When 0-4 Feels Like 0-162
That sucked. The good news is that it's only 4 games and won't continue. The bad news: everything else.
They won’t finish 0-162, but I won’t blame you if it feels that way.
The Astros started the 2024 season with a large thud, dropping the first four games of the season to the Yankees at Minute Maid Park.
The four game set offered a frustrating combination of poor play from the team’s best players combined with bad luck.
A Bad Bullpen
The biggest focus of frustration was on the team’s bullpen. The Astros either held a lead or were tied in all four of the games of the series and all four losses were tagged on a member of the bullpen. Seth Martinez was the only member of the Astros bullpen not to allow a run against the Yankees. Combined, the Astros bullpen allowed 14 runs (12 earned) in 15.2 innings.
Each member of the vaunted three-headed bullpen monster—Josh Hader, Bryan Abreu, & Ryan Pressly—was tagged with a loss. Combined, the three stars of the Astros bullpen combined for a 7.36 ERA.
A Bad Offense, Especially with RISP
The focus on the bullpen seemed to take the heat off of the offense, which did just as poorly. The middle of the lineup struggled especially. Yordan Alvarez was 2 for 17; Kyle Tucker managed only extra base hit among his 5 hits; Alex Bregman was 3 for 15; Jose Abreu managed only 1 walk and 1 hit by pitch, and Chas McCormick started the season 2 for 11. Combined, those five players had a collective slash line of .169/.263/.197.
Those especially poor performances take away from good ones by Jose Altuve, Yainer Diaz, Jeremy Pena and the Astros bench bats—Mauricio Dubon, Jon Singleton, and Victor Caratini went a combined 5 for 14.
Put together, the offense was just about average. The team slashed .259/.327/.345 for a 98 wRC+. That’s just 2% below a league average mark of 100.
So why did the Astros offense feel so anemic against the Yankees? Because they could not come through when it counted. The Astros slashed .195/.250/.244 in their 44 plate appearances with runners in scoring position. They could get runners on but could not get them home.
It’s Just Four Games
For as frustrating as the series with the Yankees was, the good news is that it is only four games out of 162. It’s obviously the worst four games to lose because we don’t have any others this season to fall back on, but it’s only four games.
The team was going to have a four game losing streak at some point this season—every team does. Don’t believe me. Just look back at recent Astros history. The 2017 team lost 5 straight from August 8-12. The 2018 team lost 5 straight on two different occasions (July 25-30 and August 9-14). The 2019 team lost 7 straight (June 16-22) and the 2022 team lost 4 straight (April 19-23). Those losing streaks did not stop those teams from winning 100 games. I don’t expect the 2024 Astros to win 100 games (right now, I’m just hoping for 1 tonight, and we’ll see where we go from there). But this is a reminder that good teams have losing streaks.
One reason that every baseball team has winning streaks and losing streaks is that baseball is a funny game, more prone to the vagaries of chance than any other major sport. Which is to say that one reason the Astros lost to the Yankees was bad luck. Look at the numbers I posted with runners in scoring position—they won’t stay that bad. The Astros had some bad timing on when they got their hits this weekend and that really hurt them in close games.
Take a look at the 9th inning of yesterdays game. Gleyber Torres reached on a pop fly single, placing the ball where an Astros outfielder could not get to it. He scored on a bloop single by Juan Soto, one of his softer batted balls of the weekend.
In the bottom of that inning, Yordan Alvarez hit the ball real hard (106.3) and real far away (385 feet), but it found the glove of center fielder Aaron Judge. The next batter Kyle Tucker hit a liner than left fielder Alex Verdugo corralled on a sliding catch. The Alvarez ball had an expected batting average of .830 and Tucker’s had one of .620. If one falls, the game would have been tied. If both fall, the Astros win and we feel a lot better.
Statcast numbers show how the Astros were hitting in poor luck against the Yankees. The Astros had a weighted On Base Average of .307 against the Yankees, below the Major League Average of .317. But their expected weighted On Base Average—a measure that is based on the quality of contact made by batters, not the results—was .353, 7th best in the majors so far. The Astros hit .046 points of wOBA worse than they “should” have, the 3rd worse mark in the majors.
Of course, things that “should” have happened didn’t actually happen. The Astros get no extra runs or wins because their expected batting numbers are good. They don’t get to take any runs off of the board because Torres and Soto’s hits against Josh Hader yesterday were not hard hit. The losses don’t go away.
But teams tend to hit their expected numbers over the long run. It Yordan Alvarez keeps hitting the ball hard and long, plenty will find gaps and even more will go into the stands. And we should think similar things about the bullpen. Each of the big three in the bullpen was tagged with a loss this weekend, but we should not expect that to continue. Over the course of the season, Abreu, Pressly, and Hader will pitch lots of shutdown innings in lots of big games.
But that’s in the future. As of today, it’s not fun to be an Astros fan. Here’s to turning it around against the Blue Jays tonight.
Agree with the general considerations here. But there is one thing I haven't heard anyone talk about yet. And that is the Astros are losing once again at Minute Maid Park. Pitching and offense are struggling there, just like last year. Now, we don't yet have any road games to compare these games to, but we will. And it will interesting to see what that looks like. I'm not convinced that last year's problems were random chance. And it certainly isn't something physical about the park itself because only the Astros have been affected. Although let's hope whatever it was it is gone away and these four games were indeed randomness at work.