Thank you, next

Alessandro Zilio
8 min readOct 8, 2024

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Baseball is poetry in motion.

On October 2024 the Detroit Tigers, a team that shouldn’t have made the Playoffs, sellers at the Deadline with one of the youngest rosters in MLB, eliminated the Houston Astros in the 2024 WC series, ending a streak of 7 consecutive ALCS.

At the helm of the gritty Tigers the same man who started that streak in Houston, AJ Hinch, ousted after the sign stealing scandal, scapegoated if you will, though not without blame.

While a 3 game series has a lot to do with variance, luck and everything small sample size, that the Tigers outplayed the Astros in every facet of the game is out of question.

And to be honest, not without expectations: this version of the Astros was by far the worst in a run of success, dynasty?, the fans like to call the Golden Era, a team that managed only 88 wins, enough to win the worst Division in baseball, an AL West with the atrocious Angels, for sale Athletics, fraudolent Rangers and the sad franchise known as Seattle Mariners.

If not for the latter’s lineup, one for the ages in all the wrong ways, the Mariners would have walked the Division home with the sport’s best 1–5 starting rotation, a quality start machine that only a historical lack of offense could stop on its track.

Houston was gifted the AL West again, see 2023, and did nothing with it, finally.

Because as much as it hurts to lose and lose early, failure is the mother of success and hopefully the harbinger of change.

Of all the things that went wrong in the 2024 Astros season, rotation was dealt the worst possible hand.

Javier and Urquidy out early with TJS, JP France shelved by shoulder issues, Luis Garcia and the mythical creature that is Lance McCullers Jr still on their way back, not to mention a couple of months worth of neck discomfort to the remnants of Justin Verlander, Houston had to figure out a rotation on the fly.

And so, they did: Framber turned back to his solid self thanks to a revamped curveball usage, though he reverted to 2023 PO Framber when it mattered most; Hunter Brown went from AAA material in April-May to top 5 ERA in MLB since introducing a sinker in June; Ronel Blanco, a 30 y.o. former reliever, saved the season early and held on strong, first in MLB per opp AVG; Spencer Arrighetti went from mid-tier prospect to strikeout heavy spin master.

Also, notorious contact fan Yusei Kikuchi was vastly overpaid from Toronto and became Randy Johnson down the stretch by ditching his curve and using his slider down and in against RHB, because baseball.

The unit that was most hurt by injuries was the saving grace of a roster in dire straits, that means something must have gone horribly wrong elsewhere.

Bullpen is a nice place to start with.

If there’s one rule in roster management and one rule only, that is never to pay relievers and try to build a super-pen.

And that’s what Jim Crane did, because boy does he know better: to a bullpen with Bryan Abreu and Ryan Pressly he decided to add established K master Josh Hader for a modest $95M in 5 years, the highest contract ever given to a RP.

Good news: games should have been over after 6!

Bad news: games weren’t much over after 6!

Abreu got once again used to the ground, his numbers went down, particularly his control and his fastball’s peripherals, a tick less mph and much worse location. He was mostly fine, but not as dominant as he used to be.

Pressly is all but washed and at $14M he’s approaching Rafael Montero levels of overpay: his ERA wasn’t bad but his Chase% cratered due to his stuff regressing in every metric. 93 mph fastballs down the pipe do not work, changeup still AWOL, many more sliders in the zone, not good news at all.

Next season might be the last hurrah for America’s closer, a reminder that relievers are ever so fickle and prone to crumble in seconds. At this point he’s nothing more than glorified middle relief, surely not your 8th inning man, at least that’s the hope.

What about all the $ on Josh Hader? Yeah, about that.

Sub 1 WHIP and almost a career high K/9…sounds like a bargain!

8–8 record with more than a homer per inning…sounds like AAA!

Hader was terrific or terrible, no shades of gray: in save situations he was mostly fine and had stretches of dominance, what you paid him for, in non save situations, tied or behind, he was bad beyond belief.

Whether that is lack of adrenaline, mental focus or the inherent nature of a reliever’s performance in a single season, that’ll be one to watch in the future. Also, he should not call his pitches from now on, if the WC taught you something.

Still, the back end of the pen disappointed. The front end, not so much.

Strangely enough, when you don’t pay premium and trust your pitching coaches and analysts to find diamonds in the rough, things go much better, wouldn’t you know?!

Journeyman Tayler Scott, now armed with a sidewinding four seamer up top, should have been an All Star in the first half, sub 2 ERA and no Barrels allowed, but got hurt later on due to unforeseen usage; Kaleb Ort, waived by Oakland and a couple other teams, came in throwing 99 and a good sweep/cut combo, few walks and 3 bombs in a row from the Padres, good results altogether.

