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2018 Houston Astros Season Thread

Planet Houston

By Planet Houston
in Baseball

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TexArcher
TexArcher

Bregs is going Crawford Boxes right here.

ERhine
ERhine

Prior to the footage being edited by Bender:

wesleywest
wesleywest

Two Diamond Club tickets available for the Sunday night game.  Free.  Need to pick them up from me in 77027. Rules: Poster must be a big contributor to this thread/last years shag thread.  No gue

BornOrange

BornOrange 1441

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, TonyTexas said:

On a sad note, 1 of the original Colt 45/Astros, Rusty Staub died. He was signed by the Colt 45s in 1961. Astros traded him to the Expos in 1969.

Rusty Staub and Joe Morgan never should have been traded away. They should have been lifetime Astros like Bagwell, Biggio, and Altuve.

RIP Rusty.

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Mez2

Mez2 4023

Posted
Posted (edited)
4 minutes ago, Horny Bull said:

 

7 RH batters , and McCann and Reddick. I like it - we're going to play lots of match ups this way all year, the flexibility of this team is insane. 

Edited by Mez2
duh
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scottonian

scottonian 36

Posted
Posted
10 minutes ago, Mez2 said:

7 RH batters , and McCann and Reddick. I like it - we're going to play lots of match ups this way all year, the flexibility of this team is insane. 

not to mention Fisher bats lefty as well. assume he will get plenty of appearances against RHP

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Ldogg53

Ldogg53 514

Posted
Posted
52 minutes ago, ERhine said:

Tempted to photoshop ldogg on the Rangers picture.

It's a shitty picture.  Hell I could post a better one of me and the old man.  I just thought it was cool that we showed up on the live broadcast during the game.  Right after that happened I started getting a bunch of texts from people that recognized me.

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

Posted
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Quote

The data revolution that reshaped baseball and sparked innovation far beyond sports also inspired an element of distrust. In marched an army of Ivy League-educated math whizzes, whose devotion to numbers threatened to upend decades of tradition and conventional wisdom that the longtime residents of this hidebound ecosystem held dear.

The Houston Astros, the defending World Series champions, believe narrowing that chasm could afford them a competitive advantage. True to their reputation as perhaps the most unorthodox organization in the major leagues, they embarked on an unprecedented experiment: They turned a wonk into a coach.

The Astros sent Sig Mejdal, one of baseball’s most respected quantitative analysts, to spend the 2017 season with the Tri-City ValleyCats, a Single-A affiliate near the bottom of the minor-league ladder. Mejdal, who entered baseball after jobs at Lockheed Martin and NASA, worked alongside manager Morgan Ensberg, offering statistical information to assist in the decision-making process and the development of young talent.

He filled that role not as a high-ranking member of the front office, but by crossing the sacred threshold of the dugout, serving as a bona fide member of the field staff. In doing so, the Astros provided a proof-of-concept for a potentially paradigm-altering idea with far-reaching implications.

“Since ‘Moneyball,’ the presentation of analytics in baseball was ‘us versus them,’” said Mejdal, referring to Michael Lewis’s seminal 2003 book. “It’s understandable that with one of the ‘thems’ coming in, there is going to be pushback.”

Mejdal is cautious about predicting how far the “thems” will advance, but some around him are not.

“The reality is this is going to be the norm in baseball,” said Ensberg, an eight-year major-league veteran. “We see what the future is going to be. Other teams may see that as something that’s silly. But if other teams really look at what the future’s going to look like, it’s going to be having an analyst on the bench.”

The idea is indeed expanding around the sports world. During spring training this year, both the Philadelphia Phillies and Tampa Bay Rays experimented with putting an analyst in uniform for an exhibition game. In the NFL last season, Philadelphia Eagles coach Doug Pederson spoke with analysts on headset during games to help with strategic decisions. The Eagles won the Super Bowl.

Upon taking over as the Astros’ general manager in December 2011, Jeff Luhnow quickly learned that the people on the field don’t always respond positively to radical new concepts. The Astros frequently faced what Luhnow described as “implementation challenges that we didn’t anticipate.” An early adopter of the defensive shift, for instance, Luhnow remembers “pitchers that would glare at the dugout” when groundouts in a normal alignment scooted through the reconfigured infield.

To combat that problem, the Astros added full-time “development coaches” in the minors, a hybrid position between typical baseball training and analytics. The candidates for that job, Luhnow said, needed “to be able to throw batting practice, hit a fungo and program a SQL.”

That went so well that Luhnow went a step further and tapped Mejdal as a coach despite his unusual background—two master’s degrees earned, zero baseball games played past Little League. A man who initially joined the Astros with the eyebrow-raising title of “director of decision sciences” would now embed himself on the frontlines.

