Houston Astros 2024 Season Thread

[tx 3 putt 77086]

7 minutes ago, Dutchrudder said:

I believe the Braves signed him to a deal, and he's in their triple A club. Never should have let him go though, would have been way better off last year using that Abreu money on someone else, and signing Yuly for 2.5m like the Marlins did. I guess he got on Crane's shit list.

.245 / .663 ops last year 

[Overlord 366]

13 minutes ago, Dutchrudder said:

I believe the Braves signed him to a deal, and he's in their triple A club. Never should have let him go though, would have been way better off last year using that Abreu money on someone else, and signing Yuly for 2.5m like the Marlins did. I guess he got on Crane's shit list.

He should have been given another year. But I do agree. He must've fucked one of the shorties in Crane’s harem

Edited June 8 by Overlord
T

[kevwun 15798]

Dudes on crutches regularly come back in a week right?

[WBT 20618]

5 hours ago, Dutchrudder said:

I believe the Braves signed him to a deal, and he's in their triple A club. Never should have let him go though, would have been way better off last year using that Abreu money on someone else, and signing Yuly for 2.5m like the Marlins did. I guess he got on Crane's shit list.

Being less washed than abreu doesn't mean we should have kept him

[LCHorn 2621]

Yuli was an out machine in ‘22.  It was obvious we needed at upgrade at first, we just chose poorly*
 

*and I was definitely in the “let’s sign Abreu” camp as he was the only FA I liked and I didn’t want to lose more prospects in trade.  

[Harrison Stafford 3335]

Can we haz two wins in a row and, maybe, possibly build a little momentum?

[tx 3 putt 77086]

6 hours ago, kevwun said:

Dudes on crutches regularly come back in a week right?

im worried 

[HtownHorn 14726]

9 hours ago, Dutchrudder said:

I believe the Braves signed him to a deal, and he's in their triple A club. Never should have let him go though, would have been way better off last year using that Abreu money on someone else, and signing Yuly for 2.5m like the Marlins did. I guess he got on Crane's shit list.

Or better yet, Crane could have signed Drury and Belt for the price of Abreu and had a deeper lineup with guys that are still MLB caliber players.

[WBT 20618]

1 hour ago, Harrison Stafford said:

Can we haz two wins in a row and, maybe, possibly build a little momentum?

It has happened before

[Pimphand 5764]

I'm pretty sure Maldy is going to finish the season below the DWI line given how little the Sox are playing him this month.

[tx 3 putt 77086]

21 minutes ago, Pimphand said:

I'm pretty sure Maldy is going to finish the season below the DWI line given how little the Sox are playing him this month.

saving him for the playoff run 

[runthebone 8015]

Hard to believe it, but the math proves that the CWS would only have one win this year without Maldy.

[LCHorn 2621]

1 hour ago, HtownHorn said:

Or better yet, Crane could have signed Drury and Belt for the price of Abreu and had a deeper lineup with guys that are still MLB caliber players.

I just don’t feel that comfortable playing armchair QB.  I’m sure there’s lot of what if’s that could have played out in all kinds of ways.  
 

More interesting to me, if I’m Crane, is what the fuck is my scouting and analytics department doing if they can’t predict a drop-off that precipitous.  
 

Keith Law, coincidentally mentioned a few posts ago, was pretty bearish on the signing at the time and cited troubling internal scouting about Abreu’s bat as the reason, but didn’t want to elaborate much further (it was clear that came from a team).  I keep beating this horse like @Wulaw Horn beats low bridges, but it’s like they have a list of players Luhnow liked (Abreu, Hader too main examples) and are still trying to follow his five year plan from 2017.

[tx 3 putt 77086]

Drury has fallen off a cliff

belt, no one signed him this year. Is there an injury ?

[tx 3 putt 77086]

10 minutes ago, LCHorn said:

I just don’t feel that comfortable playing armchair QB.  I’m sure there’s lot of what if’s that could have played out in all kinds of ways.  
 

More interesting to me, if I’m Crane, is what the fuck is my scouting and analytics department doing if they can’t predict a drop-off that precipitous.  
 

