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2023 Houston Astros Thread

Planet Houston

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henrygandorf
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FartingDreamer
FartingDreamer

Am I the only one that can't stand the sight of Altuve, Bregman or Tucker?  Something about each one of them just pisses me off.  

The Dog
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Storm the Field

Storm the Field 5305

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Games like last night are what make it all worthwhile. Hell of a night at MMP.

Best version of Garcia I've ever seen. Abreu's Houdini act was incredible and then the 2-out rally in the 8th to put the game on ice was so much fun. Lots of high-fives to strangers. I was literally shaking my client I took, yelling "that's fucking gone!" on Pena's dinger. 

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Wulaw Horn

Wulaw Horn 19253

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36 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

 

Fodder fucks sake- Salisbury asked Dana Brown what they were doing with Dubon if he’s an all star when Altuve comes back. 
He’s got a fucking 101 ops. His quality of contact is not great and he’s not walking. If he’s at 90 when Altuve comes back it’s a win.  
Salisbury now asking if Dubon can be the DH. Good grief. 

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29199

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1 hour ago, Wulaw Horn said:

Fodder fucks sake- Salisbury asked Dana Brown what they were doing with Dubon if he’s an all star when Altuve comes back. 
He’s got a fucking 101 ops. His quality of contact is not great and he’s not walking. If he’s at 90 when Altuve comes back it’s a win.  
Salisbury now asking if Dubon can be the DH. Good grief. 

tbh, i'm way more excited about what we just saw out of meyers this series than whatever the fuck dubon's batting average is.  if dubon plays well enough to let altuve fully heal, then he's done his job.  he's not gonna win or lose any games for us, realistically.  if meyers can show some pop, especially the other way, he's an actual asset.

i did like a few days ago how they said altuve keeps coming up to dusty every day to show him his hand and how fast he's progressing.  who knows if it's true, but i like it.  seems like every injury i read about has setbacks, though those are mostly pitchers (not our guys, just following roto shit).

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Wulaw Horn

Wulaw Horn 19253

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25 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

tbh, i'm way more excited about what we just saw out of meyers this series than whatever the fuck dubon's batting average is.  if dubon plays well enough to let altuve fully heal, then he's done his job.  he's not gonna win or lose any games for us, realistically.  if meyers can show some pop, especially the other way, he's an actual asset.

i did like a few days ago how they said altuve keeps coming up to dusty every day to show him his hand and how fast he's progressing.  who knows if it's true, but i like it.  seems like every injury i read about has setbacks, though those are mostly pitchers (not our guys, just following roto shit).

This is, as per usual with you, spot on. 
Honestly the two week hot/luck streak happening at the beginning of the year is going to end up costing us when Dubon gets 100 more AB’s down the stretch than he ought to. 

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Gut Wagon

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1 minute ago, runthebone said:

 

Think you made a type there and meant ".370"

I think it's an interesting question. Meyers fans feel he has it in him to be a solid hitter. So let's call that .270. Meanwhile, not even Dubon's fans think he's likely to hold 300. But I actually think the latter has a better chance of staying above .270 this year than the former has of reaching it.

Of course, feel free to throw out your own number in this "race."

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runthebone

runthebone 8137

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4 hours ago, Wulaw Horn said:

Fodder fucks sake- Salisbury asked Dana Brown what they were doing with Dubon if he’s an all star when Altuve comes back. 
He’s got a fucking 101 ops. His quality of contact is not great and he’s not walking. If he’s at 90 when Altuve comes back it’s a win.  
Salisbury now asking if Dubon can be the DH. Good grief. 

If Dubon were an All Star and Brown didn't trade him immediately, then Brown is not the guy.

 

 

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Wulaw Horn

Wulaw Horn 19253

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2 hours ago, Scraps said:

What would probably help his marketing is to uh ya know actually drop a fucking Breggy Bomb ever so often

I don’t get it. You make 30M what the fuck are you doing spending that much time on mediocre condiments and lame hats and shit? 

Edited by Wulaw Horn
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rvm96

rvm96 1643

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1 hour ago, Wulaw Horn said:

I don’t get it. You make 30M what the fuck are you doing spending that much time on mediocre condiments and lame hats and shit? 

