It’s easy to overlook short players (all puns intended), and it’s actually for a pretty good reason. As a general rule, you want baseball players to be between 6’ and 6’5”. They’re tall enough to get good leverage and not too tall as to have significant coordination issues. Sure, tall guys like Michael Pineda and Randy Johnson have done just fine, but you don’t see many because the taller one is the more body they have to get going in the right positions. Short guys have also played this game, but being smaller hinders getting good leverage and momentum along with possibly being too slightly built to play through a full season of baseball. Therefore as a general rule, you’d rather have the guys in the middle of the two extremes. It makes sense. Teams, however, understand that there are exceptions to that rule, and the Astros are hoping Jose Altuve is one of them.
Despite his shortcomings (sorry, this is just going to happen), Altuve can really hit. For his career in the minors, he’s hitting .326/.386/.479, and he’s hit at every stop since he was signed from Venezuela and began playing in 2007 (is this the first Latin American guy I’ve covered?). Altuve doesn’t draw a lot walks, but he hits for a high enough average that the walks he does get help his OBP add up to a healthy number. Altuve, however, is listed at 5’7”, but most think he’s probably shorter than that. Being that short just adds to the doubt of one’s abilities, but Altuve keeps hitting with a line of .360/.388/.554 in 34 AA games after hitting .408/.451/.606 in 52 High-A games to start the season.
But let’s not sell Altuve short. He’s a good all-around player. He can hit, field, and run, but he doesn’t do either of those last two things particularly well. Scouts, however, weren’t universally sold on Altuve before the season, and they remain largely unconvinced now. No major publication had him ranked even in the top 10 of a very bad Astros farm system before the season, and while he’s probably one of the top 2 prospects in that system now, most would also argue that he wouldn’t be if it weren’t such a bad system. Scouts like to use comparisons in order to project a guy going forward, but with Altuve, they don’t have much history to compare him to.
So how do we handle a guy like Altuve? He produces at a high level everywhere he goes, but history tells us that short, and in his case very short, players don’t usually pan out well. History, however, also tells us that there are and have been exceptions to that rule. What we do know is that Altuve has reached the upper levels and is still hitting. As long as he keeps hitting and playing a decent second base, he has a place in the majors. Whether he turns into the next David Eckstein or Dustin Pedroia is a question best left for another day, but it should be a fun story to watch unfold. I just hope it isn’t a short story.