Keith Law, coincidentally mentioned a few posts ago, was pretty bearish on the signing at the time and cited troubling internal scouting about Abreu’s bat as the reason, but didn’t want to elaborate much further (it was clear that came from a team).  I keep beating this horse like @Wulaw Horn beats low bridges, but it’s like they have a list of players Luhnow liked (Abreu, Hader too main examples) and are still trying to follow his five year plan from 2017.

was Keith law saying this at the time of signing or once the season started ?

[LCHorn 2621]

13 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

was Keith law saying this at the time of signing or once the season started ?

No, it was at the time, might have been in a chat.  I recall it specifically because I was excited about the signing and figured Law was just being a contrarian.  Plus it was a little bit of a different take than what I thought the 2022 numbers showed (which to me looked like someone who made a big swing adjustment that worked). 

[WBT 20618]

15 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

was Keith law saying this at the time of signing or once the season started ?

At the time of signing.  He said he wouldn't give him 3 years and had concerns about his drop off vs fastballs.  And cried about firing Click.

Spoiler

Law: Astros deny the existence of time by signing José Abreu

By Keith Law

Nov 28, 2022

322

So is this what happens when you get rid of your successful, respected GM, and try to Jerry Jones your way through the offseason?

Signing a 35-year-old first baseman/DH to a three-year deal, even off a year when some signs of age crept into his performance and his batted-ball stats, is some 1980s George Steinbrenner malarkey. It’s also rather contrary to the way James Click, and other execs from the Tampa Bay Rays front-office tree, try to build their rosters. First base and DH are spots you can easily fill in the lower end of the free-agent market, or use to accommodate players you already have who might be blocked elsewhere. If you’re not signing an elite player — put a pin in that for a moment — you go for a less expensive one and spend that money elsewhere.

It is quite likely, however, that the Astros, whether Jim Crane or his factotums or Reggie Jackson or whoever is making these decisions, believe they got an elite player in José Abreu. The Cuban infielder won the AL MVP in 2020 (despite being nowhere near the league’s best player) and appeared to bounce back in 2022 after a down year in between, boosting his batting average 43 points to .304, cutting his strikeout rate to a career-low 16.2 percent and generating about 4 WAR, his best full-season showing in either of the major WAR metrics since 2017. You can wave your hands a little bit and argue that the Astros got a top-tier first baseman — he was fifth in the majors among first basemen in fWAR and rWAR last year.

I’m not arguing that Abreu was less than elite last year, because that’s beside the point. The Astros aren’t buying Abreu’s 2022 performance. They’re buying his 2023-2025 performances, and those are extremely likely to be worse, starting in year one and declining sharply from there. For one thing, he’ll play at 36 this year, and his production outside of 2022 hasn’t been elite for some time; from 2018-21, he had just a .340 OBP, .336 if you take out the intentional walks. He did show consistently strong power output, averaging 33.7 homers per 162 games in that stretch, making him above-average but putting him in the 2-3 WAR range.

In 2022, his production changed, and it’s something we’ve seen before. He lost some bat speed and started to struggle on four-seamers for the first time in his MLB career. His contact quality went down on four-seamers, and the harder the pitch, the more likely he was to whiff. He actually hit the fewest homers of any season since he first signed with the White Sox a decade ago, just 15, fewer than he hit in the 60-game 2020 season. He put the ball on the ground more and went the other way a lot more, which, in an older player, is often a sign that he can no longer get around on pitches he used to pull or hit back up the middle.

Fortunately for Abreu, he made up for some of the lost power with a big boost to his plate discipline, notably on pitches well outside the zone. He chased those pitches at the lowest rate of his career and was close to league average (45th percentile, per Baseball Savant) for the first time as a big leaguer. That led to more walks, with a career-high 60 unintentionals, and a career-high OBP of .378. It turns out that you can lose half your homers — he went from 30 in 2021 to 15 last year — and still be more valuable by getting on base at a much higher clip.

When a young hitter does this, it’s almost always a positive, as we assume that the newfound plate discipline will lead to better swing choices and any power lost will return. When an older hitter does this, it may be that he’s compensating for a loss of bat speed: I can’t hit the ball as hard as I used to, and I can’t turn on pitches I used to eat for lunch, so I have to lay off more pitches and hope I either draw a walk or the pitcher makes a mistake.

