Ben Smith has a 21.21 ERA in three appearances for the Tri-City Valley Cats. All told, the 23-year-old southpaw has allowed 19 base-runners and 15 runs in 4.2 innings for Houston’s short-season affiliate.

There’s a lot more to his story than numbers.

Smith will be watching this week’s College World Series with interest. The school out of which he was drafted in 2014, Coastal Carolina, is a surprise participant in the championship round. Several of the Chanticleers are former teammates, and he expects to be “sneaking into the locker room a couple of times” each night to follow their fairy-tale quest for a title.

The fact that the lanky left-hander is playing baseball is a real-life success story of its own.

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The Astros have gotten painfully little production from the first-base position this season. Spring-training hero Tyler White stopped hitting in April, and Marwin Gonzalez hasn’t exactly stepped up to pick up the slack. Houston’s lack of offense from first is a big reason why they’ve underperformed their preseason expectations. In an effort to fill the void, the Astros have called up top prospect A.J. Reed, who figures to get the lion’s share of starts at first base from here on out.

Reed’s hit everywhere he’s played. In 2014, he lead the SEC in both on-base and slugging his junior season at Kentucky, and he closed out his draft year by slashing .289/.375/.522 between two levels of A-Ball. He enjoyed his biggest breakout last year, when he hit an unquestionably gaudy .337/.428/.604 with 34 homers between High-A and Double-A. His performance has deteriorated a bit this year, but he’s still managed a .266/.345/.509 slash line in Triple-A.

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No matter where you get your information, the Houston Astros entered the season as consensus favorites to win the American League West. Our preseason projections gave them a better than 50% chance to take the division. Forty-six of 55 FanGraphs staff members chose them to win the division. In case you think a pro-Astros bias exists on the site, whether being informed by our projections or for some other reason, consider also that Baseball Prospectus’ staff liked the Astros, as did the fine folks over at CBS and ESPN.

Y’know what’s a great way to dump a big bucket of cold water on some hot preseason expectations? Start your season 6-15. Do that, and you’ll drop your preseason playoff odds by 37% before the end of April and get FanGraphs to write an article saying you’re already in trouble. Another way: start your season 17-28. Do that, and you’ll drop your playoff odds to a season-worst 18% and get Sports Illustrated to write an article wondering if you’re already done. By that point, it was totally reasonable to have written the Astros off, May and all.

Except, y’know what’s a great way to fire those preseason expectations right back up? Win 23 of your next 31, including seven in a row near the end of June. Do that, and you’ll get your get your record back over .500, leapfrog the Mariners in the standings, get your playoff odds back to being a coin flip and get this very article written about you: the Astros have gotten themselves back in it.

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Jose Altuve has 18 steals in 19 attempts this season. No, that’s not the bizarre stat. That’s just an impressive stat. Jose Altuve is an excellent base-stealer! Among the 71 players with at least five steal attempts this year, Altuve’s success rate ranks third. Since he began receiving regular playing time in 2012, no one’s stolen more bases. He’s fast, he steals plenty of bases, and he steals them well. Which is what makes the bizarre stat so bizarre, and here it comes: despite being fast, stealing plenty of bases, and stealing those bases well, Jose Altuve has been a terribly costly base-runner.

It’s easy to assume that good base-stealers are also good base-runners. The best base-stealers, typically, are the fastest guys on the field, and the best base-runners, typically, are those same fastest guys on the field. But if you think about it, aside from simply being fast (which isn’t necessarily a requirement for proficiency in either skill), base-stealing and base-running really aren’t as similar as they might appear. Base-stealing is more about pattern recognition, acceleration, and timing. Base-running has more to do with risk/reward decision-making, fluidity, and instincts. A base-stealer runs in a straight line with a defined endpoint. A base-runner runs in angles. Speed and athleticism is all that really ties these skills together.

Altuve has the speed and athleticism. That’s for sure. But when it comes to his base-running company, he’s the only one:

Look at that list of names. Look at it! It’s literally a list of nine old dudes whom way too many baseball fans believe they could beat in a footrace, and then Jose Altuve, one of the best base-stealers in the world.

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As you’ve probably heard before, there’s not a lot of rooting in this job. Not, at least, rooting of the conventional sort, for a particular team against a particular opponent. What there’s more of is rooting for particular stories, or particular trends. That’s where I found myself earlier — rooting for the Astros bullpen against the Rangers on Thursday, because I knew I wanted to write about it. It was going well, too, until Rougned Odor went deep off of Scott Feldman in the eighth. The Astros never rallied. Still, the bullpen yielded just the one run in more than four innings of work. It did its job, which makes this a decent time to point out it’s rather consistently been doing its job.

The offseason past was the offseason of relievers, and upon its completion, people couldn’t wait to see what the Yankees had assembled in action. The Astros by no means sat the offseason out, but there hasn’t been so much talk about them, what with the disappointing start. And if you think about the Astros bullpen, you might immediately think of the early struggles from Ken Giles. You might think about Luke Gregerson losing his closing gig. Not everything has gone smoothly, which makes it all the more remarkable that the Astros bullpen has been so dominant.

