Dissecting the Astros’ Failure in 2023

Edit: Guys I never meant the season as a whole is a failure. I'm just talking about the failure within it. Making the ALCS is an incredible achievement, let alone for the 7th consecutive year. This post is not meant to diminish that success. I'm talking about the failure because they literally just lost. Most baseball players will tell you that anything other than winning the world series is failure, it doesn't diminish the other successes of the season. On to the post.

Why couldn’t the Astros repeat as World Series Champions? Baseball is hard is the obvious and easy answer, but this post is meant to highlight the specifics of why I feel they fell short. A lot of fans will simply answer “Dusty Baker,” but while I do have some serious blame to throw his way, I do not think he is even close to the main reason the Astros came up short this year.

(Notes up front: Since the Astros won the division and got the first round bye, any problems isolated to the regular season, such as Altuve and Yordan’s IL stints or Abreu’s terrible season pre-IL, are irrelevant in my eyes to their ultimate failure to go the distance. The regular season deserves its own dissection, but that is not the purpose of this post.

Lastly before we get to the meat, I love all the players and don’t want to hate on any of them, but facts are facts.)

So what is the main culprit in the Astros’ failure to repeat? The clear answer is the massive regression in starting pitching, and nothing else is even close. Every single Astros starting pitcher this year either suffered a season ending injury in the cases of McCullers and Garcia, or simply fell off compared to last year in the case of everybody else.

Let’s start with Verlander. He wasn’t even fuckin’ here! Once he did come back he was sorely needed, and without his key performances in September I don’t think the Astros would have even made the playoffs. That said, he did take a step back from last year, which he isn’t really to be blamed for considering his age. He was merely very good instead of great, and his playoff performances reflected that. In Game 1 of the ALCS he pitched very well, but not as well as Jordan Montgomery. That loss is more on the offense than him. In Game 5 he didn’t have a good outing, but it was enough to keep the Astros in the game. Out of all the starting pitchers I think Verlander deserves the least blame, but the regression is there.

Framber. I love La Grasa but if you want to pick a single person to blame for the Astros failure (though you really shouldn’t), Valdez is your man. He was supposed to be the ace this year, and he was until the All-Star break. After that he was either pitching the worst outing you’ve ever seen, or a no hitter. More of the former than the latter unfortunately. In the postseason he was bad. Every. Single. Start. This is the number 1 difference between this year and last year’s postseason runs. The Astros don’t win in 2022 without Framber Valdez, he was consistently excellent throughout the playoffs and delivered two World Series victories. He was key, an essential bulldog for the Astros, and this year we got to see what it looks like when he doesn’t deliver. His sinker just wasn’t working, we saw it early in the year when even while he was delivering great starts he was inducing a worrying number of fly balls, and we saw it in the playoffs when he gave up homer after homer. People who know what they’re talking about have said it’s because he’s throwing it too hard, lessening the late downward break it needs to induce all those ground balls, and that seems correct to me. Whatever the causes, with his failure in the playoffs the rest of the pitching staff was put in a position where they had to be nearly perfect. As we all saw, they were not.

Christian Javier. What an enigma. He was also expected by many to deliver an ace-caliber season and ended up struggling mightily. Is the premature ramp up for the World Baseball Classic to blame, his reaching a career high in innings pitched due to injuries elsewhere in the staff, a combination of the two, or something else entirely? I don’t know, but for the bulk of the year his devastating fastball wasn’t devastating, and he lives off that fastball. Towards the end of the season he put together a string of promising starts, his fastball looked great again and he was making it past the 4th inning. This run of success continued into the playoffs, he was great in the ALDS and in Game 3 of the ALCS, getting all of our hopes up that he would deliver in a crucial Game 7. Excuse me while I enter a Vietnam flashback. I haven’t looked closely into what went wrong for Javier in Game 7, it’s just still too sickening, but clearly he did not get the job done. After being lights out in every one of his playoff appearances last year, including a combined no-hitter in the MF World Series, this year is tough to swallow. But at least he delivered one ALCS victory, unlike Framber.

