The Houston Astros are not off to the start they had hoped for. At 3-7, they find themselves in last place in the AL West, and ahead of only the winless Minnesota Twins in the American League overall. The cause of their slow start? The pitching, which ranks 27th in ERA and 24th in FIP. The back end of the rotation has been particularly lousy, with Collin McHugh, Doug Fister, and Mike Fiers having combined to allow 23 runs in 29 innings. And yet, those aren’t the Astros starters I’d be most concerned about right now. Instead, I’m a bit worried about reigning Cy Young winner Dallas Keuchel.

From a results perspective, he’s been okay-ish, with a 3.55 ERA through his first two starts. But the underlying numbers during those first two starts are a bit concerning. First, there’s this.

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Luke Gregerson isn’t as slider-heavy as he was once was. The Astros reliever threw his signature pitch 41% of the time last season. Since he broke into the big leagues in 2009, his 54.4% slider rate is the highest among pitchers who’ve recorded at least 350 innings.

He’s been effective. Gregerson boasts a 2.79 ERA and 2.97 FIP in 500 career appearances. He notched 31 saves last year, and while he’s more about ground balls than punch outs, his K/9 is a more than respectable 8.81.

Most of the questions the 31-year-old righty has fielded this spring have revolved around Houston’s offseason acquisition of Ken Giles — a closer with the Phillies — and their roles going forward. On Wednesday, I approached Gregerson with a different subject in mind: his hard-to-square-up slider.

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Gregerson on what he considers ideal fastball-slider speed differential: “That’s a good question. I’ve never really thought about that too much. I just want it to move. That’s the biggest key for me. For guys who throw really hard, having a straight change that’s a slower speed is definitely a good thing. But for somebody like myself who’s not very overpowering… I’d say I’m looking more for late, hard movement, not a change of speed from my fastball.”

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On Monday, Astros manager A.J. Hinch told reporters that Luke Gregerson would start the season as his team’s closer. Given Gregerson’s successful stint as closer in 2015 and his general track record of success in recent years, such an announcement might sound like a formality. After all, “Team’s Good Closer to Remain Closer” is not exactly newsworthy.

What made the announcement interesting is that over the winter the Astros traded Vincent Velasquez, Mark Appel, Thomas Eshelman, Harold Arauz, and Brett Oberholtzer to the Phillies for Ken Giles and Jonathan Arauz. Giles, as you likely know, had been extraordinary in relief over his first 115.2 innings in the majors and could easily be considered one of the best five or ten relievers in the game. Naming Gregerson the closer and Giles the setup man raised some eyebrows given the price the Astros paid to acquire Giles four months prior.

It doesn’t matter if you subscribe to the projections, recent performance, or a simple visual analysis of their stuff, Giles grades out better. We project he’ll beat Gregerson’s ERA and FIP by 0.30 to 0.40 runs this year and Gregerson has never had a season on par with Giles’ performance to date. Both generate lots of swinging strikes, but Giles has the velocity that appeals to scouts. Gregerson is a very good reliever, but there isn’t a plausible case to be made that he’s better than Giles. Yet when Hinch went to the bullpen on Tuesday, it was Giles in the eighth and Gregerson in the ninth.

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Tyler White has already accomplished a hell of a lot for a baseball player, no less a baseball player who wasn’t drafted until the 33rd round. He earned six minor-league promotions in just three years. He hit .311/.422/.489 across those six stops — a surefire way to quickly climb the organizational ladder. He was invited to the Houston Astros’ big-league camp, where he hit .348/.446/.543, and at the end of it all, he was handed the Opening Day job as the team’s first baseman, and why wouldn’t he?

It was somewhat of a surprise, given White having never played in the majors, and the Astros’ status as a contender, and Jon Singleton having been the favorite throughout the winter, but White outplayed Singleton, and frankly, White’s outplayed Singleton every step of the way.

So a 25-year-old rookie is now the starting first baseman on a team many consider to be the best in the American League, and expectations, naturally, are high. It doesn’t take much more than a quick perusal of #AstrosTwitter to see the hype surrounding White. Many feel he’s the long-term answer at first base for a team who gave 47 starts to Luis Valbuena and Marwin Gonzalez there in the midst of a playoff run last season. Some are calling for Rookie of the Year. Someone I spoke with recently loosely compared him to Paul Goldschmidt, if not only as late-round first basemen who were slept on during their ascent through the minor leagues, despite doing nothing but crushing every level at which they played.

