The Bad Vibes of the 2023 Astros Season
And why the vibes might improve in the second half of the season.
If the season ended today, it would be a big surprise to everybody.
That’s what I think every time I hear the phrase “if the season ended today.” It obviously doesn’t, and, as a result, I’m not usually a big fan of the phrase.
But with that caveat noted, I’ll use the phrase today. If the season ended today, the Astros would be in the playoffs. And my guess is that most Astros fans do not know that fact. Or if they do, it’s not something that they think about often.
Instead, the focus of Astros fans this season has been on the things that have gone wrong. The posts I see on social media and the texts I get from friends about the Astros seem heavily tilted to the negative, with seemingly lots of anxiety that the bad news has or will snowball.
To put it in modern vernacular, the vibes are bad.
And to my eyes, they seem disproportionately bad. There is more negativity than there should be.
Reasons for Pessimism
Of course, the fact that fans are so negative about the Astros foundation. There are lots of ways in which the Astros season has been worthy of an angry text or a frustrated tweet.
The starting rotation has been beset by injuries. Both Lance McCullers and Luis Garcia have suffered season-ending elbow injuries, while Jose Urquidy has only made 6 starts this season.
Among the three high dollar free agents the team signed this off-season, Michael Brantley has the highest bWAR—and he hasn’t played a game this season. Both Jose Abreu and Rafael Montero have each been nearly a win below replacement level this season.
The team’s two best players in 2022—Jose Altuve and Yordan Alvarez—have only played 13 games together due to Altuve’s broken thumb and the oblique injuries both have suffered.
Alex Bregman has been pedestrian, with an OPS just over league average.
Cristian Javier and Hunter Brown have both hit a rough spot in recent weeks, which not only has seen their ERAs rise but also put more stress on the bullpen whose stalwart members have been worked as hard as any in the majors.
And that does not include the biggest source of concern for Astros fans this season—the Texas Rangers. The team whose City Connect uniforms are so bad because they don’t have a city to connect to has been in first place in the AL West since mid-April.
In short, this is the baseball equivalent of “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” There has been a lot of stuff to be negative about for Astros fans this year.
There is another factor driving the negativity for Astros fans this year—expectations. Astros fans expected the Astros to walk away with the AL West crown and have essentially, at this point, taken AL West crowns as their birthright.
And there is a good reason for those expectations. They have been met in each of the last five full seasons. The table below shows the Astros record at the All Star break from 2017 through this season.1
It’s a definite exercise in “one of these things is not like the other.” Over the Golden Era of Astros baseball, the team’s worst position at the All Star break was in 2021 when they were merely on a 98 win pace and only led the division by 3.5 games.
Going Against the Grain
This year, they are on a pace to win 89 games and, as discussed, trail the Rangers by 2 games in the AL West. Astros fans are justified in being more negative about this season compared to its recent predecessors.
And yet, I still find the negativity too much; too strong.
Some of this is my inherent skepticism of emotional thinking. I embrace analytics and quantitative thinking in both my day job (I’m a professor of political science, and I put the emphasis on the science part) and in my hobby of baseball analysis. And part of what attracts me to that type of thinking is that it is more durable than emotional based thinking. I try to base my analysis of both American elections and baseball on long-term patterns that endure despite the “noise” of one game or one poll bump.
So when Astros fans get too low, I react against that. And when Astros fans get too high, I react against that as well. I like neither extreme.
There Are Plenty of Reasons for Optimism
And part of my reaction against the negativity is that I’m pretty optimistic about the rest of the season for the Astros. Go through that list of negatives above, it’s not a short list. But then look again at the introduction to this piece. The Astros are currently in playoff position, despite everything that has gone wrong this season.
Why are the Astros in playoff position right now? Well, Framber Valdez has been the best pitcher in the American League this season. The bullpen is anchored by four high leverage relievers with ERAs under 3.00 (Pressly, Abreu, Neris, & Maton). And while the offense is down from previous seasons, the team still has a deep well of offensive contributors, bolstered this season by development from rookies such as Yainer Diaz and Corey Julks.
And, the team is likely to have better fortune in the second half of the season. Today, the team announced that Yordan Alvarez and Jose Urquidy will begin rehab assignments tomorrow in Sugar Land. And Chandler Rome of The Athletic wrote today that “Altuve is a bit behind him, but provided he suffers no setbacks, should return by the end of July.”
The return of Alvarez and Altuve should provide a big boost to the offense. Urquidy will take longer (pitchers always do) but he will eat innings in the starting rotation in August. And he is likely to be joined by some new arms in the rotation. On his weekly appearance on Sports Talk 610 yesterday, General Manager Dana Brown said “if you’re only give one [priority], heck, I’ll take a starter at the deadline if there was one available.”
And possibly the best news of all is that the Rangers are starting to play more like we expected in the offseason—they have gone 5-11 since June 23 and have lost 4.5 games off of their lead against the Astros in the AL West.
In short, the Astros are in striking distance of winning the division and there are lots of reasons to think they will play better in the second half of the season. Over the long haul of the 71 remaining games, it’s not hard to think that the Astros can play 2 games better than the Rangers, or that they can outplay the Blue Jays (with who they are tied in the Wild Card race) or a Yankee team struggling to hit with Aaron Judge sidelined (the Yankees are a game behind the Astros).
The challenge is much tougher this season. The team is not playing as well as it has in recent years and must come from behind to win the division. It seems really unlikely that they will win 100 games this season. But they don’t need to win 100 games to reach their goals this season. They just need to win more in the second half of the season than they did in the first half. There are many reasons to think they can do that.
2020 is not included because that season didn’t have an All-Star break thanks to…well, you know.