With two more wins after today, the Astros will be only the 6th team in major league history to have three consecutive 100-win seasons. It surprises me that it's that few.
Loved that stat. Don't know what the pitcher was thinking on Tucker's HR...he blows 3 straight up/in 95ish FBs by him (Tuck got a piece of one) and then decides to throw him a slider middle out? Tucker was so geared up for the FB that he almost yanked that hanger foul. Straw could have tried for the inside-park-HR if he hadn't cadillac'd it between home and 1st on his triple Miley got hit a bit by their good hitters (Merrifield, Dozier, Soler) which still makes me nervous, but he did a great job of working around it.
Really ****ing hard to maintain that level, you also have to consider the division and interleague setup MLB has now. It was a bit different when everybody played everybody the same # of times. Then it went to 2 divisions and that lessened a bit...now it's 3 and all bets are off as far as who gets what level of competition.
It's an unprecedented era of WS-contenders and tankers. The Astros have a large hand in starting the trend of tanking but its so league-wide right now. Teams understand there's not much benefit to being a 75-85 win non-playoff team vs a 55win team. The competitive teams (Astros, Dodgers, Yankees) are hoovering those wins up.
Record vs sub-.400 teams (BAL/DET/TOR/KC plus Seattle @ .409, since they gave up halfway through the season, and the Marlins in Interleague); and Record vs those 6 potential playoff teams (potential outlier in parenthesis): NYY: 40-14, 24-19 (12-5 vs TB) HOU: 34-6; 25-22 MIN: 37-14; 22-22 CLE: 44-15; 18-27 OAK: 23-16; 24-19 (5-1 vs CLE) TBR: 40-18; 20-25 (6-1 vs CLE)
The Astros could end up with 100+ wins 3 years in a row and 4th overall but not have the #1 seed in any of those seasons. Great chance this year though even though we were once again told that chance was gone after falling 2 games back of NYY on Thursday.
Well I started a little bit too early today so I fell asleep and missed the entire game but boy was I happy to see that we prevailed, Miley bounced back big, Tucker had a blast, Red Dog had a big day and daaaaaaaa Yankees lost. Gonna be a Great evening fellas!
It's just one of those big picture things about baseball that we (especially me) lose sight of in the day-to-day consumption. Winning 5 out of every 8 games is really hard in baseball. Getting a hit 3 out of every 10 times is really hard in baseball. Lots of seemingly-low-percentage things are very hard in baseball. The thing I'm coming to appreciate more as I get older is that 162 games (and THEN you maybe go to the playoffs on top of that) is a lot of ****ing games. No other professional sport is like that. I'd be really curious if any former players have written anything insightful about the mental toll that takes. Not within the context of drugs or injuries or anything particularly extreme or salacious. Just something like "Yeah, it's damn near impossible to give it 100% every single game; hell, by the end of the season, you can flip a coin each day to see if I'm at 70% or 20%, and, yeah, we lose games because of that. It's a slog and a marathon, and that's just what it is."