“So much of our knowledge is still theoretical,” said Mejdal, who the Astros now call a special assistant for “process improvement.” “This was a clear attempt to turn that from theoretical into experiential knowledge.”

For almost three months, the length of the New York-Penn League season, Mejdal lived like a minor leaguer, not a top official.

Instead of a polo shirt and khaki pants, he wore a uniform for the first time since childhood, donning No. 21 as an homage to his past as a blackjack dealer. He coached first base, helped with batting practice and hit grounders to anybody who requested extra work. He endured the six-hour bus rides from Lowell, Mass., to Williamsport, Pa., living in cheap motels and subsisting on late-night drive-throughs and convenience stores.

“The first time we were driving around this tiny town looking for food, where fast food was a plus if that was open, was eye opening,” Mejdal said. “The notes and ideas started.”

Mejdal struggled to shake the feeling that as an analyst from the front office, he didn’t belong in this world. At first, he compared it to sneaking into a movie theater without a ticket—“you’re half expecting someone to come tap you on the shoulders and say, ‘OK, enough of that.’”

It helped that he had the unwavering support of Ensberg, who said that a manager put into that situation unwillingly could “completely Deep Six” an intruder like Mejdal.

Ensberg instead embraced Mejdal and used him as a resource. Frequently, Ensberg would consult with Mejdal for statistical advice about how to handle in-game decisions, such as whether to bring the infield in. Mejdal would then explain what the numbers revealed.

Sometimes, Ensberg would pose additional questions, asking how the speed of the runners or the style of the pitcher might affect the outcome. In those cases, Mejdal would write everything down and insert the variables into his statistical model after the game, adding better data that would lead to more precise decision-making the next time.

“If I were ever blessed enough to become a major-league manager, I would have an analyst on the bench,” Ensberg said. “The person that needs to push this through and believe it is the manager.”

With Ensberg’s blessing, the players—many of whom had been drafted days before arriving—bought in. The Astros chose the ValleyCats for this project thinking that prospects at an introductory level wouldn’t question Mejdal the way more seasoned players might.

In reality, most of the players knew little about Mejdal. Parker Mushinski, a 22-year-old pitcher, said that he learned about him during a particularly long bus ride, when sheer boredom prompted him to punch Mejdal’s name into Google.

Mushinski can speak personally to Mejdal’s value and how traditional baseball coaching and data analysis can work in tandem. During the season, Mejdal presented Mushinski with data showing that he took upward of 1.5 seconds to deliver the ball to the plate with men on base, frequently allowing runners to steal.

Armed with that information, Mushinski worked with the ValleyCats’ pitching coach to speed up, altering his mechanics in response to Mejdal’s data. By the end of the season, his delivery time had dropped to around 1.2 seconds—enough of a difference to deter prospective base-stealers from running wild.

“It’s amazing the things somebody who may not have a background in baseball picks up on,” Mushinski said.

Before long, the team brought Mejdal into their inner sanctum. Mushinski said one running joke was to goad Mejdal into arguing with umpires so he would become “the only guy in the front office who ever got tossed from a baseball game.” That never happened, but Mejdal confessed to hollering at one particular ump over his strike zone.

Earning the trust of players also enabled Mejdal to survive when he messed up. He recalled a game in Batavia when, during a long inning, he forgot the number of outs while coaching first base. When his erroneous instructions to a runner led to a double play, Mejdal said he “felt sick.”

It is exactly that kind of experience Luhnow wanted for Mejdal at Tri-City, hoping to create a better understanding between the field staff and the front office. This season, Mejdal will spend time at all four of the Astros’ full-season minor-league affiliates to continue the learning process.

Whether that ultimately leads to somebody like Mejdal joining the major-league staff remains to be seen. But it doesn’t seem so crazy.

“The idea is not to have this separation between us and them,” Luhnow said. “Just because one person stopped playing baseball in middle school and another person played 10 years in the big leagues doesn’t mean they can’t work together collaboratively to help players get better.”

 

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TonyTexas

TonyTexas 10508

Posted
Posted
Yuli not on the DL so he'll be eligible to return by Tuesday.

Doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll be rostered on Tuesday but opens the possibility. He could still be put on the 10 day DL once his suspension is fulfilled. Doing it this way gives some flexibility.

 

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Spoosner

Spoosner 86

Posted
Posted
39 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

c10f033577b98c4b08ac9f8f18bb4bee.jpg
My god our infield is so fucking good

I’m almost to the stadium. Sitting a few sections over in 13. How does this work? I yell Muledick when it gets quiet enough?

PM if have any interest in a beer with a fellow Stros fan.

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