Something to drink to

While Ike prevents the Astros from continuing their run. (Good luck to everyone in Houston, too).

I just noticed this morning. Hunter Pence is now slightly above average (OPS+ 103). He's made the adjustments to the league's adjustments to him, I guess, and that's pretty encouraging. Especially since he was in OPS+ 80-90 range for much of the season.

Oh, and he hasn't committed any errors, either. Of course, errors are a stupid statistic, but that's good. Bill James had an article a couple of months ago where he wrote that Hunter's arm was one of the best in the league. And I'd agree. The guy has an ugly throw (and ugly swing, as we all know), but he has a pretty strong arm.

I think next year might be something of a "breakout" year for Hunter. It's tough to follow up on his excellent Rookie season, but he's showing a great deal of improvement at the plate. One more reason to have hope for the Astros' future.

Scouts tend to think that his swing is going to hurt him, preventing him from gaining true stardom in the majors. The odds are always against players attaining star numbers, anyways, but I think we've all seen guys with weird approaches make it big. I seem to recall some dude who played for the Astros a couple of years ago with a weird swing who a lot of scouts thought would never make it. What was his name again?

Oh yeah, he was never any good. Fuck him. Pence is going to suck forever and ever. 2007 was a fluke.

On Luck and the '98 Astros

In Moneyball, Billy Beane says to Michael Lewis something to the effect that he has no control over the playoffs. And he's right - the playoffs are so short, and the amount of luck involved in baseball so large, that even the 1998 Devil Rays could beat the 1998 Yankees in a five game series. It's not a very fun notion - we want to think that the team that reaches the World Series is the best of the best, but sometimes (cough2006Cardinalscough) even pretty poor teams make it. And they win the championship, too.

In the wake of Biggio's jersey retirement, and the resulting shitfest that was the "discussion" of his hall-of-fameness, I began to notice a running trend: people were counting Biggio's lack of a WS ring against him. So I'd like to write about the time the Astros really got fucked over by fate - the 1998 NLDS.

The 1998 season produced the 1998 Yankees - the "best Yankees evar" to paraphrase that dumbass Giuliani. Most people probably remember 1998 for the race between McGwire and Sosa. The 1998 season also produced three 100 win teams - the Yankees, the Braves, and the Astros. By that time, of course, the Yankees and Braves were perennial visitors to the playoffs. The Astros had, since 1994, established themselves as the powerhouse of the NL Central, along with St. Louis. 1997 was the Astros' first playoff visit since the epic 1986 season, but had resulted in a sweep in the NLDS, courtesy of the Braves.

The next season, the Astros had one of the most powerful lineups they ever fielded. At first and second were, of course, Bagwell and Biggio. Bagwell was having something of an off year, "only" posting an OPS+ of 158. Biggio was having a great one, posting an OPS+ of 139. Moises Alou would display his pure hitting prowress: OPS+ of 157. Bill Spiers was even league-average that year. Ausmus had his third best season: OPS+ of 91. Guys like Richard Hidalgo rounded out the bench and lineup. I'd say it was the best lineup of hitters the Astros would field until 2004.

Oddly enough, for a team that many associate with outstanding pitching talent, the late 90s Astros had little of it. But we did have solid starters. Jose Lima had the worst ERA of the starters at 5.28 - he would be a year away from "Lima Time." Mike Hampton and Shane Reynolds would have ERAs of 3.36 and 3.51, respectively - slightly under the league average. Sean Bergman posted one of 3.72; again, slightly better than league average. The Astros had one shitty pitcher and three semi-good ones.

Until Johnson was traded to the Astros. Johnson was in his contract year with the Mariners, and had apparently been in something of a malaise for most of the season. But the Astros dealt John Halama (a player to be named later, he was the Astros' other shitty fifth starter in 1998), Carlos Guillen (still in the MLB with the Tigers), and Freddy Garcia (just came out of rehab and signed a deal with the Tigers). This was back when the Astros could afford to do this sort of thing with the farm system - Draft and Follow had proven to be something that the Astros were awesome at, and all of Venezuela was essentially the Astros' territory. We could afford to lose a Major League pitcher and two top prospects for a guy who we knew would only be in Houston for a few months.

