It's also quite possible that the league has figured out Chas. He thrives on pitches middle/up and outside (RCF gap power) and he doesn't get those much anymore. He'll swing at anything way up or down+away and that seems to be what pitchers are feeding him. Unfortunately his bat is so, so slow now that he's swinging through mistake pitches right over the plate.
Yeah it’s been bad. I will say that Chas, even when hot, looks bad on a lot of at bats. Kinda like Diaz and Altuve. I do agree he is in a terrible funk. Maybe Chas is done. I don’t think we can tell yet.
Diaz has impressed me with his improvement behind the plate for sure, one maybe thing to think about: He's not catching several guys who spike 90 mph breaking balls in the dirt: JV, Lance, Javier...?
My prevailing theory on Chas is it’s just one of those years and he probably hasn’t gone from a really good baseball player to unplayable, overnight, at 29 years of age. My secondary theory on Chas is that he was unrestored out of high school and an afterthought in the draft because his athleticism is marginal, but he had just enough of all his skills to cobble together a big league career while he was at his athletic peak. Guys start to lose physical skills around 22 years old for the first ones (foot speed) down to about 25 or 27 years old for some other stuff (arm, swing speed). Now, most guys lose very small amounts of all that but their primes are like 26-29 because the erosion in skills is offset by increase in processing speed and reps at the big league level. However, if your skills deteriorate from fringe to not good enough maybe Chas just doesn’t have it anymore to get it done at the big league level. Gun to my head he will bounce back and be ok next year, but maybe not.
Yes. down the stretcher the astros have: 20 games with current playoff teams 9 games with good/decent teams 10 games with the dregs (angels and A’s). The mariners have 14 games with playoff teams 9 against decent/good teams 14 games against shitty teams. they’d have to go 25-12 to catch us. Could they? Sure. I’d bet against it as they haven’t all year. if the astros can go 10-10, 5-4, 7-3 that puts us at 89 wins. Seattle would have to
If it’s “one year prime” I don’t think it’s all that hard… Randy Johnson 98 Mike Scott- 86 Roger Clemens whatever year he has the sub 2 era Dallas Keuchel when he won the Cy Whatever Oswalts best season was.
Since May 28th the team is 22-7 when they start. No team has a better 1-2 punch going than we do right now. Brown 2.27 ERA (2.79 FIP) 10.0 K/9 1.13 WHIP (7th in GB%) Framber 2.60 ERA (2.96 FIP) 9.3 K/9 1.03 WHIP (4th in GB%) They respectively rank 3rd and 8th in fWAR over that stretch. K's and grounders from them which play very safely. Their expected numbers are equally sexy.
JV is gonna come back dominant. Astros gonna win 15 of their next 20. They will finish the season in the mix for best record in baseball. Murphy and Miller are worth $20M/yr, imho.
Hunter Brown is effectively replacing Justin Verlander. What a sight to behold. Now we can invest that Verlander money right in to Tucker this offseason and call it a day.
Imagine if the 97-loss 1991 team was all in their prime... C - Eusebio 1B - Bagwell 2B - Biggio 3B - Caminiti SS - Cedeno LF - Gonzalez CF - Finley RF - Lofton SP1 - Scott SP2 - Kile SP3 - Schilling SP4 - Harnisch SP5 - Deshaies SET - X. Hernandez CL - ....well can't win them all.
Those would be wild pitches though. Maldonado routinely let fastballs clang off his glove to allow a runner to advance. It was to the point of keystone cops bad that one year I believe before he left and came back. 2018 maybe? It's like he was trying to corral a hog in slop watching him catch basic fastballs. Just looked it up. He had seven passed balls in 65 career postseason games. Who knows how many countless others he dropped that didn't get far enough away to advance a runner.
The idea Blanco - who one could argue has been the team's MVP this year - might not get a playoff start is bananas. Granted, some of that might be tied to his innings. But even if innings weren't an issue, I don't know that he jumps Framber, Brown, JV (if healthy) and Kikuchi. Framber gets game 1 and the next three have elite swing-and-miss stuff, which plays in the postseason.
Well he is over 40. He claims he is 40, and is probably closer to 42-43 years old. He was pretty bad is 2022 and 2023. However he has like a 900 ops in AAA for the Braves. My guess is that Brown and the Astros want no part of the Gurriel controversy, but if the Astros think he can have an OPS+ over 100, then it is probably worth it. The post season is really short, not a lot of adjustments and Gurriel can hit fastballs.
Lance pitched 47.2 innings between 22 and 23. JV didn't pitch in 21. I don't consider Javier difficult to catch. Maldonado was complete trash.
What's the "Gurriel controversy"? I would pull the trigger. Consider what he did in the playoffs in 2022, getting 17 hits in 12 games. I think we would welcome that performance in the bottom 3rd of the order.
