Updated Projections - Game 21 of 162
That was fun
Composition of Projections:
2024 Actuals: 13.0%
Preseason Projections: 87.0%
The Astros are 7-14, in last place in the AL West and 4.0 games out of first place.
Fangraphs projects an 85-77 finish and first place in the AL West and gives the Astros a 44.6% chance of winning the Division.
Season Projections
Altuve projects for a slash line of .312/.392/.540.
JV back, Whitley optioned.
Verlander currently projected for 26 starts and 15 wins.
Stress Index
The goal is to capture the stress put on a pitcher, rather than just a number of pitches.
The calculation is really quite simple: Number of pitches x aLI, where aLI is the average leverage index.
78 pitches with an aLI of .87 for JV. Hard to draw it up much better than that.
Team average stress per start is 87.31.
Verlander becomes the team’s 8th different starting pitcher in 21 games.
Extremely high stress for Hader. 30 pitches at aLI of 2.49. Have to imagine he is down today.
Added column to show what % of total stress reliever has shouldered on season.
To date, Abreu, Pressly and Hader, as expected have shouldered the load.
The Game Turned When
Top 2nd, runner on 2nd, 0 outs, Yainer Diaz doubled to left (Grounder). Kyle Tucker scored.
The Astros win probability went from 56.2% to 65.7%, a 9.6% increase.
Josh Hader’s strikeout out of Joey Meneses in the 9th decreased the Nationals win probability by 11.1%, but at the time of the at-bat Washington only had a 20.5% chance of winning.
The Home Run Project
No home runs last night.
The Grumpy Ump
Overall, not a bad game by Cory Blaser.
NOTE: OVERALL FAVOR column is changed to reflect Astros only. In other words, a +0.24 in favor of Yankees is reflected as -0.24 here.
Information, except for O/U, courtesy of umpscorecards.com, just presented in a way that is easier for my brain to process.
Projected Standings and Luck Rankings
The Astros currently project to 97 losses.
Astros move to 27th in Luck Rankings, suggesting there will be a turn at some point.
Houston is 0-5 in one-run games and 0-2 in extra-innings (there’s some overlap).
The other two teams that haven’t won a one-run game this season: The Rockies (0-5) and Marlins (0-3).
Even more interesting to me is how far the bottom 4 teams are from the rest of the league, especially the Rockies and Marlins.
The Rockies are 4-15. They are 0-5 in one-run games their Pythagorean Theorem expected record is 6-13, while my numbers say they should be 5-14.
The Marlins have gone from the luckiest team in 2023, to the unluckiest team in 2024 and are 0-3 in one-run games this season.
Miami’s Pythagorean expected record is 6-14, while my numbers say they should be closer to 5-15.
For both teams, the reason the numbers are so low is because they have so few wins, so the number is “exaggerated”.
If you have 8 wins and you should have one more, that would be 12.5%.
On the other hand, if you have 4 wins and you should have 5, that’s 25%.
In other words, the extreme numbers are early season noise.
I would expect both teams to regress towards the mean (0.00) soon.
Stat(s) of the Day
Thanks for reading!