MLB: 8 hitters poised to bounce back from ugly 2020

4. Jose Altuve

The Astros’ second baseman had one of his worst seasons in a long time in 2020, and it might not be for the reason that you expect it to be. It really might be simply because the fallout from the sign stealing scandal go in his head and affected his on-field performance.

Altuve hadn’t had a season below a 124 wRC+ since 2013 prior to last season. He’s always reaped the benefits of simply making contact and putting the ball in play. It’s hard to reap those benefits when he basically doubled his weak contact rate and his hard contact rate was cut in half.

He was still better than the majority of the league in whiff rate, so he wasn’t swinging and missing a lot. As mentioned earlier it really just simply could be a case of not being able to focus simply on baseball to go along with the leg injuries he dealt with at the beginning of the season and again in September.

The thing that would make you nervous is if his down season was due to lack of focus, then what is this season going to look like with the return of fans in a limited capacity ready to give the Astros a piece of their mind after the sign stealing scandal? Can he get out of his own head enough to return to form?

Altuve won’t be 31 until early May so it’s not like age is catching up to him, and ZiPS doesn’t think that’s the case either as they project him to be back to his normal self. He’s never hit the ball extremely hard, ranking in the bottom 22 percentile every year since 2017, but that’s not the concern. If his quality of contact goes back up then he should be good to go in 2021.