Archive for Astros

The emotions that surround a player’s promotion to the big leagues are intense. Dealing with the realization of a lifelong dream coming true, sharing the moment with friends, family and loved ones, and putting on that uniform for the first time in a 24-hour span takes a special mindset to separate the emotions from the moment. Even veterans still talk about having butterflies on opening day, or the start of a postseason series.

When a prospect gets to the major leagues, they want to do everything they can do to stay there. Sometimes, they know up front they are only up for a specific assignment and will be sent back down at a later date, but everyone gets one chance to make a first impression. Often, that impression is made with the bat and players will try to force that issue.

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We know we’re going to strike out. That’s just a given with guys who have power. And we have a lot of guys who can hit the ball out of the park. And that kind of goes hand in hand. But you look at some of the studies — and our guys have looked at them — and there’s not a direct correlation with strikeouts and offense.

— Atlanta general manager Frank Wren, interviewed by Jayson Stark on 2/18/13

Through their first two games, Braves hitters have 24 Ks in 75 PAs. But they also hit six HRs, they scored 16 runs in two games, and they’re 2-0. They’re living up to expectations. Unfortunately, so are the Astros. They have 43 Ks in 97 PAs through their first three games, becoming just the fifth team in history to strike out at least 10 times in the first three games of the season. The team is 1-2 with just 8 total runs scored. So how relevant are strikeouts to a team’s success?
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The Houston Astros are far from the worst team in baseball this season, but their ability to seriously contend in the near future is largely based upon the rebuilding effort that was fully implemented the moment Jeff Luhnow took over. Luhnow inherited a team with a poor farm system — ranked #27 by Marc Hulet — that was high on right-handed pitching and nearly devoid of high-ceiling bats.

He also walked into a sub-par major league situation, with a strange mix of pricey veterans and underwhelming youngsters. There were bright spots in both the major and minor leagues, but Luhnow took the job knowing very well that the organization was more than a mere move or two away from turning things around.

Luckily, he brought with him a strong reputation for building from within. The Astros finally started the rebuilding process last season under Ed Wade by trading Michael Bourn and Hunter Pence, and entered this past offseason with long-term goals that took precedent over short-term — and short-lived — success.

The organization was interested in a solution, not a band-aid, and ownership seemed more than willing to experience losing seasons if management did everything in its power to essentially hit the reset button. With one-third of the season in the books, the Astros are getting closer to the point where decisions need to be made and actions taken with respect to several rostered players whose departures could aid and potentially expedite the rebuilding process.

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The Astros released Bill Hall last week to make room for the returning Jason Bourgeois. The 31-year-old Hall had been awful this season for the Astros, producing 0.9 wins below replacement. His fielding has eroded in recent years, and his offense, aside for what appears to be a fluky uptick last season, has left much to be desired for almost five seasons. His wOBAs since 2006? Try .317, .297, .261, .342, .269.

Sure, there was some reason to think that the .342 might be more indicative of his offensive proclivities, but the signing was odd for a team like the Astros. To guarantee $3 million at the major league level and include an option for next season suggests that the team believed Hall had some upside. They still have Jeff Keppinger under control, but his injury opened up a spot. Since Hall isn’t a puts-butts-in-seats kind of guy, it probably would have made more sense to use some farmhand in the spot until Keppinger returned.

Where did his -0.9 WAR rank, you ask? Good question, I say, as the original theme of this post changed from why signing Hall made little sense for the Astros when a realization was made scanning the leaderboards. The default setting on our leaderboards filters only for batters that qualify for a batting title. Sorting the players by WAR from the bottom up, I expected to see Hall’s name toward the top of the list. It wasn’t there. The list went:

– Chone Figgins (-1.2)
– Aubrey Huff (-0.9)
– Miguel Tejada (-0.9)
– Dan Uggla (-0.8)
– Orlando Cabrera (-0.8)
– Hideki Matsui (-0.8)

Hall was nowhere to be found, even though his -0.9 was the same as Huff’s and Tejada’s mark. Hall has been so bad this season that he doesn’t even qualify for most leaderboards.

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Players switching their representation to Scott Boras in order to maximize earnings isn’t uncommon. Jayson Werth felt it prudent to do so last season in anticipation of his big upcoming contract. Robinson Cano acted accordingly in February. Around the same time as that Yankees slugger, Astros center fielder Michael Bourn followed suit and dropped SFX Baseball for the biggest agent in the game.

