A Better Offense Than The Rangers; A Better Pitching Staff Than the Mariners. Why the Astros are AL West Favorites
The Rangers scored the most runs in the AL team in 2023. The Mariners allowed the fewest. The Pecota projections says the Astros will score more than Texas and allow fewer runs than Seattle.
The Astros won the AL West in 2023 for the sixth straight full season. But the word won should be in quotes in that sentence. The Astros tied with the Rangers at 90 wins. They trailed the Rangers in the division for most of the season, catching them on the final day of the season and winning the division (and a first round bye in the playoffs) on a tiebreaker.
It was the Astros lowest win total since 2016, and, with the Mariners finishing only two games back of the Astros and Rangers, indicates that their long grip on the AL West may be coming to an end.
But a look at projections for the 2024 season shows the Astros again as favorites in the AL West. The Fangraphs projections have the Astros 5 games better than the Mariners and 8 games ahead of the Rangers. The Pecota projections at Baseball Prospectus put the Astros 9 games ahead of the Rangers and 11 ahead of the Mariners. And Clay Davenport’s projections have the Astros 9 games ahead of the Mariners and 12 ahead of the Rangers.
The computers not only all have the Astros leading the AL West entering 2024, but well ahead of its major competitors. The computers look like the 2021 and 2022 seasons, rather than the 2023 season.
Better Projections in Run Scoring and Run Prevention Than the Competition
When you think of the Rangers, you probably think of their deep offense, with contributions from every hitter in their lineup. The bats carried the Rangers in 2023, when they scored more runs than any other team in the American League.
When you think about the Mariners, you probably think about their pitching staff. The Rangers have an ace in Luis Castillo, who they acquired in a trade from the Reds in 2022. After him, they have a rotation for 4 homegrown and young starters—Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, and second year pitchers Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo. The Mariners allowed fewer runs than any team in the American League in 2023.
So why are the Astros favored to win the American League West over an outstanding run scoring team and an outstanding run prevention team? The Pecota projections provide an answer. They say that the Astros will score more runs than the Rangers in 2024 and will give up fewer runs than the Mariners.
More runs scored than the juggernaut offense. Fewer runs allowed than the broad and deep rotation. Once again, the Astros enter the season with the deepest array of high quality players in the AL West. It’s why they are the favorite.
The Largest Margin Between Runs Scored and Runs Allowed
It’s worth making a point of intellectual honesty here. I have definitely cherry-picked the Pecota numbers. The Fangraphs projection has the Mariners allowing fewer runs than the Astros, and the Davenport projection says the Rangers will score more runs.
But the basic truth of all of three models is the same—they all believe that the Astros will have the largest margin between run scored and run allowed of any AL West team. And that is the reason each has the Astros favored to win the division.
The table below shows the details of the Pecota projections for the AL West. You can see the Astros are projected to score the most runs of these three and to allow the fewest. The projections show all three teams to be similar in run prevention. It is in run scoring that the Astros stand apart—projected to score 99 more runs than the Mariners and 80 more than the Rangers.
This leads to the Astros big lead in projected wins in the Pecota model, and their big chances to win the division. Pecota says that the Astros have a 77.2% chance of winning the AL West, a 94.3% chance of making the playoffs, and a 12.8% chance (that’s about 1-in-8) of winning the World Series. Needless to say, that’s the best of any of these three teams.
A Broader and Deeper Lineup Than The Rangers
I’m now going to dig into the substance of the Pecota projections for the Astros and their opponents in the AL West because it shows why the Astros are expected to score more runs than the Rangers and to prevent more runs than the Mariners.
Let’s start with the offense. The table below shows the expected everyday lineups for both teams, with players ranked by their Deserved Run Created Plus. DRC+ is Baseball Prospectus’s “all-encompassing metric for batters,” combining all of a player’s offensive contributions. The plus tells you that the measure is scaled to average. A 100 is exactly league average, and each unit above (or below) 100 is the percentage better (or worse) that player’s batting contribution is.
And the numbers show the Astros offense is better. They have the best batter by the DRC+ metric in Yordan Alvarez. They have the 3rd, 4th, and 5th best hitters in Kyle Tucker, Alex Bregman, and Jose Altuve. The Rangers have 4 batters projected to hit better than league average; the Astros have 7. The Astros do have the worst projected batter among these 18 in Jake Meyers, but Meyers is just 3 percent below his fellow centerfielder Leody Tavares.
As mentioned, the Rangers scored the most runs in the American League last year, but these numbers indicate that they think that a number of Rangers will regress from their highs of 2023. Adolis Garcia had a 124 DRC+ last season; Jonah Heim had a 110.
