He's been better in every area offensively besides his power imo... considering the fact he doesnt play as much as last season. Still just surprising to me considering thats always been his main strength besides triples
In a year where you're trying to win a World Series and have a very solid shot at doing so, I don't think $5.5M should factor into any decision. That being said, wouldn't surprise me if it does.
He still has an option. Could send him down to AAA... doubt they do that though. Was the perfect cup of coffee for both Fisher and the organization. Builds confidence for the player and trade leverage for Luhnow and staff (if they do decide to trade him).
Still the best record in MLB with a 12 game lead in our division. Pretty good. AND Altuve, Correa, and Beltron went hitless tonight. Give it up for Derek Fisher. I can't stand the other Derek Fisher, but I like this guy.
Fisher can still come up later and make the playoff roster over Aoki. Lots of season left to figure out how those types of pieces fit together
Aoki will get hot soon. The guy is a consistent .280 avg, .350 OBP player in the majors, that's just what he is.
Something interesting about Beltran is that he seems unusually affected by daylight vs stadium lighting - much more so than the team as a whole. Of 70 games played prior to today, the Astros had played 20 day games and 50 night games. The Astros batted for a team OPS of .812 in the night games vs .841 in the day games, for an overall differential of .029 OPS points. Now Beltran, individually, has hit for an outstanding OPS of .878 in his day games (comprising 65 plate appearances) but has only hit for an OPS of .655 over 184 PAs in night games. That's a day/night differential of .223 OPS points - much more than the team average. Granted, one could say that the 65 daytime PAs don't represent a very large sample size, and through luck Beltran may have faced unusually weak pitchers in those day games - but nonetheless, they were the same pitchers faced by his teammates, so I believe the comparison is valid. All of this leads me to wonder if age isn't affecting Beltran's vision, i.e whether natural sunlight isn't essential now to him having consistent success at the plate.
Jake's strikeout percentages by month coming into today's game: April - 10 K's in 21 AB's (47.6%) May - 19K's in 49 AB's (38.8%) through June 18 - 7K's in 23 AB's (30.4%) so, even though we are not talking about huge sample sizes, nonetheless there is a clear and encouraging trend in Jake's plate discipline. I'd be very happy if he could get that rate down to 25% by August and keep it under that mark consistently thereafter.
If a team willing to trade a TOR starter made a strong request for Gattis to be included in the deal, I suspect we wouldn't lose too much either offensively or defensively by agreeing to that request and bringing in Centeno as the backup to McCann. It could make sense if we get a lot of value in return on the pitching side.
So... in the the last 15 games our 3 best starters have combined to make 1 start, and our division lead has shrunk by... 1/2 game. The 2 losses to Boston were extremely winnable and we've been very conservative with our best bullpen arms in order to keep them fresh, which has probably cost us a game or 2. We are 5-8 over our last 13 games, but we've actually outscored our opponents over that stretch. Even when we aren't playing well, we aren't exactly playing all that poorly.
