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The Astros Schedule is About to Soften Up: That Might Be Bad News

The formula to play winning baseball is simple...play the good teams to a draw and beat up on the bad teams.

It's what some of the best team in the majors are doing this year. The White Sox are 13-18 against teams over .500 and 28-7 against teams below .500. The A's are 17-18 against winning teams and 24-9 against losing teams. The Dodgers are similar; they are  16-20 against teams with a winning record and 24-6 against teams with a losing record.

The Astros have one of the best records in baseball, but they are doing it differently. They are beating up on good teams--they're 27-16 against teams with records above .500--and getting beat by bad teams--they're 10-16 against teams below .500.

You can examine the data in more detailed form and the Astros backwards performance--best against the best and worst against the worst--is shown even more sharply.

I grouped major league baseball teams into thirds by winning percentage. The Astros record against teams in the best third of winning percentage, an impressive 16-9 (.640 winning percentage for the Astros). They do well, but not as well, against team in the middle third--they've won 15 and lost 10 (winning percentage .600). But against the bottom third of baseball, the Astros are playing like a bottom third team. They're 6-9 (winning percentage .400). 

The trend shows up again in the scatterplot below. The horizontal axis has the 2021 winning percentage of the Astros opponents so far this season; the vertical axis has the Astros winning percentage against each team. 

I include the "trend" or "regression" line as well. The line is supposed to slope downward as it moves from left to right--the team's winning percentage is supposed to go down as the quality of opposition improves. The Astros are doing the opposite. They are winning more games as their opponent gets better. 

I also included the abbreviation for each team next to their data point. The Astros were swept by the Tigers at home and by the Rockies on the road in April. They were also swept by the Rangers in May, right after winning a big series against the As to take the lead--if briefly--in the AL West. These series are doing the most damage to the Astros winning percentage against bad teams. 

So what explains this anomalous pattern for the Astros? The most likely answer is that there is no explaining it. Which is to say that this result if most likely the result of a small sample fluke. The Rangers series featured a series of close games where the breaks went against the Astros. The Rockies series combined a snow day with the team's COVID-19 outbreak, and the team seemed just to want to get home. The Tigers series featured blow up starts from Zack Greinke and Lance McCullers. In short, these series featured a series of unlikely events that cost the Astros games. That's how baseball goes sometimes.

The Astros have a chance to prove  the current pattern of playing poorly against bad teams is a fluke. They are in a stretch of 15 of 19 games against teams in the bottom third of the league. They start a two-game series tonight against the Rangers. After a 4 game slate against the AL Central leading White Sox, they then play the Orioles, Tigers, and Orioles again to close out June. These are the type of teams the Astros should be able to handle. They should be able to go on a winning stretch and reverse their bad record against bad teams. 

In fact, they've already started to do that. The Twins are having a miserable season, as a combination of injuries to their offense and terrible pitching (they're last in the AL in runs allowed) have produced a 26-39 season. And the Astros series in Minnesota looked like what a series between a good team and a bad team should look like. On Friday, the Astros got to the Twins bullpen, as a rally from the bottom of the order in the top of the 9th broke a deadlock and gave the Astros a victory. On Sunday, the Astros bombed the overmatched Twins pitching staff for 14 runs and an easy victory. 

The Astros are entering a soft part of their schedule. Hopefully they'll treat the Rangers, Orioles and Tigers like they did the Twins. 

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