Other seemed to hit in good luck last season. DRC is based on the stats a player “deserves” based on things like exit velocity and launch angle. Evan Carter slashed .306/.413/.645 in 75 September plate appearances in the regular season. But he had a .412 batting average in balls in play. These numbers indicate that those numbers last season were something of a fluke. The new guy on this list is Wyatt Langford, a prospect who has made their Opening Day roster. He is being greeted with great anticipation, but this projection is not so optimistic.
The Astros on the other hand have fewer candidates for regression. Veterans Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman had 123 and 122 DRC+s in 2023, right in line with what to expect from them this year. The model projects a very modest decline for Yordan Alvarez, from a 161 DRC+ to 153 this year. The projections even assume something of a bounce back for Jose Abreu, who had a miserable year in 2023.
Overall, these numbers show that the Astros have a deeper lineup than the Rangers. They have more big stars and have more hitters around league average than the Rangers. The Rangers had a great 2023 at the plate, but these projections indicate they will regress some in 2024, and the Astros will be able to take advantage.
A Rotation and Bullpen The Equal of the Mariners
To assess the Astros run prevention, I’ll compare them to the Mariners, who gave up the fewest runs in the American League last season. The strength of the Mariners is their starting rotation, and the Mariners have proven effective in recent years in developing bullpen arms, often by taking players discarded by other teams and tweaking them into effective relievers, before they trade them for other positions and start the process over again.
The table below compares the Astros pitching to the Mariners pitching, with players ranked by projected ERA.
We begin with the starting rotation, and you can see that these are very close. In fact, the Mariners have an advantage—if a slight one—in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th starters. Logan Gilbert is projected to have a lower ERA than Justin Verlander. Bryan Woo a lower one than Cristian Javier. And Bryce Miller a lower one than Jose Urquidy. But at the top of the rotation, these projections say the Astros have the advantage. Framber Valdez is projected to be the best pitcher on either team. The Pecota projection is also optimistic on Hunter Brown, expecting him to have a 3.72 ERA, second best of any of these players.
At the bottom is the bullpen, where I listed the four relievers expected to pitch in the highest leverage spots for each team. The Mariners have the best reliever by this measure in Andres Munoz, but the Astros third best reliever (Bryan Abreu) has the same expected ERA as the Mariners second best reliever (Matt Brash). The Mariners targeted Gregory Santos this offseason, trading promising relief prospect Prelander Berroa to the White Sox for him. They presumably used a different projection model to target him, as Pecota has him targeted for a 4.50 ERA, well above the 4.15 it projects for Rafael Montero.
In the middle I included two depth starter options for both teams. And again, they show an Astros advantage. None of these pitchers is projected to throw well, but J.P. France and Ronel Blanco are projected to pitcher better than the Mariners depth options. These pitchers are of course important because we know that pitchers get hurt more often than we like. In fact, France and Blanco will begin the season in the rotation due to injuries to Verlander and Urquidy. For the Mariners, Bryan Woo was placed on the IL and Emerson Hancock is expected to take his place in the rotation.
Overall, you can see that these two pitching staffs are very close in quality. Pecota gives the slightest of edges to the Astros.
Put the Offense and Defense Together
The point of this exercise is to put the two parts together. The Astros have a better offense than the Rangers, who were the AL’s top offense last season. The Astros have a better pitching staff than the Mariners, who were the AL’s top run prevention outfit last season.
Overall, the Astros are the best team entering the season. They have, as they have had throughout their run in the Golden Years, the most star level players and the fewest holes on their roster of any team in the American League West. That’s been the case since 2017, and it’s the case again this year.
Projections are of course not everything. They are an estimate based on past patterns. But of course, as they say in the legal disclaimers for financial products, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
The Astros were favored to win the AL West in 2023, and I wrote from that perspective 12 months ago. I headlined my piece “What Would It Take for the Astros to Lose the AL West?” The tone of the headline indicates that I did not expect the AL West to be a dog fight. Nor did I expect the Rangers to challenge for the division title in 2023. The only mention of them in that article was noting that they had signed Jake Odorizzi.
Baseball surprises us, and we know that the season will not follow exactly along with the Pecota projections, nor will it exactly follow any of the three record prediction projections I cited above.
But projections are based on the baseline quality of players. They show that the Astros have more good players than the Rangers or Mariners (and needless to say, more good ones than the Angels and A’s).
What the projections reveal is what we all know from having watched the Astros in 2023—that team underachieved. It should have been better than what we saw on the field. You can review the archives for lots of explanations of why that was the case.
But it’s Opening Day and 2023 is behind us. In 2024, the Astros enter the season as the best team in the AL West. And they get a chance to prove it on the field.