FALCON POINTS

5 reasons the Astros will win the World Series in a shortened season

Fred Faour
Jul 1, 2020, 9:01 am
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Now that baseball has a plan for a season, we can begin to speculate on just how it will play out. While the Yankees and Dodgers are the betting favorites, the Astros are the third choice. (And yes, here is our IF THE SEASON HAPPENS AT ALL disclaimer).

Amid all the cheating scandal fallout, people forget just how good this Astros team was last season, coming within a game of a second World Series in three years. They have been to the ALCS three straight years. Yes, they lost one of their top two pitchers to a key rival in the Yankees, but will Gerrit Cole be the same pitcher in New York's environment and now that he has a big contract? And the Astros might still have the best 1-2 punch in baseball in Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke. Forget whether or not they are likable; they cheated and got punished, no question. Maybe not being able to cheat will impact them, but then again, every other team was doing it, so it will impact them as well.

Regardless, this is likely the last run for the team as they are constructed, but there is reason to believe there may be another World Series in their future. In fact, here are five key reasons:

1) The short season will be a positive for the starting pitching.

Verlander would have missed a big chunk of a full season but now he will be presumably healthy. Coming off a Cy Young season, he still has it and should be more effective in the postseason with far fewer regular season starts. Lance McCullers, coming off Tommy John surgery, should be available for the full season and playoffs. There is no guarantee he comes back 100 percent, but if he does and stays healthy, he has always had ace-caliber stuff. It will be easier to fill out the four and five slots in a short season. A mediocre pitcher can get hot for a stretch and help carry them. If not, they can always add an arm for the stretch run. They won't be as dominant as last season without Cole, but there is no reason they can't be good enough to win it all.

2) It helps the bullpen, too.

The back end is fairly solid with Ryan Pressly and Roberto Osuna, and the short season should be a boon to them as well. Relievers tend to become less effective at the end of a long season and in the playoffs. The 60-game slate should keep them fresh for when the real games start.

3) The offense is still outstanding.

Alex Bregman, George Springer, Jose Altuve, etc. are still terrific baseball players, trash can or no. The lineup is so good, they won't need career years from everyone. The hitters match up well with the Dodgers and Yankees and runs should be no problem. And if Yordan Alvarez can improve in year two...

4) A full season for Correa?

Carlos Correa has been an enigma. He has MVP talent, but injuries have kept him from having that kind of season. With only 60 games, maybe he can stay healthy the whole way, and take that giant leap we have all been waiting for. If he does, and the rest of the bats just come close to their career averages, this will be the best offense in baseball.

5) No fans? No problem.

As much as the Astros players insist they would like fans in the stands, the reality is many of them wanted no part of the heckling they were going to get over the cheating scandal. Baseball players in general can be fragile mentally; enough words can get in their head and impact their play. With empty stadiums, that will not happen. It's almost found money that they won't have to deal with it.

Overall, the Dodgers and Yankees deserve to be favorites. But a rough stretch during a short season and one of them could struggle to make the playoffs. (Of course, that is true of the Astros as well). And even so, the Astros still match up very well this season. So those who choose to focus on the cheating scandal might be missing the bigger picture - this team is still among the best in baseball, and a serious threat to win another World Series.

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BREGMAN UNDER THE MICROSCOPE

A deep dive into Alex Bregman's mechanics reveals something interesting

Here's what the data tells us about Bregman. Photo by Joel Auerbach/Getty Images

Alex Bregman had a rough season in 2020 by his standards. He slashed .242/.350/.451 in 42 regular season games. His regular season included a trip to the 10-day IL for a hamstring strain he suffered in mid-August. His surface-level struggles continued in the postseason, where he slashed .220/.316/.300 in 13 games. However, that postseason sample size does include a tough luck game against the Tampa Bay Rays where he went 0-for-5 with five hard hit balls.

