Your first passage sounds crazy, and crazier for even saying that...but my hate for Dusty, the manager, is so much imma agree with you.
I'm not really trying to argue about 2 wins vs 5 wins or that Dusty's decisions don't matter in in a playoff race decided by a game. The 2 games was specific to Diaz. There are people on this board who have said Dusty has cost the Astros 10 wins and that Diaz alone is worth 8 wins over 60 games or that Dusty is doing things out of spite / wanting to lose and not just making bad decisions. I don't think analytics would support any of that. All these numbers are imperfect, but the pitching difference alone is something like 18 wins. Altuve, Brantley, and Alvarez missing large numbers of games were worth a lot of wins. Dusty is the tip of the iceberg in that sense, he's a very visible problem (and has hurt the Astros this season), but there are many other factors that contributed more to the overall season. Serious question - where are you seeing the war split out by position and PA? For Fangraphs I only see total WAR provided and I'd love to see the breakdown per position. To do this correctly, I think you'd want to separate defense from offense. You'd apply the difference in their defensive contributions to WAR per game to the flipped number of games say (100 for Diaz and 62 for Maldy). I think you'd then want to take Diaz's overall offensive and baserunning numbers (so everything but defense) and just assume he played catcher all those games for positional adjustment and then normalize that to plate appearance. Say 420 PA for Diaz vs 250 for Maldy. I see Sean Murphy as playing 98 games at C so far for 409 PA. You can't do this with the numbers Baseball Reference provides. You can say his offense at C is better than DH so taking his overall offensive numbers understates his WAR, but his offensive numbers as a 1B are better than at catcher and the sample sizes per position are small (maybe we should be complaining Dusty didn't play him at 1B through August ). I think a larger sample size across all his at bats are probably more predictive than just his at bats as C. All of this is sort of ironic on some level as in the last 14 games where the Astros have gone 4 and 10 and basically blown the division. The games they have lost the other teams scored an average of 6.3 runs per game, Chas has played all but 1 of them and they went 1-4 in the games Diaz started at C. The pitching has been terrible overall and the Astros have hit OK overall, but terrible with RISP none of which is an outcome of lineups or batting orders.
Bryce Miller hasn’t allowed a run in his two starts against the Astros this season. Framber gave up 8 in his two against the Mariners. Law of averages is in our favor!
Bring back Luhnow, the biggest problem this year is the org has failed to make a single good move..... Bringing back Dusty, signing Montero to that awful contract, signing Brantley knowing he is done and bringing in Abreu have all been colossal failures. Then they decide to trade their best prospect for old bum JV who has added how many wins since he got here? Probably not enough to make a single difference in the situation considering they probably won't make the post season. Every single decision up to this point has been bad, bring in Luhnow to fix this mess...
