May 4, 2016

Rubbing Mud

The Astros As Sellers

by Matthew Trueblood

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“From the beginning,” Ted Cruz said, “I’ve said that I would continue on, as long as there was a viable path to victory. Tonight, I’m sorry to say, it appears, that that path has been foreclosed.” He said it slower than you just read it. (Nope, even slower. Try again.) What he was saying, though, was that he no longer had any hope of winning the Republican nomination for President, and so, he was finally giving up. To be sure, Cruz hung in there as long as he could. If his opponent were anyone other than Donald Trump, or if Cruz were anyone other than himself, the pendulum would have swung in one direction or the other long ago, and things would have been decided. As it was, the nomination fight dragged into the spring, allowing Cruz’s capitulation to act as a backdrop (perhaps) for the dying of another Texas dream.

The Astros won Tuesday night. That’s the good news. The bad news, beyond the fact that the win came over the lowly (and even lowlier than we thought, maybe) Twins, is that that win pulled them up to 9-18. The only team in the Wild Card era to make the playoffs after such a start was the remarkable Oakland unit from 2001. That team was streaky: They surged from that 9-18 mark to reach .500 at 22-22, and then treaded water until the halfway point, before finishing a ridiculous 63-18 over the second half of their schedule and racking up 102 wins for the season. Those A’s aren’t really a model you want to count on reproducing, especially given that the league of which they were a part, the league they eventually routed past, was a more polarized, weaker one than the Astros have before them. History says it’s probably too late already, for Houston.

The Adjusted Standings page is no kinder to them. The Astros entered Tuesday with a .368 third-order winning percentage, the worst in the AL, so they’re not just getting unlucky or losing solely close games. The Playoff Odds Report reflected the Astros’ preseason standing as narrow AL West favorites, entering the season. On April 4, the report showed a 41.6 percent chance of winning the division, and a 56.9-percent chance of playing past Game 162. Entering Tuesday, those numbers had plummeted to 13.1 and 21.0, respectively. Maybe those numbers can be read as encouraging, since the search for an historical precedent for 9-18 teams turning into playoff teams implied an even lower probability. Still, they’re not pretty numbers.

The Astros are 18^th in team True Average, despite the insanely hot starts from Jose Altuve and Colby Rasmus. They’re striking out at a problematic rate (26.7 percent of the time), and the things an offense has to do to sustain success have thus far eluded them. They walk plenty, but there aren’t enough guys who can pair their walks with enough hits to post good OBPs. Evan Gattis and Luis Valbuena are the kind of hitters who could turn their cold streaks hot and suddenly help the offense a lot, but they’re also the kind who sometimes go over a cliff and are never heard from again: power-dependent, weak BABIP, moderately high strikeout rates, platoon-vulnerable. Gattis and Valbuena typify another weakness of the team, too: They’re slow baserunners with poor instincts. Houston ranks very near the bottom in baserunning runs. Though not disciplined in the way it might ideally be, it’s clear that this offense remains dynamic and dangerous. It’s not at all clear, despite Houston’s long line of competent hitters stretching even into the minor leagues, that it’s a lineup that can consistently score five runs in a game.

They need such an offense, too, because their run-prevention mechanisms are all in critical failure. They have the fifth-worst fielding group in baseball, according to PADE, turning just 68 percent of balls in play into outs. Despite their aggressive shifting, they rank among the lowest third of teams in Defensive Efficiency on groundballs, and despite an extraordinarily athletic and well-regarded defensive outfield, they’re third-worst in baseball in DE on flies. That’s despite the fact that the pitching staff has held opponents to the third-lowest average exit velocity on batted balls this season. It’s a staff that doesn’t miss bats (19.6-percent strikeout rate, seventh-lowest in baseball), so not turning batted balls into outs is an especially grave concern.

If there were just one thing wrong here, I might recommend patience. I laid out all of these failings, though, to set myself up to make the following case: The Astros probably need to be sellers, and soon. Not today, to be sure, but it's something to be thinking about today. In the crowded AL playoff picture, there won’t be other sellers peddling talented players anytime before the All-Star break. (The Twins would finally have to face their overwhelming organizational failure head-on, if they were to give up on this season, and they’re not wired that way.) Carlos Gomez will have to play a whole lot better to have any trade value, but Rasmus has a ton of it. If Tyler White can remain a clearly viable big-league first baseman (dubious, at the moment, but he’s provided reason to believe), he’s the kind of cost-controlled player who could make for a very interesting mid-season trade chip. Valbuena is a free agent at season’s end. So is Jason Castro.

The Astros could reel off a string within the next few weeks and change the outlook considerably. If they don't, they should seriously consider embracing the consolidation year. The number of players for whom they could get significant long-term help without giving up any future value they’d miss makes it an opportunity too good to miss. I suspect that’s not how Jeff Luhnow is thinking right now, but he might have to start doing so soon.

Matthew Trueblood is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @MATrueblood
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