An Appreciation of 106 Wins and a Wildly Successful Regular Season
The 2022 Astros are in the Top 1% of teams to play since integration. The team had a remarkable regular season and we should all take a moment to appreciate it before the playoffs begin.
The won 106 games.
It’s a remarkable number for two reasons.
The first is that is wildly exceeds most reasonable fans’ expectations for the Astros. For example, BetMGM set the over/under on the number of win for the 2022 Astros as 91.5. Caesars was more optimistic—by one game; they set the number at 92.5. If you were an optimist on the Astros team, you would have cashed in way early.
The Pecota system from Baseball Prospectus projected them for 90.6 wins while the Depth Charts projections from Fangraphs was more pessimistic—90.3 wins. And I wrote on the eve of Opening Day that “it seems every team in the American League set its off-season plan to try to win between 88 and 92 games this season.” This of course included the defending American League champions.
Thanks to massive improvements in the pitching staff, the team exceeded these expectations. They cut their runs allowed from 658 in 2021 to 518 in 2022; that’s the lowest in franchise history.1 They just kept winning, more than any of us had the right to expect as fans.
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And 106 wins is a remarkable number for a second reason—only a handful of teams in Major League History have reached that total. To give you a sense of this, I created the pie chart below. I took all the seasons for each individual team in major league history since Jackie Robinson integrated the game in 1947. That’s a total of 1850 seasons.
In white are the seasons from teams that didn’t win 106 games; there are 1834 of these. The orange sliver includes the seasons of teams that won at least 106 games. There are only 16 of them; it’s 0.86%.
That’s right; the Astros season we just witnessed is one of the Top 1% in baseball since it stop restricting the player pool due to the color of a player’s skin.
Who is this top 1%? The chart below shows a list of the teams that have won 105 games or more in a regular season since 1947. They are sorted by winning percentage, so the 1954 Cleveland Indians, who played only 154 games, are at the top with a 111=43 record.
This list is populated by some legendary teams. The ‘61 Yankees. The ‘86 Mets. The Big Red Machine. The Robinson-Robinson Orioles. It also includes three different Dodgers teams of recent vintage. A Braves team from their great run in the ‘90s. The best of the Derek Jeter-led Yankees World Series winners. And the 2019 Astros, who were one of the greatest collections of baseball talent we have ever seen on a field together.
This is the company that the 2022 Astros are keeping—some of the elite teams of modern baseball history.
Appreciate the Regular Season
I write this post to make sure that we appreciate the 2022 regular season, the second best by record in team history. It is also possibly the team that most beat expectations entering the season. In short, it was an awesome season.
I write this post because I know that the accomplishments of the 2022 regular season will quickly fall by by the wayside as the playoffs begin. In recent years, the narratives around baseball have focused much more on what happens in the playoffs at the expense of what happens in the regular season. This is true in general, but even more specifically true for a franchise that gets to the playoffs every year like the Astros.
Even during this excellent season, there was great attention to the losses and the slumps, and those who did this often justified their public worry with concern that these issues would appear in the postseason.
And they might. In the book Moneyball, Billy Beane is quoted as saying “The playoffs are a crapshoot.” He’s right. If you would like evidence of this, look at the list above of the best regular season teams in the history of baseball. Only six of the 15 teams who have completed the postseason won the World Series.2 These are the best teams in baseball history. Yet in the playoffs, nine of these teams couldn't close the deal.
I mean, collectively, they did very well. These 15 teams won 22 series and lost 9 of them for a winning percentage of .709.
But individual baseball games are a series of essentially coin flips. The other teams in this year’s American League playoffs are not as good as the Astros, but they are all winning teams with lots of really good players. It would not be a surprise if any of them knocked off the Astros. After all, this is a team that lost series to the Nationals and Marlins and got swept by the A’s in July. Any team can have a bad week, and we just don’t hope it is in October.
Of course, there are many reasons to believe in the Astros this postseason. They may have had a handful of bad series against bad teams, but they have also had excellent series against good teams. Their record is 35-20 against teams that made the playoffs. That’s a 103 win pace over 162 games.
This is a good team with lots of good players. They will be primarily be remember by how they play over the next three weeks.
But they should be remember for more than that. They should be remembered as a team that won 106 games and rose to the occasion again and again.
They should be remembered as the team that no-hit the Yankees in Yankee Stadium in June.
They should be remembered as the team that swept the Mariners in a raucous T-Mobile Park when the Ms and their fans thought they had a chance to get back in the AL West race.
They should be remembered as the team whose pitching staff was so deep that the set the team record for the fewest runs allowed in the history of this franchise.
And they should be remembered as one of the top 1% of teams to play regular season baseball since the sport integrated.
And 2022 was not the best run suppressing environment in franchise history. You think that would have been in one of the 51 seasons the team played in a league where pitchers batted regularly, or in one of their seasons in the cavernous run suppressing environment of the Astrodome.
Looking over this list, it’s pretty remarkable that the Astros have two teams on it. Eighteen of the thirty major league franchises don’t have a single team on it.
Obviously, this does not include the 2022 Astros and the 2022 Dodgers. Their postseason results are TBA.