Archive for Astros

Leading Astros pitchers in WAR usually takes some doing. The current AL West standings have Houston in line for its eighth division title and 10th postseason appearance in the past 12 years. Over that time, Astros pitchers have won three Cy Young Awards — two for Justin Verlander, one for Dallas Keuchel. Six other starters (Gerrit Cole, Framber Valdez, Lance McCullers Jr., Hunter Brown, Collin McHugh, and Yusei Kikuchi) have gotten downballot votes.

This year, the first-place Astros’ pitching WAR leader is 29-year-old Peter Lambert. It’s not a classic Astros rotation by any means — Brown and Cristian Javier have both spent a big chunk of the season on the IL — but Lambert is at the front of it nevertheless. No one expected this, least of all Lambert himself. Read the rest of this entry »

With the passing of Labor Day, the 2026 regular season has less than three weeks remaining. While neither league’s playoff races are as turbulent as the AL Wild Card race appeared to be just a couple of weeks ago — to say nothing of the Before Times, when Major League Baseball used actual tiebreaker games instead of math to settle ties, and rooting for end-of-season chaos was a whole lot more fun — it’s time for a check-in to outline what’s at stake.

Right now, in four of the six division races — all but the NL Central and NL West, where the Brewers and Dodgers both have comfortable margins — the first-place team leads by four games or less. That said, the hill that the Phillies (81-64) have to climb to catch the Braves (85-60) is steeper than it appears, because Atlanta clinched the season series with a 5-4 win this past Sunday and owns a 7-3 advantage, with the two teams set to play their final three games starting on Friday at Truist Park. Thus, if the two teams finish the regular season tied, the Braves would be the division winner and the Phillies a Wild Card team. Philadelphia has to overtake Atlanta to claim the NL East flag, something our Playoff Odds suggest has just an 8.2% chance of happening. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday afternoon, the Astros gave up seven unanswered runs to lose to the A’s 7-6. That loss, against the team with the worst record in the American League, dropped Houston below .500 for the first time this month, and into a tie with the Texas Rangers for the AL West division lead. That was the last game of a 3-9 homestand. The capper to this bummer of a fortnight in Houston followed promptly; the team and GM Dana Brown mutually agreed to part ways Sunday evening, which is team-and-manager speak for firing him.

Boy, am I bummed that I’ve already made an Apollo 13 reference about the Astros this year. Two in the same season would just be too many. So allow me to use some Shakespeare instead: Something is rotten in the state of Texas. While a 12-game stretch of poor play is a strange reason to change GMs, this move wasn’t about a couple of poor weeks of play. Instead, it’s about the last couple of years of poor play; the once-dominant Astros missed the playoffs in 2025, and this year they’re on track for their worst record since 2014 (excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when they went 29-31 but still made the playoffs). The farm system is one of the worst in baseball – 29th in our farm system rankings. The big league team has been outscored by 44 runs this year, and BaseRuns suggests Houston has played even a bit worse than that. Things really have deteriorated in Space City.

What’s meaningfully less clear is how much of that blame should be apportioned to Brown. He joined the Astros immediately after their 2022 World Series victory, replacing the departing James Click. Not many incoming GMs inherit a roster that just won the whole ball of yarn, but that cuts both ways. Brown inherited a great roster as well as the kind of dysfunction that leads a team and its GM to split up while simultaneously reaching the peak of the sport. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1981, when a seven-week players’ strike split the season into two “halves,” and in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic shortened the season to 60 games, teams with sub-.500 records snuck into the postseason via expanded playoff formats created to accommodate the unique and extraordinary circumstances. No team finishing below .500 over the course of a full schedule has received a playoff berth, but the possibility looms large this year. With five and a half weeks and about 35 games per team still to play, the American League has just five teams above .500, including one — the AL West-leading Astros — that entered Wednesday right at that mark before beating the Angels. It’s not out of the question that two sub-.500 teams could make the playoffs, but for all of the owners’ carping about a lack of competitive balance, messy free-for-alls such as this are just what Major League Baseball wants.

