Isaac Paredes has built his career on pulling the baseball. No qualified hitter in baseball had a higher pull rate than the Astros third baseman last season. All 102 of his career home runs have gone to his pull side. It is, by design and by instinct, how he operates.
So when Paredes delivered three consecutive hits to the opposite field during the Astros’ recent series in Detroit—including a go-ahead two-run double to right off a two-strike fastball in the eighth inning of a comeback win—it was worth paying attention to.
“I think so,” Paredes said through an interpreter when asked if he was making more of an effort to use the whole field. “We’ve got to be able to look for hits, get on base and be able to produce and have some type of production. You try to hit home runs, but you’ve also got to try to get those hits.”
It has not been a dramatic reinvention so much as a subtle recalibration—one that has coincided with some of the best baseball Paredes has played in an Astros uniform. His pull rate has dipped each month this season, from nearly 57 percent in March and April to under 47 percent in June, a meaningful shift for a hitter whose career average has hovered around 50 percent. The numbers to the pull side remain significantly stronger—a .364 average and 23 extra-base hits going that direction, compared to a .238 average and just two extra-base hits to the opposite field—but pitchers have begun adjusting to him, and Paredes has shown he can adjust back.
That willingness to adapt matters because the first two months of the season were difficult. He signed a one-year deal with Houston and posted a .222 average through his first 25 games, with his OPS dipping to .695 in late May. He has steadily turned it around since, posting an .886 OPS over his last 100 plate appearances, third among Astros hitters behind only Yordan Alvarez and Jeremy Peña.
The timely hitting has been a consistent feature of that stretch. He has delivered go-ahead hits in the late innings of multiple games during the Astros’ five-series winning streak, contributing in nearly every meaningful moment of a run that has pulled Houston back into the AL West race.
None of it has come from dramatically changing who he is as a hitter. Paredes is still looking to do damage. He is just becoming more willing to take what pitchers give him—and right now, pitchers are paying for it.
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