Yordan Alvarez spent most of the summer on track for the first Triple Crown since 2012. With 12 games left, he is behind in two of the three categories.
ESPN’s David Schoenfield laid out the math Monday, and the chase has hit a wall.
Alvarez still leads the American League in batting average at .310. That is the leg he is most likely to keep.
The other two have gotten away from him. He sits at 38 home runs, two behind Rays slugger Junior Caminero at 40. He has 96 RBI, four behind Orioles first baseman Pete Alonso at 100.
The RBI number is the killer
Alvarez has driven in just 14 runs since the start of August. Fourteen. In six weeks.
He is hitting .206 in September through 10 games after batting .287 in August. The average has held up because of the cushion he built earlier, but the power production has cratered at exactly the wrong time.
To win the Triple Crown from here, he needs to out-homer Caminero by three over 12 games and out-produce Alonso by five RBI in the same stretch, while holding off Chandler Simpson and Yandy Diaz in the batting race.
That is not impossible. Alvarez is capable of a five-homer week. But it requires him to get hot immediately and requires two other hitters to go cold simultaneously.
What is actually at stake for Houston
The franchise history angle is real. A batting title would put Alvarez alongside Jose Altuve and Yuli Gurriel as the only Astros to win one. An RBI crown would put him with Jeff Bagwell, Lance Berkman and Kyle Tucker.
And this one is the eye-opener: no Astros player has ever led the league in home runs. Not one, in franchise history.
No player has won a Triple Crown since Miguel Cabrera did it for Detroit in 2012.
The MVP race is a separate conversation
Alvarez has been the overwhelming AL MVP favorite for months, with Caminero as the nearest challenger. A September slump narrows that gap but probably does not close it, because the body of work is enormous.
The complication is that Houston is 75-75 and clinging to a lead in the AL West over Texas. A .206 September from the best hitter in the league is not just an awards problem. It is a reason the Astros are in a dogfight for a division they should have put away.
The AL Cy Young appears close to settled, and the NL race has its own frontrunner, but the MVP conversation stays open as long as Caminero keeps hitting homers.
What to watch
Twelve games. Two deficits. One guy who has been the best hitter in baseball for most of a decade.
If Alvarez gets hot in the final week, this becomes the story of the last days of the regular season. If he keeps hitting .206, the Triple Crown drought reaches 14 years and Houston might be sweating a division race into Game 162.
Either outcome is a lot more interesting than the coronation everyone expected in July.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.