So Johnson came to Houston and promptly posted a 1.28 ERA in his 11 starts. Had he done this in Seattle for anything close to the whole season, he probably would have won his second Cy Young that year. In any case, he still came in 7th in NL Cy Young voting that year. Oh yeah, and we had some dude named Wagner as our closer. So with four average starters, one awesome starter, and one of the best bullpen aces of all time, the Astros would roll towards the playoffs with Bagwell, Biggio, and Johnson leading the way.

The NLDS pitted the Cubs (who won the wild card) against the Atlanta Braves and the Padres against the Astros. In stark contrast to what will happen this year, with three good teams making the playoffs and one bad team showing up from the NL West, the 1998 season saw remarkable parity amongst the divisons. San Diego had won 98 games, Atlanta 105, and Houston 102. Chicago, San Francisco, and New York were locked in a three-way fight for the wild card. The Giants and Cubs would play each other in a tiebreaker to determine the wild card.

A lot of people picked the 98 Astros as the NL Pennant favorite. And they were probably right. What nobody accounted for was the sudden failure of the Astros hitters.

The simple fact was that Bagwell, Biggio, Alou and the rest were atrocious in the postseason that year. It shouldn't have been even close. Other than our friend Caminiti (who had finally gotten the drugs and drinking under control and was displaying his hitting talent at full force), Tony Gwynn, and Greg Vaughn (who was having an absolutely ridiculous year, hitting 50 homers and OPS+ at 150. The guy never had anything even CLOSE to that before or after), the Padres didn't have the hitting skills of the Astros. And they certainly didn't have the raw slugging ability.

Pitching was similar, as well. The Padres had two starters with better-than-average ERAs: Ace Kevin Brown and less-than-ace Andy Ashby. They featured one of the premier closers of his time and all-time saves leader Trevor Hoffman. But again, they didn't have the talent that Houston had. Johnson was better than Brown. Hampton was better than Ashby. Wagner was better than Hoffman. Bagwell was better than Caminiti, Alou was better than Vaughn, and Biggio was better than Gwynn.

But the Astros would be defeated 3-1 in the series. What the fuck happened?

Luck happened. Brown was hot, as was Johnson. But the Padres' hitters were hot, too, while the Astros' hitters simply weren't. A lot of people like to believe that it was the Astros' lack of left-handed hitting. I don't think that's the case. Left-hand right-hand crap only matters in extreme cases.

Well, maybe it was just the pitching. Maybe Bagwell and Biggio just got blown away by Brown.

But the problem with that is our data for their career stats against Brown. Bagwell had an .870 OPS against Brown, lifetime. He could handle Brown in other circumstances (interestingly, to me anyways, is that Bagwell's #1 Pitcher Faced was Maddux. And he posted pretty good numbers against Maddux, too. Bags didn't have a problem with good pitchers).

Biggio has a less pretty career line against Brown: .188/.308/.313. But that's pretty typical for Bidge. As Bill James and others have noted, Biggio had a very extreme good pitcher/bad pitcher split. He could still hit a good pitcher (again, Mad Dog was his #1 pitcher faced. Career .723 OPS. He was plunked twice), but not like how he could hit a bad one. I don't really feel like looking up the career lines of Alou or Bell against Brown right now, but I'm sure they're fairly similar.

It was just luck of the draw. From 1997 on, the Astros faced spectacular pitchers in the postseason. They faced the ridiculously good Braves' pitching corps year after year - the one including future Hall of Famers Maddux, Smoltz, and Glavine. They just didn't have the success they found in the regular season. Balls didn't fall in the right spots, pitches once called strikes were now called balls, their bats were just off by a few sixteenths of an inch. They just got unlucky.

That still leaves the "choking" explanation. I've always loved Choke City as a nickname for Houston (it's why I named the blog that, along with the Chacon-Wade incident). Houston has a fine history of choking - the 1993 Oilers come to mind, as do the 1986 Rockets, the Rockets from 2003 on, and plenty of other cases.