A lot of athletes struggle with what to do when their career is over. Maybe this is his plan.

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texashorne

texashorne 1178

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10 hours ago, Wulaw Horn said:

I don’t get it. You make 30M what the fuck are you doing spending that much time on mediocre condiments and lame hats and shit? 

Bregman isn't spending much time doing any of this.. he's smiling for the camera and that's about it. 

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Seasick Sailor

Seasick Sailor 3747

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Jose Abreu's Texas-Sized Power Outage

By Dan Syzmborski

Quote
Jose Abreu Matt Blewett-USA TODAY Sports

There are a lot of reasons why the Astros are off to a cold start in 2023 and, as of Thursday morning, are looking up at the Angels and Rangers in the AL West standings. While their Pythagorean record suggests they’ve actually played better than their record, their April offense has been an extremely unbalanced one. To a large extent, the AL’s fifth-place team in runs scored has been driven primarily by Yordan Alvarez and Kyle Tucker.

The Astros currently have three positions with an OPS under .600 for the season: catcher, first base, and designated hitter. Catcher as an offense sink was always expected; nobody had a secret belief that Martín Maldonado had offensive performance as part of his skill set. Designated hitter should improve once it has a smaller dose of David Hensley and Corey Julks at the position. That leaves first base, the home of José Abreu, the longtime White Sox slugger who was Houston’s biggest signing this winter. He has struggled in the first eighth of the season, hitting .266, but with so little secondary contribution that his OPS stands at a miserable .605. Given his age, three-year deal, and the necessity to get at least some offensive contribution from first base, how worried should the Astros be about him?

The general belief, at least among Astros fans, is that Abreu has historically been a slow starter, and that any issue will take care of itself, but I think that’s too easy a “solution” to his early-season struggles. First off, the supposition that he has historically been a worse hitter in April is factually 100% accurate. Among players in the wild-card era, he has one of the largest splits between April and rest-of-season OPS (OPS is certainly good enough for an examination such as this). Since the start of the 1995 season, there are 300 players who have accumulated at least 750 plate appearances in April; Abreu’s career split — 90 points of OPS — is large enough to make the top 20 and, unless I’m miscounting, enough to rank him third among active players:

 
Coldest April Hitters, 1995-2023
Name April OPS RoS OPS Difference
Steve Finley .696 .821 -.125
Bernie Williams .784 .901 -.116
Edwin Encarnación .752 .865 -.113
Aubrey Huff .710 .820 -.111
Mark Teixeira .777 .885 -.108
J.T. Snow .709 .813 -.104
Andrew McCutchen .753 .856 -.103
J.J. Hardy .627 .730 -.103
Adam LaRoche .713 .815 -.102
Tony Clark .740 .839 -.099
Marlon Byrd .675 .774 -.098
Shane Victorino .686 .779 -.093
David Bell .638 .730 -.092
Matt Carpenter .748 .839 -.091
José Abreu .781 .871 -.090
Dmitri Young .750 .839 -.090
Barry Larkin .764 .853 -.089
Carlos González .769 .857 -.088
Ian Desmond .669 .756 -.087
Ryan Howard .786 .872 -.086

Offense is generally lowest in April, so some kind of shortfall is not unexpected. The 300 players in this class, as a group, had a .794 OPS in April and an .806 OPS the rest of the year. With a quarter of a million April plate appearances between them and a total of nearly two million plate appearances, a 12-point OPS is a significant one, and Abreu’s history dwarfs this one.

So, he’s a bad player in April, and everything will just work outself out? Not so fast.

While Abreu has struggled at times in April, that doesn’t necessarily make it meaningful or predictive. Just how significant are monthly splits across the league as a whole? The historical OPS deviation between April and the rest of the year, apart from the 12-point OPS gain as a whole, appears to be normally distributed; in the Shapiro-Wilks test, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the distribution is normal at the 95% level of significance, though we can at the 99% level. In other words, the historical results of April versus the rest of the season for long-time major leaguers is not distributed drastically different than from what you would expect if you knew beforehand that it was random. But just because things act like normal distributions doesn’t mean that they are random. Further investigation is required, rather than just shouting p-values at people.