If the postseason were to start today, the Rays (76-50) would win the AL East by five games and White Sox (66-60) the AL Central by four games, with both earning first-round byes. The Yankees (71-55) and Red Sox (68-59) would qualify as the top two Wild Card winners; as the fourth and fifth seeds, they would square off in a best-of-three Wild Card Series as they did last season. But from there, things get ugly. The Astros (64-63) are currently clinging to a two-game lead over the Rangers (62-65) atop the AL West, but with a projected win total of 82 wins according to our Playoff Odds, they don’t have much margin for error when it comes to clearing the .500 bar, and could join or surpass the 2005 Padres (82-80) and 1973 Mets (82-79) in terms of mediocre division winners. The 1994 Rangers were a whopping 10 games below .500 at 52-62 but one game ahead of the A’s (51-63) when the players’ strike put them both out of their misery, though MLB does not consider any first-place teams from the shortened season to be official division winners. That’s how the Braves, who trailed the NL East-leading Expos by six games when the strike hit, are still considered to have won 14 consecutive division titles from 1991–2005 (an assertion I take issue with, but that’s an argument for another day). Read the rest of this entry »

I made my first trip to Oracle Park earlier this week to catch the final two games of a three-game set between the Giants and Astros. I was in San Francisco reporting a different story, but I was eager talk about Yordan Alvarez with his teammates, his opponents, and pretty much anybody else who was interested. I’ve long compared him to Willie McCovey because of his overwhelming physical stature and profile at the plate — it helps that Alvarez, like McCovey, also bats left-handed and wears no. 44 — and I considered myself fortunate to get to see the Astros DH play in San Francisco. I hoped I’d get to witness him launch one into McCovey Cove. That didn’t happen, but it was still fun to watch him during what’s turning into a career year.

One of the players I talked to about Alvarez was Houston outfielder Taylor Trammell. His response, to a question about what makes Alvarez so good, is worth sharing. “He is the most efficient player I’ve ever seen,” Trammell said. “He does exactly what he needs to do to get himself ready to play well, and then does nothing more. His preparation seems so effortless because he has so much confidence in his routine. He’s shrunken it all into a box.” Trammell also bats left-handed, yet he said he can’t study Alvarez to figure out what to do in the box because “pitchers throw differently to him. They throw him the pitches they don’t throw to anyone else just to try something to get him out.” He said Alvarez sees changeups from pitchers that he didn’t even know had changeups, and while that might’ve been a slight exaggeration, it worked to explain the helplessness that opposing pitchers must feel when Alvarez is in the box.

That’s the last we’ll discuss Alvarez here today, but if you want to read more about his MVP-worthy season, I’d encourage you to check out Dan Szymborski’s post from Monday breaking down Alvarez’s odds of winning the American League Triple Crown. Instead, in this week’s mailbag, we’re answering your questions about a pair of Cardinals pitchers who are greatly outperforming their peripherals, whether strong plate discipline translates to successful ABS challenges, the final franchise to (maybe) register a 100-loss season, and more. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Yordan Alvarez’s Triple Crown chances. Time hasn’t been cruel in this case, and his Triple Crown bid looks even stronger now than it did then. Since I’ve gotten several requests for updates, it made sense to do a quick InstaGraphs post on the Triple Crown race probabilities. There’s a slight change for the probability charts you’ll see below. In order to make the percentages in the individual statistic tables add up to a clean 100%, I did not allow for ZiPS to include ties atop its simulated leaderboards when I ran the projections for that June 8 piece. In the latest run, I’ve factored in ties and expressed them in the tables as multiple players winning.

Back in June, Alvarez was second in the American League in batting average, looking up at Rays DH Yandy Díaz. Díaz continued to hit in June, but a .213 July knocked him out of the top spot, and he’s now 24 points behind Alvarez. Most of the other batting title contenders from June have also seen their averages decline, while Alvarez’s mark has actually increased, going from .316 to .322 entering play Monday. Rays outfielder Chandler Simpson has snuck into the second spot, with Díaz down to third and 22 points of average below the Astros slugger. Both Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. (.284) and Tigers rookie infielder Kevin McGonigle (.286) are very dangerous hitters and could go on a heater at any moment to make things interesting, but Alvarez leads them by over 30 points right now, and at this point in the season, it’s unlikely that they will catch him. Alvarez has also hit the required minimum number of plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, so no hitless at-bats would need to be added to get him to the 502-PA threshold, meaning a season-ending injury would freeze him at .322.