But people don't become big league ballplayers if they can't handle pressure. Bagwell was dealing with pitches whizzing past his head at 90+ MPH almost every day for six months. He could handle pressure. The only explanation that makes any sense is luck. And that shouldn't be held against the Stros or any other franchise.

We can wonder about "what if." What if the Astros had swept the Fightin' Fathers? We would have met up with the Atlanta Braves once again. That would have been truly epic, as always. I think that would have cemented the Astros-Braves rivalry then and there. Had the Stros won the NLCS, they would have faced the Yankees. And I think the Astros would have faced much better chances against the '98 Yankees than the '98 Padres did. We might have seen the Astros' first World Series victory in 1998, "only" 36 years after enfranchisement. It would have been a thing to behold.

As it is, we had to wait for our first postseason victory against the Braves until 2004. And I think everyone would agree that the 2005 encounter between the two teams, with Roger Clemens emerging from the bullpen as the Astros' last chance to put the game away as the greatest postseason game ever played - even greater than the 1986 NLCS Game 6.

But luck played a major factor in everything. The postseason is not a good way to determine the best team, but it is a dramatic one. And that's alright. We don't watch baseball as a lesson on probability (well, I do), we watch it for the story and drama and battle.

But the Astros still got fucked.

People on Fark sure are stupid.

Granted, one shouldn't look on the internet for any type of wisdom, but Fark is the biggest collection of blathering retards this side of 4Chan.

To quote from the complete idiocy (regarding Biggio's Hall of Fame worthiness):

I'm saying that his most impressive stat (3,000) hits) was reached by merely being average for a long time.

There are obviously quite a few things wrong with this statement:

1) 3000 hits was certainly Biggio's most heralded stat, but it was not his most impressive. I'd say most career doubles by a right hander is more impressive, to me at least. His HBP record is also remarkable.

2) Biggio was anything but average. He has a career OPS+ of 111. If you don't include his post-knee injury years, it gets higher. He had 5 years posting an EQA of 300. He had 7 of at least 290. EQA takes into account park effects, and 260 is league average. His career EQA was 286. He was a spectacular hitter.

3) Being an average hitter for 20 years will not get you 3000 hits. Yes, he stayed in the game an extra year to get to that number (and I think most would agree that doing that was a little selfish), but he would have had 3000 hits if he (a) played somewhere other than the Astrodome or (b) hadn't injured himself in 2000.

The problem is that Biggio played 20 years in Houston. Had he done it in New York, Chicago, LA, or Boston, this wouldn't be an issue. ESPN would've covered his ceremony live and spent days talking about how fucking fantastic he was.

Instead, he played for an expansion club that never won a World Series. So he gets shit on by stupid fucks on the internet who never saw him play. Bidge and Bags were two of the best hitters of their era. Anyone who thinks differently on this is probably functionally retarded.

Edit:

Fark is also frequently the source of great wisdom. From "Clonod":

Craig Biggio deserves to be the Hall of Fame, even if he had 2,800 hits.

What is the most important job of a hitter? Get on base, don't make outs. This is especially true if you are hitting in the #1 or #2 hole ahead of players like Jeff Bagwell, or Lance Berkman, like Biggio.

In his prime, Biggio's on base averages were:

.378
.373
.411
.406
.386
.415
.403
.386
.382

He was slo posted slugging percentages in the high .400s-low .500s. Most of these seasons were played in the Astrodome, one of the toughest hitters parks in baseball over the last 40 years.

All of this means that Biggio's best seasons has OPS+ of 141, 139, and 138. By comparison, MVP candidate 2nd baseman Chase Utley has a 135 OPS+ this year.

Oh, and during his prime, he was also stealing 35-50 bases a year at a high frequency. And playing a capable (though unspectacular) 2nd base.

So no, the biggest redneck here:, he was not merely very good for a long time. He was one of the very best players in baseball when he was at the top of his game. I'm sorry you can't see past batting average to understand this fact.


Since WWII, I would rank Biggio the 3rd best 2nd baseman that payed the game, after only Joe Morgan and Jackie Robinson, better than HOFers Rod Carew (if you want to put him at 2nd), Ryne Sandberg, Red Schoendienst (and I'm a Cardinals fan), and Bill Mazeroski. Te only contemporary close to him is Jeff Kent, and you could make an argument that Kent if better (I would disagree) but even so, it's pretty clear that Craig Biggio is one of the greatest 2nd basemen who ever lived, and he belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Couldn't have said it better meself.

