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2019 Houston Astros Thread

Planet Houston

By Planet Houston
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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

Rustic Horn
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Mez2
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Newest Astro fan was born earlier today at 12:09 am Mez3, holla!

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tx 3 putt

tx 3 putt 76294

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Last week of the season :

1. Need to see Correa, peacock and pressley keep progressing and healing up. We need all 3 for the playoffs. 

2. #4 starter ??? It’s not miley, one of the young arms will need to step up.

3. Uncle Mike - he’s slumping hard this month, needs to get back on track 

4. Rest up and stay healthy
 

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billfromlaketravis

billfromlaketravis 11357

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10 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

Last week of the season :

1. Need to see Correa, peacock and pressley keep progressing and healing up. We need all 3 for the playoffs. 

2. #4 starter ??? It’s not miley, one of the young arms will need to step up.

3. Uncle Mike - he’s slumping hard this month, needs to get back on track 

4. Rest up and stay healthy
 

I'd start Peacock in a Game 4. Hope for 5 innings,  prepare for once through the order. 

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rvm96

rvm96 1643

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SIAP 

From MLB.com top performances for Saturday in the Arizona Fall League: Whitley’s 2019 campaign didn’t go according to plan, but the highly touted right-hander is off to a strong start in the Arizona Fall League. Whitley, who led the league in strikeouts a season ago, threw 46 of his 83 pitches for strikes and carried a no-hit bid into the fifth inning. The 22-year-old, a first-round pick in the 2016 Draft, retired nine in a row at one point and finished 4 2/3 scoreless innings having given up just one hit and allowing one walk with six strikeouts.

 

 

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Scraps

Scraps 13538

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8 minutes ago, Tommy Nobis said:

Got the email to buy ALDS tickets tomorrow. Game 1 is on Friday Oct 4 and it’s a full slate since the NL starts a day before us.

 

Anyone care to speculate game time? I really fucking hope it’s not an early start.

 

 

I'd be shocked if it wasn't mid afternoon game around 3-4pm.  Early game should be in Atlanta.  Latest game will be @ LAD and prime time will be the fucking yankees 

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Nice Guy Eddie

Nice Guy Eddie 13406

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If anyone wants ALDS tickets, I wouldn't sweat buying a ticket. Many seats go for close to face value on the secondary markets.  Season ticket holders purchase extra playoff tickets in the hopes of a long playoff run, which can net some decent profit. However they have to commit to every playoff game not just WS tickets. 

In the early games, they sometimes have to let these tickets go for low or no-profit. You might even find some for lower than face value.

My guess is also that we get the afternoon game on that first Friday. NYY and LAD will get prime time. I don't have a problem with that. We will get more than enough prime time later in the month. And if we somehow slipped up in the early round games, I'm happier to not see that on prime time.

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runthebone

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Verducci on the key to postseason success:  home runs

https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/09/23/new-york-yankees-la-dodgers-home-run-record

 

 

(notice how the URL mentions the Yankees and Dodgers)

 

Spoiler

Why Home Runs Will Be More Important Than Ever in October

By Tom Verducci
September 23, 2019

Back when Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s made an annual habit of departing early from the playoffs, Beane retaliated against the narrative that his teams didn’t put the ball in play enough, didn’t bunt or steal enough or didn’t defend well enough–in short, that they “weren’t built for the postseason.”

Beane, the executive vice president of baseball operations for Oakland, pointed out that in losing four straight Division Series from 2000-03 his team actually struck out less than its opponents in three of them.

“Do you know what wins in the postseason?” he told me. “Hit more home runs than the other team. That’s what wins. Almost nothing has a greater impact.”

Beane is right. Take the 33 postseason games from last year. Opponents hit the same number of home runs in 10 of those games. In the others, the team that out-homered its opponent went 19-4, an 83% win rate.

Last year the baseball was normal. Now we have a perfectly-balanced, lower-seam, slicker-leather baseball that flies out of the ballpark 21% more often than it did last year. Opposite-field homers of 400 feet or more are up 55% from last year! No wonder Astros ace Justin Verlander talks about how the baseball changed the objective of pitching from getting weak contact to avoiding contact altogether.

This postseason will feature the four greatest home run hitting teams of all time (Yankees, Twins, Astros and Dodgers). This is the greatest slugging season in history (.436) except for 2000. So now you want guys to push the baseball the other way and drop sacrifice bunts? Forget it.

Get ready for a postseason like no other. Forget everything you ever learned about “what wins in the postseason.” Be prepared for games that pivot on just a few swings of the bat. In this environment, with this baseball, with this hitting philosophy, home runs will determine the next world champion.

“Take the Astros’ pitching,” one All-Star pitcher told me recently. “You’re not beating Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole by stringing hits together. Not happening. You’re going to have to hit home runs. The quick strike is how the game is played. On offense you have to take advantage of a couple of mistakes. On the mound, you have to defend against it.”

