After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Houston Astros. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Chicago NL / San Diego / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Broadly speaking, the deployment of an average — which is to say, a two-win — player at every spot in a club’s starting lineup will lead to an average group of position players. With that logic in mind, these ZiPS projections offer an encouraging portrait of the 2017 Houston Astros, insofar as two wins represents more or less the floor for the club’s field-playing starters.

The foundation of the offense is marked both by youth and talent: Jose Altuve (696 PA, 5.8 zWAR), Alex Bregman (557, 3.5), Carlos Correa (682, 6.5), and George Springer (590, 3.5) are all 27 or younger. They also constitute the four Houston batters projected to record three or more wins in 2017. Among the starters, ZiPS offers the least optimistic forecasts for Carlos Beltran (521, 1.6) and Yulieski Gurriel (525, 1.6), although even that pair is expected to produce something within a rounding error of two wins.

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The Astros have had an interesting offseason thus far. They’ve signed Josh Reddick to play the outfield, claimed Nori Aoki off waivers, rolled the dice on Charlie Morton to beef up their rotation, and doled out perhaps a bit too much to acquire Brian McCann. They just signed Carlos Beltran to be their DH, too.  If nothing else, we may very well figure out if there’s a critical mass for dingers, given that Houston also employs George Springer, Carlos Correa, Jose Altuve, and Evan Gattis (and not for nothing, but Alex Bregman is projected to hit 20 bombs too). Our projections love the Astros. We have them winning 91 games, the most in the AL, and tied for second most in the bigs (with the Dodgers), behind only the Cubs. That’s not bad!

However, there’s a reasonable chance that they could come up short of that projection. Of course, there’s a reasonable chance that any team could come up short of (or exceed or exactly meet) their projections, but the Astros are the franchise du jour right now, so let’s focus on them. We know Houston will probably hit the ball pretty well. They might catch the ball pretty well, too. Their position players are good, and they’ve got a fair amount of depth. It’s their starting pitching that interests me.

Pitching was a strength of the 2015 Astros. Scott Feldman, Lance McCullers, and Collin McHugh backed a Cy Young-winning breakout effort from Dallas Keuchel. The Houston rotation threw the third-most innings in the big leagues that year. They produced the ninth-highest WAR by the FIP version of that metric placed fifth by the sort calculated with runs allowed. They were pretty good. Not world-beating, Verlander-Scherzer-Sanchez-Porcello good — or Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz good, for that matter — but good enough.

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Carlos Beltran signed with the Astros for a year and $16 million. There is probably plenty to say about this! There’s stuff to say about Beltran so far managing to defy the nature of aging. There’s stuff to say about the Astros being almost overloaded with position players. There’s stuff to say about Beltran returning to Houston after the two separated so many years back. There’s a lot for different people to tackle, but I’m only one guy and I’m also one guy in a hurry, so, here, numbers and plots. The Astros are good!

I mean, the Astros were already good. They were good before they signed Beltran. They were good before they got Brian McCann and Josh Reddick. Now they’re only better. Focusing strictly on offense, I’m going to show you two images. First, here’s one reviewing 2016. This shows total team offensive runs above or below average, that just being a combination of batting value and baserunning value. This is only for non-pitchers so as to try to balance out the leagues.

I highlighted the Astros, who were right around the middle. Specifically, they ranked 16th. Now for the projected future! I know this is to some degree a silly exercise. It’s all based on one projection system, and no team’s offseason is complete, and projections don’t do a great job of accounting for platoons. But this does give you a good idea of where things stand today. Here’s a 2017 projection of the same information as above, based on Steamer projections and our updated depth charts.

The 16th-place Astros now show up as the second-place Astros, and they’re first place in the American League. They’re 22 runs removed from the third-place Nationals, and they’re 27 runs removed from the Red Sox. Once again: the Red Sox will acquire at least one hitter. The Astros are probably finished, as their lineup goes. Anything else they do will probably be about pitching, and there are a lot of hitters left out there for other teams to pick up. But make no mistake — the Astros have built a lineup that’s going to be a daily challenge for any pitcher. There’s new flexibility and new depth, and the lineup might well lack an easy part. The winter meetings haven’t even begun and the Astros look like a terror.

As has been the case, it’s going to come down to how the rotation holds up. They’ll try to make an addition. It might not work, maybe not in the winter, but when a team isn’t sure how much it can trust its starters, the best you can do is to assemble lineup and bullpen depth. That’s what the Astros have done, and that’s why they look like possible, if not probable, AL favorites. It’s not a bad place for Beltran to seek that elusive World Series.

I’ve been attempting recently to better understand changeups through the prism of spin. A relationship might exist, but it’s difficult to identify. I’m working on it — and, if I find anything, I’ll share it here. In the meantime, though, there still remain some dependable pitch-level metrics which can reveal the quality of a changeup — namely, drop, fade, and velocity difference. While it’s true that there are a multiple pathways to success for the changeup, those which are notable by these criteria also tend to be notable for their effectiveness. Movement, for example, is what allows Zack Greinke’s hard change to work. The velocity gap between the change and the fastball, meanwhile, becomes more important for those changeups which feature less of Greinke’s signature movement.