Alvarez (86) holds the RBI lead by six, so a first-place finish here isn’t guaranteed, but it still leaves him in an incredibly strong position. Ben Rice is 11 behind now, in part because the Yankees have put fewer men on base in front of him these last few months without three-time MVP Aaron Judge in their lineup. Meanwhile, reigning AL Rookie of the Year winner Nick Kurtz, who is currently on the IL with a strained right thumb, has fallen to 17 off the lead. A good chunk of the remaining risk to Alvarez’s RBI crown chances comes from a potential injury; even a minimum IL visit for him could leave Orioles first baseman Pete Alonso (75) or Tigers catcher Dillon Dingler (80) with room to swoop in.

The home run title is basically a three-player race at this point between Alvarez (35), Caminero (33), and Rice (32). Of the other four players in the top five as of June, three missed serious time due to injury and fell out of contention: Munetaka Murakami (26), Byron Buxton (25), and Judge (17). With Caminero and Rice hot on Alvarez’s heels, this category is going to be the most difficult one for him to win.

Alvarez’s Triple Crown probability is nearly the same as his odds to lead the league in home runs at this point; if he takes the home run crown, he almost certainly will have played well enough to hang onto the RBI lead and secure the batting title, too. ZiPS projects Alvarez now as having nearly two-in-three odds (66.5%) to win the AL Triple Crown.

With apologies to Tarik Skubal and the Dodgers, for my money the most eye-catching deal ahead of Monday’s trade deadline was the Red Sox acquiring Adley Rutschman in a six-player blockbuster with the Orioles. Not only did a switch-hitting All-Star catcher move from one Wild Card contender to another, but he did so within the same division — and he’s more than a rental, with one more year of arbitration eligibility before he reaches free agency. Though he’s currently on the injured list due to inflammation in his left wrist, Rutschman is reportedly nearing a rehab assignment, and once he returns, he should provide a substantial upgrade for a team whose catchers landed on my Replacement-Level Killers list a few weeks ago.

Rustchman wasn’t the only prominent catcher on the move to a contender on Monday, as the Marlins traded Liam Hicks to the Rays, but he’s a part-time backstop whose hitting makes him a useful DH and first base option as well. While the concurrence of his being dealt illustrates that trading for a catcher on the fly in the midst of a playoff race isn’t unheard of, such moves do stand out. They’re not to be undertaken lightly because of the weighty responsibility that falls on a catcher’s shoulders in terms of quickly having to build relationships with a new pitching staff to understand repertoires, situational preferences, and interpersonal dynamics. Odds are that those newcomers are also expected to provide more offense than the catchers they replaced, because offensive slumps often spur teams to make such changes. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s trade deadline season, which means that it’s time for an annual tradition: the Astros somehow scraping together enough interesting young talent to trade for some much-needed major league improvements. This time around, they’re acquiring Daulton Varsho from the Blue Jays in exchange for Spencer Arrighetti, as Mitch Bannon of The Athletic first reported.

Varsho has a delightful positional history. He came up as a catcher, was one of the more fun multi-positional players in the league for a stretch, and then became one of the best defensive outfielders on the planet. He’s now a plus defender in center or an elite one in a corner; he’ll play center most of the time in Houston, stabilizing a position that’s been one of the worst in the majors this year. Jake Meyers was the presumptive starter, but he missed more than a month with an oblique strain and flirted with the Mendoza Line when healthy. The ‘Stros finally optioned him to the minors at the start of July, and in his place, they’ve run out a sampler platter of backup plans: Brice Matthews, who’s posted a 61 wRC+ and is currently on the IL, Taylor Trammell, a fourth outfielder type and not really a center fielder defensively, and even Lucas Spence, a fringe prospect who definitely does not look ready for the big leagues.