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It was a strange start to the season, you’ll remember. Even though the Astros, as a whole, were completely disappointing, Jose Altuve came out absolutely on fire. He put up numbers you’d expect from some elite-level slugger, and on May 5, he bashed his ninth home run. That put him on pace for something like 50, and though Altuve was never going to get all the way to 50, he was impossible not to notice. He already had the remarkable bat-to-ball skills. To that, he was adding selective strength. Call it a superstar turn.

It’s overly simplistic, but when you look at Altuve, you don’t see a home-run hitter. I shouldn’t need to explain why. The extent of the power was hard to believe, and now you could say things have calmed down: Last night, Altuve hit his first dinger in a month. I want to talk about that dinger, but more importantly, I want to talk about the process that led to that dinger. It’s not that Altuve’s start was a mirage. It’s that he was getting opportunities they’re not giving him anymore.

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Lance McCullers puts a lot of thought into his craft. The 22-year-old right-hander fashions himself a bulldog — understandably so; his father was a big-league closer — but in between starts he puts on his pitching-theorist hat. In many respects, he fits the analytic Astros’ paradigm to a tee.

Selected 41st overall by Houston in the 2012 draft, McCullers features a mid-90s fastball and a killer curveball. His lack of a consistent changeup has been a cause for concern, but to this point he’s thrived with the two plus pitches. Twenty-six games into his big-league career, McCullers has a 3.44 ERA and has averaged over a strikeout per inning.

McCullers talked about his pitching approach, which focuses more on spin than location, following a mid-May outing in Boston.

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McCullers on his adaptive approach: “I don’t like putting labels on people, like, ‘He’s a finesse guy’ or ‘He’s a power guy.’ The game will dictate how I pitch. If a team is trying to jump on my heater early — they’re really hunting fastballs — I have no problem throwing 60-70% offspeed and using my fastball for effect.

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It was an inauspicious start to the season for Michael Feliz. It’s been an inauspicious start to the season for the entire Houston Astros ballclub. One of them’s turned it around, providing hope to the other.

Feliz’s numbers, on the whole, are impressive, and even they come with something of an asterisk. In 20 innings of relief work, the 22-year-old right-handed rookie has struck out 33 batters and walked four — only two pitchers in baseball currently have a better K-BB%, and they both wear pinstripes. You’ve probably heard of them. The asterisk is that Feliz has walked just four batters all year, and they all came in his season debut, a 107-pitch relief outing back on April 6 after starter Collin McHugh recorded just one out. Feliz was thrust into action in the first, asked to eat innings, faltered, and was promptly sent to the minors for a fresh arm. He was recalled a couple weeks later, and since then, he’s been completely unhittable.

Dating back to that April 26 recall, Feliz has struck out half of the batters he’s faced, and he’s walked none of them. He’s getting ground balls, and he’s working multiple innings. Before the year, you might’ve only known Feliz’s name by being an Astros fan or a prospect hound — while he fell just outside of preseason top-100 prospect lists, most evaluators viewed him as a top-10 piece in a deep Astros’ system. Now, he’s turning heads, with the kind of numbers that practically demand attention.

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Two months ago, the Houston Astros looked like the obvious favorites in the AL West, but things haven’t exactly gone according to plan. Houston’s off to a disappointing 15-24 start, due in part to some terrible performances in the outfield. While George Springer and Colby Rasmus have hit well, Carlos Gomez, Preston Tucker and Jake Marisnick have a combined 252 plate appearances this year, and each has recorded a wOBA below .250. Gomez has been one of the biggest disappointments in baseball this year, and his struggles appear to be more than just bad luck.

To help fortify their struggling outfield, and provide a spark to their under-achieving team, the Astros have called up 24-year-old Tony Kemp from Triple-A. Although he stands at just 5-foot-7, Kemp hit .314/.393/.391 with 38 steals last season between Double-A and Triple-A, and was off to a similarly good start this year, slashing .298/.410/.405 at Fresno. Kemp’s a second baseman by trade, but has played a good deal of center and left field of late. Dan Farnsworth ranked Kemp 11th on his Astros prospect list heading into the year. Kemp appeared 15th among Houston prospects on Baseball America’s list. KATOH, however, is won over by his stellar minor-league track record. My system ranked him #2 in the Astros system and #53 overall.

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Just a couple weeks back, Dave Cameron examined the things that should worry us about Dallas Keuchel. He was more nuanced, but we could break it down into three components: lower velocity, fewer calls on the black, and fewer swings. For a guy that had the third-lowest zone percentage in baseball last year, the latter two seem hugely important for his success. So I asked the Astros’ lefty what he’s doing about those things.

Lower Velocity

Asking a pitcher about velocity is a delicate thing. Big increases mean whispers, and big declines mean… whispers of another sort. And then there’s the brutal march of time that fritters away our athleticism, day by day. You walk on egg shells.

But they know their radar-gun readings. And though age should have stolen about a tick from Keuchel, it looks like he’s down more than a tick and a half on the radar gun, from 89.6 mph last year to 88.0 this year. But that’s comparing all of last year to this year’s April, and also ignoring a slight uptick in recent games. If you compare last week’s velocity to last year’s April velocity, Keuchel is only down 0.8 mph, well in the normal range for a 28-year-old pitcher.

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