Bourn doesn’t necessarily profile similarly to Werth or Cano, but a player does not seek the help of Boras to offer hometown discounts or sign at a below-market rate. Just like the aforementioned triumvirate of new Boras representees, Bourn’s change in agencies likely signifies that he feels his money is coming. He avoided arbitration and signed for $4.4 million this season. Next year will mark the end of his arbitration eligibility, as he reaches free agency for the first time in 2013.

Is Bourn, 28, really a big contract type of player? Upon revisiting this story and reviewing his numbers it seems that, while he may be vastly underrated as a player, three issues loom with respect to his pending contractual status: the perception of players whose value is heavily derived on defense, his offensive numbers relative to the new league averages and not those from 2006-08, and the current status of the Astros franchise.

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I’m not sure exactly what is going on with the Houston Astros and their skipper Cecil Cooper, but it has me particularly concerned for Astros fans everywhere. While writer Danny Knobler hung with Mr. Cooper, the Astros manager pulled his best Jimmy Rollins impression and predicted at least 90 victories for the team this season. Why, you ask, would he think that? Feast your eyes on this quotation:

“We have a terrific bullpen. We have one of the best closers in the game. We’ve got the ace in the National League. We’ve got three of the best offensive players at their position. We’ve got, if not the best, then one of the top catchers in baseball. I mean, c’mon. We’ve got what it takes. You’re telling me we’re not going to win that many games?”

Yes, Cecil, I’m telling you that you will not be winning that many games this year. Not with the current roster, at least, and not without significant visits from the luck fairy and career year wizard. I fully comprehend that the job of a manager involves motivating his players and putting them in the best possible position to succeed, but the above quote seems more like a comment a fanboy would make in one of Dave’s organizational rankings posts.

The Astro bullpen is quite capable of performing well but is in no way a lock to dominate the league. I have long been a fan of Geoff Geary but he is slightly above average at best. Doug Brocail is still a solid enough reliever albeit being interchangeable with a good number of other bullpen arms. Wesley Wright has shown signs of promise. And any of Tim Byrdak, Clay Hensley, and Chris Sampson is likely good for slightly above replacement level production. But do not tell me you fully expect Latroy Hawkins to pitch as well as he did down the stretch. Terrific bullpen? No. Solid? Maybe.

Jose Valverde is a good closer, no question about that, but I would not slot him in the top five in the entire game. Maybe in the senior circuit, but not in all of baseball. This take is at least defendable, however. Roy Oswalt has arguably been the most consistently great pitcher of the decade, but he is not the best in the entire league. Maybe top ten or top fifteen, but not the best. He happens to be an elite performer, but not the elite performer.

Cooper’s next point of contention is asinine at best, given that if a player was clearly the best offensively at his position, we would not be racking our brains trying to figure out who he is talking about.

Lance Berkman is a great player, but Berkman < Pujols. Carlos Lee can definitely rake, but Manny Ramirez and even Matt Holliday can stake claim as the best leftfielders with the stick. After that, who would even qualify as the best offensively at a position. Miguel Tejada? Pudge Rodriguez? Is he talking about Hunter Pence? I’m even willing to forgive this massive oversight because it is harmless when compared to his next statement.

I don’t know what year Cecil Cooper is living in, but Pudge Rodriguez as one of the, if not the, best catchers in the game? What is this, 1999? Rodriguez is, at best, a league average player nowadays based primarily on positional scarcity and defensive prowess. But one of the best in the game? Seriously?

Cooper and some of his players base their 90+ win logic on the fact that they won 86 games last year and have apparently improved. Astros, Pythagoras. Pythagoras, Astros. They are not going to win 90 or more games this year. End of story. Of course I don’t expect Cooper to come out and discuss the ineptitudes of the team, but he didn’t have to emphatically overestimate their talent.

Amidst all of the excitement surrounding the Paulino-Jaramillo deal, the Waechter/Farnsworth/Horacio signings, and the impending fate of Ramon Vazquez, many of us missed the interesting scenario presented by one Roy Oswalt. The 31-year old ace of the Drayton Gang has expressed interest in restructuring his contract. Roy wants to win and feels that his salary may hinder GM Ed Wade from signing someone like Ben Sheets.

Oswalt is due to earn $14 mil in 2009, $15 mil in 2010, and $16 mil in 2011. All three of those seasons are guaranteed under the 5-yr/$73 mil contract extension he signed during the 2006 season. The deal also includes a club option for 2012 worth $16 mil, that Oswalt can opt out of for a buyout lower than the $2 mil designated by the team. The exact details of his proposal are not known, but Richard Justice is speculating that it may involve Oswalt decreasing his 2009 salary to something like $6 mil in exchange for a couple more years added to the current deal.

