The Astros are 12-12 against the winning teams and 15-9 against the losing teams.
Great work. Here is another thing - someone is going to point out that a .500 record or even a lower than .500 record against winning teams *during a season* means that the Astros are an average or mediocre team. Nothing could be further from the truth. See, sometimes fans tend to mix their sports cliches and analysis and that leads to some troublesome analysis on their part. When a sports media talk show does it, it just means more people are being led astray. Here is the point: Realize that holding serve against the winning teams and taking as many games from the dregs is *eggszactly* what makes a winning team. In 1998, one of the arguments *against* the Houston Astros being a good/great team was this very notion... that they win against the dregs and only have a .500 record against the winning teams. So the 102 game winning season was flawed. And they further point to the lost in the playoffs to San Diego as proof.
How silly.
See, let's take a baseball cliche and use it correctly here: The 162 game season is a marathon, not a sprint, however the playoffs are nothing like the season, so you cannot make one fit the other and make a judgement call on good or bad team. This is not the NBA, this is not basketball, where you can dismiss a 22 game winning streak like the Rockets had and say "well, they're beating the bad teams, the playoffs will tell us if they're *really* good". In basketball, that is a smart thing to say, in baseball it's just the opposite and a really stupid thing to say. The idea in a marathon season is to win series, as many as you can and forget about what competition you're seeing on the other end. You never take anyone lightly, so you play to the *best of your own ability* and if you're good enough, you will make the other team a losing team. This gets repeated over and over again by *other* winning teams. When two winning teams meet up in a season, the matchup in a three game series may be skewed by the rotation, the injury factor during that stretch of games, many other factors. To hold a .500 record against winning teams pretty much means you match up well against them. They win some, you win some and let's see who is the *hotter* team come playoff time.
The playoff is about who is playing the better baseball at that time and not necessarily who had the best record during the season and who was dubbed the "better team" based on stats. If so, the New York Mets would've beat the St. Louis Cardinals easily in the 2006 NLDS. Also the 2003 Florida Marlins would've lost to the mighty Yankees in the World Series. For a stretch there, the wildcard teams in the playoffs were the most feared teams because they would be playing for their playoff lives up until the last week, last day of the season and then roll into the playoffs playing great baseball. This was against teams like the 1998 Houston Astros who sat for two weeks waiting for the season to end to begin the playoffs or the Detroit Tigers who sat around and waited for the Cardinals to win the NLDS and thus cooled off. Last year, the hottest team in the playoffs were the Colorado Rockies, who were so hot, they walked through their NLDS and NLCS games quickly and had to sit and wait for the eventual World Series winner to arrive into the championship series. It's who is playing the best baseball, not who is considered the better team on paper/stats that wins in the playoffs.
Also, I hear sports talk radio and newspaper guys do this a lot and for the life of me, I cannot figure out why: matchups strength. IOW - they take position by position and make some sort of whacky analysis who has the better part of that position and thus they pronounce one team's point totals on a per position matchup as the indicator as to who is the better team. Wow! That could not be the more stupidest and misinformed way to judge a baseball team against another that I could think of. Matchups?
It works something like this:
1st base: Cubs - Derrick Lee, Astros - Lance Berkman... push (.5 points each team), 1 point for Cubs or 1 point for Astros?
Ahum, that's stupid, okay! And what is worst is that they'll say something like "Lee is hitting....". Wait, wait, wait... I thought this was by "position", so isn't this about *defense*? If you want to make a hitting lineup comparison of the two teams, then it should be 3 hole hitter versus 3 hole hitter, so it's Tejada vs. Lee... no? Plus, a three hole hitter with talent on a well constructed lineup is going to be much better off than a quality hitter like say A-Rod on a poorly constructed lineup (see: Rangers, Texas). So even when you compare lineup to lineup, you have to consider the lineup construction more than anything else. Give me a well constructed lineup over one that features a mega-star at the three hole with not so great accompanying players for me to think that one is better than the other. IOW - it's about team, not individuals. All this is to say that what some folks considered informed and well versed baseball analysis is nothing more than fringe quasi-baseball ramblings. You have to know the game to know how to judge it. 1st baseman are not charged with *guarding* the other team's 1st baseman, so why make these sort of NBA-ish analysis in the first place? Know that in the game of baseball, the defense initiates the play, so that is where you look for strength and weakness right away. Pitching and defense. The offense is charged with reacting to the play initiated by the defense and thus we consider those who fail *only* seven times out of ten to be the superstars of the game on offense (.300 hitters).