And it’s true — White has been slept on. Even this year, a year after putting up a .467 on-base percentage and 178 wRC+ at Triple-A, he didn’t make a single top-100 prospect list. Not at MLB, not at ESPN, not at Baseball America, not at BaseballProspectus. Our own Dan Farnsworth was higher on White than any other prospect evaluator this offseason, and even Farnsworth’s bullishness pegged White as the sixth-best prospect in the system.

Mostly, it has to do with the position. White came up as a third baseman, but has since been moved to first and may even be better suited as a designated hitter. He offers little in the way of speed, and without any value coming from the field or the bases, the bat’s got to be elite for him to have value as a prospect. His career minor-league wRC+ is 157, which sure hints at an elite bat — for reference, Goldschmidt’s was 163 — but what makes White such a compelling case, beyond the production defying his late-round draft status, is his offensive profile.

See, White’s overall production in the minors has mirrored that of a slugging first baseman, but the way he goes about that production has not. More specifically: for a first baseman, he doesn’t have much in the way of power. Instead, he derives his offensive value from a remarkable ability to control the strike zone; in the minors, he’s walked 174 times and struck out 164 times. Yes, that’s more walks than strikeouts across more than 1,200 plate appearances.

White is intriguing due in part not only to his career trajectory, but also his profile. Both seem nearly unprecedented, and so in cases like these, when we begin treading into unfamiliar territory, it only makes sense to gain context by means of historical perspective.

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Dan Straily needed to see a doctor. He wasn’t running a fever or suffering from strep throat; he had a bum shoulder. The symptoms of his malady were decreased velocity and general ineffectiveness. He initiated some independent research, and upon the recommendation of Houston Astros pitching coach Brent Strom and bullpen coach Craig Bjornson, Straily, 27, picked his practitioner.

After sitting in the waiting room that is Triple-A for much of the 2015 season, Straily paid a visit to Driveline Baseball in Seattle, where he met with Kyle Boddy. Boddy — the subject of a recent post here by Eno Sarris — isn’t an M.D., but you can think of him like a pitching doctor. Straily showed up, rattled off his ailments, and named his desired health benchmarks.

Straily told Boddy he needed to get his fastball back to sitting at 92 mph, with the ability to touch 94. That’s where he was when he first came up as an exciting, 23-year-old pitching prospect with Oakland back in 2012. Lately, his fastball had been sitting 89, and he struggled to touch 92 at all, and his effectiveness plummeted. The reason was the shoulder; he needed to get that healthy. And his breaking ball, he told Boddy, needed sharpening up.

Straily’s average fastball velocity by year

Boddy listened to his patient, and ran the preliminary examinations. That meant a trip to the biomechanics lab to analyze Straily’s delivery, and some tests to measure the movement and spin rate on his pitches. The doc came back with good news.

“I brought everything back and I said, ‘You know, your breaking ball is actually fine. I think that problem will go away if you throw 94 and sit 92,’” Boddy said. “And [Straily] said, ‘Alright, perfect.’ So we were on the same page from the get-go.”

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There’s a stat on here we don’t talk very much about. It’s a stat that measures double-play value, above or below average, and it’s folded in with the baserunning numbers. It goes by wGDP, and for hitters, a positive number is good, and a negative number is bad. Here’s something about the stat that shouldn’t surprise you: Over the last three years combined, the worst hitter in baseball by double-play value has been Billy Butler, at -10.5 runs. It’s good to make sure advanced numbers mostly agree with your impressions, because that confirms the numbers aren’t imaginary. As double plays go, Butler has everything working against him. So, yeah.

Now I have a quiz for you. You’re given that, since 2013, Butler comes in last by this measure. Who do you suppose is second-to-last? Think about this carefully before you answer. Think about what would cause a player to hurt his team the most via double plays. Think about playing time, and lineup position. I shouldn’t give you any more clues. Here’s the quiz, with all of one question:

Are you all done? Great. Everyone who voted is wrong. The answer is Jose Altuve.

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Episode 639
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he examines Houston’s relative weakness at first base and designated hitter, the possible implications of Baltimore’s strikeout-heavy lineup following the acquisition of Pedro Alvarez, and a potential blindspot in the BaseRuns run and win estimator.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 33 min play time.)

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The Houston Astros are, in some ways, an odd team. Their best hitter is their 21 year old shortstop, and then their next best hitters are a toolsy outfielder and a 5’5 second baseman. Pretty much around the field, the team has stockpiled well-rounded players, and they have a lot of good athletes who are also good hitters, giving them significant depth in their line-up. In fact, our depth charts project them to get average or better production from seven of their nine spots, and gives them one of the best up-the-middle groups in all of baseball.

