Part of baseball’s charm is the everyman nature of its players. Though some stars are the types of muscular super-humans who populate sports like football and basketball, others are lanky, beer-bellied, stocky, or short. The leading man of your favorite team may possess talent you can barely fathom, but he also might be visibly indistinguishable from the guy next door. Even so, baseball players like Jose Altuve are simply not supposed to exist. Altuve, the Houston Astros’s 27-year-old second baseman, is the shortest player in baseball, listed at 5 feet 6 inches and sometimes presumed to be even smaller. He is also the frontrunner for the American League MVP award, fresh off a season in which he won his third AL batting title in four years and led the league in Baseball-Reference’s player value metric, wins above replacement. And in Game 1 of the AL Division Series against the Red Sox on Thursday, Altuve showed why he might be the best player in the MLB postseason, homering three times in an 8-2 Astros win. Related Story Baseball’s Eyes Are on Aaron Judge Altuve was once a long-shot to become a professional baseball player, let alone a superstar. As a teenager in Venezuela, he was cut from an Astros tryout because the organization considered him too short. According to a 2014 Sports Illustrated profile, Altuve’s father coaxed him to return to the next tryout, where he earned his way into a deal with Houston and a signing bonus of $15,000, a small fraction of what the top amateurs typically receive. From there, Altuve hit his way through the Astros’s minor-league system, putting up impressive numbers to little acclaim. Despite posting a .327 batting average and a .867 on-base plus slugging in five minor-league seasons, he was never named to a top-100 prospect list on any prominent site. Even when Altuve reached the Major Leagues and kept hitting, he was regularly written off as a role player at best or a fluke at worst. Optimists compared him to David Eckstein, another diminutive infielder who was lauded more for his grit and scrappiness than for his talent or production.
But by 2014, his third full season in the Majors, Altuve had risen to become one of the best players in the league, a slap-hitting, bag-swiping dynamo who led the AL in batting average, hits, and stolen bases, while winning his first Silver Slugger award. He had seemingly reached his full potential, as a feisty hitter in the Ichiro or Tony Gwynn mold. Then the most improbable thing of all happened: The 5-foot-6-inch Altuve became a formidable power threat. The spike began in 2015, when he started hitting the ball in the air more often, saw his home run/fly ball rate double, and wound up with 15 long balls, more than twice his total from a season ago. In 2016, that surge accelerated, as Altuve doubled his home run/fly ball rate again and belted 24 homers. This year, he launched another 24. Though sudden home-run spikes sometimes signal a coming regression, Altuve’s gradual slugging gains suggest he has tapped a level of power he couldn’t access before. Tellingly, MLB’s Statcast technology reveals he hit the ball squarely in 2017 nearly twice as often as he did in 2015. Home runs will never be Altuve’s primary weapon, but he nonetheless racked up more this year than sluggers like Albert Pujols, Hanley Ramirez, Robinson Cano, and Mark Trumbo. And thanks to that newfound power, plus a steady diet of doubles, he ranked sixth in the AL in slugging percentage, a stat usually dominated by 230-pound behemoths. His performance Thursday against the Red Sox—when he submitted only the ninth three-homer game in postseason history—was impressive but not surprising to anyone who had been following his season.