We all know the old trite expression "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings." The American League West division race is not over, the regularly sized primadonna wearing the Valkyrie costume does seem to be warming up.
Last night was 8 1/2 innings of frustration for us Astros fans. The Astros constantly could get runners on base, only to leave them stranded at the end of an inning; the Astros were 1 for 12 with runners in scoring position in the first nine innings. The Mariners scored in the most frustrating way--driving in 2 with a two-out, two-strike hit by J.P. Crawford and a homer by this year's designated Astro killer Kyle Seager. The Mariners also tallied an insurance run in the top of the ninth off of Ryan Pressly, which only seems to portend more doom for Astros fans.
That feeling changed suddenly when Alex Bregman homered in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game. The Astros had life. Ryne Stanek responded with an excellent inning in the top of the tenth, with a big assist to Kyle Tucker who made an excellent catch against the wall in right center. Then, Caros Correa led off the bottom of the 11th with a rocket to right center that bounced into the stands, scoring Yuli Gurriel, who had been placed on 2nd as the Manfred man.
With the victory and the A's loss last night to the White Sox, the Astros moved 6 1/2 games up on the Mariners and 7 games up on Oakland. There are 24 games left in the Astros season. All four of the major season projection systems that create playoff odds--Fangraphs, Five Thirty Eight, Baseball Prospectus, and Baseball Reference--list the Astros as having a 98-99% chance of winning the AL West.
That the Astros are going to win the AL West is not a new development. Fangraphs helpfully puts their division odds in chart form. The Astros have had the highest odds to win the division pretty much every day of the entire season. When the Astros took the actual division lead in late June, their odds went up significantly, and have continued to rise for most of the rest of the season. After a small drop in early August, the Astros have extended their odds of winning the division over the last month. While they have not played all that well, Oakland has played poorly and the division lead expanded.
While the shift across the season are meaningful, it is worth looking at the the left most portion of the chart, which are the odds on opening day, before any games were played. The Astros were the best team in the AL West entering the season, They had the largest collection of star level players despite recent losses of George Springer and Gerrit Cole to free agency and Justin Verlander to Tommy John surgery.
Fangraphs also publlished a graph of "expected wins," which you can see below. For the Astros, this number exists in essentially 2 places. In the first two and a half months of the season, the Astros were expected to win about 90 games. A win streak pushed the expected wins up to around 95, which is where they have stayed for pretty much all of the season.
The A's have had a pretty steady number in the high 80s, though there is a clear decline for them over the last month. The Angels started out with expectations that they could be a contender for the division crown, but their usual combination of injuries and bad pitching pushed that number down quickly.
Of course, the notion that the Astros were going to easily win the AL West was challenged after Sunday's game when the Mariners moved within 4 1/2 games of the Astros with a head-to-head series pending. As you can see from the graphs above, the playoff odds were unmoved by Mariners win streak. They knew the Mariners were playing over their heads and that the Astros were a better team.
This knowledge gave me confidence in this series. But it didn't do much for a large part of Astros Twitter.
Regardless of what people think, the game is played on the field. The Astros won the type of game they have won a ton of this season on Monday--bashing Mariners pitching and winning a blowout. And then on Tuesday, they won the type of game the Mariners have been winning a ton this season--a close game that could go either way.
The ability to do both has put the Astros in control of the AL West. If the Astros go .500 for the rest of the season, they would end up with 93 wins. The Mariners would have to 18-5 and the A's 19-5 to catch them. In other words, it's not going to happen.
This race is not over, but we sure know who's going to win it.
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