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2019 Houston Astros Thread

Planet Houston

By Planet Houston
in Baseball

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My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer 3 weeks ago. Tomorrow she starts her treatment. She's been a wreck ever since the diagnosis. I mentioned a few pages back how a friend of the family manage

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Newest Astro fan was born earlier today at 12:09 am Mez3, holla!

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29194

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ok, 8/28 trucker hat update:

i have picked up the new hats.

i have become close with lupe, who works at the hat place.  there's something dangerous about her and i'm into that.  we're having drinks later.

the following list is being shipped out tomorrow am:

@Mez2

@APMP

@Rip76

@patrickdrinksbeer

@Tommy Nobis

@kevwun

@elfenix

@UTexasFight

@Pods

@elguapo

@Honeysucklerose

@Planet Houston

@Mack Tripper

@Doug E. Fresh

 

if you are not on this list and feel like you should be, please pm me.  if you are on this list and feel like you should not be, also, please pm me.  turns out surly mail is not outlook express and my assistant quit, so things have started to get away from me a little.

at current count, it looks like i may have 1-2 navy and 3-4 orange leftover (overstock, no discount).  if you're still looking for a hat, pm me.  i'm still crunching the numbers and i've made promises.

also a dude who works at the grocery store complimented my orange hat and said he used to watch jr richard pitch.  so there's that.

until next order,

 

-hg

vp, hustle and craps systems, h.g.t.h., int'l

#cantstopwontstop

 

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29194

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that speech would've been fine without that one sentence.  just say the other teams are great and you should be great too.  don't need the "we all know what it's really about in houston" nonsense. 

the texans are the youngest franchise in town by far, and also the most dysfunctional.  by far.

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Mack Tripper

Mack Tripper 696

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Damn my subscription just expired
Possible to post behind a spoiler?


I got you fam

The Houston Astros are among the favorites to win the World Series, and the reason is shockingly simple: They are really, really good at hitting the ball and really, really good at preventing their opponents from hitting it.

This explanation might sound insultingly obvious. But in reality, what the Astros are doing right now is beyond remarkable—it’s on the verge of being unprecedented. The Astros entered Tuesday with the most strikeouts in the major leagues from the mound and the fewest strikeouts in the major leagues at the plate. No team has done that over a full season since batters’ strikeouts were first tracked MLB-wide in 1913.

That powerful combination isn’t a coincidence. Under the leadership of general manager Jeff Luhnow and his data-driven front office, the Astros have beaten all of their competitors in the race to weaponize perhaps the most important statistic in modern baseball: the strikeout. And it has made them a juggernaut.

“That’s an attribute that a lot of people building teams would like to have,” reliever Will Harris said. “I don’t think that’s by accident. They want guys who have bat-to-ball skills and pitchers that can put guys away.”

Scanning the Astros’ roster, it isn’t difficult to figure out what they’re looking for. In the past two years alone, they’ve traded for Gerrit Cole and Justin Verlander to anchor their starting rotation, giving up seven total players for the privilege. Verlander and Cole rank first and second in the majors in strikeouts.

Across MLB, players strike out in around 23% of their plate appearances. Almost all of the Astros’ regulars whiff less than that, with five of them—Michael Brantley, Yuli Gurriel, Josh Reddick, Alex Bregman and José Altuve—possessing a strikeout rate of less than 15%. Brantley has struck out barely 10% of the time in his career, a significant factor in why the Astros gave him a two-year, $32 million contract this off-season.


Pitcher Gerrit Cole, left, and third baseman Alex Bregman are key to the Astros’ winning formula. PHOTO: FROM LEFT: BOB LEVEY/GETTY IMAGES; PATRICK GORSKI/REUTERS
While it isn’t exactly news that strikeouts are good for pitchers and bad for batters, the Astros’ emphasis on them actually goes against baseball’s conventional wisdom. Even in 2019, with league-wide strikeouts about to set a record for the 12th straight season, pitchers rarely admit that they actively seek them. To the contrary: They often talk about trying to induce contact early in the count, considering that a better approach than going for punch-outs.

