CHICAGO -- Astros left-hander Framber Valdez admits he hasn’t been at his best through his first seven starts of the season. The proof is in the results, with Valdez sitting at 1-4 with a 4.39 ERA and 1.27 WHIP in 41 innings pitched. Houston is 2-5 in games he’s started, though he does have four quality starts.
A closer look at the metrics, though, reveal some areas in which Valdez has underperformed this season compared to past years. He’s been one of baseball’s best left-handed starting pitchers since the shortened 2020 season and an anchor in an Astros' rotation that has constantly changed around him.
“I haven’t been the best,” he said. “I can admit that, but I know things can get better. It’s just a thing of showing faith and giving faith through those bad times. I know I’m a better pitcher. I know I can be better than that.”
Valdez allowed four runs on seven hits and two walks to go with six strikeouts in five innings in Friday night’s 7-3 loss to the White Sox at Rate Field. He struggled to get his sinker down, a pitch which has been his bread and butter. If Valdez is not getting the sinker down in the zone and getting ground balls, he isn’t at his best.
“Any time you see some balls in the air and early in the game, balls in the gap and stuff like that, that’s just not your typical Framber,” manager Joe Espada said. “He’ll make his adjustments and we’ll get it right.”
Here’s a look at how some of Valdez’s key metrics (entering Friday’s start) compare to his body of work in 2025:
- Strikeout percentage: 24.0 (2024) vs. 20.9 (2025)
- Whiff rate: 27.2 (2024) vs. 23.1 (2025)
- Walk percentage: 7.8 (2024) vs. 8.8 (2025)
- Launch angle: 0.4 degrees (2024) vs. 6.7 degrees (2025)
- Meatball swing percentage: 70.6 (2024) vs. 81.8 (2025)
The increase in launch angle off the bat is tied for the 20th-largest increase among qualifying pitchers. As a result, Valdez’s ground-ball rate was down 9.7 percent entering Friday, tied for the 25th-largest drop among those same pitchers. Valdez has been baseball’s best ground-ball pitcher since 2018, with a 62.4 percentage entering this start.
Valdez typically throws his sinker 64 percent of the time, but Baseballsavant.com had him throwing only 20 sinkers from among his 87 pitches against the White Sox. That’s because some of those sinkers were registering as changeups, the result of Valdez taking some velocity off the pitch to try to get the break to mimic an effective sinker.
“I think there were probably a few more [sinkers thrown], but some of those sinkers don’t look quite like sinkers because they don’t have the down action like we want to,” Espada said. “But we know when Framber’s on, he gets early ground balls, the sinker’s sinking, he’s ahead in the count and he can put people away with his breaking balls.”
Coming off a complete-game loss at Kansas City on Saturday, Valdez allowed three of the first four White Sox hitters to reach, with Edgar Quero scoring Chase Meidroth with a double past Jose Altuve, who recovered to relay a throw to shortstop Jeremy Peña that helped nab Luis Robert Jr. at the plate after Meidroth had scored. The White Sox took a 2-0 lead on a Brooks Baldwin single in the fourth, and Robert took Valdez deep in a two-run fifth that put the Astros in a 4-1 hole.
“He battled,” Espada said. “His stuff, the velo is there. The sinker is there. Just needs to get it down and get some quicker outs. Five innings, he could have been more efficient in the beginning. But not the performance he was looking for.”
The Astros will give the ball to emerging ace Hunter Brown (4-1, 1.22 ERA in 37 innings) on Saturday while looking to get back on track, while the team’s ace of years past will have to wait until next week in Milwaukee to try to earn his first win since Opening Day.