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2020 Astros Season Thread


Jshep34

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5 hours ago, jkates said:

I love Framber.

 

I miss our bats.

Yeah man, it's something. They all (other than Yordan, Tucker and Brantley) caught a case of the suck at the same time, and then Yordan got hurt.  Nobody on the team over 900 ops.  Almost nobody over 800.  Nobody on any leaderboards other than Tucker probably.  

I haven't watched us much and I've watched everyone else for a total of about 5 minutes- is offense down all over the place, or is this an us thing?

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18 hours ago, Wulaw Horn said:

Yeah man, it's something. They all (other than Yordan, Tucker and Brantley) caught a case of the suck at the same time, and then Yordan got hurt.  Nobody on the team over 900 ops.  Almost nobody over 800.  Nobody on any leaderboards other than Tucker probably.  

I haven't watched us much and I've watched everyone else for a total of about 5 minutes- is offense down all over the place, or is this an us thing?

BABIP has been down a lot league-wide...I think it has crept up in recent weeks, but it was way down around .275 and has historically been right around .300. 

Plenty of individual players are doing well, but other great players (Yelich, Bellinger, Bryant, in addition to Altuve) have been bad too. 

I think the thing to keep in mind is that, in an ordinary season, we'd be right around Memorial Day right now. So this is still a small sample size. 

Springer has been mostly himself after a bad start. Bregman notoriously starts slowly, and he hasn't been awful - one hot week and his numbers will be right where you'd expect. 

There was a good piece on Altuve's struggles in Fangraphs yesterday...doesn't really draw anything conclusive, but a good analysis. He's seeing fewer fastballs than ever. The most interesting part, to me, is that he has an unusually large standard deviation of launch angle, and the author notes there is a relationship between that and BABIP (meaning, his low BABIP is likely not all attributable to bad luck): 

Spoiler

So, what’s going on? There are a few aspects of Altuve’s season that could rightly be passed off as chance-related, but others might serve as signals of decline in the second baseman’s skills. When trying to explain poor performance, one obvious place to look is to see whether pitchers are taking a new, more effective approach to a batter. Pitchers have been throwing Altuve more sliders than ever before, a 28% rate that’s nearly double what it was four or five years ago. He’s struggled facing the pitch this year, hitting .226 with no extra-base hits; with a .283/.312/.387 line against sliders over the course of his career, it’s the pitch he’s had the most trouble with. But those numbers are not disastrous in themselves. Before now, Altuve’s been really good at hitting just about everything.

Last month, my colleague Alex Chamberlain discussed Altuve’s launch angle tightness and how he’d been increasingly inconsistent in 2019, an inconsistency that persisted into the first few weeks of the 2020 season. Altuve’s standard deviation of launch angle of 32.7 degrees in 2020 would have ranked him dead-last in baseball last year. Inconsistency from a struggling player, one who used to be among the more consistent in baseball, isn’t what you want to see. And this is important because a large part of Altuve’s missing performance is BABIP-related and a tightly clustered launch angle has a relationship with that number. Altuve had a career .340 BABIP entering 2019, put up a .303 last year, and is standing at .254 this year.

The zBABIP model in ZiPS does not include a concept of how tightly clustered a hitter’s launch angle is — though I’ve been experimenting with how to include such data in the model — and Altuve has are additional BABIP worries beyond the consistency of his launch angle. There is strong evidence of some poor luck here, with ZiPS thinking Altuve ought to have a .303 BABIP right now, some 50 points above his actual numbers. So, chalk it up to poor fortune and declare 2020 a fluke? Not so fast. If we divvy up the six hits ZiPS sees as missing and, based on Altuve’s profile, add a double and five singles to his record, it only gets him to .255/.317/.353 — less of a disaster, but still a pretty bleak season from a non-ancient player who was once a regular MVP candidate. One of the oddities in Altuve’s profile — and perhaps an explanation for his inconsistent launch angle — is that he’s increasingly gotten his hits from bad pitches. When an at-bat has been resolved by a pitch in what Statcast defines as the “heart” of the strike zone, he’s a career .360 hitter. That dropped to .297 in 2019 and .250 this year.

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/is-jose-altuve-still-on-target-for-3000-hits/

 

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9 minutes ago, Jshep34 said:

Tip of the hat to JV. Amazing how stupid Astros medical staff can be in delaying players surgery when its needed.

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He was going to be out next year regardless. Let the rebuild begin. CYA JV, George, Yuli, Josh and Uncle Mike. It was a hell of a lot of fun while it lasted

Edited by TonyTexas
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No doubt he was but it seems many players have had "nagging " injuries for months only to need surgery that further delays playing again. 2021 Astros are going to look completely different. Always have support and appreciation for the 2015 to 2019 guys.

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48 minutes ago, Jshep34 said:

No doubt he was but it seems many players have had "nagging " injuries for months only to need surgery that further delays playing again. 2021 Astros are going to look completely different. Always have support and appreciation for the 2015 to 2019 guys.

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They definitely fucked up the Alvarez situation 

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