Astros Dream Draft Fantasy Tournament

Over at The Crawfish Boxes, we're making the best of a bad situation by running an All-Time Astros Fantasy Draft and Tournament. We held a draft where every player in franchise history (with two or more seasons on the team) was eligible, and we tried to make the best team possible. The best team was up for discussion, fan voting, and Out of the Park simulations. The full series is over there and still in progress, but I wanted to re-post my team here, as well as my reasoning:

The Best Players Without a Retired Number, by Number

Jonah Keri posted something the other day over at CBS Sports about the best players to wear each uniform number. It made me think of an idea I had been kicking around for a while (read: had a filled-out spreadsheet sitting open on my desktop for months), the “Best Players Without a Retired Number, by Number” list, where I basically try and guess the best retired number candidates for each uniform number. This seemed like as good of an excuse as any to see how that experiment would go, so let’s dive right in.

Astros and the 2019 Hall of Fame Ballot

I looked at a number of Astros on the 2019 Hall of Fame ballot who fall somewhere near the Hall's borderline, but who might have their chances ended early by bad design.

The Astros Should Retire Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt's Numbers

In light of the duo's appearance on the Hall of Fame ballot, I wrote about how the Astros should retire 17 and 44 over at The Crawfish Boxes. Go check it out!

Op-Ed: Baseball Teams Should Retire More Numbers

The Giants announced on Tuesday that they will be retiring number 25 for Barry Bonds. They’ve held the number out of circulation since he retired (or forced out of the league, depending on your view of things) after the 2007 season, but will formalize the whole thing now, after over a decade in a sort of limbo.

This makes Bonds the third confirmed player to see their number retired this coming season, after the Tigers announced that they’d be honoring both Alan Trammell and Jack Morris follow the Veterans Committee electing both of those players into the Hall of Fame.* Like Bonds, both had seen their numbers unofficially removed from circulation following their retirements (although Trammell’s #3 found its way back into use a few times in the meantime).

*I expect we’ll see a few more announcements on this front soon. The Indians still haven’t announced anything about Jim Thome’s #25 since his induction was announced. Ditto the Angels and Vladimir Guerrero, who will be the first player with an Angels logo on his plaque, but his case is maybe more complicated given that his #27 has since been reissued to Mike Trout. We’ll see how that plays out. Also, I wouldn’t be shocked to see one other announcement; there always seems to be a wild card or two in the mix.**

**Edit, February 12: This year's wild card is Roy Halladay .

All of these points factor in to a couple of my strong opinions on baseball teams retiring uniform numbers; I guess writing a couple hundred pages on the topic will give you some of those. Namely, I think teams are making some errors in their judgment of what makes someone worthy of getting a number retired, and this is manifesting in a couple of notable ways that could best be summarized as “teams are being a little too cautious in their decisions”.

Roy Oswalt's Retirement and the Raised Bar for Hall of Fame Pitchers

I’m going to be covering some older news here, so apologies if you were looking for breaking news. Unfortunately, real life has kept me busy lately; I was determined to write this, though.

Roy Oswalt retired this offseason, as you may well know. When I heard this, I went through my traditional reaction, which was to look at Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference and reflect on his career. He had quite the run of dominance; from his 2001 debut year to 2007, he threw 1413.1 innings with 1170 Ks and a 143 ERA+, as well as three All-Star Game selections and five Top-5 Cy Young finishes.

For his career, he managed a 163-102 record with a 3.36 ERA in 2245.1 innings and 1852 strikeouts against only 486 unintentional walks. That all translates to a 127 ERA+, 49.9 rWAR, and 49.7 fWAR. All in all, pretty solid stuff. He’s certainly going to be well-remembered in Houston (I can’t imagine his number 44 remaining in circulation with the Astros for very much longer given their history and his talent), but he’s probably not going to Cooperstown without paying for a ticket.