But their line-up also has a couple of notable weak spots: first base and designated hitter. These are ostensibly the two easiest positions on the diamond to fill, given that you can focus primarily on offensive production at those spots, widening the pool of available options, but while the Astros have found quality performers at every other spot, they’ve struggled to find guys who specialize in just hitting. Last year, the team got just a 104 wRC+ from their first baseman, and a 101 wRC+ from their designated hitters, ranking in the bottom tier in the league at both positions.

Incumbent first baseman Chris Carter was non-tendered for his lack of production, but interestingly, the team didn’t really make any moves to replace him, and will instead rely on an in-house mix of candidates while looking to get better production than they did a year ago. While there weren’t a lot of quality first baseman moving around this winter, they could have theoretically gotten involved in the Todd Frazier bidding, or gone for a lower-upside play like Yonder Alonso or Adam Lind. But the team was apparently comfortable with what they had internally, and are now using spring training to sort out who is going to grab the jobs at the two bat-first positions. Let’s take a look at those options.

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Every year, we go through spring training, and every year, we mostly ignore it, so, every year, we get asked what, if anything, really matters out of these preseason contests. For me, the answer has remained the same. As hitters go, it’s difficult to find substance, although you might be able to read into any newfound power to the opposite field. That’s what tipped me off a few years ago to the coming emergence by Michael Saunders. It’s a little easier to get into pitchers, and while it can be fun to track any progress by newly-adopted pitches, it mainly comes down to velocity. There’s not really any “faking” velocity. Any velocity spike warrants attention. Any velocity drop warrants different attention.

It’s simplistic, sure, and it can be a little annoying, because some pitchers are still building up their arm strength, and spring-training velocities aren’t widely available. If you focus on velocity, though, you have the best chance of keeping signal separated from noise. You have a decent chance of not being deceived, and with all this in mind, I’ve already seen one particularly encouraging note. When the Astros signed Doug Fister, he was something of a reclamation project. He might already be most of the way fixed.

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Earlier this week, Salvador Perez and the Kansas City Royals agreed on a second contract extension. In terms of financial need or justification for the Royals, there weren’t any compelling reasons for the Royals to sign Perez to another extension when his previous contract kept Perez under control through the 2019 season. Even with no extensions, Perez would not have been a free agent until after this season. In his analysis of the deal, Jeff Sullivan focused on the human element of the deal and being fair to Perez. Ken Rosenthal wondered if this would start a trend and named a few other players who might benefit from teams deciding to be a bit more fair. Perez is certainly not the first player to sign a very team-friendly deal, but he is also not the first player to be awarded a second deal despite having a number of years still left on his first contract.

In Rosenthal’s piece, he acknowledges that Perez was a “special case,” noting that the Royals catcher had recorded just 158 plate appearances at the time he signed the contract. That lack of experience led to a very low guarantee and the three team options that would have prevented Perez from reaching free agency for another four seasons. While acknowledging both the lack of need and the recognition of fairness, Rosenthal suggested six other players who might fit the same bill as Perez, although perhaps on a smaller scale given their larger guarantees: Paul Goldschmidt, Anthony Rizzo, Jose Altuve, Chris Sale, Madison Bumgarner and Chris Archer.

On the whole, these types of extensions save massive amounts of money for teams, but we can take a look at the contracts Rosenthal discusses and compare them to Perez’s to see if they are actually close. The first few columns of the table below should be self-explanatory, but the last column, FA Surplus Value, might not be. To calculate the surplus value, I took current projections, applied standard aging curves, set the cost of a win at $8 million for this year along with 5% increases in years thereafter and compared the value of the projected production to the cost for free agent years only. For the players below, their arbitration salaries have also been at a discount, so if you want to include those values, feel free to add on another 20% or so (whichever number you feel like) to capture that discount as well.

Rosenthal did a very good job identifying the super-team-friendly contracts. Perez falls right in the middle of those contracts in terms of surplus value, but what makes his case different is the very low salary-level in relation to the other players — this, even if his options had been picked up. The top-four players on that list are massive bargains, but at least they will be paid around $10 million or more per year — double that of Perez. Altuve is in nearly the same boat as Perez in terms of salary, but he gave up just two years of free agency, which limits the surplus value.

Looking back through MLB Trade Rumors’ extension tracker, I identified players who were locked up to a second extension while still possessing multiple years on their first one. The idea: to find some sort of precedent for the Perez contract, or perhaps something closer to the situations of Sale, Bumgarner, Goldschmidt and Rizzo. Certain names come to mind immediately when considering players who’ve received a second extension while still playing on the first. Miguel Cabrera, for example. And Ryan Howard. These are classic cases of a team mistakenly extending players before they’d have to, but neither case is really similar to Perez’.

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