Expecting to Win Beats Being Chicken Little
The Astros swept the Yankees and the Mariners last week. And I wonder why there was so much concern, consternation, and trepidation at the All Star break and why people don't trust the number.
There was definitely concern. Or alarm. Some consternation and dismay. You could call it dread, or fear. And there was certainly trepidation and agitation.
This is a list of synonyms for panic found at thesaurus.com, and my description of Astros Twitter last Sunday, as the Astros lost a series to the A’s while the Mariners won their 14th straight game.
I’ll spare those who turned their Twitter account over to Chicken Little the embarrassment of posting their tweets. Instead, I’ll summarize the mood by using this tweet from Chronicle beat writer Chandler Rome—which loads as much alarm, dismay, and dread as possible into a framework allowed by journalistic neutrality—as the representative of this attitude.
I found the dread and agitation of last Sunday curious. Sure, it’s not fun to lose a series to a bad team like the A’s, and the Astros didn’t play particularly well defensively that series. But that’s baseball. There’s a reason they play 162 and even the best teams usually lose 50 to 60 games.
And this is where I trust in numbers. My tweet last Sunday after the loss to the A’s noted the Astros overall situation—near certain to win the American League West. And it reflected the attitude I discussed after The Bad Week when the Astros lost four of five against the Mariners and Marlins in the early part of June: “the huge lead in the American League West provides a unique opportunity…to wash off the bad losses and bad weeks quickly.”
So the Astros took off three days for the All-Star break and came back on Thursday. As Rome noted, they faced one of the more daunting stretches of their schedule with a rescheduled doubleheader on Thursday against the team with the best record in the AL taking away an extra off-day. It was quickly followed with a long flight to the Pacific Northwest to play the surging Mariners.
And here on Monday morning, we know how that daunting five game stretch went.
Good Baseball Teams Win Baseball Games
Winning all five games against two teams currently headed for the playoffs is surprising, but winning games against playoff teams should not not be. As I wrote on Twitter after the win in the Friday night game “This is a very good baseball team. Expect them to win a lot of ball games...even if the other team is good or hot.”
The Astros have won a playoff series in five straight seasons and entered the All-Star break on pace to win 105 games, even accounting for the lost series to the A’s. The not quite panic but synonym for panic attitude of the fanbase seemed so out of place to me.
And this is part of why I put a good bit of trust in numbers and projections. I won’t say that our emotions lie to us, but they often create greater intensity at particular moments than others. Sometimes that is for our benefit. But for sports fans, we know that one of the ways that emotions toy with us is that they make the losses—especially against bad teams like the A’s—more intense than the wins. That attitude was prevalent in spades last Sunday.
But here is a look at the probability of winning the AL West this season for the Astros and the Mariners from Fangraphs. If you look hard, you can see the really tiny dip last Sunday for the Astros and the bump for the Mariners. But you have to look hard. Scanning out from that small bump, you can see that the Astros have been near 99% odds to win the AL West for nearly a month now.
Did the series loss to the A’s suck? Absolutely. Was I frustrated watching the Astros seemingly constant defensive miscues against Oakland? Of course, it was infuriating. But it was also temporary. A look at the division odds told me that the chances of the Astros blowing the division were 1 in 100. And I knew the Astros big odds to win the division last Sunday were based on two things: 1) a nine game lead in a division is really large, and 2) the Astros are intrinsically a good team.
The Astros Depth Showed Through This Week
The Astros are a good team because they are deep in good players. The five game streak against the Yankees and Mariners showed that depth. The Astros got big contributions from Jose Altuve. The star second baseman went 7 for 22 with a pair of home runs. They also got a pair of home runs from Yordan Alvarez, who scored 4 runs and drove in 5 last week.
But Alvarez was out of the lineup on Sunday resting his sore hand. The Astros didn’t miss a beat, scoring 8 runs as the bottom 3 guys in the order (Chas McCormick, Mauricio Dubon, Martin Maldonado) went 4 for 10 with 2 walks, 2 runs scored, and 5 RBI. Even when All Stars like Alvarez are out, the Astros bench guys all make enough contributions to keep the team’s floor high.
We saw similar things on the mound. The Astros are six (and soon seven) deep in above average starting pitchers. We saw that quality over the five starts this past week. Astro starters allowed only 8 runs, 21 hits, and 11 walks over 29 2/3 innings pitched. That’s good for a 2.43 ERA.
The highlight of course was the performance of Justin Verlander on Saturday, as he shut down the Mariners for his first six innings, then found an extra bit of velocity to strike out Cal Raleigh and Sam Haggerty to quash a Mariners rally in the seventh and preserve the Astros lead.
A lead that was saved by an unusual bullpen combination—Parker Mushinski and Bryan Abreu. The Astros needed their leverage relievers on both Thursday and Friday to win close games, and had to rely on their bullpen depth on Saturday. As did so many of the Astros depth players this weekend, Mushinki and Abreu came through.
A Business Like Atmosphere
There is another reason why one should expect the Astros to cruise through the rest of the season and to play well against good teams like the Yankees and the Mariners—they’ve done it before.
Playing a “big series” in front of sold out crowds that boo the team’s big stars is not new to the Astros and their veteran players. They have done this many times since the team entered their golden age back in 2017, and they continue to show no signs that they are bothered by such an atmosphere. This was a business trip.
And this attitude was best expressed after the game yesterday by closer Ryan Pressly, who gave this quote to Rome.
We’re not really thinking about them.
The Astros aren’t thinking of who their opponent is because they know they are a good team with good players. The “expect to win every day” because they have done it before and know they can do it again.
Bumps in the road will happen, as they did against the A’s last weekend. But overall, this team has won a lot of games, often against high quality opponents. Expect them to continue to do so, and retire the Chicken Little act the next time the drop a game or two.