Retired Numbers

A while back, I read Joe Posnanski's article on retired numbers. Biggio retirement ceremony has got me thinking about it again.

Posnanski kind of slights the Astros on the quantity of numbers retired.

"No offense to the fine people of Houston but … that’s a few too many retired numbers for a 1960s expansion organization that has not yet won a World Series."

At first, this kind of pissed me off when I read it. It still does, but for different reasons. I used to be pissed off because he didn't know how fucking great Cheo Cruz and Jimmy Wynn were; now I'm pissed off because he presumes to know when Houston should retire a number.

Now that Biggio's number is retired, the Astros have retired 9 numbers:

34- Nolan Ryan
24- Jose Cruz
25- Jimmy Wynn
33- Mike Scott
49- Larry Dierker
32- Jim Umbricht
40- Don Wilson
5 - Jeff Bagwell
7 - Craig Biggio

Umbricht and Wilson's numbers were retired because of their tragic deaths. Wynn, Cruz, Scott, Ryan, Bagwell, and Biggio were all great players. Bags and Bidge are going to the hall of fame. Wynn probably should have gone, Ryan is already in, and Cruz is a borderline case who was beloved by Houston fans. Mike Scott very nearly took Houston to its first pennant. Dierker was our first really good pitcher and a fixture in the Astros organization for many years as a player, broadcaster, and manager.

It occurs to me that two other players are actually deserving of retirement: JR Richard and Joe Niekro. Both were great pitchers; both were loved by the fans. Richard stroked out on the field and was never the same. Niekro holds the Astros record for most wins (which is meaningless, I know, but he spent half of his career here and was only behind his brother and maybe Wakefield as a knuckleballer), which will likely be broken in the next few years by Oswalt.

Everyone is pretty certain that Berkman and Oswalt will have their numbers retired when they retire. Barring anything weird (Berkman goes out and shoots up downtown Houston / Oswalt turns out to be the anthrax terrorist), I'm sure they will be, too. JD and Brownie were saying that Oswalt and Berkman are in the middle of HOF careers. I'm inclined to agree, but we'll see in six years where everyone's at. Berkman's most similar batter (by similarity score) is David Ortiz, and I think everyone thinks he'll go in. In any case, it's way too early to start talking about this.

Anyways, that will mean the Astros will retire 11 numbers. I think Billy Wagner will probably be in the HOF not too long from now, and he'll probably go in as an Astro. Houston will be practically obligated to retire #13. So that's 12 numbers retired. That's a lot of jerseys. Especially for a club enfranchised in 1962. The Yankees are the only ones close, at 15 retired.

Some clubs have very strict rules about who gets their jerseys retired. The Mariners and Red Sox only permit those who have been inducted into the HOF to be retired. Most clubs have not retired anywhere close to the number Houston has.

But I don't think that's necessarily bad. There's nothing more like "Houston" than telling older cities, organizations, traditions, or whatever to fuck off. This is a city renowned for the oil boom - couldn't get much more "new money" than that until the internet bubble. We're a sprawling metropolis that flies in the face of what a city should be. The Astrodome - the symbol of this city and the Astros organization - was the biggest, tackiest architectural monstrosity money could buy. Older clubs played in parks like Yankee stadium and Fenway. We played on artificial grass with air conditioning and the home run spectacular. Our grounds crew wore fucking space helmets. We wore the rainbow guts. The Oilers played Run-and-Shoot. The Rockets had the Dream Shake. The Cougars redefined college basketball. The city of Houston doesn't give a shit about your fucking traditions.

So if we want to retire every fucking number between 1 and 99, and start issuing symbols and letters, then we can and will. I hope they retire Roger Clemens' number, too, even if he's denied a Hall of Fame spot for this steroids crap. Fuck them dumbass Yankees - he delivered us our first pennant. And you'll just have to deal with it.

