WASHINGTON — Yordan Alvarez isn’t the sort to tout his greatness, to stake claim to a nebulous designation. Yet in answering a simple question, he truly left just one answer.
Who’s the greatest hitter in baseball right now?
Alvarez, the Houston Astros slugger headed to his fourth All-Star Game, leaned back in his chair a moment and pondered the state of slugging across Major League Baseball.
“I think there’s a lot of good hitters in the league,” he told USA Today Sports via a team translator. “For example, you have Aaron Judge. Even though he’s hurt right now, I think he’s the best hitter in the game."
“You also have (Shohei) Ohtani and even though he hasn’t maxed out yet to his full potential, he’s also there," he added. “There’s a lot of good hitters out there.”
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It’s true: Judge and Ohtani have combined for seven MVP awards, but the New York Yankees slugger already missed a month with a rib injury, with no return timeline in sight. While Ohtani’s two-way brilliance continues apace, the hitting side of that equation shows a first-half decline from his three consecutive MVP seasons.
Which leaves just one logical option as this 2026 season rumbles into the second half.
“He is for me, the best hitter in the game,” Jose Altuve, the Astros’ three-time batting champion and author of nearly 2,500 career hits, told USA Today Sports of Alvarez.
“And when we think he can’t get any better," Altuve said, "he comes and gets better and does beautiful things for us.”
Indeed, Alvarez has been a force since the moment he stepped into the Astros lineup in June 2019. At 29, the Cuban-born left-handed swinger might be painting his masterpiece right now.
Alvarez is making legitimate runs at a pair of Triple Crowns, one traditional, the other more modern. He leads the American League with 29 home runs and 55 RBIs, while his .313 batting average swaps the first and second spot almost daily with countryman Yandy Díaz.
Then there’s that slash line: .313/.420/.621, putting him on course to lead the major leagues in on-base and slugging percentages, while jousting with Díaz for the AL batting lead.
It’s a skill set that can only be described one way: Judgeian.
Yordan Alavarez leads the American League in home runs and RBIs through July 7.
'This guy can take over a game'
It was just a season ago when Judge put together one of the greatest all-around seasons of anyone’s lifetime, leading the majors in batting, slugging and on-base percentage (.331/.457/.688) while hitting 53 home runs.
He became just the third player this century — joining Barry Bonds (2002) and Miguel Cabrera (2013) — to claim, if you will, the major league slash line triple crown. Judge’s injury created a significant void that the Yankees in particular and the league at large feel, particularly as the All-Star Game approaches and the game’s most recognizable player this side of Ohtani is in recovery mode.
Unfortunate as it is, it’s somewhat appropriate that Alvarez’s greatness will be more fully appreciated with Judge temporarily off the stage and Ohtani long gone to the National League.
After all, Alvarez’s 2022 season was a masterpiece: A .306 average paired with 37 home runs and a 188 adjusted OPS that remains his career best, all capped by a World Series title.
For all that, he finished third in AL MVP voting.
No shade: It’s hard to quibble with Judge’s record-setting 62-home run season or Ohtani’s two-way value that produced 9.7 WAR. Yet it was a standard-setting season for Alvarez, setting a bar for a hitting and hit-for-power combination that he’s well on track to exceed this season.
Judge showed a mastery last season of taking what the pitcher is giving him. Alvarez is approaching that level.
“I think I know how to manage the situations,” Alvarez said. “There’s days I feel like I can hit home runs in every single at-bat. And days I feel like I can hit for average, get those hits. I think it’s a combination of being able to know those things.”
“If he’s not hitting the ball out of the ballpark, he gets a single, he walks and the guys behind him are starting to pick him up," Astros manager Joe Espada said. “When he’s healthy, he’s one of the best, if not the best.”
Ah, yes, health. The lone blip on Alvarez’s career came last year, when he missed 99 games with a vexing right hand injury. A left ankle sprain cost him the last 11 games of the season.
Alvarez played in just 48 games last season, managing six home runs. The Astros’ eight-year streak of making the playoffs ended.
“It was very difficult,” Alvarez said. “You can’t look back on the past — you can see how blessed we are right now and the season we’re having."
Alvarez’s loss was so glaring that Espada says he still feels it today, even as these Astros are an AL-acceptable 46-48 and lurking just two games out of first place in the AL West.
“We missed him so badly last year that seeing him every single day, you think man I wish we would’ve had him,” Espada said. “Injuries are part of the sport. But when you have him in there every single day, it just adds that level of comfort to our team that at any point, this guy can just take over a game.”
Yordan Alvarez celebrates his All-Star selection.
Joy to the world
Alvarez predictably dominates all the Statcast measurables, ranking in the 96th to 99th percentile in all the hard-hit, exit-velocity, expected statistics. Yet three other metrics indicate how hard he is to handle this season.
Alvarez says he made mechanical tweaks this offseason to get the ball in the air more often — and the result is a career-best 40.2% flyball rate. He’s also pulling the ball a career-best 34.3% of the time, and it is not hard to imagine what happens when you hit the ball hard, in the air, and pull it.
Meanwhile, his walk rate is a career-best 14.7%. Perhaps that’s one reason why Astros GM Dana Brown readily admits his desperation to reel in a left-handed hitting outfielder to support Alvarez and the rest of the lineup.
For the third consecutive season, the Astros started the season miserably. Yet they’re 26-17 since May 21, the best record in the middling AL in that span.
“The team has been playing better. We’re focused on making the postseason and that’s the end-all, be-all," Brown said. "We gotta make the postseason. Anything other than making the postseason would be a failure, in my opinion.”
Those are the expectations in Houston, even after a one-year absence. Alvarez knows it well, starring as a rookie on the 2019 club that lost the World Series in seven games to the Washington Nationals, then leading a new generation that included Kyle Tucker and Jeremy Peña to the 2022 World Series title.
Peña was MVP of the ALCS and World Series, but the lasting image came from Alvarez. Rarely has there been a World Series home run so massive both in its significance and its enormity than Alvarez’s Game 6 shot against Philadelphia lefty Jose Alvarado.
The Astros trailed 1-0, with two men on in the sixth inning and Alvarado summoned to face Alvarez for the fourth time in the Series. The first three confrontations yielded two infield pop-ups and a bases-loaded hit-by-pitch.
The last round would go to Alvarez: A fly ball so towering that it cleared the faux green ivy of the center field batter’s eye, the ball tumbling into a standing-room-only group of fans in disbelief a ball could get to them, an estimated 450 feet from home plate.
The Astros won Game 6 4-1 and the World Series 4-2, their slugger once again adjusting to prevail when it mattered most.
He longs for that sensation once again, with yet another generation of Astros surrounding him, his stature in the game preceding him.
“It was a great feeling. One of those moments that will stay with you your whole life,” he said. “And the very cool thing is you can see how much joy it gave one city. How much joy it gave to an entire country of Cuba."
“You can see how, with one swing," he added, "you can give that joy to an entire nation.”