Restructuring contracts is very tricky, because the Players Union is not very likely to allow a player to receive less than he signed for. However, this sort of restructuring is not entirely taboo. In fact, one instance of such a move occurred in 2006 with Tom Glavine and the New York Mets. Glavine had signed a 4-yr/$42.5 mil deal to pitch in New York from 2003-2006. He was set to earn $10.5 mil in 2006, but restructured the deal to pay him $7.5 mil. Added onto the contract were options, both club and player, for the 2007 season.

Initially, Glavine’s $10.5 mil included half of the money deferred at 6% interest. Upon restructuring the deal to $7.5 mil, the deferred total fell to $2.5 mil, meaning that, no matter what, he would earn $5.25 mil and then the rest of that year’s salary deferred at 6% interest. The player option for 2007 would earn him $5.5 mil with an increase of $1 mil each for logging 180, 190, and 200 innings. The club option was worth $12 mil. In either case, if his salary fell below $14 mil, he could earn that amount through bonuses and incentives.

In essence, Glavine restructured his deal to pay him a lower fee in 2006, yet guarantee himself security for the 2007 season.

Oswalt is likely looking to do something similar, in terms of trading current money for a bit of extra security in the future. Perhaps he will not look to reduce his 2009 salary by $8-9 mil, but I can definitely see him renegotiating to earn something like $8 mil in 2009 in exchange for the 2012 season becoming guaranteed and the option shifting to 2013.

Oswalt had a “down year” in 2008, but Marcel projects him at a 3.70 FIP in 185 IP. Translated to runs and wins, as well as a slight bonus for pitching that amount of innings, Oswalt’s true talent level calls him a +3.7 win pitcher next season. Were he to sign a 1-yr deal at fair market value, the deal would be close to $18 mil. He is already signed to a deal that “underpays” him, and now he is looking to earn even less than that so the team has a better shot at competing next season.

Who knows if anything will come of this, as Ed Wade has not publicly discussed the situation, but it sure would be interesting if the team could afford Ben Sheets due to Oswalt restructuring. He could not accept a paycut, as the union prohibits such practices. His decreased salary in 2009 would have to be made up for in the form of more money and/or years down the road.

Drayton does not want to go over $100 mil on his payroll, and his supposed unwillingness to be flexible bugs me. The team was not that good in 2008, vastly outperformed their talent level, and realistically has little chance at contending in 2009. Signing someone like Sheets will not guarantee them the division or wild card, but at the very least shows someone like Oswalt that the team is serious about winning. Regardless, I find it quite odd that McLane wouldn’t be willing to up the payroll by whatever it takes to sign Sheets, or someone along those lines.

Roy Oswalt has been one of the best and most consistent pitchers in baseball this decade. He never got enough credit, likely due to pitching with Roger Clemens for the last few years, and does not have an intimidating frame out on the mound, but any team would be better with him on their staff. This year, though, many analysts have questioned what is wrong with Astros righty. Baseball is a game of reputations, and it is very possible for a player to have an entire season generalized on great or poor performance either very early or very late into a season.

This seems to be the case for Oswalt, who pitched poorly early on, but has been great recently, arguably the best starting pitcher in baseball over the last thirty days. Don’t believe me? Heck, based on his performance early on and the lack of national publicity directed towards the Astros, I wouldn’t believe that either, but his 1.47 WPA/LI in this span outranks everyone else.

His recent performance has lowered his seasonal ERA and FIP both to 3.91 which, while good, are definitely worse than we have come to expect from Oswalt. His FIPs since 2004 have been 3.17, 3.16, 3.30 and 3.59, leading to this year’s 3.91; it appears his controllable skills are steadily declining. Are they? His K/9 is the highest it has been since 2004, while his BB/9 is almost a half-batter lower than last year. His HR/9, however, which has ranged from 0.59 to 0.73 recently, is currently 1.09, which explains quite a bit.

How has the home run rate increased? The culprit is a HR/FB rate that has gone from 6.7-8.7% over the last four years to 13.8% this year. The league average in this category is generally 11-11.5%, so Oswalt had outdone it by a good margin for a few years. This year, though, his rate has been worse, despite decreasing quite a bit over the past month.

