The Houston Astros grabbed all of our attentions a couple of weeks ago, when they rattled off 10 wins in a row and vaulted to the top of the American League West. They’ve cooled off quite a bit since, going 3-6 since that streak. Yet, despite their recent struggles, they had built up enough of a cushion to maintain a .618 winning percentage and a four-game lead over the second place Angels. Not bad for a team that lost 111 games just two seasons ago.

The Astros have a very good record, and a decent shot at making the playoffs (45% by our calculator), but their roster isn’t without holes. And perhaps none of these holes is bigger than the one at shortstop. Currently, the Astros are employing Marwin Gonzalez as their primary shortstop, with a little bit of Jonathan Villar on the side. To date, these two have wRC+s of 68 and 30, respectively, and have contributed a total of -0.5 WAR.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Astros signed Jed Lowrie to a three-year contract back in December to play shortstop, but he lasted all of three weeks before landing on the shelf with a thumb injury. As of this writing, Lowrie’s on the 60-day DL and isn’t expected to return until sometime after the All-Star break.

Gonzalez and Vilar are unlikely to contribute much value for the Astros going forward. And, given the nature of Lowrie’s injury, it’s anyone’s guess whether he’ll be of much use in the season’s second half. The immediate future looks pretty bleak for the Astros at short, but help is on the way. The Astros promoted top prospect Carlos Correa to Triple-A on Tuesday, putting him just a step away from the big leagues.

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This would’ve been better-timed yesterday, before the Astros lost a game to the Rangers, thereby having their winning streak snapped. Good teams don’t want to make a habit of losing games to the Rangers. But the timing doesn’t matter, because the message still stands: even with the loss, the Astros currently have the best record in the American League. More than that, the Astros have put a full seven games between themselves and the next-closest team in their division. The other AL division leads: two games, and half of a game. As a reminder, the team we’re talking about right now is the Houston Astros.

You know how this works. All these posts nowadays have to contain this information. On Opening Day, we gave the Astros a 14% chance at the playoffs, with a 5% chance at the division. Now they’re at 51% and 36%, respectively. They’re the favorites to win the AL West, even though we have them projected to play the rest of the way slightly below .500. It’s the whole thing about every game mattering. The Astros’ advantage is in the books, and the season is about a sixth complete. Let’s say, before the year, you figured the Astros would be 10 games worse than their direct competition. Let’s say you still believe that! Over the remainder, with the season shortened, you’d put the difference a hair over eight games. And, as I write this, the Astros’ lead is seven games. It’s very simple math. Because of their start, and because of the starts of their various rivals, the 2015 Houston Astros are for real.

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It takes a lot of muscle to square up a big fastball. In the case of George Springer, it might also take some relaxation.

Heading into the series that had the Astros in town, I asked hitting consultant and FanGraphs author Dan Farnsworth about a few of the Astros hitters as part of my research process. About Springer, Farnsworth said “I like his swing a lot, perhaps except for the excessive effort he has sometimes.” I didn’t get to talk to Springer, but I did talk to his hitting coach Dave Hudgens, and that word came up again.

Apparently, though, excessive effort is not a problem in batting practice. Take a look at the swings he took that day in batting practice, and they do look free and easy.

In game, it’s tough to get the same side view. But here in this package of highlights about Springer’s five-RBI night against the Padres, you might see some more effort.

And then there’s the problem that most videos are highlight videos, when the player is acting optimally. But here’s a side-view of a Springer at-bat in minor league camp, and in a swing before the home run, you can see what might be called effort issues. (And another, here, from the majors, with some slow mo.)

Of course, we’re talking bout batting practice, which is a two-fold problem.

For one, hitters are often working on parts of their swing that aren’t their best features. Farnsworth pointed out that Ian Kinsler’s batting practices are full of squibbers to first base, and then come game time, Kinsler is hitting frozen ropes to left field, his pull field. Despite the fact that scouts take a lot of knowledge away from batting practice, you wouldn’t want to assume Kinsler was a light-hitting opposite-field guy after watching him in BP.

