but you're arguing something else entirely, namely whether the astros are 44 runs "worse" than their competition. that's certainly debateable, i guess. (i'd argue the first half last year was far less flukey than the second half when berkman declined well below career averages and lee missed significant time.) but if a generic team is -44 in run differential, a .46% winning clip is not by any means flukish. and it's certainly nowhere near as flukish as a team winning 65% of its games while outscoring its opponents by a grand total of 13 runs.
I don't care if it's a formula or not, and if that's what we're discussing I'd rather not. Also, I already told you in my last post that I don't think this way of looking at baseball is without merit...or that it can't be a good predictor. My point was that in the context of this "woe is me, we're as bad as our 1-6 record suggests" thread, everyone seems to have forgotten this team actually managed to win 86 games last year. I don't care how they did it...they did win 86 games. Pixie dust...luck...whatever. This group found a way to put 86 under the column marked "W." that's it. that's all i'm saying. Not that they'll win 86 this season.....but that thinking they might win somewhere in the neighborhood of 79-82 games doesn't qualify someone for incapacity or a straight jacket. that's the context of the thread that i'm talking about.
but that's to predict how many wins, which isn't the point - with run differential, no formula is needed. the astros allowed more runs than they scored. ergo, they should not have finished 11 games over .500.
cool, MadMax - i disagree; i think they'll be in the 73-77 range - but cool. as you stated, the formulas - the dense, complicated ones as well as the easy ones - do indeed have merit; they're invaluable tools for evaluating teams, players, etc. so my issue (if you can even call it that - it's not like i'm upset) is that you took an uncalled for swipe at the geekoratti. i didn't see any one posting formulas in this thread or trying to use numbers to claim the 2008 astros didn't exist - so why the golden hate bridge, bro? that's all I'M saying.
Something else, but not at all in left field. The two are so related they're joined at the hip. Regardless, I agree with your assessment here. I was raising questions that came to mind rather than attempting to make a point or argue the point. The Wigginton effect! You're probably right here, too.
i'm hoping we could get back some cash in that deal.. like in the hundreds of millions otherwise, i think i'll take drayton rather than hunsicker trying to build a team for 25 minimum contracts so he can pay it
On a side note, here are the worst teams in the majors at scoring runs this far: 30. Houston - 16 runs 29. San Fran - 27 runs 28. Anaheim - 28 runs There's not another team with less than 30 runs. We're not just terrible, so we are way more terrible than the 2nd most terrible team.
This is actually a sign for hope. Lee is hitting .207 and Berkman .214 with a total of 6 RBI's between them. If, somehow, Berkman and Lee hit at the same pace all year and combine for roughly 110 RBI's, I don't think I will particularly blame the 'stros management for not forseeing that eventuality. It is reasonable to assume that their offense won't score less than 2/3 as many runs as the second worst offense by the end of the year. IIRC we were having more or less this same conversation about how bad they were at this time last year. On the same date last year, their record was 6-10.
I don't follow baseball at all, but I know this much. The Astros always get off to crummy starts, and they always make a comeback midseason to give fans a glimmer of hope. Any explanation for this pattern which we see over and over and over again?
It's happened a few times in recent years. I don't know if it it was happening 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc... I grew up an Indians fan and only started watching the Astros in 2002 when I moved to Houston. It may just be a fluke and not something you can really expect to happen year in and year out. I'm not sure that the sample size is signficant enough to conclude that it is the norm, especially when you take in to account player/manager turnover. Then again, I saw a piece from the Chron's Zach Levine a few weeks ago where he showed that in one recent season the Astros made a second half surge with a relatively easy second half schedule while in another recent year they made a similar surge with a relatively difficult second half schedule. Maybe the age of the team is a factor in that older players take longer to get it going. We haven't had a lot of good young talent make it up to the bigs over the past several years. On the other hand, the Yankees are usually a pretty old team and I don't know if they've struggled out of the gates as often as we have recently. I believe they did start slowly last year and possibly the year before that. I can't remember for sure.
