Houston fans know this sinking feeling. The one where the team that should win doesn’t. The 2001 Astros have six games to avoid this fate.
Notwithstanding losing 4-1/2 games in the standings in a week, the Astros still lead the National League Central by the razor-thin margin of one game. They need a sum of six Houston wins and St. Louis losses to clinch their fourth division title in five years and make an impressive comeback from a 90-loss season in 2000.
The Astros’ slide, during which they’ve lost five of six games, has been depressing. The pitching has been mediocre, and the offense has been awful:
Team R/G Avg OBP Slg -------------------------------- Astros 3.2 .183 .271 .277 Opponents 5.3 .272 .371 .440
This came on the heels of a streak during which the Astros won six of seven games and handled contending opponents exceptionally well:
Team R/G Avg OBP Slg -------------------------------- Astros 7.7 .298 .375 .472 Opponents 5.7 .218 .296 .449
A day off to regroup is probably what the Astros needed most. Whether the successful mid-September or horrific late-September version of the team shows up this week remains to be seen.
They’re playing the same caliber of opponents they faced in both their streak and their slide. They’ll continue to do without starter Roy Oswalt, as they have for half of September.
Getting back Moises Alou is key. He batted .292 with a .393 OBP and .583 slugging average during the 6-1 span, scoring five and driving in nine runs. He has sat since then with a calf injury, pinch hitting just once to drive in two runs with a double in Sunday’s loss.
The thing beyond the Astros’ control, except when they meet head to head, is how well St. Louis has been playing. Between mid-August and mid-September the Astros won 10 of 14 games from the Pirates and Brewers, who are a combined 66 games below .500.
St. Louis has played even better against the same opponents in September, winning 10 of 11 games so far. Superior play against these Central Division lightweights has propelled the Cardinals into contention for the division title.
The Astros are going to have to beat tough teams in the playoffs, and now is as good a time as any to show again that they can do that. While the Astros square off against the Giants this week, St. Louis will again play the lowly Brewers.
Since St. Louis is unlikely to drop more than one game to Milwaukee, it’s imperative that the Astros take at least two of three from the Giants to avoid falling out of first place. Even going into St. Louis tied for the division title next weekend, while not fatal, would be perilous for the Astros.
The Astros have the wild card to fall back on. If they have to cash in this insurance policy, though, it will be demoralizing and a failure, no matter how it lets them configure their starting rotation.
Despite what you may have heard or read, home-field advantage, particularly in the playoffs when every game is a sellout, does matter. And it’s risky waiting until the Division Series for the Astros to figure out whether they can re-ignite the fire that carried them to 57-27 from June 18 through last Monday.
The bottom line for the Astros is this: in order to win the division, for the next six games they need to post a record at least as good as that of St. Louis. If they do, the collapse of the last week will be an afterthought.
An Aside on the Wild Card
It’s a rare and wonderful thing when a pair of divisional foes separated by little or nothing face off for the last series of the season. Or, rather, it used to be before the wild card robbed such a series of meaning.
In 1996, the second year of the wild card’s implementation, the Dodgers went into San Diego leading by just two games with three games to play. The Padres swept the series, and, with it, the division title. The Dodgers settled for the wild card.
Thanks to the wild card, what would’ve been a classic series just a couple of years earlier rates about as high as Julio Solano on the scale of baseball memories.
I suppose you can’t blame teams, and, vicariously, their fans, for overlooking what would otherwise be meaningful games the last week of the season in order to angle for playoff pitching match-ups. Major League Baseball has established a system that encourages such endings devoid of drama.
Dispelling Myths
Are the Astros successful merely because they are the beneficiaries of a soft National League Central? And is the Central the worst division in baseball? Simply put, no and no. Here is each National League team ranked by its winning percentage against the East plus West divisions:
Tm W L Pct ----------------- StL 36 27 .571 Ari 60 45 .571 Hou 34 26 .567 Phi 59 46 .562 SF 58 47 .552 NY 56 49 .533 Atl 53 49 .520 LA 53 49 .520 Cin 30 30 .500 Chi 31 32 .492 SD 47 55 .461 Col 45 57 .441 Mon 43 59 .422 Fla 42 60 .412 Mil 24 36 .400 Pit 16 44 .267
The Astros have played almost as well as any National League team against the East plus West. Their winning percentage is better than that of other contenders such as Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, and Atlanta, and just behind that of St. Louis and Arizona.
Whether that winning percentage would hold up with more games against those divisions is unknowable, but based on the available data the Astros have fared just fine outside the Central. Here is each division’s record against the other two divisions in its league:
Division W L Pct -------------------------- AL West 208 136 .605 NL West 195 157 .554 NL East 160 174 .479 NL Central 171 195 .467 AL Central 153 180 .459 AL East 144 189 .432
The AL Central and AL East have been worse than the NL Central, mostly because they’ve had to contend with the Mariners and Athletics in the AL West. Even the Angels have a 48-38 record against the AL East plus AL Central, though.
The NL Central indeed has the worst inter-division record in the National League. Much of the blame for this lies at the feet of the league’s doormat, the Pirates, with a 16-44 inter-division record. The Pirates’ winning percentage against the East plus West is 133 points worse than any other team’s.
On the other hand, the Central has two teams, the Astros and St. Louis, in the top three against the East plus West, and two teams, the Cubs and Reds, with .500-ish records against the East plus West. That’s four teams nearly break-even or better against inter-division competition.
In any event, as bad as the Central has allegedly been, teams still have to take care of business against those teams. The Astros have done that almost as well as anybody, posting the league’s third-best winning percentage against the Central:
Tm W L Pct ----------------- SD 24 15 .615 Atl 22 14 .611 Hou 48 33 .593 StL 46 32 .590 LA 23 16 .590 Ari 21 15 .583 Chi 45 33 .577 Col 24 18 .571 Fla 19 17 .528 SF 18 18 .500 Phi 16 17 .485 Mil 36 45 .444 NY 14 19 .424 Pit 34 47 .420 Mon 14 22 .389 Cin 31 50 .383
In sum, the Astros have the third-best record against the East plus West, and the third-best record against the Central. Were they playing in the East or West, they may not have the best record in the league, since they would face tougher intradivision opponents more often, but there is no reason to believe that the Astros would suddenly fall into mediocrity. This claim is sheer popery.