Updated Projections - Game 43 of 162
Ace Like
Composition of Projections:
2024 Actuals: 26.5%
Preseason Projections: 73.5%
No Updates Saturday/Sunday - I’ll be in Crawford Boxes
The Astros are 18-25, in 4th place (by percentage points) in the American League West, 5.5 games behind the Seattle Mariners.
Fangraphs projects an 83-79 finish, 2nd place in the AL West, gives the Astros a 30.5% chance of winning the Division and a 48.9% chance of making the playoffs.
Season Projections
Stress Index
The goal is to capture the stress put on a pitcher, rather than just a number of pitches.
The calculation is really quite simple: Number of pitches x aLI, where aLI is the average leverage index.
Critical Moment
Bottom 1, runner on 1st, 0 outs, 0-0. Kyle Tucker doubled to right (Liner). Jose Altuve scored on error. Kyle Tucker advanced to 2B. Error by Zack Gelof.
Astros win probability went from 58.3% to 69.9% (+11.6%).
The Home Run Project
No home runs last night.
The Grumpy Ump
Under: 24 Over: 16 Push: 3
The first 100% called strike accuracy of the season, and probably the best overall called game of the season.
There have been other 97 Overall Accuracy Ratings, but no other ump has been as good across the board.
NOTE: OVERALL FAVOR column is changed to reflect Astros only. In other words, a +0.24 in favor of Yankees is reflected as -0.24 here.
Information, except for O/U, courtesy of umpscorecards.com, just presented in a way that is easier for my brain to process.
Projected Standings and Luck Rankings
Astros project to 73-89. See Stats of the Day below for additional projections.
The Astros are 3-9 in one-run games.
Stat(s) of the Day
Below is an example of why we do what we do.
In orange you can see Bregman’s slugging percentage from week to week, culminating in his recent hot streak.
In blue, you can see what the current projections are for his slug for the season (.421).
Green shows his actuals as of today (.351).
Back in the preseason, I projected a .450 slug for Bregman and those have trended downward due to the 43-game sample of .351.
In short, there’s still an upside, but he likely won’t reach .450 due to the slow start.
It’ll be fun to track as the season wears on to see what happens.
For me the value in the projections is not getting too high, or in this case too low, with small sample sizes, especially for someone with 4,369 plate appearances and a .482 career slug.
Bregman is too good to slug .280 like he did in week 1, but his extended slump also means he’ll have to tear it up for just as long to get back to preseason projections.
Thank you for reading.