MVP and nine-time All-Star is 36 and bearing the mark of time. He’s hitting .235/.307/.404, good for a .711 OPS and a 98 wRC+. It’s his worst season since 2020. Arguably, it’s the worst season of Altuve’s career. And it might just be the start. Father Time is not a graceful foe. He takes no bargains, hears no pleas. The best one can do is fight him back. Can Altuve, like his namesake, fight off his nemesis? That requires a deeper dive.
At first glance, the answer is yes. Altuve’s barrel numbers aren’t too dissimilar from his strong 2025 campaign. Then, he hit .265 with a more-than-serviceable .771 OPS. That’s one nod in Altuve’s favor. A second is that his HardHit% is actually up, going from 30.9% last season to 33.6% this year. Though not a leap, it’s another punch back against Father Time. A third, more of a uppercut than a jab, is Altuve’s Squared-Up%. This is way up. Last year, Altuve finished in the 51st percentile. Now, he’s in the 74th. To summarize, Altuve isn’t barreling the ball any less than before. That’s good. He’s hitting it harder than before. Another plus. And he’s squaring up more balls than he was. That’s three strong signs of rebellion.
Yet here we still are, with Oil Can Harry standing triumphant and our hero prone in the dirt. Why? There’s a variety of reasons. A counterweight to Altuve’s barrel data is bad luck. His xBA on fastballs, for instance, is .261 while his actual average is .248. A similar disparity comes on offspeed pitches, where Altuve should be hitting .164 but is hitting .148. Except that’s cherry-picking. Altuve is far more lucky than he is unlucky. He’s greatly outperforming expectations on breaking balls with a .237 average despite a .193 xBA. And overall, Altuve is hitting .235 while analytics suggest he should be hitting .228. This is one area where Altuve is getting one past his foe.
A bigger problem than luck is where he’s putting the ball. Altuve is grounding 47.9% of all balls, the third-highest mark of his career, and his highest since 2023. Doing so has come at the cost of his flyball percentage, itself down 5% from last year. At 20.3%, it’s the lowest of his career, and it’s not even close. While Altuve’s hovered around a 21% and 22 FB% in the past, he’s averaged 23.1% throughout his career. To be almost exactly at 20% is staggering. His balls have no cape; Just boots.
A possible cause for this is Altuve’s pitch mix. Currently, Altuve is seeing sinkers 23.5% of the time, tying him for the 18th-highest total in baseball. This is something of a trend. Altuve saw sinkers 18.3% of the time in 2024 and 20.7% of the time in 2025. Pitchers keep feeding them to him. In the past, it mattered not. Altuve hit .304 and .296 against them in these respective years. That’s changed now. This season, he’s hitting just .217 on all sinkers. That’s in addition to a .283 slug, a -4 run value, and most crucially, a 48 GB%.
Time’s betrayal is not a surprising one. It is writ in stone. Destined. Crueler than it, however, is the betrayal of the body. And that is one other trial Altuve’s fought. Altuve landed on the IL in Mid-May with an oblique injury. The ailment cost him three weeks, and maybe more. Before this injury, Altuve was hitting .245/.326/.380 with a .706 OPS. Since then, Altuve’s hit .221/.280/.434 with a .715 OPS. Pain’s robbed Altuve of his contact. In its absence, it’s oddly supplied him power. Great power. Altuve hit just four home runs in his first 42 games. In the 32 games since his return, he’s hit seven.
This is maybe Altuve’s new responsibility. He knows he is not capable of winning a fourth batting title. He knows that he’s grounding too many balls into the dirt. With his age and his injury, there might be one thing left available to him: Slugging. He’s hitting for more power since his return, striking out 25.8% of the time, an unheard-of number for Altuve, and has a 39.5 Chase% in July. He’s changed who he is. Altuve, it seems, is taking Uncle Ben’s dying words to heart.
The Verdict: Allow Altuve one last arc. Altuve has one recourse left: Vanquishing foes with a mighty blow. Humor him; For old time’s sake, before our eternal enemy silences him.
Jackson Merrill, OF, San Diego Padres
In George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, there is a prophecy. To save you from reading five books, or watching a combined 12 seasons of television, we’ll make it brief. The idea is that there must be three dragon riders to thwart the coming ice apocalypse. And so goes the saying, “The dragon must have three heads.”
How, when, and if that prophecy might pass is unclear. The books remain open. But they seemed quite shut for the San Diego Padres two seasons ago. Fortune indicated that the Friars had their three heads in then-shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr., third baseman Manny Machado, and outfielder Jackson Merrill. Machado was the veteran, with claw marks on his scales, yet still able to put some on others. Tatis was already a star at 21. Ready since his egg hatched. And then there was Merrill, the newest firebreather who’d duked it out with Paul Skenes for the 2024 NL Rookie of the Year. San Diego’s dragon had three heads.
Now, two years later, it might have one. Tatis has rebounded, taking to the air after being grounded for the first quarter of the campaign. As for the others, Machado is in the midst of the worst season of his career. He has more scars than he can care to inflict. Merrill, like him, has regressed. His fire’s grown cold. Through 92 games, he’s hitting .219/.278/.350 with a .628 OPS and a 76 wRC+.
Merrill’s descent was covered before. The good news is all those issues covered then remain. For instance, Merrill still isn’t barreling balls. That was a strength in his stellar 2024 rookie season. And though his overall numbers dipped in 2025, his barrel numbers actually improved that season. There was concrete, analytical proof that Merrill could become even more of a slugger than he already was.
