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2018 Houston Astros Season Thread

Planet Houston

By Planet Houston
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Rimbo

Rimbo 27,053

Posted
Posted
13 hours ago, WBT said:

 

I just hope people are enjoying this.  I realize people like to bitch and vent in the moment when things go wrong but sometimes I just don't get some of the comments here (even after utgrad is gone!).   There's a very good chance that when this window closes you'll never have a chance to watch an Astros team this good again.

Truth. Our hitting last year was among the all-time teams; our starting pitchers this year are similar.

The Process worked.

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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

henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29,228

Posted
Posted

Is there a weak spot anywhere on the Astros? If there is, it’s pretty easily papered over by the superstars who are performing so far above average that they mask the deficiencies of those struggling. 

i guess i get what they're saying - that our players are performing above league average.  but earlier in the article it already said that our superstars and others (marwin) aren't even performing to last year's pace, or what they're capable of showing (tuve/spring/carlos).

in the 12 game streak, we had a game where dk gave up 6 runs.  morty walked 6 (and hit 4) and went 3+ innings.  cole just walked 5 yesterday.  our starters have walked 2-3 pretty much every game in the streak and have an era of 4+

the rest of mlb may think we're peaking and everything is clicking perfectly.  but we know better.  this shit could get way worse, for them.

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9,819

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Posted
Herrera isn't worth much.  A similar deal (value wise) with us would have been a package of Corbin Martin, JD Davis, and one of our new DSL'ers.  No thanks.  

It’s gonna be interesting to see who we decide to move in the next ~40 days.
Would be nice if someone came along and had a high value on our favorite AAAA player, AJ Reed.
He absolutely destroyed a pitch last night and now has 18 HRs, to match his jersey number, to go along with 61 RBIs. Both lead all of triple A
On pace for 36 HRs and 122 RBIs.

62 Ks and 41 BBs in 66 games so far.
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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29,228

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gammons just said he thinks our top trade targets from what he's hearing - raisel iglesias and jose abreu.  i guess both clubs are scouting our milb games/rosters.  he confirmed tucker/whitley will not be involved in anything we're planning.  seems kinda unfair we have those two guys likely less than a year away from being ready to contribute at an mlb level.

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

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Posted (edited)

I just don't like rentals when our team is already this good.  For example, the Liriano trade seemed fairly harmless but look what Teoscar is doing in Toronto.  If we deal it needs to be for real value spread out over multiple years.  

Edited by Fozzz
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Amos Moses

Amos Moses 795

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gammons just said he thinks our top trade targets from what he's hearing - raisel iglesias and jose abreu.  i guess both clubs are scouting our milb games/rosters.  he confirmed tucker/whitley will not be involved in anything we're planning.  seems kinda unfair we have those two guys likely less than a year away from being ready to contribute at an mlb level.


Interesting on Abreu. Iglesias I totally get, but wouldn’t a corner outfielder make more sense than a first baseman? Unless Abreu can play LF .....
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Lat22

Lat22 4,086

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Posted
1. Question for any of y'all who were at MMP: was it as loud in the 9th as it sounded on tv? because it sounded fucking LOUD. Like "I can't hear the announcers" loud.
2. i hope some of y'all caught that the name of the Rays pitcher who choked the game away was Romo. Choking. Romo.

The sound levels were off. The field mics were high and the announcers were low.
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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9,819

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Posted
Bregman playing LF last night and 2nd today.  
We should be able to get Sale + JD Martinez for him now 

Nope
They need to throw in Kimbrel as well


Alex Bregman is on the brink of stardom

For a dude who hasn’t turned 25 yet, what Alex Bregman has already done — above-average major-league work at third base for a championship team — is impressive. But there’s something about the way he’s done it that suggests there’s more on the way. Alex Bregman has been good for the Houston Astros. Alex Bregman is about to break the heck out.

Let’s do a simple search to find other players like Bregman in the past. He’s under 25, he doesn’t strike out (strikeout rate 8%), and hits more fly balls than groundballs (groundball per fly ball rate -10), his legs (base running runs over zero) and the fact that he’s had above-average power results so far (isolated slugging over .145). The list of players that have done this since we’ve tracked ground-ball rate is short, but it’s sweet.