“Shortening up” against Verlander and Cole to simply “put the ball in play” may not be as smart as you think. Verlander and Cole allow only 2.25 singles per game. They allowed only 19 run-scoring singles in 64 starts–but 62 home runs.

Do you know how many sacrifice bunts the Yankees, Astros and Twins each have after the sixth inning?

Three.

Do you know how many stolen bases the Yankees have in high leverage spots?

Ten.

I asked an American League third base coach in August how many times he had given the hit and run sign this year. “Three,” he said.

People love to talk about “The Golden Age” of baseball, as if one window in the game’s history was better than all others. Here’s the definition of “The Golden Age” of baseball: whatever kind of baseball was being played when you were growing up. Millennials aren’t pining for 1980s style baseball.

People of a certain age like to wax nostalgically about small ball because it was part of the game when they grew up. But that’s not how baseball is played today. It’s not better or worse. It’s just different.

“Small ball” in the postseason has been dying since 2015, when the baseball first became livelier and analytics uncovered the importance of power as a more efficient way to play the game.

Recent world champions made little use of singles and sacrifices, the vaunted jewels of “small ball,” to run through the postseason. The past four World Series champions combined used fewer sacrifice hits in the postseason than did the 2014 Giants. Also take note of the decline in singles on the paths to a title:

Postseason "Small Ball" Tactics by World Series Winner
Team Singles Singles Per Game Sacrifice Hits
2014 Giants 122 7.2 9
2015 Royals 100 6.3 4
2016 Cubs 83 4.9 1
2017 Astros 84 4.6 1
2018 Red Sox 78 5.6 2

The way to a title is with home runs. Trying to win without home runs sounds smart and even quaint, but it’s a losing formula–increasingly so. The odds of winning a postseason game without a home run have gone down since 2015. Let’s look at those games in four-year increments:

Postseason Team Games With No Home Runs

Seasons W-L Record Win Percentage
2003-06 31-56 .356
2007-10 30-58 .341
2011-14 48-76 .387
2015-18 22-66 .333

One homer is nice, but it’s even more important to hit a second home run. First, a snapshot of 2018 postseason outcomes for teams by how many home runs they hit:

2018 Postseason Win Percentage by Home Runs
Home Runs W-L Record Win Percentage
0 7-16 .304
1 10-13 .435
2 10-4 .714
3 4-0 1.000
4 2-0 1.000

That’s 17-29 (.370) when a team hits zero or one homer, and 16-4 (.800) when it hits more than one. That’s a difference in winning percentage of .430, what I call the Multi-Homer Delta.

Let’s grab a larger sample. Let’s look at the Multi-Homer Delta of 2015-18 and compare it to four-year postseason windows of 10, 20, and 30 years ago:

Postseason Outcomes by Home Runs

  2015-18 2005-08 1995-98 1985-88
Zero or One HR 73-112 (.396) 71-92 (.436) 72-103 (.411) 54-64 (.470)
Multi-HR 69-30 (.697) 42-21 (.667) 55-24 (.696) 21-11 (.636)
Multi-HR Delta +.301 +.231 +.285 +.166

Hitting multiple home runs is even more important in today’s postseason baseball.

And remember, we are playing with a hotter baseball than we saw in 2015-18. Major league teams this year won only 344 games without a homer–the fewest such games in history, despite adding more than 2,000 games to the schedule in the expansion era.

A necessary word of warning: don’t make the common mistake people make today of turning complex issues into a binary choice–in this case, home runs or small ball. The subtleties of the game remain important and can swing a game. Just think about how the 2018 World Series began. In the first inning of the first game, Mookie Betts of Boston reached base on a two-strike infield single, stole second base on the next pitch, scored on a single by Andrew Benintendi, who upon the throw home advanced to second and eventually scored on a single by J.D. Martinez. It was a full breadbasket of some fresh small ball: three singles plus a stolen base equaled a 2-0 lead.

You’re bound to see such rallies at various points this postseason, and they are still cool, like vinyl and turntables. It’s just that those rallies happen less often. With the way baseball is played today, and in a tournament with the four greatest home run hitting teams in history, and with a jalapeño of a baseball, the home run is more important than ever–even, or maybe especially, in October.

So as you root for your team in the postseason, savor the multi-hit rallies that may come your way. But what you really should be rooting for is for your team to hit multiple home runs.

 

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9375

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Cole on Saturday and JV to end the season Sunday, per chron.com

Here is the post that I think caused the sat vs sun confusion

 

This link below from chron.com (and the above) says the opposite. JV on Saturday and Cole on Sunday

 

https://www.chron.com/sports/astros/article/Astros-rotation-set-final-regular-season-games-14459325.php

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