I decided to construct a very simple model of predicting next year’s April OPS by only knowing a player’s previous seasonal OPS and their career April OPS splits. Knowing the actual April result was significant, but mildly so. The most accurate model of predicting next year’s April OPS consisted of around 95% last year’s OPS and 5% the player’s April/rest-of-season OPS splits. To put it in simpler terms: the fact that Abreu has underperformed the rest of the season by 90 points of OPS in April doesn’t mean that it’s predictive in a manner that would lead us to conclude he’ll have a 90-point improvement going forward. The actual number ends up at about 22 points, about 10 more than the group as a whole.

A 22-point improvement in OPS for Abreu wouldn’t be enough to make him a contributor this season — nor, for that matter, would be a 90-point improvement. This doesn’t mean that Abreu is doomed to wash out of the majors in the first year of his new contract — just that shouting “April” isn’t a panacea to his early-season issues this year. So we have to look at more traditional performance metrics.

There are some highly concerning issues in Abreu’s early-season profile this year that weren’t present in other early starts. When he struggles, he still generally hits the ball extremely hard. This year, his exit velocity has averaged 86.6 mph with an overall hard-hit rate of 36.7% — extremely low numbers for him. He was lousy last April, hitting .217/.308/.348, but he was still crushing pitches he connected with, resulting in a 94.6 mph average EV and a hard-hit rate of 59.6%. He also struggled in April 2021, hitting .213/.296/.394, but with a 92.1 mph EV and a 53.7% hard-hit rate — not quite as good as 2022, but worlds better than where those numbers currently stand. He got off to good starts in 2018 and ’19, so they’re not particularly helpful, and he crushed the ball in August of 2020 (I did not include any 2020 seasons in the April numbers, as the year was just too weird).

What troubles me isn’t just that Abreu isn’t crushing pitches, but that they go hand-in-hand with worse plate discipline. Statcast has a 35.5% out-of-zone swing percentage for him in 2023, his highest figure since his early seasons with the White Sox. And it’s not just a byproduct of a more aggressive approach; his 61.8% in-zone swing percentage this year would be the lowest of his career if it persisted for the rest of 2023. He isn’t really fitting into his frequent (but not yearly) pattern of April struggles; he’s hitting the ball much more softly, swinging at more bad pitches and not swinging at more good pitches.

Abreu’s return to a free-swinging approach at the plate is something that developed late in 2022, not something that just happened. He had an excellent first half, hitting .304/.387/.470 for an wRC+ of 147. He was one of the most disciplined White Sox hitters, too, with a 25.3% StatCast out-of-zone swing percentage, higher than only Danny Mendick and Yasmani Grandal. In the second half, that mark jumped to 39.3%; second-half Abreu was 50% more likely to swing at an out-of-zone pitch than first-half Abreu. His second-half numbers were still a healthy .305/.366/.414, but that represented a 77-point OPS dropoff from the first half, though he was still hitting the ball very hard.

Abreu-OSwing.png

 

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closetojumping

closetojumping 63212

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23 hours ago, Wulaw Horn said:

Meyers is probably a 250 hitter. Dubon might be a 300 hitter in a good year because he never strikes out, but without walking or hitting the ball far he still could be below league average. 

In a universe loaded with infinite alternate realities, there isn't a single one in which Mauricio Dubon is his hitting .300 for an entire season. Holy shit.

And he's still the leadoff hitter tonight for this team. Holy shit. 

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Wulaw Horn

Wulaw Horn 19253

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23 minutes ago, closetojumping said:

In a universe loaded with infinite alternate realities, there isn't a single one in which Mauricio Dubon is his hitting .300 for an entire season. Holy shit.

And he's still the leadoff hitter tonight for this team. Holy shit. 

League average babip is 300. If Dubon literally never strikes out he can hit 300. Hitting 300 without any walks or power is basically worthless. It makes you a sub par offensive player. 
And yeah- I’d like him not playing or batting 9th. And Maldy shot into the face of the sun. But I’m not getting my way on any of that. 

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