The Offense Has Certainly Been Offensive
The bats have started the season very cold. It's just a slump and will turn around at some point. Sooner would of course be better than later for that.
There is good news. The Astros are one game ahead of last year’s pace after six games and they still won the AL West last year.
But that’s the end of the good news.
The bad news is, well, they just got swept the Giants. At home. And the offense has been…well, its definitely been offensive.
Yesterday at Daiken Park, the Astros scored only 3 runs in a 6-3 loss. Those 3 runs ctually raised the team’s runs per game average. After 6 games, the Astros have scored 2.0 runs per game.
The official sabr-metric term for this level of offense is “sucks.”
After today’s game, the Astros have a slash line of .178/.279/.222 for an OPS of .492. The Astros are not getting a lot of singles, which is clear from the .178 batting average. But they are especially not getting extra base hits. The Astros have hit only 4 of them through their first 6 games. They have hit only two home runs—one by Jeremy Pena on Saturday against the Mets and one from Jose Altuve on Tuesday against the Giants.
So no one is getting base hits and no one is getting extra base hits and, as a result, the team is not scoring runs.
At a press conference after the Bay of Pigs disaster, JFK said “victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” But that’s not true with the Astros offense so far this season; almost everyone has contributed to this defeat. Eleven of the Astros 13 hitters ended today with an OPS of .600 or lower. No one Astros batter is responsible for the offensive slump; they just all about can take credit.
Silver Linings
Obviously, the Astros offense shouldn’t be this bad. For most of baseball history, that would be an insult. in the modern era, it’s an affirmative conclusion we can make based on data.
Statcast data tells us what the expected results of a team’s offense should be, based on things such as exit velocity and launch angle. Based on those numbers, the Astros should have a batting average 54 points higher than the actually do, and a slugging percentage 104 points higher than what we have seen.1 Statcast says the Astros have an weighted On Base Percentage (wOBA) of .229. Their expected wOBA is .287.
That is one silver lining, though it is not the best silver lining. A .287 wOBA is better than .229, but it’s still not very good. It is only the 26th best xwOBA in the majors.
Another silver lining is the fact that the Astros are also hitting the ball pretty hard so far this season. The team has an average exit velocity of 89.9 MPH, which is the 9th best in the major so far. They have hit 47.2% of their batted balls at more than 95 miles per hour, the Statcast definition of Hard Hit. That’s the 4th best rate on the majors.
It’s better to hit the ball hard as hard hit balls are more likely to get past the glovers of opposing fielders. And exit velocity tends to be “sticky.” That is, hard exit velocities in short samples tend to stay around in longer samples.
Which gets us to the third silver lining for the Astros offense. It’s only 6 games, an extremely short sample.
Team slump at all points of the season. When a team does that in August, we have the first four months of the season to give us a better understanding of that team’s true talent than a particularly bad week. When it happens at the beginning of the season, we lack the anchoring effect the rest of the season has. Instead, all we have is this bad week of hitting.
And every team has a bad week, even the best teams. The 2022 Astros will of course be known for winning the World Series after a dominant regular season, where they won 106 games. And yet, the had a “Bad Week” in mid-June, losing 4 straight, and lost a series to the A’s as part of a losing week that prouduced about some level of panic in Astros fans.
I urged a long-term perspective then and I urge a long-term perspective now. The offense will get better. After all, regression to the mean works both ways. Those below the mean will regress up to it.
Which is what we should expect from Yainer Diaz, who has a .269 OPS. That won’t last. We have seen him hit too much in the major leagues over the last three seasons to think he will continue to hit like a pitcher.
We know that Yordan Alvarez will lift his .480 OPS and Jeremy Pena will lift his .490. We have seen them hit better than that.
And while we have not seen it in Houston, we know that baseball fans in other cities have seen Isaac Paredes hit better than his .520 OPS and Christian Walker hit better than his .250 OPS.
Over the long run, the Astros offense will get to normal. But of course, baseball is played day-to-day, and our expectation is often what we hae seen most recently will continue indefnitely. Our rational brain knows it doesn’t work that way. But our emotions tend to focus on what’s right in front of us.
So I won’t begrudge anyone who said today when the Astros went down 3-0 today that there is no way they will score 3 runs. It was understandable.
But the nature of baseball is that tomorros is another day. And there is game later today. Let’s go get some runs, boys.
These numbers are calculated through the Tuesday game.
Thanks for talking me down from the ledge :-)