Now in 2026, he’s gone backwards. His Barrel% went from that career-best 13% in 2025 to 9.2% today. Likewise, he’s barreling just 6.2 pitches per plate appearance. He barreled 9.1 a season ago. He’s coughing up more smoke than fire. The former piece of regression is especially noteworthy. Merrill’s declining Barrel% is the 25th most pronounced in baseball. It’s not just poor by his standards, but by the game’s. Broadly, that is the chief concern. How has Merrill lost so much already at just 23? Why does he bear so little in common with the player we saw just two years ago with almost bulletproof possibility?
A similar piece of data comes in the form of his Squared-Up%. This, unlike his barrel numbers, has been in decline for some time now. Merrill went from finishing in the 50th percentile as a rookie to the 19th as a sophomore. Now as a proverbial junior, he’s in the 10th. So, what we have so far is a hitter who isn’t barreling, or squaring up balls. Daor sȳz, as the Valyrian dragonriders say.
Some solace can be found in this fact: That’s actually an improvement. Earlier, during our first visit with Merrill, his Squared-Up% was in the 2nd percentile. Climbing up eight whole spots is an encouraging sign for a hitter with so few of them.
The same cannot be said for Merrill’s HardHit%. Still a career-high 45.9% overall, Merrill has struggled lately. He has a 36.7 HardHit% this month, a number which would easily be the worst of his career. Ironically, July’s been kind to Merrill on the whole. He’s hitting .267/.327/.400 with a .727 OPS in 12 games. There’s something other than cinders in his gullet, at least now.
Echoing that is Merrill’s maturation at the plate. Somewhat. He’s walking more, for starters, with a career-best 7.2 BB%. That number is nearly double that of his 4.9 BB% as a rookie. Similar growth is in his Chase%, which is in the 20th percentile, higher than it’s ever been. If he can retain this newfound discipline while rekindling his past success, he’ll be back to something akin to The Black Dread. However, he’s not completely polished. Merrill’s also striking out more than ever, touting a 24.7 K%. Even more alarming, he has a 31.2 K% on four-seamers, a pitch he sees more than any other.
The Verdict: See how July goes. Merrill might be coming out of it. If he does, his ballad might now sound with a different tenor.
J.P. Crawford, INF, Seattle Mariners
Let’s preface all of this with something of a caveat. J.P. Crawford has never been Altuve. He’s never been Merrill, either. In all honesty, he’s had just one season with an OPS over .800+. That season is now four years removed. For the vast majority of his career, Crawford’s been Just Plain Okay. Not exemplary, never remarkable. Just fine.
The question here isn’t whether he’ll have some metamorphosis. He won’t. 2023 was a blip. The question is moreso whether Crawford is worth much in the long term. It’s an examination of his value and whether this new low is who he’s fated to be forever. A free agent in 2027, that question is doubly true for MLB teams.
With that in mind, let’s pivot. Where is Crawford excelling? Where might he be providing hope? That’s easy. It’s in his bat data. Crawford, despite conventional wisdom, is having a terrific year under a certain lens. His 36.1 HardHit% is the third-best of his career. His 7.0 Barrel% is the highest of his career, as is his 4.5 barrels-per-plate-appearance. The latter exhibit exceptional jumps. Crawford entered this season with a career 3.9 Barrel%. Of 561 players since his 2017 debut, Crawford ranked 473rd in the stat. Likewise, he has a career average of 2.7 barrels per plate appearance. He has, in effect, juiced those numbers drastically. And at age 31, it’s almost unheard of.
Crawford’s Squared-Up% is seeing an even bigger uptick. In 2023 and 2024, Crawford never ranked highly, finishing in the 33rd and 32nd percentiles. It mirrored his other barrel-related data. Now, it’s doing so again. Crawford currently sits in the 77th percentile. He’s squaring up 34.4% of all balls he makes contact with. Correspondingly, Crawford’s Ideal Attack Angle% is way up, blooming from 36.8% in 2025 to 46.4% in 2026. It’s a huge leap, the fifth-highest in all of baseball. It should then come as no surprise that Crawford has a career-best 88.4 average exit velocity.
Other signs of growth come with his discipline. Always adept at limiting his Chase%, Crawford is in the 96th percentile after finishing in the 88th last season. He’s also back to a near-elite Whiff%, currently ranking in the 84th percentile after seasons in the 76th and 75th. A similar pattern holds with his BB%, still in the 91st percentile.
Yet, it’s all bupkis. Crawford has next to nothing to show for all his work. An inflating HR%? Yes. Wonderful advanced data? Assuredly. But when it comes to results, the whole thing the game is founded on, he has nothing. He’s hitting .218/.334/.359 with a .693 OPS and a 107 wRC+. For all his “breakout” data, he’s just treading water.
Why? Well, most of Crawford’s problems come down to the fact that he isn’t hitting fastballs or breaking balls. And those two pitch types account for 88.7% of what he sees. Against fastballs, he’s hitting .217. While he has a xBA of .267, again, it’s a case of data versus reality. Against breaking balls, he’s hitting .173. That’s no lie. It’s not bad luck. His xBA is .178. Crawford also isn’t slugging either pitch type, even in hypotheticals.
To step away from generalities, sliders and cutters are particular vulnerabilities. He’s seeing the former 11.5% and is hitting .135 with a -4 run value, .216 slug, and .166 wOBA. That’s nothing compared to his pain with cutters. He’s seeing them 11.3% of the time and is hitting .033 with a -8 run value, .033 slug, and a .052 wOBA. He is statistically the worst hitter in baseball against cutters. His -8 run value is worst in the sport, as are all those other aforementioned stats. That said, Crawford is performing against fastballs and sinkers, the two pitches he sees more than any other. But with deficiencies as pronounced as this, it’s a challenge to survive.
The Verdict: Dealer’s choice. There’s enough here to warrant keeping Crawford around. There’s also enough evidence to say he is what he is. Which you’re inclined to believe is up to you.