In other words, acquiring Varsho is mostly about not having a sinkhole of a position in the middle of the outfield. From that perspective, just by showing up he’s going to fulfill his end of the bargain. He’s Houston’s best outfield defender right away, and unless Yordan Alvarez is getting a rare day in the field, he’s probably their best-hitting outfielder too. Cam Smith has scuffled offensively for his whole big league career at this point, and the LaMonte Wade Jr./Zach Dezenzo platoon in left field isn’t exactly fearsome. Read the rest of this entry »

We have some movement in the race between immovable objects.

The Rangers on Monday capped a four-game, wraparound series win over the Mariners to take what feels like a commanding 2 1/2-game lead over them and a two-game lead over the Astros in the AL West. Texas followed that up by dropping a series to the AL-best Rays, while Seattle dropped a series from the NL-best Dodgers and Houston swept the Angels. Entering Friday’s action, the Rangers lead the Astros by a half game and the Mariners by 2 1/2 games. That’s how it’s gone for the league’s most languid division in 2026.

Monday’s win gave the Rangers a 7-3 record against the Mariners on the year, securing Texas the tiebreaker should that become relevant in late September. Meanwhile, the Rangers head to Houston this weekend for a three-game set with the Astros currently holding the tiebreaker, 6-4. A Texas sweep in the road series would give it the head-to-head advantage against both of its AL West rivals. If not, things could get even more interesting come the final week of the season.

Even so, our Playoff Odds aren’t expecting the Texas-Houston tiebreaker to matter too much. That’s because, for the first time in 2026, the 55-54 Rangers look like the favorites to win the division.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

May 25
After nearly five hours of sleep, Derek Jr. wakes up a bit past one in the morning. She’s clearly struggling with some gas issues. I try to soothe her without taking her out of the crib, bicycling her little legs to help her through it, but it doesn’t help at all. She displays every sign of ravenous hunger, so I change her and start her on a bottle, but the milk just won’t go down. Something is going on. She’s clamoring for the bottle, she’s pulling milk into her mouth, and she’s riotously upset every time I take the bottle away, but she keeps letting all the milk run right down her chin. She doesn’t need to burp. It’s not her diaper. I’m not sure what else could be wrong, so after awhile, I give up on the bottle and get her into what has become my standard soothing-a-gassy-baby position. It’s basically a human swaddle.

I settle Derek Jr.’s shoulder in the crook of my right arm, my hand reaching down to grab hold of her right thigh and pull her knee up toward her belly. With my left hand, I give her a pacifier and press her right arm across her chest, then I turn my right arm to press her into my body so that her face is buried in my chest, which holds the pacifier in place. When it works, this position soothes her instantly, though she still pulls frantically at the pacifier. It takes a good 20 minutes for her to work through the gas, and then, suddenly, she relaxes. Not only is she hungry, but she wolfs down the entire the bottle and falls promptly to sleep. I settle her on my shoulder to burp her gently, and I pull out my phone to check what happened in baseball today.

Tomorrow — well, today I guess — is my first official day back at work. I spent the morning preparing this journal’s introduction and first installment for editing, then going through my wife’s camera roll looking for images I could use. I found pictures of myself from the day Derek Jr. was born. Parents are strongly encouraged to give the baby as much skin-to-skin contact as soon as possible. It’s good for bonding and it promotes the release of oxytocin, so there I am in the hospital room wearing my FanGraphs hoodie with no shirt underneath, feeling supremely silly, the zipper cold against my chest. It never really worked out, though. Derek Jr. just wasn’t comfortable being against my chest that way, and I felt like I’d failed. I’d forgotten about that until I saw the pictures this morning.

