The 2019 Astros Join a List of Great Failures

The list of baseball’s winningest teams is one that any franchise would want to be on, but if we take that list and remove the World Series champions, it becomes something of a bummer. Everyone remembers the 2001 Mariners more for what they didn’t do than what they did. It’s not clear how history will remember the 2019 Astros. It seems likely this club will simply get tossed in with the 2017 team that did win it all, taking some of the sting away from not being able to claim a second championship this season. Though perhaps difficult for Houston and its fans right now, we should remember just how great this team was. There’s a reason the Astros’ World Series odds were so high for so long, and it’s because they put together a roster that, over the course of the regular season and much of the postseason, was a lot better than everyone else.

The table below feels almost obligatory, but here’s a list of the teams to win least 105 games, with how their seasons finished:

Ahead of the Astros on the list are the 2001 Mariners, the 1906 Cubs, the 1954 Indians, and the 1969 Orioles, with the 1931 A’s also winning 107 games. Looking just at wins can skew things a little because teams haven’t always played 162 games and doesn’t give us a great sense of their underlying talent level. To provide some of that perspective, let’s first take a look at WAR. I went back to 1903 and separated every team’s WAR by pitching and hitting, and put it on this scatter plot:

The Astros are one of just nine teams to hit 60 WAR in a season. Of those teams, only three won the World Series. Here are the teams with the most WAR produced in a season:

If someone tried to tell you that WAR doesn’t matter since only seven of the top 20 teams won the World Series, keep in mind only 11 of the top 21 teams by wins won the World Series. Also, look at this scatter plot that shows win percentage and WAR by team for every season since 1903:

There’s pretty clearly a strong relationship between a team’s WAR and how many games they win. Because both WAR and wins matter, I wanted to put the two together to give this Astros season greater context. To that end, I created an IQ-like score for win percentage and WAR, where 100 is average and each standard deviation away from the average was worth 15 points:

The Astros aren’t the best team not to win the World Series; that “honor” still goes to the Mariners. And they aren’t the best team to make it to the World Series and lose. Even if you throw out the 1906 Cubs because it was so long ago, the 1969 Orioles probably have the better case. But after those teams, the Astros stand out. Also standing out on this list, the Washington Nationals, who just beat two of the greatest teams of all time on their way to winning the World Series. The Astros had a great season, great enough that they are now on the list no team wants to be on.