This leads into the title of the post. Yesterday, Pizza Cutter, my colleague at Statistically Speaking, wrote an article about Kelly Johnson in which he discussed how performance is equal to talent and luck; last year, Johnson’s performance was more luck-driven, whereas this year his performance is worse, but comprised of more talent. How does this apply to Oswalt? Well, since his HR/FB was so much lower than the average for those years, his FIP might not be the most accurate indicator of controllable skills. Look what happens when we introduce xFIP, which normalizes the home run factor of FIP:

Year   FIP     xFIP
2004   3.17    3.73
2005   3.16    3.56
2006   3.30    3.75
2007   3.59    4.08
2008   3.91    3.74

According to these numbers, Oswalt’s FIP is expected to be right around where it should have been from 2004-2006. The difference between FIP and xFIP is at its smallest point this year, meaning that Oswalt’s current performance is more talent driven than the result of “luck,” which I use very loosely because there may or may not have been something in his repertoire that limited home runs. His flyball rates have stayed stagnant, however, eliminating the possibility that perhaps he just had very low percentages of flyballs in those years.

We might not know how much talent or luck Oswalt has or benefits from, but he isn’t as bad as some people made him out to be earlier in the season. His xFIP has been in the same general range for the last five years. If there is something wrong with him, it would be that this is the first year in that span in which his FIP has not surpassed what was expected of him.

One of the odder stories this season was the revelation that former MVP shortstop Miguel Tejada is actually two years older than the public had been to led to believe. Despite the questionable journalism techniques utilized in order to show that Miguel’s pants had in fact been on fire for sixteen or seventeen years, the fact remained that he was 33 years old, not 31 years old. A few months later, he is now 34, not 32 years old.

The first thought to cross my mind upon hearing this news was how it would effect his projection coming into this season. He was already a 32-yr old shortstop experiencing a noticeable decline in power. Now that we discovered him to be a 34-yr old shortstop, the sharp decline made a bit more sense. With the in-season Marcel projector readily available I plugged in Miguel’s current numbers but entered in both of his birthdays. Here are the results:

32 yr – 2nd Half: .293/.346/.455, 8 HR, .801 OPS
32 yr – Total: .284/.329/.435, 18 HR, .764 OPS

34 yr – 2nd Half: .291/.344/.452, 8 HR, .796 OPS
34 yr – Total: .283/.328/.434, 18 HR, .762 OPS

In 2004, he posted a .534 slugging percentage as a 30 year old (thought to be 28 year old). Since then, the same metric has decreased in each year and, if his true talent level holds up in the second half, the .434 would again show a decline from the year prior. His true talent level was barely affected by the change in age based on these in-season projections, but moving forward this level will have two lost years to take into account.

In case you have not heard yet, Astros pitcher Shawn Chacon and general manager Ed Wade found themselves entangled in a verbal-turned-physical altercation yesterday. The incident, which took place prior to the game, stemmed from some combination of Chacon’s play, the manager’s office, and dinner. For a recap of the actual event, watch the video below:

Now, Chacon mentioned that he hopes this does not prevent him from pitching in the major leagues again, yet I’m wondering why he is pitching in the major leagues right now. Here’s a comparison between his Marcel for this year and his actual numbers:

Marcel: 1.44 K/BB, .266 BAA, 1.50 WHIP, 73.7% LOB, 4.69 ERA, E-F of -0.41
Actual: 1.29 K/BB, .267 BAA, 1.51 WHIP, 72.7% LOB, 5.04 ERA, E-F of -0.64

Marcel did a pretty darn good job of showing where his numbers would hover around and they really are not that good. His LOB rate is right around league average meaning he has not really been unlucky at all or due to regress. His K/BB is 3rd worst in the NL; his HR/9 is 5th worst; his FIP is 3rd worst; and his BB/9 is 7th worst.

Using the ‘last 3 calendar years’ parameter and setting the qualifying cutoff at those with 180+ IP in that span, here are Chacon’s ranks amongst all pitchers–SP and RP–since he was a reliever last year:

K/9 – 185 of 263
BRAA – 188 of 263
HR/9 – 209 of 263
WHIP – 218 of 263
WPA/LI – 227 of 263
BB/9 – 241 of 263
FIP – 253 of 263

Based on his controllable skills just ten pitchers given the chance to pitch as often, if not more, have been worse, and yet it took a physical altercation with his GM to get him off the mound? Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but regardless of his “good start,” I would have very little, if not no, confidence with him in my starting rotation. Maybe the Astros can use this as an excuse to get rid of a low-risk signing that does not appear to offer even medium reward.