The Astros don’t necessarily see it that way. Luhnow called a strikeout “the best possible outcome” for a pitcher. Balls in play can lead to defensive errors, bloop hits and other fluky occurrences. Not so with strikeouts.

“There is a calculated risk to taking a ground ball,” Cole said. “We all know that a strikeout is the safest out. It leaves the least amount of things up to chance. In a big moment with the game on the line, you’d like to not have to make a play if you don’t have to.”

Given that, the Astros don’t hesitate to push for strikeouts and devise their game plans around maximizing them, even if it forces their pitchers to throw a few extra pitches to achieve them. Houston has essentially eliminated the sinker from their pitchers’ arsenal, dumping the pitch most designed to generate contact rather than a swing and miss. Instead, the Astros have focused on four-seam fastballs up in the zone paired with curveballs, with devastating results.

In his last season before joining the Astros, Cole threw his sinker and changeup close to 30% of the time. Upon joining the Astros, he all but got rid of both pitches entirely in favor of more four-seam fastballs and curves. From 2017 to 2018, his strikeout rate jumped from 23% to 34.5%, and it’s over 37% this year. Charlie Morton, now with the Tampa Bay Rays, is perhaps an even starker example. In 162 games from 2008 through 2016 before coming to Houston, he struck out 16% of the batters he faced. In two years with the Astros, after overhauling his arsenal and sequencing, that number was nearly 28%.

When it comes to playing in October, strikeouts matter. The top five pitching staffs in strikeouts last season all reached the playoffs. In 2017, it was the top eight.

“The swing-and-miss is such an important characteristic of a pitcher,” Luhnow said. “There are pitchers that can be successful without swing-and-miss, but if you have it, it makes your life so much easier.”

New thinking in baseball has erased the stigma that came with strikeouts for decades. Strikeouts were once seen as the ultimate embarrassment for a batter. Now, many teams are willing to sacrifice contact in the pursuit of power.

The Astros defy that. They hit for power. Lots of it. Entering Tuesday, only one team, the Minnesota Twins, had a better OPS than them. But that thump doesn’t come at the expense of putting the ball in play.

“It’s not easy to do both,” Altuve said. “Not a lot of people can do it.”


Astros left fielder Michael Brantley is the team’s leading hitter this season. PHOTO: STAN SZETO/REUTERS
The Astros train to make that happen. Long on the cutting edge of technology, they stress pitch recognition, believing that strikeouts are more a product of poor swing decisions than an inability to make contact. They also try to make batting practice more like game situations, exposing their hitters to velocity and breaking pitches in the cage to prepare them for games.

Meanwhile, with two strikes, they aren’t afraid to shorten their swings in order to put the ball in play. They are the only team in baseball to have a batting average above .200 with two strikes.

There’s a reason for all that. It’s no longer a secret that the baseballs themselves are behaving differently, with MLB acknowledging that they are more aerodynamic and less air resistant than they once were. The supercharged balls serve as an incentive not to strike out.

“The same contact in 2011 that would have resulted in an out now results in a home run or a double,” Luhnow said. “You get rewarded a lot more for hard contact.”

The Astros know that as well as anybody, and their prize could be their second championship in three years.


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Gourmand

Gourmand 7774

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27 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

that speech would've been fine without that one sentence.  just say the other teams are great and you should be great too.  don't need the "we all know what it's really about in houston" nonsense. .

That one sentence was strikingly stupid though. Look, Bill, I am a HTown sports fan for life so I will always root for the Astros, Rockets, and Texans. But know your audience bruh.  It's pretty dumb to mention the Astros and in the same breath tell an entire city of fans "what it's really all about" when that same city of fans endured a devastating natural disaster only to be buoyed by a storybook World Series Championship just two months later.  That is not something Houston will ever forget no matter what the future holds for the city's NFL team. 

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9517

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ok, 8/28 trucker hat update:
i have picked up the new hats.
i have become close with lupe, who works at the hat place.  there's something dangerous about her and i'm into that.  we're having drinks later.
the following list is being shipped out tomorrow am:

 

hell yeah. Now I’ll have one for myself. Original print has been hijacked by the 4 yo.
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