Abreu can still hit mistakes, at least for now, and I don’t think he’s going to stop drawing walks tomorrow. But he’s very, very unlikely to post a .350 BABIP again with the slippage in his batted-ball data, not with a career BABIP of .327 either, and all the projections I’ve seen have him dropping to under 3 WAR in year one of the deal. I’d give him an over/under of around 5 WAR for the three years, but with a significant chance that he follows Yuli Gurriel’s path, where he’s fine one year and completely toast the next — Gurriel went from a 132 wRC+ in his age-37 season to an 85 wRC+ in his age-38 season, making him a 3 WAR player one year and then below replacement level in the second. He did that for the Astros, by the way. You’d think they’d remember.

There aren’t many other first-base options in free agency this winter, however, which may have driven Houston’s urgency here. Josh Bell was the best of the candidates, and after this contract and the two-year deal Anthony Rizzo signed with the Yankees for a $20 million AAV, Bell should at least be looking for comparable money and three years since he’s younger than either of the other players.

The White Sox, meanwhile, have an opening at first base for the first time since 2013, but they do have some internal options they could try, starting with moving Andrew Vaughn back to the dirt and hoping he shows more of the exceptional plate discipline that was his calling card in college. Vaughn has played out of position for most of his MLB time in the last two years, and, unsurprisingly, he’s done it very badly, rating as the worst defender in baseball last year by Outs Above Average, with -17 OAA just in his time in left and right field. I don’t know if moving him to his natural position of first base will help him hit better, but he’ll cost the team a lot less with his glove if they do so.

They also have Gavin Sheets, who has more raw power than Vaughn but is probably a platoon bat and isn’t a very good defender at first. A rebuilding team would be fine giving these guys the time at first and DH while also using the latter spot to rest guys like Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert and try to keep them healthy. I’m not sure if the White Sox view themselves that way, and they may end up going after Bell or someone in a trade who offers more predictable production.

 

[Pimphand 5764]

1 hour ago, runthebone said:

Hard to believe it, but the math proves that the CWS would only have one win this year without Maldy.

I think his new nickname is Breathalyzer since he can pass the test

[HtownHorn 14726]

1 hour ago, LCHorn said:

No, it was at the time, might have been in a chat.  I recall it specifically because I was excited about the signing and figured Law was just being a contrarian.  Plus it was a little bit of a different take than what I thought the 2022 numbers showed (which to me looked like someone who made a big swing adjustment that worked). 

It was interesting because his EV was still very good, just his launch angle was off from his previous seasons. I think he's hurt and get healthy because old players tend to do that, and lets be honest there is a good chance that he's 3-4 years older than his listed age.

[Dutchrudder 11141]

13 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:

.245 / .663 ops last year 

Yeah, a bit worse than Abreu in 2023 and overall below league average, but for the low low price of 1 year 2.5m.  Huge difference in cost vs benefit. Plus I think Yuli was a very good guy to have in the locker room, something that I think is sorely missing from this current team and may have been a factor last year.  I don't think he deserves to be let go, unless he pissed someone off behind the scenes. 

I know it's not all that important, but I also like to see guys play their whole career with 1 team when possible. Yuli was pretty close to doing that if they kept him last year. If they signed Abreu and kept Yuli too, he would have kept Jon Singleton off the roster, and maybe kept someone like Hensley or Julks spot to start the season. Not a huge loss, and an arguably better pinch hitter than any of those guys. 

[UTexasFight 9504]

2 hours ago, WBT said:

At the time of signing.  He said he wouldn't give him 3 years and had concerns about his drop off vs fastballs.  And cried about firing Click.

  Hide contents

Law: Astros deny the existence of time by signing José Abreu

By Keith Law

Nov 28, 2022

322

So is this what happens when you get rid of your successful, respected GM, and try to Jerry Jones your way through the offseason?

Signing a 35-year-old first baseman/DH to a three-year deal, even off a year when some signs of age crept into his performance and his batted-ball stats, is some 1980s George Steinbrenner malarkey. It’s also rather contrary to the way James Click, and other execs from the Tampa Bay Rays front-office tree, try to build their rosters. First base and DH are spots you can easily fill in the lower end of the free-agent market, or use to accommodate players you already have who might be blocked elsewhere. If you’re not signing an elite player — put a pin in that for a moment — you go for a less expensive one and spend that money elsewhere.

