The Astros made their first playoff appearance in 1980. This was after their first 18 regular seasons ended unsuccessfully with trips to their homes and another hopeful off-season rather than a post-season series. While the expansion Amazing Mets (five out of six 100+ loss seasons) and the Astros of the early 2010’s (three 100+ loss seasons) had much worse single-season numbers, the expansion Colt .45s / Astros were bad and unfortunately sustainably bad.
The Astros enter 2020 after an off-season of more loss than addition. The players that were with the team at the end of the 2019 regular season that have moved on include Gerrit Cole, Wade Miley, Robinson Chirinos, Jake Marisnick, Collin McHugh, Will Harris, Hector Rondon and Aaron Sanchez.
This discussion has occurred before. Baseball’s players’ unions and the MLB owners have bumped heads over the years and folks have wondered if these collisions would bring baseball to its knees.
We are in the depths of baseball boredom right now. So, the only thing to do is for Dan P to stand up and tip his head over and see what thoughts pour out.
With Justin Verlander pitching so well at 35 and 36 years old, some folks are wondering if he could be like Nolan Ryan and pitch effectively into his 40s.
This is always a ridiculous proposition for any team. How do you pick four folks from an organization and honor them with a place on Mount Rushmore from what is 50 to 100+ seasons depending on the organization? So, we are going to try to make this it a little easier by imagining that there are multiple Mount Rushmores to populate from the 58 seasons of Astros’ baseball. This will still be tough, but not as tough as it could have been…
The Astros in their 58 seasons of existence have had a mixed bag of success by position. On the low side, you have these five fine gentlemen as the top five catchers of all time. Note – when Jason Castro comes in third, the depth is nothing to write home to mama about.
There have been tons of baseball numbers featured since Bill James created the new industry of sabermetrics in the 1970s. One of the harder to understand but heavily used numbers thrown around has been WAR (Wins Above Replacement). In general terms, this is how much value (how many wins) a major league player is worth to their teams as compared to a minor league call-up. Of course, when the MLB player is Tyler White (-1.3 WAR) and his replacement is Yordan Alvarez (3.7 WAR)….well that is surely a good example of why a player needs replacement.
