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Point and laugh, folks. Point and laugh. Without their little garbage can-banging scheme to illegally know what pitches are coming in 2020, Houston Astros stars Jose Altuve and George Springer are having the worst seasons of their careers.
Of course that could just be a coincidence, but hey, they made their beds, now they have lie in them.
Heading into this season, Altuve hadn’t had an on-base percentage less than .353 since 2014. This year it’s .253 so far, thanks to a abysmal .184 batting average.
As for Springer, he is batting .193 with 14 strikouts in 57 at bats. Which means his strikeout average (.246) actually much higher than his batting average.
When the season began, the only baseball video game worth a flip, MLB The Show 20, had each player with 85 ratings which fall into the Diamond category, the highest in the game.
After their early seaosn struggles, both players have now been downgraded to gold status.
Both Springer and Altuve have lost their diamond ratings in MLB The Show pic.twitter.com/kNuSnAWdJE
— Very Baseball Moments (@verymlb) August 15, 2020
Altuve and Springer have actually dropped even more since that tweet went out. Altuve now has a rating of 81 thanks to a .184/.253.310 slash line with more strikeouts (21) than hits (16), while Springer is now an 82 with a sad slashline of .193/.342/.368.
In their favor, as far as the cheating effect goes, Alex Bregman is still slugging .500 and Carlos Correa is batting .293, and both of them were deeply implicated in the Astros sign-stealing scandal.
Perhaps Altuve and Springer are just more affected by the fact that pretty much everyone outside of Houston wants to do what Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly did to Astros hitters a couple of weeks back.
https://twitter.com/AsteriskTour/status/1238299007727869953