It is quite likely, however, that the Astros, whether Jim Crane or his factotums or Reggie Jackson or whoever is making these decisions, believe they got an elite player in José Abreu. The Cuban infielder won the AL MVP in 2020 (despite being nowhere near the league’s best player) and appeared to bounce back in 2022 after a down year in between, boosting his batting average 43 points to .304, cutting his strikeout rate to a career-low 16.2 percent and generating about 4 WAR, his best full-season showing in either of the major WAR metrics since 2017. You can wave your hands a little bit and argue that the Astros got a top-tier first baseman — he was fifth in the majors among first basemen in fWAR and rWAR last year.

I’m not arguing that Abreu was less than elite last year, because that’s beside the point. The Astros aren’t buying Abreu’s 2022 performance. They’re buying his 2023-2025 performances, and those are extremely likely to be worse, starting in year one and declining sharply from there. For one thing, he’ll play at 36 this year, and his production outside of 2022 hasn’t been elite for some time; from 2018-21, he had just a .340 OBP, .336 if you take out the intentional walks. He did show consistently strong power output, averaging 33.7 homers per 162 games in that stretch, making him above-average but putting him in the 2-3 WAR range.

In 2022, his production changed, and it’s something we’ve seen before. He lost some bat speed and started to struggle on four-seamers for the first time in his MLB career. His contact quality went down on four-seamers, and the harder the pitch, the more likely he was to whiff. He actually hit the fewest homers of any season since he first signed with the White Sox a decade ago, just 15, fewer than he hit in the 60-game 2020 season. He put the ball on the ground more and went the other way a lot more, which, in an older player, is often a sign that he can no longer get around on pitches he used to pull or hit back up the middle.

Fortunately for Abreu, he made up for some of the lost power with a big boost to his plate discipline, notably on pitches well outside the zone. He chased those pitches at the lowest rate of his career and was close to league average (45th percentile, per Baseball Savant) for the first time as a big leaguer. That led to more walks, with a career-high 60 unintentionals, and a career-high OBP of .378. It turns out that you can lose half your homers — he went from 30 in 2021 to 15 last year — and still be more valuable by getting on base at a much higher clip.

When a young hitter does this, it’s almost always a positive, as we assume that the newfound plate discipline will lead to better swing choices and any power lost will return. When an older hitter does this, it may be that he’s compensating for a loss of bat speed: I can’t hit the ball as hard as I used to, and I can’t turn on pitches I used to eat for lunch, so I have to lay off more pitches and hope I either draw a walk or the pitcher makes a mistake.

Abreu can still hit mistakes, at least for now, and I don’t think he’s going to stop drawing walks tomorrow. But he’s very, very unlikely to post a .350 BABIP again with the slippage in his batted-ball data, not with a career BABIP of .327 either, and all the projections I’ve seen have him dropping to under 3 WAR in year one of the deal. I’d give him an over/under of around 5 WAR for the three years, but with a significant chance that he follows Yuli Gurriel’s path, where he’s fine one year and completely toast the next — Gurriel went from a 132 wRC+ in his age-37 season to an 85 wRC+ in his age-38 season, making him a 3 WAR player one year and then below replacement level in the second. He did that for the Astros, by the way. You’d think they’d remember.

There aren’t many other first-base options in free agency this winter, however, which may have driven Houston’s urgency here. Josh Bell was the best of the candidates, and after this contract and the two-year deal Anthony Rizzo signed with the Yankees for a $20 million AAV, Bell should at least be looking for comparable money and three years since he’s younger than either of the other players.

The White Sox, meanwhile, have an opening at first base for the first time since 2013, but they do have some internal options they could try, starting with moving Andrew Vaughn back to the dirt and hoping he shows more of the exceptional plate discipline that was his calling card in college. Vaughn has played out of position for most of his MLB time in the last two years, and, unsurprisingly, he’s done it very badly, rating as the worst defender in baseball last year by Outs Above Average, with -17 OAA just in his time in left and right field. I don’t know if moving him to his natural position of first base will help him hit better, but he’ll cost the team a lot less with his glove if they do so.

They also have Gavin Sheets, who has more raw power than Vaughn but is probably a platoon bat and isn’t a very good defender at first. A rebuilding team would be fine giving these guys the time at first and DH while also using the latter spot to rest guys like Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert and try to keep them healthy. I’m not sure if the White Sox view themselves that way, and they may end up going after Bell or someone in a trade who offers more predictable production.