Jose Urquidy. He was bad this year, for the part of the season where he wasn’t on the IL. I’ve always been an Urquidy defender, until this year he had always posted a sub 4.00 ERA, and you take that every time from a #4, #5, or certainly #6 starter as he was when McCullers returned last year. This year he posted a 5.29 ERA and a FIP around the same number, which is, uh, not good. He struggled with stamina, he would get tired consistently around the 4th inning or so and give up runs. This could be due to also getting ramped up too early for the WBC, or his shoulder injury, or even the pitch clock. I would be remiss to say the clock couldn’t also be a factor with Framber or Javier, especially Framber who could no longer step off and do his breathing exercises. The clock isn’t going anywhere, so they all need to adapt if that is the issue. How did Urquidy do in the postseason? The fact that he was even the Game 4 starter is a testament to the thinness of this year’s pitching staff compared to last year, the absence of McCullers and Garcia really can’t be emphasized enough. Regardless, Urquidy did well in the ALDS, delivering the final nail in the Twins’ coffin. He did poorly in Game 4 of the ALCS, only getting 7 outs and allowing 3 runs, but we nevertheless won that game thanks to a shutdown bullpen performance and an offense that came to life and posted 10 runs. He pitched 2 by then meaningless innings in Game 7, giving up 1 run. Overall Urquidy did poorly but since we won every game he started, and his only relief appearance was meaningless, his poor performance didn’t matter much.

With the end of the playoff starting rotation, I’ll spend some time on Hunter Brown and JP France. Brown had an overall disappointing rookie season, hopefully he can bounce back next year with his great stuff. JP France was a godsend for much of the year, the Astros may not have made the playoffs at all without the many key performances this previously unheralded rookie delivered. His performance did however taper off towards the end of the year, silencing arguments that he should be a game 3 or 4 playoff starter. How did these two do in the playoffs, their roles relegated to long relief? While it didn’t feel like it at some points, Hunter Brown did fairly well overall. Appearing in 4 games, he pitched 7 innings in relief and gave up 2 ER, for an ERA of 2.57. In Game 4 of the ALCS, he delivered 3 key innings of shutout baseball after Urquidy’s early exit. In Game 7 however, while giving up only a solo homer in his two innings of relief, he required 41 pitches to get through those two innings and looked shaky enough that it seemed necessary to bring in JP France. France, whose only other postseason appearance was a good 2.1 scoreless relief showing in ALCS Game 2, really s**t the bed in the 4th inning of Game 7, only getting 1 out while allowing 4 ER. The absence of Luis Garcia, who delivered 5 scoreless innings in a long relief masterclass in Game 3 of last year’s ALDS, once again looms large here. Though to be fair to France, the 2022 Mariners offense doesn’t compare to the 2023 Rangers. France certainly doesn’t deserve the largest share of blame for Game 7’s loss, but this is when the game really got out of hand.

One could argue France was left in too long, and I agree, but Dusty’s reluctance to bring in another bullpen piece was not entirely unfounded. This brings me to what I believe is the second most important reason for the Astros’ failure: regression in lower-leverage relievers, namely Raphael Montero and Ryne Stanek, as well as the absence of Kendall Graveman in the playoffs due to injury. Both healthy pitchers regressed massively compared to their excellent performance last year, Stanek to a lesser extent compared to Montero, but still significant. Montero finished the year with an ERA of 5.08, Stanek with one of 4.09. Looking at the situation in the 4th inning of Game 7 this problem becomes very apparent. Phil Maton, who had a decent year overall, had already been burned in the first inning after Javier’s collapse, and the high-leverage trio of Neris, Abreu, and Pressly couldn’t reasonably be expected to cover the remainder of the game starting in the 4th inning. Someone else had to get some outs at some point of the game. Who do you go to? Urquidy’s start earlier in the series was disastrous. Ronel Blanco hadn’t pitched at all in the playoffs, he was only on the roster due to Graveman’s injury and it was clear his only role would be mop up duty. Verlander was never going to pitch on such short rest.