Name Team PA HR OPS WAR
David Wright Mets 3048 130 0.922 28.1
Mookie Betts Red Sox 2550 96 0.865 24.5
Ryan Zimmerman Nationals 3229 116 0.839 24.2
Hanley Ramírez – – – 2753 103 0.917 24.1
Andrew McCutchen Pirates 2497 82 0.858 19.7
José Ramírez Indians 2207 69 0.835 17.7
Dustin Pedroia Red Sox 2119 42 0.825 13.7
Eric Chavez Athletics 1307 63 0.862 9.8
Anthony Rendon Nationals 1432 33 0.768 8.5
Kyle Seager Mariners 1547 45 0.743 8.5
Marcus Giles Braves 877 29 0.861 7.6
Alex Bregman Astros 1159 37 0.824 6.6
Andrew Benintendi Red Sox 1084 34 0.824 5.7
Let’s do a quick sanity check, putting Bregman against the average of this group in all the categories we used to group them.

Name BB% K% ISO BsR Def GB/FB
Bregman 9.7% 16.2% 0.197 1.1 -9.1 0.88
Ave Comp 9.5% 14.9% 0.192 10.3 12.7 1.02
So Bregman absolutely belongs in this group of baseball players that ranges from above-average regulars to absolute stars of the game. Mookie Betts is in the conversation for the best player in the game, José Ramírez is a rounding error from being the best player in the game over the last calendar year, Andrew McCutchen, David Wright and Ryan Zimmerman have been superstars in this game and listing Bregman along with Andrew Benintendi and Anthony Rendon as potential next generation superstars feels very right.

But, while Bregman has made this Astros core one for the ages by adding depth, there’s still work remaining to close the gap on the elite players in the game.

“I can be one of the elite players in this game,” Bregman agreed last week before a game with the Oakland Athletics. “I think I can be that guy right now.”

There might be two things standing between Bregman and the results of his peers on that list.

Balls in play

Bregman hasn’t been unlucky, per se, but a .281 batting average on balls in play is a little low, especially for a batter of his caliber.

“As soon as my BABIP starts rising, you’ll see something,” said Bregman before a game Friday. He hit two homers in his next two games just to make a point.

For his career, Bregman has had a .304 BABIP, and the league averages around that number right now, so maybe some regular old regression will help Bregman.

But really the way forward for Bregman is on the matter of millimeters. Take a look at his launch angle and exit velocity-defined batted ball mix, and you can see that he’s doing really well at avoiding the bad balls (ground-ball rate in blue and popup rate in purple), but that the mix in the middle needs to be tightened up.



Those two middle bands — Line Drive and High Drive percentage — are the best balls in the game. But if you relax the requirements to include lesser balls, Bregman is still in the top quartile of the league when it comes to Well-Hit Percentage. So, to some extent, he just needs to turn some of that green and orange into yellow and red — small changes.

“If you hit a groundball, you’re out,” said Bregman. If you hit a pop fly, you’re out.”

So he understands the basic aim when it comes to hitting the ball hard. But he’s also sophisticated in his knowledge of the ideal batted ball mix.

“You want that 10 to 25,” Bregman said of the ideal angles. “You want to keep it on a line. I want to hit four line drives every game. I want to hit the ball through the wall, not over it.”

Listen to his approach when it comes to turning his swings into good batted balls, and he’s got an advanced idea up there.

“I want the ball in the middle of the plate that I can drive,” he said of the link between plate discipline and power. “Guys with great plate discipline are able to let the ball travel and trust that they can get to the heater if they let it travel. When I’m up there, when I’m letting the heater get deep, it allows me to see the ball a little longer. If you’re looking for a heater, you can catch the heater out front. If you let the heater travel, you catch the offspeed for homers.”

That sounds like an approach that will lead to more power shortly.

Defensive numbers

When it comes to Bregman’s defensive numbers, there may not be anything the player needs to to change to get better. It may just be that we don’t have the right numbers to understand how good he is on defense.

“I want to know how the hell some of these guys are ranked positively on defense and I’m negative because it makes no damn sense,” Bregman said, laughing, when we talked about his ratings.

One of the problems is sample size. While a good season gives a batter 650 chances to prove his ability (or over 2,000 if you’re counting every pitch as an opportunity), that same season will only give a third baseman maybe 200 chances defensively, and maybe only 30-50 of those are difficult balls that provide a defender the chance to separate themselves from the pack.

So when you look at a leaderboard that says that Bregman has been the second-worst third baseman defensively since he joined the league, you have to also notice that he’s only had 314 plays that registered with Ultimate Zone Rating. Not a huge sample.

You might also notice that he’s had fewer chances per inning than many on this list. That has to do with shifting. UZR does not account for positioning of the fielder. It has a simpler question it tries to answer which is if a player got to many balls in his zone. Because of this, plays with shifts are thrown out of the equation…and the Astros shift more than any team in baseball.