All-in-all, 2020 felt like a lost season for Bregman. He never really got going. He got off to a slow start, but he's always been a slow starter. Once he started to pick it up, he strained his hamstring, and he played poorly after returning from the hamstring strain. Then, he started to turn his batted ball quality around in the playoffs, but he hit into a lot of tough luck outs.

Hard Hit % - 33.6%

Barrel % - 3.9%

K% - 14.4%

BB% - 13.3%

Chase % - 18.1%

Bregman comes from the Michael Brantley school of hitters. He has elite plate discipline and elite bat-to-ball skills. This makes Bregman a fairly consistent hitter. That may sound odd considering his 2020 "struggles" but even an extended period of poor performance for him resulted in a .801 OPS and a 122 wRC+. If his valleys are still 22% better than the league average hitter, then that's a pretty reliable producer.

There aren't any alarming trends in Bregman's statistics. Yes, his K% was slightly up, his BB% is slightly down, but it isn't a massive difference in either category. His Chase % was up, but again, 18.1% is elite discipline. The biggest drop was in his Hard Hit%, where he fell from 38% to 33.6%. Even so, his average exit velocity only dropped .4 MPH, so there's not really a catastrophic trend here.

His .254 BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play) was low, but he's never put up really high BABIP numbers. In fact, his BABIP has gotten worse every year of his career, from .317 to .311 to .289 to .281 to .254. While his BABIP will likely spike back up next year, it isn't enough to be the difference between the 2019 and 2020 versions of himself. His xBA and xSLG weren't out of whack either. His .256 xBA isn't much better than his .240 AVG, and his .400 xSLG is actually worse than his .451 SLG.

Bregman is as forthcoming with his hitting mechanics, approach, and mental cues as any big leaguer out there. Here is what he had to say about his swing this year. This was a Zoom press conference with the media following the Astros game on September 25th against the Rangers.

Bregman says he wants to hit balls in the air to the pull side and on a line to the opposite field, but in reality, he was hitting flares to the opposite field and hitting them on the ground to the pull side.

The data mostly backs up that claim. In 2019, on balls hit to the pull side, Bregman had an average exit velocity of 90.7 MPH at an average launch angle of 16°, a 40% Hard Hit %, and a 16% HR%. Since Bregman has elite bat-to-ball skills, most of those metrics didn't change. In 2020, his average exit velocity was 90.6, essentially the same as 2019. His Hard Hit % was 42%, a touch better than in 2019. However, his average launch angle dipped from 16° to 11°, which contributed to his HR% dropping all the way to 9%. Bregman hit 47% of his pull side swings on the ground. In 2019, that number was 40%. He absolutely had less production to the pull side in 2020.

The data gets a little hazier going the opposite way when comparing 2019 to 2020, as Bregman actually performed slightly better to the opposite field in 2020 than 2019, but he also only had 20 batted balls to the opposite field all season. Considering the small sample size, it isn't worth diving too deep into the data.

He's right that most of the balls he hit that way were flares. He had an average exit velocity of 83.4 MPH with an average launch angle of 32°, but that's about the same as what he did in 2019. A lot of the statistical drop off comes from balls that were backspun rockets to the pull side in 2019 becoming top spinners or roll overs in 2020.

Bregman also performed horribly against breaking balls in 2020. He batted .150 with a .250 SLG against them in 2020. He had an 84 MPH Average Exit Velocity against them and whiffed 26.5% of the time against them.

It was a far cry from 2019, when he hit .265 with a .588 SLG, 87 MPH average exit velo, and whiffed 18% of the time.

Those numbers lend credence to his statement on his mechanics. It's tough for a hitter to have adjustability against breaking balls if he's blowing out his front side and pulling off of the baseball.

Bregman will spend the offseason working on these mechanical fixes and getting back to the hitter he used to be. If he's consistently hitting the ball in the air to the pull side next year, and he's performing better against breaking balls, then he should be right back in the mix for AL MVP.

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