Archive for Houston Astros

No one hacked into the Houston Astros database 40 years ago. Had that been possible, they could have gleaned valuable information by doing so. Tal Smith is the reason why.

Smith was ahead of his time. While serving as the Astros director of player personnel, he began accumulating and cataloguing data “around 1969 or 1970.”

“This was only a few years after the advent of the amateur draft, and I thought it was important,” explained Smith. “I wanted a backlog of all the draft choices —where they were coming from, out of high school, out of college, and so on — and to track those players’ progress. We inputted all that data. This was back in the old keypunch days.”

His colleagues weren’t as enamored with his efforts. Smith left to work for the Yankees in 1973, and when he returned to Houston two years later he found that no one had maintained the program. It was necessary for him to start over. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, 10 MLB managers shared their thoughts on what has become known as the Third Time Through the Order Penalty. The fact that it exists in one thing. What to do about it is another.

One idea is to develop relievers who are able to work multiple innings on a consistent basis. In other words, go back a few decades to where it wasn’t uncommon. Pitchers like Bob Stanley used to do it all the time, and not just in the middle frames. He earned numerous multi-inning saves.

A while back, I asked Stanley if there’s any reason today’s relievers couldn’t do what he, and several of his contemporaries, did.

“You have to remember, back in the day we only had 10 pitchers on the staff,” said Stanley, who coaches in the Blue Jays system. “We had five relievers and they could all go two or three innings. Now we have seven relievers and most of them can only go one inning. Could they go longer? Sure, although some guys aren’t as tough as they used to be. It’s a different game now.”

Orioles pitching coach Dave Wallace — also in an older conversation — told me much the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Thirteen months ago, Houston scouting director Mike Elias described Derek Fisher as “A big kid who can run and has a good swing with some power.” Last night, the Astros sent the 37th-overall pick of the 2014 draft to the Philadelphia Phillies as part of the deal for closer Ken Giles.

Fisher — a 22-year-old left-handed-hitting outfielder out of the University of Virginia — possesses power and speed. Splitting this season between low-A Quad Cities and high-A Lancaster, he went deep 22 times and swiped 31 bags in 38 attempts. His slash line was a solid .275/.364/.483. Punch outs were an issue, as he fanned 132 times.

Fisher, who finished his first full professional season with the Glendale Desert Dogs, talked about his toolsy-yet-unpolished game near the conclusion of the Arizona Fall League season. Read the rest of this entry »

The Houston Astros acquired right-hander David Paulino and outfielder Danry Vasquez from the Detroit Tigers at the trade deadline in 2013 for a two-month rental of reliever Jose Veras. At the time Vasquez was a rising prospect for the Tigers and the centerpiece of the deal. Paulino was nothing more than a rail-thin project to sweeten the pot.

A lot has changed since then: Paulino has bulked up, his fastball has gained velocity and the breaking ball has taken a step forward developmentally. Across three levels of A-ball this season, the 21-year-old boasts an impressive 72:19 strikeout-to-walk ratio over 67.1 innings. Here are my notes from seeing Paulino in extended spring training this year.

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Astros right hander Francis Martes started the year in extended spring training and Kiley McDaniel had him graded as a 35+ FV. Martes was one of the lesser pieces in the big Jarred Cosart/Colin Moran trade and he was in Rookie-level ball at the time of the trade. From last year to early in 2015, Martes’ velocity jumped, his breaking ball jumped from fringy to at least plus, all of which has helped his above-average changeup play even better. Last week, Kiley graded Martes as the top prospect in the minor leagues that wasn’t in his pre-season Top 200, falling somewhere among the top-50 prospects in baseball and earning at 55 FV grade.

Martes went out to Low-A from extended spring this year, then to the hitter-friendly High-A Cal League where he dominated again until the 19-year-old scorching hot prospect got the promotion to Double-A on Monday. Here’s my observations from two looks at Martes earlier this year in extended spring training, in April/May when his whirlwind season was just getting started and very few scouts were paying attention.

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Twelve months ago, Eno Sarris wrote a great piece on how Dallas Keuchel grips each of his pitches. Today, hours before the Houston Astros ace starts for the American League in the All-Star game, we’ll take a look at his approach. We’ll do so with Keuchel’s own words, as well as those of his pitching coach, Brent Strom.

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Keuchel on setting up hitters: “When I go into a start, I’ll definitely look at the scouting report. I’ll watch video and make assessments of each hitter. But it’s also important to have a feel for what you’re doing and to command the ball to both sides of the plate. If I’m confident about a pitch that differs from the scouting report, I’ll try to execute that pitch to the best of my ability.

