Jose de Jesus Ortiz is the Chronicle’s beat writer for the Stros, but curiously, the newspaper allows Ortiz to provide subjective blather about the club and its players rather than objective analysis. Get a load of Ortiz’s latest on the reeling Stros:

The pitching staff has actually been good, considering Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte are gone and Jason Jennings has been on the disabled list most of the season. Pitching coach Dave Wallace has aided the development of rookie Chris Sampson and Wandy Rodriguez, who have stepped up and helped ace Roy Oswalt lead the rotation while veteran Woody Williams tries to get back on track and Jennings works his injured right elbow back into shape.

“The pitching staff has actually been good?” Here are the facts.
The Stros pitching staff overall has allowed 15 more runs than a merely average National League pitching staff would have given up through 48 games of the season, which rates 11th among the 16 National League pitching staffs. Two fifths of the rotation — Woody Williams (-11 RSAA) and Matt Albers (-9 RSAA) have been among the worst starting pitchers in the National League this season, while another starter — Wandy Rodriguez (-2 RSAA this season) — has been one of the worst starting pitchers in the National League (-38 RSAA) over the past two and a third seasons. In just the past week, reliever Rick White has given up 9 more runs in his appearances than an average NL pitcher would have given up and fellow reliever Brian Moehler has surrendered 8 more runs than an average NL pitcher would have given up pitching the same number of innings. I wonder if Ortiz thinks that Stros pitching coach Dave Wallace “has aided the development” of those pitchers?
Meanwhile, in the same article, Ortiz bashes the Stros anemic hitters, which is certainly legitimate criticism. However, although those hitters have generated 16 fewer runs than a lineup of average NL hitters would have created using the same number of outs, than output is only one run less than the -15 RSAA of the pitching staff. So, using objective criteria, the Stros pitching staff overall has been every bit as bad as the Stros hitters so far this season, which is the point that Ortiz should be making.
Adding this latest Ortiz column to a couple of dubious previous ones (here and here), a good case can be made that Ortiz is having every bit as bad a season writing about the Stros as the Stros are having on the field.

As the Stros wander off to their second losing season in the past 15 seasons (21-26 record, lost 6 of their last 7), this earlier post reminded that it could be much worse. Along those same lines, it’s comforting to read this Jim Reeves/Ft. Worth Star Telegram op-ed confirming that the other Texas Major League club continues to toil in its perpetual state of futility:

What’s happened to the Rangers (18-29) this season isn’t one man’s failure, or even two. This is an organization-wide travesty that starts at the top with [owner Tom] Hicks himself. Most of all, it’s a players’ failure and for anyone who cares to debate that point, I refer you to the team’s .248 batting average, 5.15 team ERA and 39 errors going into Monday night’s homestand opener against the Twins. Argue with those numbers, if you can.
Of course, this is all Greek to Hicks, who just happens to be in Greece this week to see his Liverpool soccer team play. Guess he figured his baseball team could continue to fall apart without him. Or maybe he just wanted to see a real offense at work.
Absence, in this case, definitely makes the heart grow fonder.
Hicks is the root cause of many of the Rangers’ problems, whether he’ll admit it or not, and not all of it even has to do with the fact that he spends money like he owns a team in Tampa or Kansas City instead of a top 10 market.
It was Hicks who hired the youngest and rawest general manager in baseball history and didn’t insist that he at least add a veteran baseball voice as a sounding board in the front office. Then the owner compounded the problem by signing off on a manager with absolutely zero major league managerial experience.

Gosh, the plight of the Rangers makes a starting rotation that includes Woody Williams, Matt Albers (mercifully demoted yesterday to AAA Round Rock) and Wandy Rodriguez almost seem tolerable.

As noted here last year, the Chronicle’s beat writer for the Stros, Jose de Jesus Ortiz, regularly reveals that he doesn’t really understand the game even after covering it for 10 years and writing a book on the subject. Here is Ortiz’s latest example of analytical confusion, again involving former Stros centerfielder, Willy Taveras:

Former Astros center fielder Willy Taveras stole his 10th base of the year in the Colorado Rockies 40th game. The 10 stolen bases would have tied for the team lead last year.
After a slow start, Taveras is playing well for the Rockies. And although he’s among the league leaders in being thrown out, he has added a running game that Colorado didn’t have last year when Matt Holliday, Jamey Carroll and Cory Sullivan all tied for the team lead.
Taveras, who actually missed the second week of May with groin issues, didn’t need nearly as much time to reach 10.