Except there’s one other career value that I like to check: Hall Rating. And according to Adam Darowski’s metric, Oswalt actually clears the Hall of Stats bar. Granted, it’s just barely, with a 104 rating. And given the fluid nature of the Hall of Stats, combined with his proximity to the border, it’s no guarantee that he’ll make the Hall of Stats come 2019 (since they try and match the size of the Hall of Fame in size and keep the worst member as 100, the formula for Hall Rating shifts depending on voters). But he’s pretty much on track-it looks like 24 people would have to get the boot before he would slip below 100.

Out of the Park Baseball 14 and the 2001 Astros: Part 2

Last time we checked on the 2001A Astros in Out of the Park Baseball, they were preparing to head into the season with a newly revamped lineup and rotation. At least, I wasn’t considering making any more moves, and it was only January. So, I kept an eye on the trading block and waiver wire while slowly moving towards opening day.

2001A had some divergences from our time stream, beyond me combining the 2001 Astros, 2001 Pirates, and 2004 Cardinals. For example, Brian Roberts retired in February to become a professional golfer, the Red Sox traded away future captain Jason Varitek for a minor leaguer and bench depth, and John Rocker injured himself in a freak treadmill accident. A few small deal went on across the league. I myself turned down an offer or two to swap bench players while making a small minor league signing or two. R.A. Dickey and Juan Rivera were among my minor league moves; although both wouldn’t establish themselves until well past 2001, I figured it couldn’t hurt to add them.

Re-Run: Future Hall of Fame, AL and NL East Pitchers

Let me just preface this by saying that pitchers, as a whole, are much more difficult to predict than hitters, at least as far as the rest of their career goes. Pitchers are much more susceptible to random, career altering injuries, discovering new pitches, and other unusual events; therefore is a much greater element of randomness. Also, the Hall of Fame seems much more unclear on what constitutes a Hall of Fame pitcher, outside of 300 wins. The last starter elected by the Baseball Writers Association (essentially, what you think of when you think of the election process) was Nolan Ryan, back in 1999. Before him, the last choices were Don Sutton, Phil Niekro, Steve Carlton, and Tom Seaver. You may notice two things about that group. First, every one of them has 300 wins. In fact, the Baseball Writers haven’t elected a non-300 game winner since Ferguson Jenkins (only 284 wins) back in 1991; whether this says something about the Hall’s electors or the quality of pitching in that time, I can’t say. Second, every one of the aforementioned pitchers started their career in the 1960s. Yes, apparently, it has been over four decades since any Hall of Fame starter began his career.

This doesn’t even account for the erratic process they use to elect relievers; there is no obvious milestone, or, really, any sort of standard (if you’re looking for a good example of such oddities, look up one of Joe Posnanski’s articles comparing Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter and Dan Quisenberry).

Nevertheless, I want to cover every position for the the future of the Hall of Fame; and so, I begin with my first round of pitchers.

(Note: I used Baseball-Reference for WAR throughout the article. Fangraphs calculates pitching WAR a different way, and uses a more standard scale, but they only have numbers from 1980 on. Feel free to check it out if you’re interested, though.)

(Another note: There are a lot of pitchers. Surprising, I know. So, I broke them up by division; this article will be on the AL and NL East pitchers, with ones for the Central and West to follow.)

Retired Numbers Series: Houston Astros

The next team I’m covering in my Retired Numbers Series is one that has always intrigued me. When I first visited Minute Maid Park, I was actually surprised by the sheer amount of jersey numbers that they had retired. Many of the numbers were from players that I had never heard of at the time. When compared to the amount that other teams have retired, the Astros especially stand out, particularly taking into account the fact that they’re a relatively recent expansion team.

After reflecting on the Astros method, I decided that I like their methodology a lot, possibly more than any other team (at the very least, of the ones that I’ve covered so far). Every player had some significance to the team, even if they weren’t all necessarily Hall of Fame-level talents. And it preserves the memory of the players-I doubt that I would have bothered to look up some of the players had their numbers not led to my curiosity.

Anyway, onto the numbers.