I think the same applies for the Texans. We should retire every number the Oilers retired before Bud Adams consummated his relationship with the devil. And if Goodell has a problem with it he can shove it up his ass. The NFL fucked us over in 1997, and they let fucking Cleveland keep its club name, records, etc, while the legacy of the Oilers left for hillbilly country. Warren Moon and Earl Campbell didn't even fucking play in Tennessee, ever. Why the fuck should they get to keep their records and numbers? Campbell didn't cripple himself for Memphis, he did it for Houston.

Fuck. Now I'm all angry again. Fuck Bud Adams.

Roy Oswalt pitches a gem; Craig Biggio is awesome

The Wizard went 8 innings, allowing only 1 hit, 2 walks, no runs, and striking out 10. Pretty goddamn awesome, especially since he was getting squeezed through the whole game. Roy seems like he's getting back to form. I don't know if it was simply time, a mental thing, or if he went out and got a personal pitching coach, but he has been kickass through his last several starts. Ty Wigginton shot a three-run homer into the Crawford boxes, which accounted for all of Houston's offense. Spaz went 0 for whatever, but he made a pretty spectacular assist with Ausmus at the plate. Valverde came in the ninth, giving up a hit, but getting the save. All around a pretty awesome game.

---------------------

Biggio, of course, was the focus of the day. The ceremony was pretty good, and all of the retired numbers were there, except for Ryan. Bunch of speeches. Everyone talked about his 3000 hits, his doubles, etc. But most of all, they talked about his grit.

I think that's always what happens with players. People seem to want to remember them for things that don't affect the game all that much. Don't get me wrong, the guy was a joy to watch and certainly had grit and was a gamer and all that crap. But I think it's important to remember exactly why he was such an awesome player.

Bill James ranked the best players of the 1990s in his New Historical Baseball Abstract. In it, he placed Bonds at #1. No question, Bonds was the best player of the last two decades. He might have been the best of all time.

#2 (and this always surprises me) was Craig Biggio. James loved the Bidge. And it's easy to see why. Biggio really was a "five tool player." He could hit for average and power, he had a great arm and played spectacular defense, and he displayed remarkable speed.

That speed kept Biggio from grounding into the double play, as did his power. The guy has more doubles than any other right-handed hitter. He won four gold gloves (and deserved it). He had a great ability to get on base, particularly for a guy not spectacularly powerful. And he really knew how to take a pitch to the head. He won five Silver Slugger awards, four as a second baseman and one as a catcher. He had a career high OPS+ of 143, and a career average of 111. He was great - one of the greatest.

Biggio was certainly robbed of a lot of power statistics from his years in the Dome. Had he played in, say, any other ballpark, he likely would be considered one of the greatest of all time by the national media, and here's why: Biggio was only 9 homers away from the 3000 hits, 300 HRs, 300 SB club. If he had played anywhere but the Dome, or if he had played all year in 2000, he would have done it. There's only one other player in all of baseball history to pull that off: Willie Mays. And Biggio had about 80 more stolen bases than Mays, too.In his "Big Book of Baseball Lineups," Rob Neyer wrote that Biggio was "unique." And he meant that in the literal sense. Nobody else has gone from being an all-star catcher to being an all-star middle infielder. That's just not done.

Going by Similarity Scores, Biggio was most similar to Robin Yount. But Bidge has no "truly similar" match. His #3 match, Joe Morgan, is the guy I'd say was most similar, but really there was no one quite like Craig Biggio.

James ranked Bagwell #5 on the Best Players of the 1990s list. The Astros really had a great tandem with the Killer B's. Few teammates in the history of baseball are that great together. The last 15+ years have truly been a great time to be an Astros fan, even with the postseason losses and disappointment. It's a shame that the two had to eventually retire, but they made baseball big in Houston, and did a lot for this city and franchise.

-----------------

So they had about a billion in-game interviews today: Bagwell, Biggio, Bill Doran, and Mike Scott all showed up in the booth. I usually hate that type of crap, but hearing those guys was pretty sweet.

Bagwell gave a pretty great endorsement for Bogusevic. Great ballplayers aren't always great evaluators of talent, but it can't hurt to have one of the greatest hitters ever say that you're looking good at the plate. I hope he gets called up in September.