Tonight, my wife and I only had an hour or so of free time between getting Derek Jr. down to sleep and going to bed ourselves. My going back to work will be enough of an adjustment, so I didn’t want to force her to spend her one hour of relaxation time watching baseball. We put something else on the TV while I perused the leaderboards looking for something to write about tomorrow. As a result, I still have no idea what happened during tonight’s games. What I missed was Houston’s Tatsuya Imai, Steven Okert, and Alimber Santa combining to no-hit the Rangers. With Derek Jr. still asleep on my shoulder, I pull up the highlights. They are hilarious.

It’s got to be one of the sillier no-hitters in history. The highlight package starts in the first inning, with no outs and two Rangers already on base, because apparently Imai walked the first two batters of the game. He only strikes out two, and aside from a couple popups, every ball in play seems to fall into one of two categories. Either center fielder Jake Meyers is running down what looks off the bat like a surefire double in the gap, or a middle infielder is standing on his head to corral a hard-hit grounder that appears destined either to fracture Imai’s tibia or end up in center field.

Imai started the season (and his MLB career) in disastrous fashion. He went on the IL with arm fatigue, got shelled in one of his two rehab appearances, then got shellacked in his first start back in Houston. He came into the game with an 8.31 ERA and -0.2 WAR. Tonight, he walked twice as many as he struck out and had a 50% hard-hit rate. The Rangers walked fewer batters and allowed only one more hard-hit ball than Imai did, and they got lit up for nine runs. The Astros didn’t throw a single offspeed pitch or curveball all night. Aside from four sinkers from Imai, every pitch was either a four-seamer or a slider. Somehow, that didn’t help the Rangers much. Maybe this is what I should write about tomorrow.

A minute or so into the highlights, Derek Jr., still asleep, does sort of a reverse bear crawl from my shoulder down to my chest. She settles with her knees on my lap and her torso pressed against mine, her head resting sideways just below my chin. It’s a position both the teachers of a parenting class and the nurses at the hospital encouraged us to use, as it allows for maximal skin-to-skin contact. They made it sound special, and I was excited for it. I’d seen other people hold their babies that way. It’s why we have those dumb pictures of me holding Derek Jr. with no shirt under my hoodie. But I couldn’t make her comfortable that way, and I gave up. All of a sudden, two months later, it’s where she wants to be. After a rough afternoon and night, she’s finally comfortable and happy, her warm little body pressed against me. She gets so tense when she’s upset; sometimes we lift her up from the crib and her whole body is stiff as a board. But she’s relaxed now. The highlight package is long, and as I watch the Rangers smash the ball every which way except into some grass, I’m overwhelmed by gratitude for the chance to have this moment with Derek Jr. melted against me. Maybe it’s the oxytocin.

I shouldn’t be up writing this. I’ve mortgaged two hours of sleep to document this moment, and I have to be up in three-and-a-half more to write about how James Wood can’t seem to figure out which pitches to challenge. If Derek Jr. wakes up right now — which could absolutely happen — I’ll be doing so on very, very little sleep. That’s been the tradeoff of this whole project, though. I can make sure we never forget all of these special moments, but only if I’m willing to lose some sleep in the night and be a bit more of a zombie during the day. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it going now that I’m going to be spending my days writing. It’s certainly felt worth it so far, and I’ve been so lucky to have had this time, to have such an amazing job that lets me write this journal at all.

Here’s one thing that I haven’t been able to document, that I don’t think I’ll be able to document fully. I’ve written a lot about what it feels like to have Derek Jr. asleep in my arms in the rocking chair in the middle of the night. It’s the most special thing I have. It’s my time to be close to her, to share my warmth, and to know that I’m taking care of her as well as I possibly can. I sing to her. I tell her how loved and beautiful she is. I crane my head down to look at her perfect face, and then I tilt my head back until I’m looking at the ceiling (my God, does that hurt, by the way) and try to burn the image into my memory. But I can’t do it. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I can’t hold onto it, and there’s no way to take a picture of it. I know I’m going to forget this image. It is the most precious thing to me, and I’m going to lose it. In some sense, I’ve lost it several times already; too slowly for me to notice, it must have changed so much as Derek Jr. has grown and grown over the past two months. No matter how tightly I hold her, so much slips away. So I stay up late. I put it into words as best I can. I get through the day.