Playing well? Through a quarter of the season, Taveras has generated 3 fewer runs for the Rockies than a merely average National League player would have created using the same number of outs as Taveras, which is worse than Chris Burke (-1 RCAA) gave the Stros during his brief stint in centerfield earlier this season. Taveras has improved his on-base percentage to a respectable .373, but he undermines that with a horrific slugging percentage of .339 (the NL league average is .432), which is the result of having only 4 doubles, no triples and no home runs among his 33 hits. He has whiffed 22 times while drawing only 11 walks in 130 plate appearances, and his 10 stolen bases is more than offset by the fact that he has been thrown out 7 times.
The bottom line is that Taveras is a well below-average Major League hitter. Inasmuch as Ortiz does not understand that, his analysis of the Stros should be taken with a very large grain of sale.

As the Stros reach the quarter pole of the 2007 season, the club’s prospects on the surface seem to be somewhat improved over the dreary first eighth of the season (prior season reviews here). The Stros (20-21) stabilized a bit during the second eighth of the season with a 11-9 record marked by overall improved hitting and pitching, and the spark provided by the arrival of rookie centerfielder, Hunter Pence (9 RCAA/.392 OBA/.652 SLG/1.044 OPS). Despite those positive signs, however, there is nothing that has occurred in regard to the direction of the club over the past 20 games that indicates that this Stros team has much of a chance at competing seriously for a playoff spot.
Through a quarter of the season, the Stros have scored 2 more runs than an average National League team would have scored using the same number of outs as the Stros have generated this season to date (“RCAA,” explained here). That ranks 7th out of the 16 National League teams and trails National League Central rivals the Brewers (26-16 record/29 RCAA, 4th in NL) and the Cubs (19-21/7 RCAA/6th). The Stros had a -13 RCAA during the first 21 games of the season, which ranked 10th among National League teams at the time.
The Stros’ pitching has improved modestly, too. The Stros pitching staff has saved 3 more runs over what an average National League pitching staff would have saved over the same number of innings (“RSAA,” explained here), which ranks 9th in the National League and behind NL rivals the Brewers (13 RSAA/5th in NL) and the Cubs (9 RSAA/6th). The Stros pitching staff had saved 7 fewer runs than an average NL staff during the first 21 games of the season, which ranked 13th among the NL clubs at the time.
Despite this mild improvement, I’m still not bullish on the Stros’ prospects this season. The Brewers are a clearly superior club through the first quarter of the season and the loser of the National League East — either the Mets (27-14) or the Braves (25-16) — appear to be the likely NL Wild Card team. So, the Stros are probably going to have to win the NL Central in order to achieve a playoff spot and I do not see Stros management making the hard decisions necessary for the Stros to overtake the Brewers and probably the Cubs.
The season statistics for the Stros to date are below, courtesy of Lee Sinins‘ sabermetric Complete Baseball Encyclopedia. The abbreviations for the hitting stats are defined here and the same for the pitching stats are here. The Stros active roster is here with links to each individual player’s statistics:

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I took in the first game of the Stros-Giants series last night, and it was probably the best game of the season to date. The Stros took a 3-0 lead, only to blow as the Giants went up 5-3, then the Stros’ rookie CF Hunter Pence tied it with a two-out, two-run yak that hit the left field foul pole in the bottom of the eighth, and LF Carlos Lee (who had two taters, two singles and a walk) finally won it for the Stros 6-5 with a walk-off moonshot in the bottom of the 10th.
Despite the excitement, however, I found myself feeling a bit sad for Stros 3B Morgan Ensberg, who struck out in a pinch hitting role. Ensberg is clearly on the trading block after a slow start to this season (-4 RCAA/.323/ OBA/.330 SLG/.653 OPS). 2B Chris Burke was recently sent to AAA Round Rock to play 2B as he prepares to replace Craig Biggio, hopefully as soon as possible after Bidg gets his 34 hits to attain the 3,000 hit level because that .306 OBA at the top of the lineup sure is getting ugly. Meanwhile, Brooks Conrad — the only remaining position player-farmhand at the high level of the Stros’ minor league system who has a legitimate shot at becoming a regular MLB player — has slid over to 3B at Round Rock in contemplation of getting a shot at that position with the Stros. Meanwhile, Mike Lamb (7/.455/.521/976) and Mark Loretta (4/.412/.403/.815) are currently getting the starts at 3B in place of Ensberg.
I can’t help but think that the Stros have mishandled Ensberg and that his career could have turned out quite differently had he been treated more fairly. Ensberg burst on the scene as a 27 year old rookie in 2003 (20/.377/.530/.907), but was inexplicably platooned by former Stros manager Jimy Williams at 3B with the notoriously unproductive Geoff Blum (-23/.295/.379/.674) in a move that probably cost the Stros a playoff spot that season (the Stros finished one game behind the Cubs for the NL Central title that season).
Laboring under the incompetent Williams during half of the 2004 season, Ensberg struggled that season (-12/.330/.411/.742) for his only truly subpar MLB season, but then rebounded in 2005 with his best season (39/.388/.557/.945), although he faded late that season after suffering a hand injury from a pitched ball. Ensberg took off like a rocket again in 2006 and looked like he was going to repeat his 2005 season, but he hurt his shoulder in early June and never really recovered, although his overall hitting statistics for the season were still well above-average (16/.396/.463/.858). In fact, Ensberg’s career numbers (55/.370/.478/.848) are much closer to that of the Stros’ $100 million man, Carlos Lee (80/.340/.496/.836), than Lee’s career numbers are to the Stros’ best position player, Lance Berkman (362/.417/.562/.978).
So, why are the Stros — a team bedeviled by poor hitting over much of this decade — getting rid of the club’s third or fourth best hitter? Yes, he is off to a poor start, but that happens to even great hitters sometimes (Berkman didn’t exactly light up the scoreboard during April this season, either). Ensberg’s decline in power since the shoulder injury last season is a legitimate concern, but are 125 plate appearances really enough to conclude that Ensberg is such damaged goods that the Stros should give up on their last homegrown position player to reach the majors before Pence?
Count me as skeptical. By the way, Ensberg’s replacement last night was Mike Lamb, whose career numbers (-18/.339/.426./765) are nowhere near as good as Ensberg’s. Lamb was 0 for 5 with two strikeouts.

The Stros are not off to the best of starts this season. But if you are having trouble appreciating the local ballclub, take a moment to read this annual early May column of Kansas City sportswriter Joe Posnanski declaring the end of the Kansas City Royals’ season:

Well, sadly, yes, itís time once again for the annual, ìYouíve got to be kidding me, the baseball season is over already?î column. We wrote this column last year on May 5, so if thereís any consolation, at least this yearís version comes a week later.
Youíre right. Thereís no consolation.
We begin this installment by first offering a list of May Royals highlights over the last 10 years. Every Kansas City fan knows the Royals have been awful in April (.390 winning percentage in the last 10 years). What not everyone appreciates is they have been even worse in May (.384 winning percentage). This team has routinely dug a hole so deep in those first two months they actually play June games in China.
(Technically speaking ó according to my sixth-grade science teacher ó if you tried to dig a hole through the Earth, you would not end up in China. You would end up, well, technically speaking, youíd end up dead. So, letís not speak technically.)
May 23, 1998: Royals lose their eighth game in a row ó the lowlight of the streak being a three-game series sweep by the Cleveland Indians. In those three games, the Indians score 36 runs, the Royals score 10 ó it is the worst stomping the Royals had ever endured in a three-game series. ìIs it getting old, losing like this?î a reporter asks manager Tony Muser.
ìIt got old a long time ago,î Muser says.
May 11, 2000: The Royals are actually playing good baseball and need a win on this day to climb into a first-place tie. Instead, they lose a squeaker to Cleveland, 16-0. Itís the second-worst loss ever for the Royals. Clevelandís Manny Ramirez hits two home runs ó on one of them he broke his bat. The Royals ó thanks in large part to a dreadful bullpen, finish with a losing record despite having the highest-scoring offense in team history.
May 4, 2001: The Royals lose their fourth in a row, sparking Tony Muser to make his famous philosophical statement about the teamís lack of toughness: ìIíd like to see íem go out and pound tequila rather than cookies and milk,î Muser said. It is the beginning of the end, and almost exactly one year later Ö
May 1, 2002: It is actually at midnight ó so just as April turned to May ó that Royals general manager Allard Baird informs Tony Muser that he is being fired. Unfortunately, Muser had already been informed of his demise by reporters who knew about it two hours earlier. ìI wanted to do this the right way,î Baird would say later.
May 1, 2004: The Royals ó in a move so stunning you would swear it was from a rejected ìMajor Leagueî movie script ó decide to start a minor-leaguer nobody had ever heard of named Eduardo Villacis at Yankee Stadium against the New York Yankees. Shortly after Villacis is ripped to shreds, manager Tony PeÒa guarantees the Royals will win the division even though they are, at the time, in last place. ìWe are going to be unstoppable,î PeÒa says. The Royals end up losing 100 games, of course, and almost exactly a year later Ö
May 10, 2005: PeÒa resigns after another loss, the Royalsí eighth in nine days. ìItís tough to go to the ballpark and lose game after game,î PeÒa would say.
May 25, 2006: The Royals lose their 13th straight. Royals general manager Allard Baird has essentially been fired ó he knows it, everybody knows it ó but owner David Glass will not pull the trigger. One player says, ìThis team is some kind of circus, isnít it?î
So, thereís some May history for you. And now? Now the Royals are 11-26 ó 13 games back ó worst record in the American League. Theyíre hitting .244 as a team; theyíve also given up more hits than any team in the league. The Royals have been hit by more pitches than any team in the league, but theyíve hit opposing batters less than any team in the league. That tells a story right there.
The Royals lost Fridayís game when their young shortstop Tony PeÒa Jr. ó a defensive whiz ó let a double-play grounder go through his legs. They lost Thursdayís game when the pitching staff gave up a team record six homers to an Oakland Aís team that, up to that point, couldnít hit at all. They scored one run on Tuesday. On Sunday they were losing 13-0 at one point, in large part because Zack Greinke gave up three two-run homers in the same inning. The day before that, the bullpen blew a lead.
And so on.

Read the entire column. And then say a word of thanks for the Stros, who have had only one losing record in the past 15 seasons and have gone to the playoffs in 6 of the last 10.

Well, as Kuff noted, it was probably meltdown yesterday on the local sports talk radio programs as local hero Roger Clemens decided to reject the home team Stros and go back to New York for another round with the Yankees. Although it’s fun to watch even a fading Clemens pitch for another several months during the autumn of his Hall of Fame career, the reality is that the Stros are better off that Clemens took the Yankees offer over that of the Stros.
The Clemens deal with the Yankees is the biggest in baseball history by average annual value, $28.5 million for the year or about $18.5 million for the 2/3rds of a season that Clemens will play. Add in the luxury tax hit and the Yanks are committing about $26 million in signing Clemens.
The reason that it’s good for the Stros that they didn’t sign Clemens is that — for any other club than the Yankees — it simply does not make sense to pay that kind of scratch for a number 2 starter. Baseball Prospectus projects Clemens this season as saving roughly 28 runs more than a replacement level starter (think Brian Moehler or Wandy Rodriguez, at least so far this season) and generating 3.5 more wins than a replacement level starter. Given Clemens’ age (44), the fact that he has been nagged by leg injuries over the past three seasons and is going from the relatively weak NL Central to the powerhouse AL East, my sense is that that projection is overly optimistic and that Clemens probably is more likely to be worth only a win or two more than whatever other starter that the Stros will trot out there (the Yankees are already downplaying Clemens’ probable impact on the club). But what the heck, we’re talking Clemens here, so he might just be as good as BP projects. But even so, are 3.5 wins worth $18 million?
No way, at least for the Stros. Clemens will pitch limited innings over the rest of this seaon, that 44 year old body is at high risk of giving out, and the probable Stros’ replacements — particularly Juan Gutierrez at AAA Round Rock or Troy Patton at AA Corpus — will likely be better than replacement level, which reduces the impact that Clemens would have on the Stros. Moreover, even a couple of extra wins is not likely to make a difference with this Stros club between making the playoffs or staying home.
The bottom line is that signing Clemens simply does not address the Stros’ main problem, which is a chronic lack of hitting. The Stros invested $100 million in the off-season to sign slugger Carlos Lee and, through 30 games, Lee has been a below-average National League hitter while grounding into a league-leading 8 double plays. Throwing $18 million at the Rocket only constrains the Stros’ flexibility later in the season to make a personnel moves if a good hitter or two becomes available on the trade market.
Is it worth for the Yanks to spend $26 million to sign Clemens? Probably, because if they didn’t, then the Red Sox probably would have. In a tight AL East pennant race, a game or two improvement from Clemens could definitely make a difference.

