The Astros have just won eight straight. That places us "only" 7.5 games behind the Brewers in Wild Card standings. Knuckleheads throughout the city (fine, throughout the Chronicle comments pages) have latched onto this as a playoff run. It ain't happening, people. No matter what Dick Justice or JdJO write in the paper, the Astros just aren't a very good team.
Right now, the Good Guys are greatly over-performing their expected Win-Loss record. Going by Pythagorean Win-Loss, they are on pace for a 78 win season. Granted, this is better than last year, but the Astros just aren't going to pull this into a winning season, let alone a playoff run. Not without Roy at the top of his game and Carlos hitting behind Twinkies.
The next series is against the D-Backs. Arizona's pitching is very good (Brandon Webb is posting an Oswaltian 2.88 ERA), but their hitting is awful. Dunn will undoubtedly add a great deal to the offense, but one can't expect one man to turn around an entire offense. So maybe the Astros can win by exploiting their shitty batters.
But wait! The D-Backs aren't actually that bad compared to the Astros. They've only scored 5 fewer runs than Houston. That might be bolstered by the quality of the NL West this season, but it still doesn't bode well for the Stros.
The Astros have shown themselves to be good at beating up on bad bullpens. Tuesday's game showed that best - Houston didn't get anything going until Ausmus hit a line shot off of Lincecum's knee. But the D-Backs have a very strong bullpen (as best as I can tell; neither ESPN nor MLB.com have ERAs for the bullpen as a whole). Even if the Astros can tire Webb and Johnson out, Arizona won't send out some young scrub to finish the game.
Which brings me to my final point. Chad Qualls. Why did we trade this guy? He proved himself to be one of the strongest parts of the Astros' bullpen, and we traded him, Burke, and Gutierrez for Valverde. Given Valverde's penchant for giving up fly balls and MMPUS penchant for turning those into homers, he was not really worth it for the Astros. More to the point, he's terrible with inhereted baserunners. Managers seem to think that accruing the "Save" is more important than using their closers efficiently, but Valverde is supposed to be the best guy in the bullpen. He's actually one of the weakest.
Beyond that, Valverde is also an injury risk. Cooper has kept him from having a heavy workload, however, and we haven't seen that side of him this season. The whole deal stunk back then, and it still does. We should have traded Burke and Gutierrez for anything else, and just held on to Qualls.
The only way I see this working out is if Ed Wade trades Valverde to a larger, stupider club next year. He's grabbed a fair number of saves this year, and only blown a few of his opportunities. Detroit comes to mind as a team with a good farm system and a desperate need for relief pitching. Valverde is overvalued right now, and the Astros could probably turn him into something significant.
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