Grading the Astros’ Pitching Staff After a Tumultuous 2025 Season

When it comes down to the stats and metrics, the Astros looked promising throughout the entire year regarding their pitching. While there were certainly some hiccups along the way, they ultimately put together a rather impressive season for a unit that was marred by injury as much as it was.

With that said, where did they end up ranking out in some key standard and advanced metrics?

Where Did the Astros Rank Statistically When It Comes to Their Pitching?

Starting out with the standard counting and average metrics, Houston ranked No. 11 in the MLB in ERA, had the second most complete games, tied for No. 4 in WHIP, was No. 5 in batting average allowed. They also had the second most strikeouts, and ranked around league average in walks at No. 15 from lowest to highest.

The advanced metrics are where things get a little more intriguing, as they dominated in many of them. According to Baseball Savant, they tied for the eighth-lowest barrel rate at 8.2%, tied for the seventh-lowest exit velocity, had the lowest expected batting average, third-lowest expected SLG, second-lowest XWOBA, and fifth-lowest XWOBACON.

Essentially, the premise of this is that they were not being hit hard the vast majority of the time they put pitches into play. Even though they gave up a decent amount of hits, they were typically pretty quick-hitting plays and not hard, volatile contact.

This is what you want to see out of a pitching staff as a whole, especially considering many of them were called up or backups by the end of the year, so it is impressive they maintained this level of success.

The hope is that this can be maintained heading into 2026, while they continue to work on lowering their contact rates a bit further. Overall, given the extent of the setbacks they had injury-wise in 2025, they had a promising pitching staff that performed well in many cases.

While not the best in the league, they certainly showed promise, worthy of an A- grade on the year, with room to improve even further in 2026.