In one of my last pieces, we discussed the concept of correlations. There are never any perfect correlations in statistics. We are looking at what impacts run scoring and we saw that secondary average and real offensive value. However, there are noted situations where you score runs without hits or walks. You have that runner on third with one out and you have to find a way to get him home.
At times last season, it felt like the Astros were leaving a small village on base. The main reason for the lab
is that we want to find ways to test what we are seeing in a systematic way. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. For one, we often remember certain discreet events and not all of them. Those tend to be wrapped up in our emotions. If we are disappointed then we will remember the negative. If we are elated then we will remember the positives.
However, the most important reason that eyewitness testimony is unreliable is that we do not have a frame of reference. There are two primary forms of that. The first is how the Astros compare with the rest of the league. We might decry when the Astros fail in those situations, but how often are other team’s succeeding? Success and failure are always relative to your competition. The second frame of reference point is what you have personally done in the past.
In this edition, we are looking at offensive efficiency. This is simple. What percentage of your base runners cross home plate? When we look at this we will see how good the Astros are in converting runners in runs. We will start by comparing the Astros with the rest of the American League. We can take a mean and median for offensive efficiency and see what the Astros would do if they were more or less average at getting runs across. Total base runners adds hits, walks, and hit by pitches. You take total runs and divide it into total base runners.
I should note that the “Homeless Team” is the team formerly known as the Oakland Athletics. They were known as the Athletics last season, but they are now a nameless and homeless baseball team until they go to Las Vegas. You can see the results as clear as anyone else. The Astros were 13th out of 15 American League teams in offensive efficiency. They were the median team in runs scored, but they were above the median in total base runners.
We should probably talk about the pure math in how this impacts runs scored. If you took the Astros base runners and plug in the median efficiency rating then you would have 720 runs scored instead of 686. It should be noted that this would make them the 7th best run scoring team instead of the 8th place run scoring team. Obviously, that doesn’t feel like a revelation, but most sabermetrcians use ten runs as a benchmark for every win. So, an extra 34 runs would be equivalent to three or four wins. Four wins win them the AL West. So, it is not insignificant.
It is fair to ask the question of what the Astros normally do in this department. Do they normally struggle to push runs across home plate or was 2025 an anomaly? You will undoubtedly notice that the Astros were better in certain seasons. Now, whether someone can replicate success in this department is a separate question. Let’s see where we are with 2020 excluded.
So, the 2025 Astros were going away the least efficient offense in recent franchise history. One of the great things about numbers is that they sometimes confirm something we think we are seeing. We saw a ton of base runners stranded on base. What these numbers also show us is that they were pretty darn efficient in past seasons and more efficient than most of the teams in the league.
Also, notice that the top three seasons in efficiency also involve the team advancing to the World Series. The top three seasons in efficiency also coincided with the team scoring the most runs in the period. Obviously, this makes perfect sense. The key to succeeding in the lab is to make sure we don’t go over our skis. We know that the 2025 team was less efficient than every other team during this current iteration of the Astros. What we don’t know is why.
There are two distinct possibilities. The first one is that there is something we can measure that can help explain what we are seeing. The second one is that it is more or less luck. As I sit here, I cannot say definitively about which of those is mostly true. What we do know is that the Astros hired new hitting coaches after their worst season of the period. Their 2025 season would be ninth in base runners out of ten seasons, so they also need to up that ante as well. Still, without knowing the particulars of how efficiency happens, it would be fair to expect some improvement in that department based on historical norms. I wouldn’t expect a jump to the team mean or median, but splitting the difference seems like a fair bet. That by itself would create a reasonable increase in runs scored.
