Over the last 2 years Feldman, Fiers and McHugh have ERA's of 3.80, 3.25, and 3.39 respectively. Maybe you didn't expect them to be that good, but there was no real reason to expect all of those 3 would suddenly be dog s**t terrible like they have here early. Fister was the only true gamble.
Why wouldn't it be good enough? We were 5 outs away from beating the now 2 time AL champs, who BTW, haven't had a very good rotation either time. The Indians & Rays were the only teams that really looked like better rotations in the AL. They were banking on McCullers. If Keuchel & McHugh perform like they have the last 2 years, McCullers posts a mid-3 ERA, and Feldman, Fiers continue what they have done the last few years, this rotation is good (as they showed last season).
And their advanced stats said that they were all quality guys. I think McHugh (his velocity is down though) and Fiers will see improvement down the line. I'm not as optimistic about Feldman and Fister.
I follow the Stros pretty regularly but I don't recall seeing that from too many national pundits. I seem to remember a World Series Champion cover or something like that. Not saying your wrong; I just didn't see any of it. Our former beat writers were turds so it is hard to take much of anything they said seriously. McHugh was better than you're giving him credit for. I was really down on him early last year as well, but he was solid overall. We also have to consider what other options were available...we weren't going in on the big $$ free agents and Luhnow wasn't going to overpay for a mediocre one, especially considering how well the rotation pitched last year. I think he was right in doing that. Like I said in my previous post; mgt couldn't predict that half of the 25 would all $hit the bed (repeatedly) so far this year. Hopefully a few of them turn it around and hopefully a few others won't play much once a certain service time deadline passes.
LOL, So our depth chart looks something like this C Castro/Kratz 1B White/Marwin 2B Altuve/Marwin SS Correa/Marwin 3B Valbuena/Marwin LF Rasmus/Marwin CF Gomez/Marwin RF Springer/Marwin I'm sure they would move Rasmus to CF if Marwin came in, but still we are extremely thin on the glove side. This move is likely very short term to get an extra arm with Devo unavailable for a few days, nothing more.
I don't think it is, our rotation is very weak and we need to go with 13 pitchers. I do think that Gattis will be able to catch and then we can release Krats and bring another player to the majors.
It is interesting that Marisnick went down instead of Tucker. I think we can get by defensively, but we are now without a pinch runner.
They first need an option to produce at the plate vs. worrying about who's going to run if that person somehow gets on base. While he's been scuffling as of late, Tucker still should be putting up better overall numbers vs. any of the other guys still with options to be sent down. The main issue with this move is that it further cements Gomez into the lineup without any possibility of giving him a cerebral transplant to get right. While I'm for Giles trying to pitch his way out of it, the converse seems to be holding true for Gomez... Who is somehow getting worse with each and every AB.
They really could use both right now, but you are right that sending Tucker down would have left nobody to pinch hit.
Rasmus is AL player of the week for the 3rd consecutive Astro to win the award this year. It absolutely mind boggles me how their bottom of the order is so god awful when they have a very good top and middle order.
That's gotta be some sort of obscure record... They own the POW award for the season, but they're 6-13. Just goes to show you that you can't have half the lineup, and 3/5ths of the rotation sucking... And still be a good team. But you can have stellar individual performances... That ultimately means very little in day to day wins/losses.
Yeah, McTaggart says they're the first team to win the award 3 times in a row to start a season since it was given out in 1974.
