Maybe the Astros are the best team in baseball, and maybe they’re not. There are lots of good teams, and the differences are all fairly slim. At least, we can say the Astros have the best record out of anyone in baseball, and they deserve to stand where they’re standing. They’re easily clear of the rest of their own division, and while they’ve experienced a handful of significant or semi-significant injuries, they’ve chugged right along. The Astros were supposed to be good. So far, the Astros have been great. Projections can miss in one of two directions.

One of the things we knew was that the Astros were going to hit. During the winter, they were lauded for their offensive depth, and the Astros have an easy MLB lead in wRC+. But now I have a fun fact for you. It’s even more telling than that one. The Astros, as a team, lead baseball in home runs. They also have baseball’s lowest team strikeout rate. In the 19 full seasons since baseball moved to a 30-team landscape, no offense has led in both categories. The Astros are trying to be the first, which is downright impressive.

Read that again. Home runs? Sure. Everyone hits home runs. Marwin Gonzalez hits home runs. The Astros might as well be leading. But, strikeouts? Yeah. It’s not that there was zero warning. Reality is just following what could’ve reasonably been expected.

Here now is a very simple scatter plot. You see team strikeout rates for 2016, and team strikeout rates for 2017. In order to not penalize National League teams or anything, I’ve decided to look just at non-pitchers. The Astros, as you could imagine, are highlighted in flashy yellow.

There’s the hint of a linear relationship in there. Which, of course there is — team offenses generally don’t completely change season to season. Strikeout rate is a fairly sticky tendency. Only four teams have had their strikeout rates change by at least three percentage points. The A’s look the worst in here; their strikeout rate has gotten worse by six percentage points. Not that strikeouts are everything. The Astros, on the other side, have gotten better by 5.9 percentage points. That’s almost four percentage points better than the next-best improvement. The Astros have made a lot more contact, and much of it has been hard.

5.9. Let that number sink in. Does it strike you as maybe kind of familiar? It should, if you’ve been reading FanGraphs for a while. Here’s a post from the end of January, where I talked about strikeouts and the projections. At that time, the Astros were projected to have a strikeout-rate drop of 5.7 percentage points. That number is virtually identical to what’s actually happened through the first three months. I don’t bring this up to toot my own horn, because it’s not like that’s anything I did. I didn’t nail the Astros’ contact-hitting exactly right. That’s all on the projections. We could tell a long time ago that the Astros were going to put more balls in play, and all those dreams have come true, if only for half of the season to date.

The Astros used to be an extreme strikeout team. Over the five years between 2012 – 2016, the Astros had a strikeout rate of 23.5%. That was the highest rate in baseball by more than two points. That’s one of the reasons why this turnaround is so remarkable, even if we could see it coming. What would it mean to have a year-to-year improvement of 5.9 points? Here are the biggest year-to-year improvements since 1920, going back nearly a full century:

Biggest K% Drops Since 1920 Team Year 1 Year 2 Y1 K% Y2 K% Change Astros 2016 2017 23.4% 17.5% -5.9% Brewers 2001 2002 22.1% 17.3% -4.8% Rangers 2009 2010 20.4% 15.6% -4.8% Mariners 1986 1987 18.6% 14.0% -4.6% Diamondbacks 1998 1999 19.5% 15.2% -4.3% Braves 2014 2015 21.5% 17.3% -4.2% Orioles 1968 1969 15.0% 10.8% -4.2% Diamondbacks 2010 2011 24.2% 20.0% -4.2% Marlins 2014 2015 22.2% 18.3% -3.9% Mets 1972 1973 15.2% 11.5% -3.7%

The first line deserves an asterisk, because the season isn’t close to complete. But the Astros are on track to reduce their strikeouts by more than anyone else. In fact, the gap there between first and second place is more than a full percentage point, which gives the Astros some wiggle room. They’re in a good spot as arguably the most-improved contact-hitting team ever.

That table does include some more recent teams. In recent years, league strikeout rates have grown, so it’s become easier to experience a larger swing in strikeout rate. I hear you, professional statisticians. As an attempt to correct for that, I assigned every single team since 1920 a strikeout rate z-score, based on the year-specific average and league standard deviation. As things stand, relative to a year ago, the Astros’ team strikeout rate is better by about three standard deviations. That would make them the fifth-most-improved strikeout team over the span. Fifth might not be as sexy as first, but we’re dealing with a sample of more than 2,100 team-seasons. Fifth is all right. And they’re still first by the raw measure.

One year ago, non-pitchers struck out 20.6% of the time. The Astros had 17 players with at least 50 plate appearances. Of those, 14 had strikeout rates higher than average. This year, non-pitchers have struck out 21.1% of the time. The Astros have had 12 players with at least 50 plate appearances. Of those, two have strikeout rates higher than average, and one is exactly tied. Where last year, eight Astros struck out in at least a quarter of their opportunities, these Astros are at one. That one is Jake Marisnick, and he’s lifted his wRC+ from 58 to 129. Marisnick is striking out because he’s selling out for power he never before had. Even the one guy striking out has still been a success.

It’s all about player development and player replacement. Several high-strikeout players left during the offseason, and whether by coincidence or design, better contact hitters came in to replace them. And there are internal players who have either always made contact, or who have improved at making contact. Last season, the Astros ranked 27th in strikeout rate and 15th in ISO, and their walk rate was a hair better than average. This season, their walk rate is a hair worse than average, but they rank first in strikeout rate and third in ISO. The Astros have made more contact while barely sacrificing any walks, and their overall power output is up. The Astros have assembled an offensive juggernaut, and still there are specific areas where they might attempt to improve.

The fact that the Astros have so dramatically trimmed their strikeouts doesn’t explain why the offense is so much better. In theory, they could’ve trimmed their strikeouts by just trying to put anything and everything back into play. So then they’d lose all their walks and they’d lose all their power. That’s not, obviously, what they’ve done. The Astros’ strikeouts aren’t dramatically down because they’re all a bunch of contact hitters. Their strikeouts are dramatically down because they’re all a bunch of quality hitters. You can’t even say you weren’t warned. The Astros didn’t build this in secret.