If your coaches manage to make Hector Neris look not awful, a bit too many HRs, and to make Caleb Ferguson, sub 3 ERA, look a MLB caliber pitcher at all, maybe they are doing it right.

Also, props to Bryan King, a fastball-slider lefty, former AAA Rule 5, who was impossible to hit while sitting 91.

All of the former at minimum salary, $740,000 or so…but hey, Josh Hader has a nice intro!

What really hindered the Astros quest at another ALCS, as much in the Playoffs as in the regular season, was the offense.

Altuve lost 100 points of OPS, Yordan only 50 but his knees all so frail, Bregman walked less than 7% of his ABs, Yainer almost got to .300 but saw his power numbers nosedive.

Everyone not named Kyle Tucker, MVP worthy if not for a shin bone bruise to fracture that cost him 3 months, had a mid to mediocre season at the plate: Pena is what he is, .700 OPS with 15 homers and speed, Chas was hurt and awful when healthy, Meyers can really field and can’t really hit, Dubon hits but without any pop.

Victor Caratini was a shrewd pickup, so good with his bat as a backup catcher that he found himself playing consistent 1B due to Big Jon Singleton’s extreme splits, league average against RHP but useless against LHP, and to the much needed departure of Crane/Bagwell/Jackson’s worst mistake in Jose Abreu.

How does a lineup with those names only get to be middle of the pack, 11th at its best, in runs scored?

Let’s investigate:

  • Top 3 Swing% in MLB
  • Top 3 Chase% in MLB
  • Led all of MLB in 1st Pitch Swing%
  • Trailed all of MLB in Zone%
  • 27th in Walk%
  • 17th in Barrel%

Do you remember the old Astros adagio of “passing the baton”? Me neither.

A lineup that used to destroy the opposing starter under the pressure of unending quality ABs transformed into a mass of free swingers, easy to pitch around and always available for a short inning and for some bad contact.

Well, maybe they were better with RISP, in the clutch, in leverage spots…or not?

Hey, they hit for average with runners on! Forget about the inexistent walk rate, below average ISO, no grand slams in a season and all of that! Average, that’s where it’s at!

All of this to say that, given the roster at hand, this was by far the worst offensive display of the Golden Era, and, don’t be fooled, by design.

It’s easy to blame all of the aggressive ones for such numbers, the Altuves Yainers and Dubons, but when almost everyone else follows suit, when Yordan Bregman and many others see their Swing% rise by 2–4% and their Chase% with it, that is an epidemic issue that stems from wrong coaching and lack of adjustments.

Astros hitters did nothing but swing all season long, a strategy adopted to avoid strikeouts, believing that the first pitch is the one to do damage on.

The latter might be true IF the pitch is a good one to swing at AND if the hitter swings with intent, both things the Astros avoided like a disease: pitchers threw fewer meatballs 0–0 to Astros hitters, more offerings at the edges and out of the zone, to which they swung at with no reprieve.

The whole organizational approach to hitting fell pray to the belief that contact quantity is to be prioritized whereas a lineup should focus on improving contact quality, even at the expense of more strikeouts.

You’d much rather have Yainer hit .270 with 30 HR than this iteration, and so on.

The “first come first served”, highly aggressive approach was conceived by Dusty Baker and preached by Alex Cintron, the primary Astros hitting coach, if one might say so.

No one knows what he’s looking at his tablet 24/7 because a lineup that lost the likes of Springer, Correa and Brantley, all disciplined hitters with good eye, and is about to say goodbye to Bregman, a man whose knowledge of the strike zone is second to none, still hasn’t changed his ways, if not only worsened with time.

Many of the Astros hitters would benefit from a more passive approach, less swings and more focus on either or both pitch type and location, early in the count and before two strikes.

A lineup that has above average bat to ball skills in almost its entirety, save for Meyers and Pena, shouldn’t be afraid of getting into more 2 strike counts, they’ll survive with the usual bad contact BUT they’ll also see more balls, more hitter counts and possibly more hangers, mistakes and pitches down the middle to swing at for the bleachers.

Line drives are great, the best kind of contact actually, but they are hard to come by and forcing them leads to many more grounders than flyballs, the former much worse than the latter, even more so when playing at MMP or another small ballpark.

Houston’s offense was the primary culprit of such a rollercoaster, and ultimately a failure of a season when compared to the expectations defined by the Golden Era.

As to what to do to get back into a run of success, I’ll get to it later as Playoffs come to an end and another franchise that is not the Astros will raise the WS trophy.

Only then there’ll be the official start of an offseason that looks to be crucial if Houston still wants to be a major contender and not an afterthought come 2025.

As it is right now, the Golden Era seems on the brink of ending sooner rather than later.

There’s work to do not to let it happen.

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Alessandro Zilio

Italian baseball stathead. I’ll write about MLB, NPB and Korean dramas. A lot of Astros related content and obscure references.