 

Yep.

i remember him getting absolutely blasted in the offseason thread 

[UTexasFight 9504]

57 minutes ago, HtownHorn said:

and lets be honest there is a good chance that he's 3-4 years older than his listed age.

What’s the cutoff for when people stop believing this?

is it the Livan Hernandez generation?

abreu’s?

or are we fucked with Yordan as well?

[LCHorn 2621]

13 minutes ago, Dutchrudder said:

I know it's not all that important, but I also like to see guys play their whole career with 1 team when possible.

Normally I think that’s a terrible sentiment if you want to win championships, but then I remember Hakeem in a fucking Raptors jersey…

[LCHorn 2621]

1 hour ago, HtownHorn said:

I think he's hurt and get healthy because old players tend to do that

I remember some ball player talking about Griffey Junior’s time with the Reds and made the point that a lot of good major leaguers still have their skills when they are older (I.e., raw bat speed is still there), but they just are never at 100%.  That’s accounts for a lot of the performance irregularity (I don’t buy that but thought it was interesting that it’s what pro athletes might believe).  

[UTexasFight 9504]

 

https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/topic/27864-2023-official-astros-world-champs-offseason-thread/page/29/

 

Some fun reading…the law article is first linked about halfway down that page 

initial reactions to the Abreu signing by all of us smart guys start on the previous page.

 

[kevwun 15798]

There was a crack down after 9-11 by the government on documents for baseball players.  The age thing isn’t really an issue anymore.

[UTexasFight 9504]

23 minutes ago, kevwun said:

There was a crack down after 9-11 by the government on documents for baseball players.  The age thing isn’t really an issue anymore.

That’s what they want you to think 

[WBT 20618]

1 hour ago, UTexasFight said:

 

https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/topic/27864-2023-official-astros-world-champs-offseason-thread/page/29/

 

Some fun reading…the law article is first linked about halfway down that page 

initial reactions to the Abreu signing by all of us smart guys start on the previous page.

 

er hrm

On 11/28/2022 at 5:38 PM, WBT said:

I think Law is more right than not.  Father Time always wins.  There's a good chance Abreu has a 2022 Yuli season before the contract is up. 

But it's only 3 years and we will still have a shitload of controllable cheap pitching during those 3 years.  It won't really hurt us much and there is a chance for some upside.

Edited June 8 by WBT

[tx 3 putt 77086]

Great job throwing that curse on our pitching staff !!!

@WBT

 

Edited June 8 by tx 3 putt

[tx 3 putt 77086]

I think everyone figured year 3 would be a huge slide, after kicking ass year 1 and 2 

🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

[David Dennison 18924]

 

[Scraps 13565]

Trying to do my part to bring Chas good juju

[WBT 20618]

that sounds disgusting

[Scraps 13565]

that sounds disgusting

.

[Scraps 13565]

It was about as good as his season has been so far

[Scraps 13565]

Texas and Seattle both lost again lets get it

[tx 3 putt 77086]

 

 

[tx 3 putt 77086]

 

[WBT 20618]

13 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

 

My first year watching, been hooked ever since

[WBT 20618]

23 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

Spoiler

Ryan  Davis  Ashby  Scott  Andersen  Kerfield  Deshaies  Puhl  Cruz  Lopez (Senor Smoke)

Coach?  Coach  Coach?  Doran  Bass  Knepper  Darwin (Bonham Bullet)  Calhoun  Walling  Smith  Thon

DK  Little Guy  Coach?  Coach?  Menke  Lanier  Yogi  Galante  Coach?  DK

Ball boy?  Pankovits  Lopes  Hatcher  Garner  DK  DK

 

[tx 3 putt 77086]

12 minutes ago, WBT said:

My first year watching, been hooked ever since

we should have won it all 

[tx 3 putt 77086]

Let’s F’n Go !!!!!

[WBT 20618]

Bullshit short fence

[Mitch Hedberg 2090]

More lefty’s in the lineup! 

[cabowabo 4489]

lol. Really?

[David Dennison 18924]

JFC

[cabowabo 4489]

If that was a run on contact play, then why is Yordan still on 2nd?

[Mitch Hedberg 2090]

Well shit

[UTexasFight 9504]

Hunter has grown awfully picky about his baseballs 

[David Dennison 18924]

Up and in on 0-2.

Solid plan.