“You’ll see some of the smarter pitchers set-up guys, even though I don’t like the term “set-up.” If you can command your pitches away, say a fastball and a changeup away, then you can set hitters up for a fastball inside that they’ll take for a punch out. You can get feels for that during the course of a game. Read the rest of this entry »

The kerfuffle that led to Jerry DiPoto resigning as Angels GM has received plenty of attention, and for good reason. The reported power struggle is seemingly a clash of philosophies. Harkening back to the nascent days of Moneyball, more than a modicum of us-versus-them appears to be at play.

I’m certainly not privy to the club’s inner workings. Nor do I believe in taking sides based on conjecture. Until I learn more, I’ll question, but refrain from criticizing either faction.

Two things stand out from my most-recent time around the team. One is the length of the pre-series meeting the Angels had at Fenway Park earlier this season. It was notable for its duration, and apparently not atypical. According to an Anaheim beat writer, Mike Scioscia’s squad routinely spends a lot of time on scouting reports.

Reportedly, the DiPoto-Scioscia discord was related to Angels coaches not being willing to convey scouting information provided by the front office. That leads one to wonder what is covered in the meetings, and what type of information is being withheld.

A conversation I had with Angels pitching coach Mike Butcher also stands out. Read the rest of this entry »

At a time not very long ago — actually, just a single month and a few days ago — viscount of the internet Rob Neyer wrote at Just A Bit Outside about how the Houston Astros, then as now a first-place team, had been winning games with negligible contribution from any players drafted by General Manager Jeff Luhnow. Quoth Neyer:

The 2012 draft has, so far, produced two major leaguers: pitcher Lance McCullers and hitter Preston Tucker. McCullers and Tucker have combined for zero wins and one home run (granted, the homer was a big one Thursday). The 2013 and 2014 drafts haven’t produced any major leaguers.

The final sentence of Neyer’s paragraph remains, as of this writing, true. But, in a testament to how rapidly things are changing down in Houston, the first two sentences of Neyer’s paragraph have already become dramatically obsolete. Please recall that Neyer’s post is barely one month old.

Read the rest of this entry »

For me, there’s been something about seeing the first fruits of the Houston Astros’ years-long rebuilding project that really gets the imagination going. This is a team that is unquestionably built for the vague future that is even more unquestionably winning a lot in the concrete now. Let’s forget, for the length of this article, that the 2015 major-league team — alternately composed of beefy sluggers and finesse worm-burner-inducers — is favored by our projections to win the American League West and is tied for the seventh-best odds to win this year’s World Series. Let’s focus, for now, on the Astros’ draft picks in next week’s draft.

And I don’t mean the specific prospects that the Astros may or may not pick, a subject that has already been discussed in impressive depth by Kiley McDaniel. I mean the team’s early draft slots: 2, 5, 37, 46. The Astros are rich, and they stand to get much richer.

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The Houston Astros are 31-20 and on top of the AL West by four games. They’ve been winning in a signature way: by striking out a lot (the most in the league), hitting a lot of home runs (the most in the league), and recording a string of solid starts (10th-highest WAR among starting staffs). One way we didn’t expect the Astros to dominate this season, however: their bullpen. After two months, the Houston bullpen is ranked first among all major-league teams by strikeout and walk rate, and they also have the second-best ERA. Is this just a run of early-season success? Or, like the Royals, have the Astros built a relief corps that only a select few clubs have?

The bullpen was a major focus of the Astros’ offseason plans before the start of the 2015 season, as they added Pat Neshek, Luke Gregerson, Will Harris, and Joe Thatcher to a group that finished dead last in bullpen ERA in 2014. Neshek and Gregerson were brought in as high-pressure help, with Gregerson installed immediately into the closer role. Gregerson has struggled (relatively speaking) to the tune of a 3.74 ERA, but he’s really been the only one in the bullpen who hasn’t been lights out, and he’s chosen great times to be bad, blowing only one save.

What’s been the key to the success for the Astros bullpen? First of all, they’re striking out an incredible rate of opposing batters. Houston relievers have struck out 28.8% of the hitters they’ve faced — a figure which would be the most ever for a bullpen in history. They’ve also limited walks, only handing out free passes to 6.2% of opposition batters. That walk rate would be good for 25th-best in baseball history if the season ended today. Looking at these two figures, it’s not hard to see why the Houston bullpen has been great: success usually follows pitchers who strike out a high percentage of batters while keeping walks to an absolute minimum.

This mostly unexpected domination out of the Astros bullpen has come from a few unlikely places. First, there’s newcomer Will Harris, who’s struck out 29 batters in 24 innings of work while posting an elite ground-ball rate (58.3%). As the most-used pitcher out of the Houston pen, his two pitch, hard cutter/curveball combination has been very effective in two parts of the strike zone: 10 out of his 13 strikeouts with the cutter have been in the upper half of the strike zone and above, while all but one of his 11 strikeouts with his curveball have been in the lower half of the zone and below. This is what success in changing eye levels looks like:

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.