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Sure, he’s the shortest regular of this century, but Jose Altuve has managed big things. Last year, he put up the second-best batting average of a second baseman in the free agency era, broke the Astros’ single-season record for hits, and showed the best pop of his career. A few changes to his game helped him be even better.

“Oh he’s always been this good, I remember when I first saw him in the Venezuelan Summer League and was amazed,” laughed his current hitting coach, Dave Hudgens. But he agreed that a small change to his batting stance over the last few years may have made a difference.

Here’s Altuve in 2013. Watch his front leg.

Here’s Altuve this year. Watch his front leg again.

See it? Altuve added a little bit of a more dramatic step with his front leg in early 2014. “Not too much, just a little,” Altuve said of the change. “I wanted to do an early step, not a big leg kick.”

The change has helped him in a couple different ways. “I recognize pitches earlier now that I’m doing that,” Altuve said. Hudgens agreed that the step has helped him start his entire swing and thinking process earlier. Altuve has always made a lot of contact — he’s in the top ten in contact rate this year — but his ability to make contact took a leap forward with the step.

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When MLB added a second Wild Card in each league for the 2012 season, making a version of the postseason got easier. More teams were invited into the season’s final month, even if you want to make conditioned arguments about how adding the extra teams changed the nature of in-season roster decisions. Over three seasons, we’ve had six second Wild Cards who averaged just under 90 wins per team per season. It’s a small sample as far as trends go, but the values have been lower in the National League and have generally decreased each year.

As a result, we can essentially say that the average second Wild Card will win about 90 games this year. It might be more or less, but it’s a fairly safe starting assumption. It’s an assumption you take into account when thinking about your team’s chances of making the playoffs. We’ve seen teams make the postseason with fewer wins, and in an age of increasing parity, 88 might do the trick as well. In general, a 90 win team has performed well enough that they will very likely make the playoffs under the current regime.

Which brings us to the 14-7 Houston Astros who currently lead the AL West by four games on April 30. The Astros, if you haven’t noticed, have been bad for quite a few years, and there was an expectation entering the 2015 season that they would remain relatively unimportant to the AL playoff picture. They averaged 58 wins over the previous four seasons, and while they built a team that our Playoff Odds machine projected for 78 wins in 2015, that’s a far cry from the amount needed to make the postseason, as we just learned.

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On Wednesday, Collin McHugh pitched well against the Ben Zobrist-less Oakland A’s. Zobrist’s absence made the A’s a weaker version of themselves, but they were still a tougher opponent than the hapless Rangers he saw five days earlier. While McHugh only tossed 5.2 innings and faced just 23 batters, he tied Trevor Bauer for the single-game strikeout lead for 2015 with 11. Although unlike Bauer, McHugh walked zero A’s instead of five Astros.

This is largely noteworthy because Collin McHugh was one of the most prominent breakout players from a year ago, and we’re dying to know how much of that breakout we should take to heart. In 2014, McHugh was a 3-4 win player, who could have been a solid number two starter on almost any team in the league and he posted those numbers in under 160 innings. If McHugh is actually that able, the Astros have five more seasons of a very good pitcher who can help anchor their next playoff rotation.

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One year ago, Jon Singleton was a consensus Top-100 prospect. Eleven months ago, he was making around $8,000 per month in Triple-A. Ten months ago, he was was promoted to the majors where the Major League Baseball minimum salary would have paid him a little over $300,000 for the rest of the season. Just yesterday, he was sent back down to the minors where he again would have been making around $40,000 for the season. He is not making $40,000, however, because Singleton signed a controversial contract last year guaranteeing him $10 million before he reached the majors. He’ll make $2 million this season, and every month he spends in the minors he will make 50 times as much money as he would have without his contract.

