The Crawford Boxes didn't make Alex Bregman

Unlike Juan Soto, a generational hitter who is going to be productive no matter where he plays, Alex Bregman is the type of hitter who – according to popular opinion – would be massively affected if he left the short porches of what was until recently Minute Maid Park in Houston. It’s not hard to see why that feeling persists, either:

• Because Bregman is a pull hitter with OK-but-not-elite power (51st percentile hard-hit rate, 41st percentile bat speed)
• Because he was a member of the 2017 Astros team that got penalized for sign stealing at home

You already know how this gag goes: We share something that seems true, and then tell you why it’s not true, so let’s just get the punchline out of the way. Over the course of his career, Bregman has no discernable home/road split whatsoever ...

• Home: 94 HR, 13% K, .270 AVG, .846 OPS
• Away: 97 HR, 14% K, .275 AVG, .850 OPS

… and, like many players who don’t call Coors Field home, his annual splits have been wildly inconsistent over the years, fluctuating in one direction or the other.

In some years, like in 2017 (that's right, 2017) and 2019, he’s hit better on the road. In some years, like in 2018 and 2022, he’s hit much better at home. In 2024, there was barely any difference at all. For the most part, it’s up-and-down.

If there’s evidence that he’s a mere product of his home field in Houston, we’re not seeing it here.

But: Why? How is it that a medium-powered hitter with a swing geared for a very friendly landing spot in his home park hasn’t actually been meaningfully better at home? We have two ideas.

1. First things first: Houston’s home field is not the right-handed home run haven you think it is.

We’ve all seen it, of course. It’s a moderately-hit fly ball to left that’s a lazy fly ball in every other park, but just ever so barely sneaks over the wall in what will now be known as Daikin Park. It happened to Ronel Blanco just last summer, as one example of several.

Bregman himself has benefited from it too, certainly, like in 2022 when he hit a ball not that hard (94.1 MPH) and not that far (341 feet) and ended up with a home run out of it anyway.

It’s not that those things never happen. It’s just that they don’t happen nearly as often as you think, and if you were to look at Statcast park factors for right-handed hitters over the last three years, you’ll learn something interesting. Daikin Park has been almost exactly average park for righty batters, and only slightly above-average for homers, where it ranks tied for 11th.

There's a whole lot of "that's average, or close to it," so far as Houston park factors go.

Why? We’ve been talking about this since at least 2018, that the park is better for pitchers than you think, and way back in 2005 the New York Times was on it about the park's neutrality. In 2023 the Athletic spoke to visiting hitters who claimed that the batter's eye wasn’t favorable for seeing the ball – and it’s worth noting the team did make changes to that backdrop both in Sept. 2023 and in Aug. 2024 in response.

That can be seen somewhat in the fact that the hard-hit rate factor is near the bottom over the last three years – hard to hit it hard if you can’t see it well, we suppose – but if we’re talking about homers, then it might come down to the fact that since 2021, Houston batters have 419 homers at home, and 428 on the road. It’s essentially identical.

So, the park isn't really what you think it is. Turns out, neither is Bregman.

2. While Bregman is a pull guy, he’s not only hitting cheapies either.

Because Bregman isn’t of Aaron Judge-esque stature (he’s listed as 6 feet, 190 lbs.), and because he’s hardly a Giancarlo Stanton-like exit velocity god (he’s maxed out at only 109 MPH, and that happened only twice in his entire career), and because he is essentially a pull-only homer hitter (84% of his homers have been pulled, one of the highest rates on record since Statcast tracking began in 2015), it’s easy to think that the Crawford Boxes are responsible for creating his homers.

Again: It’s not that it’s never happened. In May, MLB.com’s Theo DeRosa investigated those “stadium specials,” the kind of “out in just 1 of 30 parks” cheapie homers that you’re very familiar with in Yankee Stadium’s right field, among selected other places. It is true that Bregman was tied with DJ LeMahieu for the most of those types of homers, with 10, ahead of Aaron Judge and Jose Altuve. (Yes, there’s a home-field theme here.) It’s just that 10 out of 191 career homers over nine seasons is just really not very many. It’s one per season.

It’s also not recent. There were 595 of those “out in only 1 of 30 parks” home runs in 2024, playoffs included, and Bregman didn’t hit a single one of them. (Gleyber Torres had the most, with three, all at Yankee Stadium, one coming off of Michael Wacha in the pivotal Game 5 of the ALDS.) Bregman hasn’t actually done this since June 2023, when he took Jacob Webb out for a grand slam, and he’s actually done it just four times in the last five seasons – once in 2021, once in 2022, and twice in 2023.

So what’s happening here? It’s mostly that while he only hits moderate exit velocity homers to left field is true, those home runs he hits aren’t just created by the Crawford Boxes is also true. When he hits them that way, they stay hit.

His first homer of the year certainly doesn’t look, visually, like anything Judge has hit, but it was also out in all 30 ballparks.

When he took Simeon Woods-Richardson out of the yard in June, it was well past the Crawford Boxes, and would have been out in 29 of the 30 parks – everywhere but Baltimore.

It’s that last part – a homer everywhere but Baltimore – that’s key here.

It’s not that a moderately-powered hitter like Bregman can’t be affected by ballparks, because he can. It’s just that it’s probably less “he badly needs Houston to prop him up,” and more that “there’s a few specific ballparks where this profile would not work out well,” parks that eat up right-handed power due to dimensions or atmosphere, like in San Francisco, or Pittsburgh, or Miami, Baltimore (depending on how the again-changed left field plays), or Seattle, or St. Louis, – or Detroit, a popularly-suggested destination both due to the Tigers' need for offense and Bregman’s association with former Astros manager AJ Hinch.

Maybe Soto, or Pete Alonso, can muscle the ball out of any park. Bregman likely can’t. Which means that the primary goal shouldn’t be “staying in Houston,” so much as it is avoiding the places listed above – or managing to get himself to stronger right-handed power parks, be they places unlikely to sign him (Colorado, Cincinnati, Los Angeles [Dodgers]), or teams that are more plausible landing spots (Phillies, Red Sox, Blue Jays).

As Davy Andrews wrote recently, Fenway may be the most ideal home for this profile, as Bregman is the only player in history with at least 60 regular season plate appearances there and an OPS north of 1.200.

If there is a concern here, it’s this: Bregman’s once-vaunted plate discipline wasn’t quite so disciplined last year. His usually-excellent walk rate declined in half, to a below-average 6%; his once-strong sprint speed, which had been in the 83rd percentile as a rookie, is down to a below-average 32nd percentile. It’s not that he’s not aging, and it’s not that there’s nothing at all to give you pause about what kind of future he has. But it’s probably going to be a lot more about the fact that he’s a ballplayer in his thirties than it is that he’s possibly no longer going to have the Crawford Boxes to take aim at.