The Astros are unstoppable! The Astros desperately need to make a trade!
Two Houston Astros-based storylines seem to have taken hold during the month of June, with only about a week separating their apparent apogee and nadir. After an 11-game winning streak that saw the Astros standing at 42-16 two Mondays ago, people were ready to put a fork into the AL West race. Then Houston suddenly started losing, dropping seven of its next 10 games as Dallas Keuchel, Lance McCullers Jr. and Charlie Morton landed on the disabled list. And just like that, the sky was falling.
But Houston hasn't panicked, nor does it seem likely the front office will, and the Astros remain the AL team to beat. Starting off 42-16 is something only very good teams manage to do. Playing .724 ball for more than a third of a season isn't something you can do by fluke or luck of the Pythagorean variety. Only 37 teams in baseball have done as well over their first 58 games, and only five failed to win their league or division. Three of these occasions came from baseball's infancy, from the inconsistent-quality leagues from the 1870s and 1880s. But even with those teams in the mix, the 37 teams combined to finish the season with a .695 winning percentage.
If you look only at the teams from the start of baseball's modern period in 1901, in order to get a game and league structure that are at least vaguely similar to today's game, you get 21 teams that started 42-16 or better and only a single club that failed to grab a pennant -- the 1942 Brooklyn Dodgers. And they finished at 104-50, a .675 winning percentage (equivalent to 109 wins per 162). I think every single person reading this would agree that record would take any division in 2017.
The worst winning percentage of the 42-win starts belonged to the 1913 Philadelphia Athletics and the 1952 Brooklyn Dodgers, both finishing 96-57 for a .627 winning percentage (or a 102.6-win pace in a 162-game season).
Just as important for the Astros is that their hot start was enough to establish an impressive cushion within their division. A 10-game lead through June 17 had been managed only nine times before the Astros did it, and none of those teams dropped out of first place. Only the '53 Yankees even made it briefly interesting, seeing their lead drop to four games by mid-July.
Now, teams have blown 10-game leads in the past, but it's exceedingly rare. The 1951 Dodgers lost a 13-game lead, the 1993 Giants and 1978 Red Sox blew 10-game leads, and the 1995 Angels saw an 11-game lead evaporate.
But to manage these epic collapses, each of those teams also needed a formidable bête noire to administer the coup de grâce. Now that I've used up all of my French, what AL West team can take the role of the 1978 New York Yankees, a team that led the American League in ERA and had a lineup featuring Reggie Jackson, Willie Randolph, Graig Nettles and Thurman Munson? Those Yankees needed to win 100 games to knock off the Red Sox, after all. But the rest of the AL West this year looks like a mass of .500-ish teams. Well, maybe not the A's.
But let's look a little deeper with the stats and standings; how poorly would the Houston Astros have to play the rest of the season to put their 11-game lead into some kind of jeopardy?
Through Sunday's games, the ZiPS projection system gives the Astros a mean projection to finish the season with a 99-63 record and a 99.5 percent projected chance at winning the AL West, the best projected shot in baseball.
Now, remember, this projection factors in estimates for missing playing time from the injured pitchers. None of the newly disabled pitchers are expected to be out that long, after all: McCullers may be back in the rotation next week; Morton's starting rehab soon; Keuchel's about to start throwing again; and even Collin McHugh -- not part of the team's hot start -- is expected to throw live batting practice soon. Nor is Josh Reddick's stint on the concussion list likely to be a major hindrance. While it's always risky to call any concussion mild, it does appear to not be of the Corey Koskie/Justin Morneau level of career-threatening severity.
That being said, the injuries and the worse play generally from the team in the past week does drop the rest-of-season average roster strength projection from .573 (at the height of Houston's hot run) to .558. That's not enough of a drop to seriously risk Houston's place in the standings.
But let's be really negative. What if Houston's roster strength is really only good for a .520 winning percentage? That drops the team to a 98.9 percent projected playoff chance. OK, how about .500? Now we're down to 93.6 percent. That's still not far enough, so let's go down to .468, which would make the Astros the worst team in the division in the projections (the Angels with Mike Trout projected to be out until August come in at .469 for the rest of the year). That finally drops the Astros' odds down to 84.9 percent, meaning that they would still have nearly a 5-in-6 chance at winning the division as a lousy team.
Having a lead this large is simply very hard to blow. Spot the San Diego Padres an 11-game lead in the National League West at this point of the season and even they would have better-than-even odds (57.6 percent) to hold off the division.
To get the Astros down to that .500 roster strength, you need a doomsday type of scenario. Let's assume that Keuchel, Morton, McCullers and McHugh all miss the rest of the season. So as to not jinx pitchers with injury talk, let's assume that they walk away from the game to form an indie rock quartet. (Keuchel does have the beard of a bassist.) That's actually what's needed, getting the team's projection down to .500. -- .501 actually, but let's not split hairs.
Given the 93.6 percent projected chance in this scenario, a team like the Texas Rangers needs more to happen to really make the Astros sweat. So let's go crazy and engineer a Mike Napoli-for-Paul Goldschmidt trade. Even the team's former GM Dave Stewart wouldn't do that, of course, but we're playing in a theoretical sandbox here. That projects about 2.6 more WAR for the Rangers, getting the Astros all the way down -- to an 88.0 percent chance of taking the AL West.
Obviously, the All the Astros Pitchers Retire and the Rangers Get Goldschmidt scenario is extremely far-fetched. But even that still leaves the Astros the overwhelming favorites to win the West. The thing is, the team can't help but be aware of the commanding-if-not-guaranteed position it's in, which is why the sudden flurry of talk about how the Astros must now overpay for Jose Quintana or need to get Johnny Cueto from the Giants is just that: talk.
Houston's front office is not one that tends to panic. While adding Jose Quintana last winter would have looked to improve the team (not so much in hindsight given Quintana's results so far), Houston balked at the price. One thing that defines the Astros is that they do value their minor leaguers highly, and not just to squeeze out the maximum price in trades but as contributors to the team. There was no fear in the team about bringing up Alex Bregman and giving him a prominent role last year in the middle of a pennant race. This year, when players hit the disabled list, there was no hesitation about using Derek Fisher and David Paulino or Francis Martes, all players who could have theoretically gone in a trade for a starting pitcher, either last winter or now.
This organizational mindset differs from a team such as the Mets, who tend to respond to their questions by not completely trusting their young talent. After an awful six weeks last year, Michael Conforto didn't get a single at-bat in the majors after June 16. The Mets have received the benefit of his play in 2017 not because they trusted him but because early-season injuries forced them to play him. And with injuries in the middle infield, instead of using Amed Rosario, the Mets are using a Potemkin village lineup in which we're supposed to believe Jose Reyes can still play baseball at the major league level.
What would it take to change Houston's mind and make a trade? With the division not seriously at risk, to make a major trade the team would likely need a reason to worry about the playoffs. Except that the Astros are not even close to that kind of worry with their pitching staff right now.
The Astros got to where they are with a modern, progressive style of baseball planning, and where they are is at the top of the division by a large margin. They remain the overwhelming favorites to win the AL West and strong favorites for the AL's best record, and even with a short-term blip, the team will most likely continue to dance with the ones they brought. So White Sox and Giants fans can stop dreaming of Houston's top prospects on their rosters, at least until Dallas Keuchel decides to go for a Grammy.