Nothing is going to change the fact that the Astros likely got a bargain when they signed Singleton. They lowered his potential arbitration salaries and received an option for a free agent year while only guaranteeing $10 million. Even if Singleton does not become a successful major league player, guaranteeing him less than what the team is paying Scott Feldman this year was an easy choice. For Singleton, the choice was not likely so easy.

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Yesterday, we kicked off our look at each division by going through the NL West. Today, we’ll do the AL version from the land of pitcher’s parks.

The Projected Standings

There are two pretty strong contenders at the top, two somewhat interesting teams hanging around the middle, and a likely also-ran. The top of the AL West is unlikely to be as strong this year as it was a year ago, but the low-end of the division should be somewhat better, and the race is open enough to remain interesting all year long. Let’s take a look at the teams.

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Yesterday, 2014’s top overall draft pick Brady Aiken announced that he had undergone Tommy John Surgery, leaving him as a bit of a lottery ticket for this upcoming draft. Aiken, however, made sure to emphasize that he doesn’t regret walking away from the Astros final $5 million offer on the day of the signing deadline.

Since last summer, a lot of people have wondered how I could have turned down a multi-million-dollar signing bonus after being picked first in the draft. Now, I know they’ll probably be wondering about it again. I can honestly say I don’t regret not signing. It was a very difficult decision, but it also was an informed decision based on circumstances only a few people know the truth about. My family and I planned for all the possible outcomes. We weighed the pros and cons, talked with friends and mentors and doctors whose opinions we value and discussed it over a number of family dinners. This wasn’t a decision we made lightly.

The money wasn’t the only factor to consider. I wanted to play somewhere I felt comfortable, with a support system I felt would lay the groundwork for a successful and long career. Making sure I had that in place was worth the frustration of not being able to get on with my career sooner.

My family was smart, and we accounted for all of the possible risks. Having gone through this process, I really encourage other players to take the time to be fully educated about what they are getting into and to plan for the unexpected. Having a solid plan helped me through the ups and downs. Even now, I know I made the decision that made the most sense for my future.

The second paragraph is the latest in a long list of complaints Aiken and his representatives — primarily Casey Close — have lobbed at the Astros. It is not news that the negotiations between the Astros and Aiken’s camp were contentious, and as Mike Petriello wrote after it all fell apart, both sides came out of it looking poorly. And while yesterday’s news certainly seems to validate the Astros medical concerns about the risk potential of Aiken’s elbow, I have to mostly agree with Evan Drellich that using this news to proclaim that the Astros were right and Aiken’s camp were wrong is drawing a conclusion without sufficient evidence to support it. Let’s just quote Drellich’s piece:

What did the Astros believe?

There appears to be a public assumption that the Astros’ stance was that Aiken would fall apart, that they wanted nothing to do with him.

The situation wasn’t nearly that black and white. In simple terms, the team had to weigh the value of signing Aiken vs. the value of receiving the second overall pick in 2015. (Baseball Prospectus had an in-depth piece on the negotiation logic.)

The fact that the Astros offered Aiken $5 million on the final day of negotiations, above the minimum $3.1 million they had to offer him to be compensated with the second overall draft pick this year, is important. If the team were so sure Aiken’s health would fail, why would they raise the offer?

(An interesting but impossible to prove counter argument would be that the Astros reacted to public opinion in raising the offer, against their better judgment.)

“Basically, we tried to engage the other side, Casey Close three times today,” general manager Jeff Luhnow said July 18, right after an afternoon deadline passed. “Made three increasing offers and never received a counter, really they just never engaged, for whatever reason there was no interest. There just didn’t appear interest to sign on their side.

“Very disappointed. I think this is a player we wanted obviously we took him 1-1. You know we would have liked to have signed him and (Jacob) Nix and (Mac) Marshall, all three of ‘em. But you can’t do that without the other side wanting to be a part of it, so we move on.

“We made that offer a while back, the 40 percent offer. But we came up from that three times without ever receiving a counter.”