Over the course of this past season, a few changeups improved in these regards. We should take notice because, even in today’s era of spin, a nasty changepiece can really pull an arsenal together.

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The Astros had themselves a busy Thursday, picking up Brian McCann from the Yankees, and then signing Josh Reddick out of free agency. This is not intended as an overreaction to that. There’s no such thing as a team being “put over the top,” and the Astros haven’t been dramatically altered by adding a decent corner outfielder and a veteran catcher whose contract was partially paid down. The reality is that an awful lot was already in place. It’s just worth talking about what’s being constructed, instead of me focusing specifically on Reddick. The smaller story is that the Astros signed Reddick for four years and $52 million. The bigger story is that the Astros are entering the league’s upper class.

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The Yankees acquired two high-octane arms from Houston in exchange for veteran catcher Brian McCann today in right-handed pitchers Albert Abreu and Jorge Guzman.

Abreu is the main piece for New York, a somewhat undersized (on paper, anyway) righty with absolutely electric arm speed that he produces with little effort. Abreu’s fastball will sit in the low- to mid-90s, usually 91-96, and touch as high as 98. He has well below-average command of his fastball (and the rest of his repertoire) right now but the ease of Abreu’s delivery allows for considerable projection in this area, though of course it’s not a foregone conclusion that he’ll develop starter-level command.

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Without looking at either team too hard, you might think the Astros needed major league pitching and the Yankees needed major league pitching. So of course the Yankees traded catcher Brian McCann (and $5.5m a year) to the Astros for prospect right-handers Albert Abreu and Jorge Guzman. We’ll learn more about the prospects (other than their high velocity fastballs) later, but the major league teams probably both needed this trade, and it might have actually been about pitching for the Astros anyway.

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Times are desperate, man. You know what kind of shape the free-agent market for starting pitchers is in. I hope you like Edinson Volquez, because you can’t even get a Jeremy Hellickson, and there’s only one Rich Hill to go around. Everyone knows the market is bad. Even the pitchers who make up the market know the market is bad. Out of this bad market, the Astros have plucked Charlie Morton, for two guaranteed years, and at least fourteen million guaranteed dollars.

Morton is newly 33. He appeared in four games last year before getting hurt, and his career ERA is 19% worse than league average. The Phillies let Morton walk, instead of exercising a $9.5-million option. The thing about front offices thinking so similarly is that you can’t just say “oh, the Phillies were being stupid.” No one is stupid. In Morton, the Phillies saw downside. In Morton, the Astros see upside. It’s always interesting when this happens.

And me, I’m an optimist. I’m a believer in people, and though that does come back to bite me, I see reasons to believe in Charlie Morton. I like him as an upside play, as a guy who could affordably knock your socks off.

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This morning, the Astros announced that they have signed Charlie Morton to a two year, $14 million contract, bringing the right-hander to Houston to bolster their pitching depth. And as Mike Petriello notes, there’s some obvious synergy here.

Charlie Morton was top 5 (min. 50 thrown) in curve spin last year (2990 RPM). The Astros threw more curves as last year went on. Easy fit. pic.twitter.com/TuS7zjWtm7

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) November 16, 2016

Charlie Morton is a high-spin curveball pitcher. The Astros like high-spin curveballs, using it as the primary reason to bring Collin McHugh into the organization a few years ago, and getting some good value out of that bet. Two years ago, when Eno Sarris wrote about trying to find “The Next Collin McHugh”, he showed a spin-rate table with Morton near the very top.

So, yeah, Morton and the Astros are a natural fit, and it’s easy to think about what Houston might be able to do with a guy with a good sinking fastball and a curve that should be a put-away pitch. But in reality, unless the Astros can figure out how to make Morton’s curveballs get lefties out, they might have just signed Bud Norris with health issues instead.

Since Morton debuted in the big leagues in 2008, no pitcher (minimum 350 innings pitched) has been worse against left-handed hitters. His sinking fastball dives right into a lefties wheelhouse, and despite the spin, his curveball hasn’t been effective at getting them off balance so they don’t just crush his fastball. Against right-handers, his repertoire is quite effective, but against lefties, he’s basically throwing batting practice.

That doesn’t make this a terrible gamble for the Astros. If they think they can fix Morton, and get him to stop running a .350 BABIP against LHBs — yes, that’s his career average — then maybe there’s some upside as a back-end starter. And if they can’t, maybe they’ll be able to convince him that he could be a quality reliever, using him mostly as a right-handed specialist. The ability to perhaps convert him into a quality bullpen arm if the starting experiment continues to fail gives his signing a chance to work even if they can’t make him Collin McHugh 2.0.

But the Astros already have a deep bullpen full of right-handed arms. What they really could use is another quality starting pitcher. Unless the new CBA bans left-handed hitters, I’m not sure I’d count on Morton being that guy.

Position: Houston Astros Baseball Research & Development Analyst

Location: Houston
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