If not France, either Montero or Stanek would have to get some outs, and both had proven themselves unreliable in the regular season as well as literally the day before in Game 6 when both gave up multiple runs. Dusty chose to stick with France, if Montero or Stanek had proven themselves more reliable Dusty would have had a much easier decision to make. To be clear I still think Dusty made an error here. I would have thrown in Neris at this point for as long as he could go, thrown Stanek at the bottom of the order when the opportunity presented itself and hoped for the best, and tried to stretch the rest of the outs between Abreu and Pressly. But this wouldn’t necessarily have worked either, and it’s worth noting that Abreu gave up 2 ER himself in Game 7. Point being, Dusty didn’t have any good choices here, he had bad ones and worse ones. This would not have been the case with a deeper bullpen, Graveman’s presence could have made a huge difference, as could have better performances from Stanek or Montero.

The distant (I believe) though still significant third reason the Astros came up short in the playoffs was offensive inconsistency, some of which is likely due to Dusty’s decision to play Maldonado over Yainer Diaz which baffled so many of us all year. It’s impossible to know how much, I don’t think scattered pinch hits and a single start at DH (where he struggled all season) tell us anything about how well he would’ve done starting at catcher everyday. Odds are it would’ve been much better than Maldonado. If any starting pitchers did well enough to warrant Maldonado’s special treatment this year, as could have been reasonably argued last year, it might be a different story. Unfortunately not a single starter on the staff did nearly well enough to justify the supposed worth of Maldy’s “intangibles” over the very high and tangible worth of Diaz’s bat, as well as his superior defense compared to Maldonado who has been regressing in that department for years. This is especially clear since many of the pitchers actually had a lower ERA when pitching to Diaz, which I think is mostly a statistical anomaly, but it certainly shows that Maldonado was not making the difference needed to justify his “intangibles.” I don’t like to say it, but Dusty deserves all of the criticism he has received in this area, although I do think it has been blown a bit out of proportion compared to the pitching staff when blame for this year is assigned.

The unquantifiable missing impact of Diaz’s bat aside, how did the offense do? From Fangraphs:

• Alvarez: 292 wRC+
• Abreu: 158 wRC+
• Bregman: 152 wRC+
• Altuve: 144 wRC+
• McCormick: 112 wRC+
• Dubón: 70 wRC+
• Brantley: 70 wRC+
• Tucker: 54 wRC+
• Maldonado: 29 wRC+
• Peña: 28 wRC+
• Astros Overall: 113 wRC+

Alvarez was the second coming of Barry Bonds. Abreu silenced the haters. Bregman and Altuve were excellent. Chas was pretty good. Dubón and Brantley were not good, Tucker was bad, Maldy and Peña were terrible. The offense overall was pretty good, but way too concentrated in the away games. Some of your bats are pretty much always going to go cold over the short sample of the playoffs, which is a big reason you want all your best hitters like Diaz playing so that when key guys struggle someone down the line can pick them up (which is why heavy hitters like Tucker struggling does not mean Maldy being a black hole offensively doesn’t matter as some strangely suggest). Last year it was Altuve who struggled mightily, this year it was Tucker and Peña. Peña has established himself as a very middle of the road hitter over the totality of his two years in the big leagues, with hot streaks and cold streaks as would be expected. Like everyone else I hoped for another postseason explosion, but that was always wishful thinking. It’s not very surprising he went cold, in the optimal lineup with everyone healthy this year, he would be the least good hitter in it. Tucker going cold is more surprising, but again, these things do happen very predictably to somebody in the lineup. It’s not an excuse for him, just statistical reality.

There’s my very long analysis of why the Astros failed to repeat this year, what do you think?