A Pitching-First Team

Passing Memorial Day means we can start making conclusions in baseball. The Astros are, somewhat surprisingly, a pitching-first team this year and will go as far as their arms take them.

There are a lot of traditions associated with Memorial Day. In my small town in New Jersey, there is a Memorial Day parade leading to a ceremony or remembrance. It is followed by another Memorial Day tradition, a barbeque. As a college baseball fan, Memorial Day means the announcement of the teams who will compete in the NCAA baseball tournament for a chance to get to Omaha—my LSU Tigers were paired with Oregon State, Sam Houston State, and Tulane, starting on Friday.

In Major League Baseball, Memorial Day means that enough time has passed in the season that the results start being “real.” We can stop using the term “small sample size” and start looking at the standings. A player with poor numbers isn’t just off to a slow start and a player with good numbers might have shown enough to prove that he has leveled up.

For a team, we are starting to get enough games played that the standings really start to matter. And based on that, we get a sense of what a team is.

The first 52 games of the season show that the Astros are a pitching first team. They were of course last year too, as the team’s pitching took the lead for the first time in the Golden Era and lead the team to another AL West title and its second World Series crown.

Even More Pitching Forward Than 2022

But the 2023 is even more pitching forward than last year’s squad. Part of the reason for that is that the offense has clearly regressed from last season, much less the offensive heights of the late 2010s Astros squads. Yesterday’s 7 home run barrage against a beleaguered Oakland pitching staff raised the Astros slash line to .245/.316/.391; that’s good for a .706 OPS. That’s not that good. That’s down from 2022, when the Astros slashed .248/.219/.424 for a .743 OPS. It’s markedly down from 2019, when the Astros slashed .274/.352/.495, leading the American League in each category.

As of this morning, only 4 Astros hitters have an OPS+ above 100.¹ They are Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, Jake Meyers (!), and Jose Altuve. But each of the other 11 men who have taken an at bat this season all stand below league average in park adjusted OPS+.

The bats have tallied 239 in their first 53 games, good for 4.51 runs per game. That is good for 17th best in the majors and below the league average of 4.58 runs per game.

And yet, the team is winning. The Astros stand at 31-22 and are on pace to win 95 games this season. The had a stretch of 14 wins in 17 games snapped with the extra inning loss yesterday to the Twins.

And of course, the reason they are winning is their pitching staff. They have given up 3.48 runs per game, a quarter of a run better than the second place Twins. They lead the majors in ERA (3.16), are second in WHIP (1.17) K/9 (9.8), and K/BB (3.50). These numbers show that Astros have one of the best pitching staffs in baseball.

The pitching staff is the opposite of the hitters. Only three pitchers have an ERA+ below the league average or 100²—Jose Urquidy, Rafael Montero, and Ronel Blanco.³ The other 14 pitchers who have recorded an appearance for the Astros this year all have ERA better than average.

Leading the way are the two top pitchers in the rotation—Framber Valdez (179 ERA+ and Cristian Javier (143 ERA+. But the rotation has held up despite injuries to three of the expected starters going into Spring Training thanks in large part of Hunter Brown (136 ERA+), who has looked like a polished big league veteran even in this his rookie year. And the guys called up from Sugar Land to fill holes in the rotation have done exactly that. JP France has an ERA+ of 107 in 5 starts and Brandon Bielak has an ERA+ of 121.

And that’s before we get to the real strength of the team—the bullpen. Despite his blown save yesterday (his first in 30 chances), Ryan Pressly remains one of baseball’s top closers; Bryan Abreu has built off his impressive 2022 playoffs to become the team’s top set-up man; Hector Neris is having his best season in the majors, and Phil Maton is producing at a level worth trading a starting center fielder.

The first pitchers on the pitching-first 2023 Astros are Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier, who are the 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation.

Not the Balanced Team I Was Expecting

Before the season I had speculated that we would see a more balanced Astros team than we had in a while. The pitching staff would take a step back with Justin Verlander gone in free agency, but the upgrade from Yuli Gurriel to Jose Abreu at first base would lead to a more effective offense.

That has not come to pass, quite obviously. Instead, the pitching staff got even better thanks in large part to bullpen surpassing the high standard it set last season and the rotation remaining strong thanks to the team’s outstanding starting pitching depth. It has made up for an offense that has taken a step back from its 2022 form.

The biggest question for the Astros moving forward through the summer months is will the offense improve. One should expect that it will. As well as Mauricio Dubon has hit as a fill-in, Jose Altuve is a better hitter at second base. Alex Bregman is showing signs of getting his numbers to return to form, and Jake Meyers seems to have improved as a hitter thanks to a new leg kick.

We have some reason to expect modest improvements. But it seems clear as we sit here on Memorial Day that that Astros have established themselves as a pitching-first team in 2023. Their pitching has carried them to a winning record so far this season ad the team will need their arms to carry the load throughout the rest of the season.

As we saw in 2022, they are plenty capable of doing that.

1. OPS+ takes a player’s OPS, which is his On base percentage Plus Slugging percentage and does two things to it. First, it park adjusts is so that a player doesn’t get extra credit for hitting in a hitters park like Colorado’ls Coors Field or get dinged for hitting in a pitcher’s park like Seattle’s T-Mobile Park. It then “normalizes” the number so that 100 is league average and each number above or below is what percentage better or worse that player is than average.

2. ERA+ uses the same process described above for OPS+ for ERA.

3. Seth Martinez went over 100 in ERA+ with his shutout inning yesterday.