Astros Recap Round-Up

Over at The Crawfish Boxes, I did the recaps for both games in Oakland this week. That includes Tuesday's big 9-1 win, as well as Wednesday's quick 2-1 loss. Go check them out.

Astros Weekly Round-up

I just did a recap of the Astros' 3-1 win over the Mariners over at the Crawfish Boxes, which features the continuation of a number of streaks. 

Also, if you didn't see it earlier in the week, I also wrote about Carlos Correa's early success in 2019.

The Most Encouraging Part of the Astros' first two weeks

Over at The Crawfish Boxes, I wrote about Carlos Correa's hot start, and why it might be more meaningful in evaluating the Astros' season than your average first two weeks.

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Closers

I recently ran my annual look at which hitters and starting pitchers are on pace for the Hall of Fame, and in them, I mentioned the idea of switching things up and looking at relief pitchers as well. After all, there’s been something of an explosion in relief talent in Cooperstown over the last two years; after being stuck at five closers in the Hall for a decade, we’ve seen three new ones added in Mariano Rivera, Lee Smith, and Trevor Hoffman. Plus, Billy Wagner continues to hang around the ballot, and may see his support continue to climb in the coming years.

Now obviously, eight closers still isn’t anywhere near the body of evidence we have to work with when trying to predict position players or starters, but it might be fun to play around with, and see if we can spot any sort of nascent trends in who the Hall is electing.

It’s not a lot to work with, but there are some fun things I noticed while looking into things:

Weekly Writing Round-Up

Over at The Crawfish Boxes, I published a piece looking at the Astros' (quite frankly, bizarre) struggles with the bat so far in 2019.

Earlier, I also contributed a game recap for their lone win of the week.

Also, keep an eye on this spot; I should have a follow-up to the Future Hall of Fame series coming soon.

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Pitchers, 2019 Edition

We turn now to the second part of my annual series predicting future Hall of Famers, the starting pitchers.

As a quick refresher on the methodology: I looked at every Hall of Fame starter’s career WAR over every age of their career, then took the median WAR as a “Hall benchmark” of sorts. Then, I looked at how many players throughout history were at or above that mark at each age, and took the percent that were eventual Hall of Fame inductees as the rough “odds” that the current player would reach Cooperstown. For starters, I focused exclusively on pitchers who started 10% or more of their games at each stage, and looked only at pitchers who debuted in the liveball era (1920-on), due to how radically the nature of the role of starter has evolved over time. Also, I will be grouping players based on their age in the 2018 season, with the traditional June 30th serving as the cutoff.

The normal caveats apply: some players not in the Hall might get inducted, some players with Hall-worthy careers might be overlooked, and non-playing factors might ultimately be the deciding factor for a lot of candidates. One other thing worth noting, which I studied more in-depth last year: success as an old pitcher is especially key for modern starters to get inducted, in a way that it isn’t for position players (for reasons I went into more deeply in those pieces). That sort of widened my scope of which pitchers I was focusing on here; also, given how much starters can use their mid-to-late-30s to bolster their cases, and how unpredictable the question of “who stays good into old age” can be (hello, Jamie Moyer, Tim Wakefield, and Bartolo Colon), it’s probably worth casting a wider net for starters either way.