As the Stros’ hitters continue to strand baserunners by the dozens, most of you are undoubtedly having to endure comments on the radio and elsewhere such as “the Stros are not good at hitting in the clutch” or they “are not good at situational hitting.”
As this hilarious Fire Joe Morgan post explains, those comments are mostly blather. Extensive statistical analysis of baseball statistics over the years has shown that there is rarely any meaningful difference between a hitter’s performance in “clutch” versus “non-clutch” situations. Rather, a combination of bad luck and weak overall hitting are the true reasons why teams go through periods such as the Stros are enduring now in which they leave a large number of runners on base.
The fact that the Stros are 10th out of the 16 National League clubs in both on-base average and slugging percentage has much more to do with the Stros leaving a large number of runners on base than any lack of “clutch hitting.” By the way, after Sunday’s loss, that $100 million off-season acquisition, slugger Carlos Lee, has generated 5 fewer runs than a merely average National League hitter would have created using the same number of outs as Lee has made so far this season, a .290 on-base average and a paltry .738 OPS.

The first 21 games of the season of the Stros’ (9-12) season has been one of streaks — they started out the season by losing 5 of their first 6 games, rebounded momentarily by winning 8 of their next 9, only to blow that comeback by losing their next 6. As a result, the excuses of the club’s spotty performance are already in full bloom:

“Berkman and Lee haven’t started hitting yet.”
“If Jennings comes back strong, the starting pitching will be fine.”
“Burke is a good athlete who will find his way in centerfield.”
“Biggio is such an inspiration.”

Well, maybe all those statements are true. But the harsh reality is that this is not a good baseball team right now.
As noted in the 2007 season preview, none of this is particularlry surprising. Despite catching lightning in a bottle in the post-season during 2004 and 2005, the Stros have been trending downward for most of this decade into the current mediocre edition of the club. During most of that time, reasonably strong pitching tended to mask the decline in the club’s overall hitting.
However, through the first eighth of this season, both the hitting and the pitching on this Stros club have serious questions. The Stros’ hitters have already generated 13 fewer runs than an average National League club would have scored using the same number of outs at this stage of the season (RCAA, explained here), which ranks 10th out of the 16 National League teams (the NL Central-leading Brewers are at +18 RCAA). The pitching staff has been about as bad, saving 7 fewer runs already than an average National League staff would have saved so far this season (RSAA, explained here), which ranks 13th among National League clubs.
The season statistics through to date are below, courtesy of Lee Sinins‘ sabermetric Complete Baseball Encyclopedia. The abbreviations for the hitting stats are defined here and the same for the pitching stats are here:

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Forbes just published its annual valuation of Major League Baseball clubs, with the Stros rating a solid 11th among the 30 clubs at an estimated $442 million, or a bit more than a 1/3rd of the value of the top-ranked Yankees and about 60% of the value of the second-ranked Mets and Red Sox. The Texas Rangers are valued at about $80 million less than the Stros. Craig Depken provides some heavy duty analysis of the numbers and comes to the following conclusion:

In the business of baseball, especially in an era of free-agent salaries and the luxury tax, the more the team wins, the lower the profits. What’s going on? The source of this conundrum is the diminishing returns to quality on the revenue side: marginal improvements in team quality do not increase revenue as much. On the cost side, marginal improvements in team quality become ever more expensive.