A Bad Time for the Hitters to Slump

In a dispiriting week, the starting pitching was great, but the bats were terrible. The damage to the team's playoff chances was substantial.

The Astros entered this past week with spirits held high. A series win in Oakland had pushed the Astros record to just 5 games below .500, the first time the team had been that close to even since April 17, just 17 games into the season. The team had gone 15-10 over their last 25 games and had reduced their deficit in the AL West to 3.5 games.

The team had dug a hole with their terrible start to the season, but they seemed to be slowly but surely working their way back to being in the playoff hunt.

And then they lost 5 of 7 games, many of them coming in close games, which meant the week was quite dispiriting. Weeks like this past one are particularly harmful to the Astros playoff chances because their margins are so small because of the big losing skid to start the season.

The Optimistic Side: The Starting Pitching Was Great

Because I do not like to dwell only on the negatives—and the advantage of long form analysis is to give a fuller picture than one gets on social media—let’s talk about the good thing from this past week.

The starting pitching was excellent.

The table below shows the numbers for the starting staff over the past 7 games and you can see the high quality numbers. The two that stand out to me are the innings—42.2—and the quality starts—6. Astros starters averaged over 6 innings a start and in all but one game, the starter went at least 6 and gave up 3 or fewer runs.

That’s what you want from your starting pitchers—length and giving the offense a chance to win the game. But this is where the optimistic part ends.

The Realistic Side: The Bats Were Bad…Real Bad

The starting pitching was let down by the bats. Over the 7 games last week, the Astros scored only 18 runs. And and as you can see from the team’s batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage in the chart below, it’s not because the team was hitting in bad luck.

The team just was not hitting. The strikeout to walk rate was an abysmal 4.83 (58 Ks and only 12 walks). The strikeouts are particularly notable. The Astros struck out 23.6% of the time last week, which is not that high (league average is 22.3%), but is much higher than its league best 17.9% strikeout rate over the entire season.

The Astros did a get a tough draw in facing a set of excellent starting pitchers in the Mariners rotation and the top of the Twins rotation in Pablo Lopez and Joe Ryan. But the Astros are supposed to be one of the league’s top offenses. They weren’t this week—wasting an excellent performance by the starting pitchers.

The Pessimistic Side: Big Damage to the Astros Playoff Chances

The biggest problem with the Astros bad week is not the week itself. Those have happened before and will happen again. Sometimes, baseball happens.

When the Astros had a Bad Week in June of 2022, I wrote that “ a big picture view does suggest that we Astro fans should take the losses in stride, even if there are too many of them.” That focus on the big picture in 2022 held up pretty well.

But that’s not the correct view in 2024 because the biggest problem with the bad Astros week is the hole the team dug itself in April. But starting the season 7-19, the Astros put themselves in a place where “it’s getting late early.”

As I wrote after the 7-19 starting, “because of the big hole the Astros have dug in the first 26 games of the season, they do not have the comfort of relying on the long run. They need to start winning now.”

In 2022, the team could afford a Bad Week because it played so well in the other weeks that, as I wrote at the time “The bad week did little to affect the long-term standing of the team within the division or in the American League playoff picture.”

The opposite is the case here in 2024. When the week began, the Astros had a 52.8% chance of making the playoffs, according to the Fangraphs playoff odds. That’s down significantly from the 86.2% chances they began the season with, but shows the capability of the this team that was favored to win the AL West entering the season.

The chart shows that the Astros playoff odds have declined to 33.8%. The Astros have just about a 1-in-3 chance to make the playoffs. To do so requires the team to play really well over the 102 games left in the season.

How well do they have to play? Last season, the Blue Jays claimed the AL’s final Wild Card spot by winning 89 games. To win 89 games, the Astros need to finish the season with a 63-39 record. That’s a .618 winning percentage, which is a 100 win pace.

In short, the Astros need to play like the best teams in franchise history over the rest of the season to reach the playoffs. They did that for a couple of weeks in May. But last week eroded much of that progress.

They are capable of playing much better than they have so far this season. But they have to start playing much better quite soon.