DAT 6/28: A's (Hahn) vs Astros (Paulino) | 7:10 PM

Time for our team to start playing better at home. We desperately need some healthy starters so we don't have to keep running guys like hoyt out there in key situations.

Hopefully lunhown is working on a bullpen acquisition as well. Doolittle would be a nice add for us and you know Oakland is selling.

I think the dimensions of MMP are a negative. The home runs are nice but Crawford box pinches the Left fielder in closer and more into the gap because a ball down in the corner doesn't hurt them. It's a double either way. Also short porch in RF means right fielder is closer and tougher to score from second on singles.

There is literally no way they could remove the Crawford boxes and replace those seats even if they wanted to.

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Time for our team to start playing better at home.

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This is obvious.

I just want to say I love the DAT.

I thought I was very knowledgable regarding Astros Baseball, then I came here and realized I knew nothing.

I live and die with every at-bat, and I'm very emotionally invested, but I don't know which lefty bats well against left-handed pitching, WAR (and other Next-Gen stats), which batter requires which infield shift, who our top minor league prospects are, etc.

I've been sitting back and appreciating the knowledge dropped in these threads.

For that, I want to say thank you.

Get used to it. The injuries are coming home to roost now. Staff is cooked.

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-astros-contact-dreams-have-come-true/

good stros fangraph circlejerk

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One of the things we knew was that the Astros were going to hit. During the winter, they were lauded for their offensive depth, and the Astros have an easy MLB lead in wRC+. But now I have a fun fact for you. It’s even more telling than that one. The Astros, as a team, lead baseball in home runs. They also have baseball’s lowest team strikeout rate. In the 19 full seasons since baseball moved to a 30-team landscape, no offense has led in both categories. The Astros are trying to be the first, which is downright impressive.

Read that again. Home runs? Sure. Everyone hits home runs. Marwin Gonzalez hits home runs. The Astros might as well be leading. But, strikeouts? Yeah. It’s not that there was zero warning. Reality is just following what could’ve reasonably been expected.


Here now is a very simple scatter plot. You see team strikeout rates for 2016, and team strikeout rates for 2017. In order to not penalize National League teams or anything, I’ve decided to look just at non-pitchers. The Astros, as you could imagine, are highlighted in flashy yellow.

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There’s the hint of a linear relationship in there. Which, of course there is — team offenses generally don’t completely change season to season. Strikeout rate is a fairly sticky tendency. Only four teams have had their strikeout rates change by at least three percentage points. The A’s look the worst in here; their strikeout rate has gotten worse by six percentage points. Not that strikeouts are everything. The Astros, on the other side, have gotten better by 5.9 percentage points. That’s almost four percentage points better than the next-best improvement. The Astros have made a lot more contact, and much of it has been hard.

5.9. Let that number sink in. Does it strike you as maybe kind of familiar? It should, if you’ve been reading FanGraphs for a while. Here’s a post from the end of January, where I talked about strikeouts and the projections. At that time, the Astros were projected to have a strikeout-rate drop of 5.7 percentage points. That number is virtually identical to what’s actually happened through the first three months. I don’t bring this up to toot my own horn, because it’s not like that’s anything I did. I didn’t nail the Astros’ contact-hitting exactly right. That’s all on the projections. We could tell a long time ago that the Astros were going to put more balls in play, and all those dreams have come true, if only for half of the season to date.

The Astros used to be an extreme strikeout team. Over the five years between 2012 – 2016, the Astros had a strikeout rate of 23.5%. That was the highest rate in baseball by more than two points. That’s one of the reasons why this turnaround is so remarkable, even if we could see it coming. What would it mean to have a year-to-year improvement of 5.9 points? Here are the biggest year-to-year improvements since 1920, going back nearly a full century:

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Your welcome. My pleasure.

No, my welcome.

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Tyler White (@twhite409) in June: 23 G, .413 BA/.491 OBP/.791 SLG, 10 2B, 8 HR, 25 RBI, 13 BB/18 K @FresnoGrizzlies #Astros

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tKing

I don't get it. What did he throw 50 pitches? I would rather these guys be able to give us a guaranteed 5 innings before coming back up.