The Astros Go Over .500 for Their All-Time Winning Percentage
The franchise has been over .500 for only 41 days in its history. But with the Golden Age continuing in the 2022 season and beyond, they should spend a lot of time over .500 in the near future.
It started out pretty well. The Colt .45s swept the Chicago Cubs in their first three games of the franchise’s history. And thanks to that sweep, the team stood over at 6-5 after a victory over the Cardinals on April 24, 1962.
But then reality set in. This was an expansion team, made up of castoffs at the bottom of the roster of other National League teams. The team then lost three straight to go under .500. Where the franchise would stay for the next 46 years.
For a brief time in the early parts of the 2006 season, the franchise finally reached .500 for its history. But then that team slumped, and finished 82-80. And then the franchise collapsed, recording losing records in seven of its next eight seasons. The team was nearly as far away from .500 as it had every been.
And then it turned, as the franchise entered it's golden age, posting winning records in 8 straight seasons. And on Friday night, with a 4-3 victory over the Angels, the Astros all-time record moved to 4814 wins and 4813 losses. And today, the franchise stands where it has stood on only 41 days in its 61 years of history—over .500.
The Five Eras of the Astros Franchise
The chart below shows the end of season win differential for the Colt .45s and Astros over the course of the franchise’s history. You can see the downs and up and the downs and ups of team over its 60 years playing in Colt Stadium, the Astrodome, and Minute Maid Park.
The chart shows there are five distinct eras of Astros baseball across the history of the franchise:
The expansion era (1962-1968). The Colt .45s began as an expansion team in 1962, and the team had losing records for its first seven seasons. There was no free agency during this period to acquire good players. In addition, it was difficult to build a brand new player development system that can compete with franchises that had done this a generation ago. The Astros had a losing record in their first seven seasons, just like their expansion brothers the New York Mets.
The middle class years (1969-1992). In 1969, the Astros broke their streak of losing seasons..by going 81-81. And in 1992, the franchise went 81-81. Over those 24 seasons, the team collectively had 1914 wins and 1913 losses.1 The franchise had some of its most successful seasons during this period—going to the playoffs in 1980, 1980, and 1986, but while it could develop good players, they never developed a true star who could produce sustained success.
Biggio and Bagwell (1993-2005). And then they developed not one star player to sustain a long period of winning, but two future Hall of Famers in Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell. In 1993, the team went over .500, where they would remain for 11 of the next 13 seasons, which produced 4 division and 2 wild card crowns, as well as the franchise’s first World Series appearance in 2005.
The Nadir (2006-2014). I almost want to call this the Carlos Lee era. After a disappointing 2006 season, the franchise chose to sign Lee to a 6 year/$100 million contract. Signing an aging, defensively challenged hitter with low walk rates represented the short-sighted thinking of the late Drayton McClain years. The neglect of the draft and the farm system meant that by the 2010s, the franchise was in the worst shape it had ever been—terrible on the field and terrible in its player development operation.
The Golden Years (2015-sometime in the future). It didn’t change all of sudden. The 2015 team was highly flawed, but there was young talent. The team sputtered in 2016, but by 2017…well, you know how it ended in 2017. But unlike the franchise’s previous World Series appearance, 2017 was the beginning. The team had young talent. But it also had the major’s best player development machine that allowed the franchise to crank out another young core as its previous one aged into its steady veteran leaders. The Golden Years have not ended.
There are three conclusions I reach from reviewing the franchise’s history.
It’s Hard to Be an Expansion Team
How many expansion franchises have a all-time record above .500? The answer is one. It’s our team, and shockingly enough, only our team.
The table below shows the record for all 14 franchises that have joined major league baseball as an expansion team since 1961. And the Astros are the only one with a cumulative record above .500.
It is hard to be an expansion team because you usually start off with a team at the bottom of the league and the need to create your own farm system out of whole cloth. But those disadvantages should wear off in a few years. The modern era of baseball has tended to favor big markets, which of course were usually taken over a century ago.
Yet market size does not explain all of the difficulties of expansion teams. Teams like the Mets and Angels play in huge markets, and it’s not like Houston, Dallas, Phoenix or Toronto are small markets. It seems too easy to just chalk it up to randomness, but there seems to be little good reason that 60 years after first expansion and 24 after the last one that all of the expansion teams are below .500
Well, all but one. It is a testament to quality of the Astros player development system that they have risen to the top of the pile of their expansion brethren in Major League Baseball.
Good Gravy, the Nadir Was Bad
The team finished 2006 82-80, and only 4 games below the all-time .500 mark. Then they lost a collective 29 games over the next four seasons. Not good obviously, but respectable in historical perspective. Then the bottom fellow out, as the team went a collective 162 games below .500 over three straight 100 loss seasons from 2011 to 2013. The 70 win 2014 season didn’t seem so bad in comparison, but it dropped the franchise to a collective 217 games under .500.
Only once before had the franchise ended a season more than 217 games under .500. That happened after the 1978 season, when the team went 74-88. That was one of only two times the team had a record more than 3 games above or below .500 from 1969 to 1978. The team then built itself up over the next two and half decades to get over .500 early in the 2006 season. The swoon in the early 2010s basically undid all of that work in only four seasons.
The Golden Years Have Been Awesome
Which makes the climb up from the low point even more remarkable. The franchise has made up that 217 games in just 8 seasons. It took the franchise 27 plus seasons to get from the low point after the 1978 season to breaching .500 early in the 2006 season. It was a long steady climb through the 1980s and a quicker but still slow climb in the Biggio and Bagwell era.
The Golden Era climb has been much quicker for good reason. These are the best Astro teams that anyone has ever seen. The franchise had one season with more than 100 games in its first 55 seasons. It produced three straight 100 win seasons from 2017 through 2019 and is on pace to produce another 100 win season this year.
How does a team win 100 games four times in five full seasons? You have lots of really good players. Not just MVP candidates who can sustain a high level team for multiple years (e.g. Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, Yordan Alvarez), but you also have high level contributing players who either come out of your system or that you acquire from other organizations. But you also need to keep refreshing the roster with excellent young (and let’s be honest, cost-controlled) players.
And that is where the Astros have especially succeeded in this recent era. While stars like Charlie Morton, Dallas Keuchel, Gerrit Cole, George Springer, and Carlos Correa have departed in free agency, the team has brought in young players like Kyle Tucker, Framber Valdez, Cristian Javier, Jeremy Pena, and Jose Urquidy to create another young core that can sustain the team’s high level play.
And that is what seems different about the franchise going over .500 yesterday than the one the broke through early in the 2006 season. That team was clearly at the end of one era. Bagwell had hurt his shoulder, and he would not play in the 2006 season or ever again. Biggio turned 40 in that 2006 season, and he would be a below average player in that season and his final year of 2007. The 2005 team’s young players were either not that young (Morgan Ensberg was 29; Jason Lane and Adam Everett were 28) or not that good (Willy Tavares’s career bWAR: 5.1).
This season’s Astros team may be the fifth straight to win the AL West in a 162-game season, but it does not feel like it is at the end of an era. With a strong young starting rotation and star level young hitters like Kyle Tucker and Yordan Alvarez, the team seems poised to win more games in 2023 and beyond.
They are going to spend more than 41 days with a collective record above .500.
The 1992 team won its finale 3-0 over the Dodgers at the Dome. Thank goodness they won this version of a rubber game.