The fact that the Astros made multiple offers to Aiken is a point in favor of the fact that Aiken had some value even with the medical concerns, but we also have to remember that the Aiken negotiations weren’t being held in a vacuum; the Astros needed Aiken to sign in order to have enough money to sign Jacob Nix and Mac Marshall. They weren’t just making offers based on Aiken’s own personal risk/reward, but on the total value of being able to sign Aiken, Nix, and Marshall while staying within their bonus pool allotment. If they put a high enough value on Nix and Marshall, it could have been a net positive to pay Aiken even if they were 100% convinced that he was going to need Tommy John surgery and wouldn’t have been worth his own bonus, so long as it left them enough money to sign two other players who they thought they were getting value on.

Of course, we can’t know if the Astros were actually 100% certain that he would need this surgery. It’s almost impossible to be sure of anything in life, and while Aiken’s ligament did tear last week, the fact that something happens does not prove that it was an inevitability. We can add this data point to the list of things we know and say it’s now more likely that the Astros correctly analyzed his risk profile than it was before he blew out his arm, but this doesn’t prove that they got it right. It suggests it, to some slightly larger degree than previously known, but just as you don’t want to judge a decision by its outcome on the baseball field, so too should we not assume that the Astros definitely had this figured out just because Aiken’s elbow did eventually give out.

And that’s the problem with drawing conclusions from our perspective; there are just too many things we can’t know about this entire situation. Something clearly happened between Jeff Luhnow (or one of his employees) and Casey Close that rubbed both of them the wrong way, but what it was and who was to blame is something that we have no real evidence of. We could build a speculative case against the Astros based on the fact that this isn’t the only time they’ve had some issues with negotiating contracts with players, but even if the Astros somehow screwed up the Ryan Vogelsong deal, that doesn’t prove they were definitively to blame in the Brady Aiken situation.

We can guess at things. We can attempt to decide which side’s version of self-serving comments we put more credibility into, and maybe even be comfortable with our speculation about which side was more likely at fault in all of this.

But the reality is that it’s all just uneducated guessing. The real evidence, the kind of stuff that would allow us to form opinions that are worth anything, is not public and almost certainly never will be. So we’re just left with just enough information to be dangerous. There is enough out there to give us a false sense of certainty that we can have a real opinion on what probably happened, but not enough to really support a strong opinion either way. The amount of information we have about this situation is the equivalent of knowing a batter’s batting average with runners on base in Wednesday afternoon games.

While it’s tempting to say that this news proves the Astros were in the right all along, I don’t think we can actually say that with any confidence. We just don’t know enough. All we can really say is that something went down, we don’t know who is to blame, and the whole situation sucked for everyone involved.

It’s gettin’ to that time of year when folks tend to preview stuff ’round baseball. Our annual Positional Power Rankings will be coming to the site over the next couple weeks, you’ll surely see all sorts of divisional preview pieces pop up between now and Opening Day, and this right here is going to be a preview of team defenses.

We saw last year where a good defense can take a team. The Kansas City Royals were more than just a great defense, but it was evident, especially during the playoffs, how much an elite defense can mean to a ballclub. The same was true, but on the other end of the spectrum, for the Cleveland Indians. Our two advanced defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating — agreed that the defense in Cleveland was worth around -70 runs last season. In Kansas City, it was something like +50. That’s a 120-run difference! That’s about 12 wins! Those teams play in the same division! Move 12 wins around and the result is an entirely different season! Defense isn’t the biggest thing, but it’s a big thing. Let’s look ahead.

All the numbers used in this piece will come from UZR and DRS. For the team projections, I simply utilized our depth charts and did a little math. We’re going to take a look at the three best, the worst, the teams that got better, the teams that got worse, and then all the rest down at the bottom. For the upgrades/downgrades, I used the difference of standard deviations above or below the mean between last year’s results and this year’s projections.
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