Team Shift%
Astros 39.0%
White Sox 37.9%
Rays 30.6%
Royals 30.5%
Phillies 28.3%
Take a skill that’s difficult to nail down, and then take a small sample and reduce it by nearly half, and you have your reason why the numbers may be wrong about Bregman’s defense right now. How to fix it is not quite obvious, but maybe the team at Statcast will have some interesting numbers for us soon.

For now, we can say this at least: The group of third basemen that averaged over 82.5 mph on their competitive throws to first base, and ran faster than 27.5 ft/second by Statcast’s sprint speed metric (minimum 50 runs), includes only Bregman, Matt Chapman and Kris Bryant. That’s good company.

Of course, that ignores the fact that competitive throws are difficult to separate from “get the ball over without messing up,” that straight-ahead speed may not have much to do with the ability to get to a ball quickly, that reaction time is huge and that the transition from glove to hand is another skill we have yet to unlock. But maybe it suggests that Bregman at least has the tools to be an average third baseman with the glove, if not better.

Bregman is already a top 25 position player right now. But that’s with negative defensive value. Give him Bryant’s defensive numbers, and Bregman moves into the top 20 and into a virtual tie with teammate Carlos Correa. Add a little power and batted ball growth and you might be moving him into the top ten with comps Betts, Benintendi, and Ramírez.

That’s good, because that’s the player’s aim for himself. And with an attitude like this, it seems like the only thing standing between him and that sort of rating is time.

“I just have to keep doing it, just keep getting better every day, keep learning, keep growing, keep trying to improve, keep trying to be more consistent every single day with the quality of everything I do,” Bregman said. “I think I will be and should be, and I won’t be satisfied until I’m an elite player in this game.”
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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29,228

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Posted

ottavino yes.  treinen yes.  hand?  fuck that.  the padres have shown they're a pain in the ass and have no idea what they're doing.  not worth the headache.  still wish we had gotten wilson with jv last year, as per my prediction (and request) in june.

re:bregman, when we grabbed him 2nd in the draft, someone (gammons maybe?) told a story about the usa team he was on with basically every great not-yet-mlb player on it.  they had a team vote for the captain, and bregman won the vote 23-1, quoting most of the team saying stuff like, "he's the best player i've ever been around."  dansby swanson (who went 1st in front of him) was on that same team.  that was all i needed to know.

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TonyTexas

TonyTexas 10,783

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Posted
I don't want Hand because I don't want his contract.  Ottavino is an excellent choice because he is a FA after we hoist the trophy.  

Hand’s contract is 1 reason he’ll be expensive to obtain. Very club friendly. $3.5MM this year, 2019-$6.5mm, 2020-$7.5mm and a $10mm club option in 2021
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Seasick Sailor

Seasick Sailor 3,747

Posted
Posted (edited)
7 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

How many MLB starts does Bregs have at 2B?

 

I Split G GS PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS TB GDP HBP SH SF IBB ROE BAbip tOPS+
  as 2B 4   8 8 1 5 1 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 .625 .625 .750 1.375 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 .625 237
  as 3B 240   1011 893 136 235 65 6 34 120 18 5 101 169 .263 .342 .464 .805 414 25 9 1 7 2 6 .288 96
  as SS 34   126 112 24 41 7 3 3 19 6 3 10 14 .366 .421 .563 .983 63 1 2 0 2 0 2 .392 140
  as LF 2   2 2   0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 .000 .000 .000 .000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .000 -100
  as DH 4   14 13 1 2 1 0 0 3 0 0 1 5 .154 .214 .231 .445 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 .250 10
  as PH 3   3 3   1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 .333 .333 .333 .667 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 .333 66
Edited by Seasick Sailor
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runthebone

runthebone 8,379

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Seasick Sailor said:

 

I Split G GS PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS TB GDP HBP SH SF IBB ROE BAbip tOPS+
  as 2B 4   8 8 1 5 1 0 0 2 1 0 0 0 .625 .625 .750 1.375 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 .625 237
  as 3B 240   1011 893 136 235 65 6 34 120 18 5 101 169 .263 .342 .464 .805 414 25 9 1 7 2 6 .288 96
  as SS 34   126 112 24 41 7 3 3 19 6 3 10 14 .366 .421 .563 .983 63 1 2 0 2 0 2 .392 140
  as LF 2   2 2   0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 .000 .000 .000 .000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .000 -100
  as DH 4   14 13 1 2 1 0 0 3 0 0 1 5 .154 .214 .231 .445 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 .250 10
  as PH 3   3 3   1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 .333 .333 .333 .667 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 .333 66

My God, he is a .625 hitter when he plays second.  What is Hinch doing?!!!

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