Jeremy Peña's offensive leap has forced the Astros front office into a tough spot

While most of the offseason focus has been on what the Houston Astros will add to the roster after a disappointing collapse to finish 2025, taking care of one of the club's breakout success stories, Jeremy Peña, should be at the top of Dana Brown's mind.

Once a top prospect, Peña debuted in 2022 and flashed amid some growing pains. The shortstop was said to have plus power, and in his rookie year, he delivered with 22 homers. It came at the cost of a 24.9% strikeout rate, which, when paired with a 3.9% walk rate, left his on-base skills leaving a lot to be desired.

In the years that followed, Peña would cut down on the K's, dropping to a strikeout rate of 20.3% in 2023 and then 17.1% in 2024. However, while the strikeouts plummeted, so too did his power. Peña had become a ground ball machine while still struggling to draw free passes at an average rate.

The end result was a lot of empty contact, resulting in slightly below average offensive output. His glove kept him as a useful piece, but he was far from the foundational piece the Astros were hoping for when they let Carlos Correa walk.

Jeremy Peña's offensive breakout in 2025 will force the Astros into a tough decision regarding his future

Then 2025 happened. Peña spent the first half of the season looking like a dark horse MVP candidate with a .322/.378/.489 line and 11 homers. But the breakout star wound up hitting the IL at the end of June thanks to a fractured rib suffered when he was hit by a pitch on June 27 in a matchup against the Chicago Cubs.

The injury cost him the entire month of July, and when he returned, he wasn't the same. August saw Peña's performance drop to numbers that were more in line with his career averages, slashing .252/.319/.417 during the season's dog days.

His return to earth coincided with an offensive downturn that would ultimately doom the Astros' season, but as the team's struggles extended into September, Peña sprang back to life with an .869 OPS and his best isolated slugging mark, .205, of any month of the season.

But does the underlying data support the uptick in performance being sustainable? Well, Peña substantially raised his hard hit rate and barrel percentage from 2024 to 2025, with the hard hit rate going from 38.8% to 42.9% and the barrel percentage going from 5.4% to 8.2%.

The biggest growth was in how frequently he squared up pitches, going from a 55th percentile performance to a mark in the 86th percentile this year. On top of that, his ground ball rate has steadily declined, while his line drives have remained more or less constant, and the growth is going to the fly ball side.

Still, Peña doesn't show up as elite in nearly any of the underlying offensive metrics. The growth does indicate a real shift towards the positive, however, and his speed and glove work make him a valuable total package.

The question is how valuable and how long Houston reasonably believes it can wait before offering him a deal. A repeat of 2025 next season would drive his price to the moon, but as it stands now, there's a middle ground between where he was and where he finished 2025 that is likely where his true talent lies.