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Sports

José Altuve: A Literal Hit Machine

The littlest 'Stro is having a great season and managing to accomplish the impossible: get people to pay attention in Houston.
Photo by Troy Taormina-USA TODAY Sports

It's probable that José Altuve was produced in a lab. Not the Communist super-soldier factory that designed Yasiel Puig, nor the top-secret Disney research center that gave the world Mike Trout—Altuve was crafted in the desert, far from the confines of Minute Maid Park. An unformed lump of teenager, he was deposited alone in the cracked Texas wasteland and subjected to months of vaguely athletic torture, the sort of incoherent masculine nonsense usually reserved for truck commercials. This was nature's laboratory, and it gave us a 5'5" miracle.

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"Gentlemen," announced one proud man in a lab coat to other proud men in lab coats. "We have done it. We have created a ballplayer perfectly calibrated to impress people's dads."

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Besides José Altuve, everything sucks in Houston. After three straight seasons with 100-plus losses, the Astros are on pace to lose 97 games. Their payroll remains the lowest in baseball, and though their farm system is rich, the team's ownership has a cruel habit of hiding young players in the minors. One and a half seasons after being forced to join the toughest division in the American League, they are fighting with the Rangers for fourth place—a rivalry which has failed to produce the attendance boost promised when the Astros came to the land of the DH. The franchise is years from a World Series, but in two months Altuve could win Houston's first batting title. It is a meaningless honor, but wonderful all the same.

Only 24, he made his major league debut in 2011, and after three seasons of subpar play he has become something no Astro has been in a while: watchable. Not just watchable, in fact, but hard to ignore. He's right there on the leaderboards, an unlikely HOU on top of hits, batting average, and steals. Once an easy strikeout, he has learned discipline, and now leads the league in at-bats per K. His swing, retooled to good effect after last season, is compact. His bat flashes, and he is halfway to first base before it hits the grass. Altuve is built like a warthog, but runs like a hare.

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If Altuve played in a major market, his chase for the batting title would be relentlessly shoved down our throats. If he were a white American, we would be treated to endless columns praising his grit, scrap, heart, moxie, vim, and zip. Thanks to Houston's relentless badness, we are spared this, and Altuve's followers have been allowed to enjoy the season in peace. Any national exposure would bring inevitable comparison to another short, smiling, scrap-happy moxie-haver—unfair comparisons because while he may have plenty of moxie, Altuve has something else, something just as intangible but rather more important: He is really good at baseball. Just, wow, really good at it. Look at him go.

Last month, he stole multiple bases in four straight games, something no one had done since Ray Chapman—a wonderful event if only because it was nice to hear "Ray Chapman" spoken for reasons unrelated to fatal beanballs. Not a graceful baserunner, Altuve steals bases like he's one of the Little Rascals. The resemblance is not just because of his height, but because of the way he drops his head and churns his legs when he sets off for second. He really looks like he's stealing something, and hopes desperately to get away with it.

So far, he has. Altuve does nothing but hit and hit and hit and run and run and run. He is a two-dimensional player, but what a wonderful pair of dimensions to have. A glance past the batting average on his stat sheet shows little power, lousy defense, and an alarmingly-high BABIP which suggests his league-leading average may be a balloon close to popping—which will happen in a hurry if the league ever returns to pitching him outside. But the back of his baseball card looks fantastic, and to a certain type of baseball fan, that is the most important thing.

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Diehard Astros fans can dream of prospects Mark Appel and Domingo Santana and the elaborately-named Mike Foltynewicz. They can stare at Fangraphs until their eyes cross, looking for numbers to distract them from how bad their team has been. They can dismiss Altuve as an amusement, a good-but-not-great player chasing a title that means nothing, but casual fans don't have to. Altuve is perfectly calibrated to please those Houstonians who have been avoiding the team, but are more and more intrigued by the young Venezuelan who's keeping HOU on top of the batting average chart.

To wit: dads.

By dads, I mean anyone who prefers sports sections to comment sections, who may like the Astros but who were clever enough to step back during the last six seasons in hell. I mean the man who was glancing at the box scores this morning during his second cup of coffee, and smiled approvingly at what he saw.

"That Altuve got another hit last night," he declared to anyone within earshot. "He's hitting .342! And you know, he's only like five-foot-five. Mmmm."

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