ARLINGTON, Texas — Earlier this season, when injuries invaded their pitching staff and setbacks seemed an almost weekly occurrence, the Astros looked atop their rotation for solace.
Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier avoided the adversity plaguing their teammates, providing perhaps the best 1-2 punch of any rotation in baseball. Twenty-one of the team’s 45 wins have arrived with either Valdez or Javier on the mound. Houston is 24-27 with anyone else.
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Valdez’s 2.49 ERA is the lowest of any qualified American League starter. He is a workhorse in every sense of the word and is authoring a Cy Young-caliber season. Javier is capable of crafting one, too, even if it hasn’t seemed so for the past five starts. He sported a 2.97 ERA before a brutal June swoon.
These two stalwarts are masking the many issues still affecting Houston’s rotation, be it season-ending injuries to Lance McCullers Jr. and Luis Garcia, rookies Hunter Brown and J.P. France approaching their career-high workloads and the absolute lack of established depth behind them. Protecting Valdez and Javier should be priority No. 1. If either is compromised, it is difficult to envision the Astros achieving any of their goals.
Foremost among them is chasing down the Texas Rangers to capture a third consecutive American League West title. This four-game series at Globe Life Field is a step toward it. Manager Dusty Baker has not diminished the series’ importance. His club entered it trailing Texas by five games.
Having Valdez and Javier scheduled to start the final two games felt like a luxury. Winning the series opener Friday magnified it. A day later, Houston gave it away, opting for prudence over panic. The team will skip Valdez’s turn in the rotation Sunday while he battles a right-ankle injury. Shawn Dubin will make his first major-league start in Valdez’s place. A loss would send the Astros six games back of Texas in the West.
Javier is “as of now” scheduled to start Monday, according to Baker, who acknowledged the right-hander is “scuffling a little bit.”
Parsing some of Baker’s recent comments suggests the team would prefer to give Javier an extra day of rest, but its lack of depth leaves few options. Javier did throw his between-starts bullpen session Saturday, but the team could summon Brandon Bielak from Triple-A Sugar Land to start Monday if necessary. The team optioned Bielak on June 18, meaning the 15-day window he must stay in the minor leagues expires Sunday.
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“Discretion, that’s tough in this situation,” Baker said before Saturday’s 5-2 loss. “We can’t lose any more guys. We’ve already lost two or three guys as it is. That’s a tough balance, a tough thing to have to make a decision on.”
Valdez sprained his right ankle after slipping on the dugout steps during his June 20 start against the New York Mets at Minute Maid Park. There was some doubt whether he’d pitch against the Cardinals on Tuesday at Busch Stadium, but Valdez made the start. He surrendered a season-high eight hits and four earned runs and said his ankle started to feel “more tender” throughout the outing.
Neither Baker nor Valdez acted alarmed about the injury. Valdez played catch in left field before Saturday’s game. Afterward, Valdez said he could be ready to pitch either Thursday or Friday against the Mariners.
“I just figured it’s best to skip a start than to regret it the rest of the season,” Valdez said through an interpreter.
Javier’s decline must cause more serious concern for Baker and his coaching staff. Last season, Javier cemented his place in postseason lore with one pitch. Seventy of his 97 offerings during Game 4 of the World Series were four-seam fastballs. A Philadelphia Phillies lineup that punished the pitch all season still could not touch it.
Javier stymied them across six hitless innings. Three relievers followed to finish the second no-hitter in Fall Classic history, a performance that thrust Javier and his four-seam fastball into the national spotlight.
Rafael Montero, Bryan Abreu, Cristian Javier, Christian Vazquez and Ryan Pressly pose after throwing a combined no-hitter in the 2022 World Series. (Bill Streicher / USA Today)A pitch the Astros called an “invisiball” became an overnight sensation. It averaged just 93.8 mph but fooled hitters due to Javier’s deceptive delivery and an elite vertical attack angle. Opponents batted just .183 against Javier’s four-seam fastball while whiffing 27.3 percent of the time.
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Javier threw his four-seam fastball 59.9 percent of the time last season. His arsenal features three other pitches — a slider, curveball and changeup — but none dictates his effectiveness or dominance more than the four-seamer.
Without the best version of his fastball, Javier vacillates from shutdown to suspect. His past five starts prove it. Hitters have found something on a pitch many presumed invisible, putting Javier in a perilous predicament and the Astros searching for a solution.
“The season-long trend has been pretty consistent: that it’s been inconsistent,” pitching coach Josh Miller said. “The fastball (velocity) is down a touch, the spin rate with it is down a touch. The slider shape is a little inconsistent. Execution of his pitches is a bit inconsistent. We’re just trying to shore up his delivery and make sure he’s on time, as much as he can, to work efficiently and get to his best pitch.”
Javier had a 5.79 ERA during five June starts. He failed to finish five innings in either of his final two. Opponents hit .310 and slugged .493 against his four-seam fastball in those five starts.
Drops in the fastball velocity and spin rate from last season prompt wonder if Javier is healthy, but Miller insisted Friday that the 26-year-old right-hander “is feeling good physically.” Baker reiterated it Saturday, even after bringing up — without prompt — that Javier is “scuffling.”
Between the regular season and playoffs, Javier threw a career-high 161 1/3 frames last year. He’s already thrown 87 this season, putting him on pace to easily exceed it.
“It has something to do with anybody that’s pitching. I don’t think (Javier is) fatigued now,” Miller said. “He’s feeling good physically, but it’s something we’ll monitor, for sure. We’re aware of it in the macro background of things and we’re making decisions. I wouldn’t be surprised if we shorten some of these guys’ outings some if it makes sense to do so.”
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Miller’s more pressing concern must be Javier’s mechanics. The team believes some small flaw is causing much of Javier’s fastball decline. His vertical release point with his fastball this season is 5.75 feet, up from 5.65 feet last season. Because of that, his relative vertical movement is down a bit and the angle on the pitch has changed a little.
“He has less margin for error, for sure. But our aim is to get back to that version of him,” Miller said. “It’s in there. We’ll find it.”
These may not seem like big changes, but each small difference has made his fastball more conventional. Take a look at how the shape of his pitch has been different over a few different time frames:
What you see here is a fastball that has recently lost about a tick and a half off where it was last season, almost an inch of induced vertical break (IVB), and is coming in at a worse vertical approach angle (compared to league average, or VAA AA) than it did before.
At its best, Javier’s fastball comes in on a straighter plane. Now it is arriving at more of an average plane — the closer that number gets to zero, the worse it is for the fastball. Javier used to be a full standard deviation above average in this measure.
Here’s another way of looking at how all of these small changes come together to make a big difference. The stat Stuff+ looks at all of these things in concert and gave Javier a 111 four-seam fastball Stuff+ last season, good for 16th among all qualified starting pitchers. This year, he’s got a 93 Stuff+ on the four-seam fastball, good for 30th among all qualified starting pitchers. It’s down to a 90 Stuff+ in the last month.
And the results on his four-seamer have followed this trend: Javier’s slugging percentage on the pitch last year was .326. It’s .450 this year and .506 over the past month.
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Javier has thrown 869 four-seam fastballs this season and yielded 57 hits against it. He allowed 59 total against 1,530 four-seamers across 30 regular-season appearances last season. The pitch has a negative-8 run value, according to Baseball Savant. Last season, it was negative-18.
“We’re not bearish on Cristian Javier one bit,” Miller said. “We expect him to be really good his next time out.”
For the Astros to have any chance at World Series contention, he must.
(Top photo of Christian Javier and Framber Valdez: Troy Taormina / USA Today)
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