Ok so this is funny. Preparing for my POD today and as promised we said we were going to dork out on the math and try to calculate how many wins Dusty cost us last year. I did an hour and a half of spreadsheets and baseball reference and a bunch of other stuff and my number came out to 3.2 Games. I think it's probably higher than that b/c I made no attempt to play guys in more advantageous situations (like Meyers only against LHP, or Diaz never DH'ing), so I'd say the number was probably 4 games he cost us through lineup decisions.
Then, to check myself I just played Diaz at catcher 125 games and maldy at Catcher like 40, while also giving Chas back an extra 15 or 20 games Dusty took from him and benching Abreu so Diaz could get 20 games at 1b. Just those 2 simple decisions, pro rated out, added up to 3.1.
Then I looked at our Pythag vs our actual record and it was 93 wins v the 90 we actually had.
So, with even luck and optimal playing time the answer is 97 wins. This last years astros team, with the players available to it, and average luck should have probably won 97 games.
Will be interested in seeing Andrew's math on this. We will be doing a weekly throughout the offseason. 1st offseason one is look back at manager look ahead at managers we like or are looking at. #2 will be highs and lows and favorite parts of the year. After that it will just be whatever makes sense in light of events going on in the offseason- projecting out 2024 and then some talk about baseball movies. I love baseball movies.