Joe Espada has done something that makes one of baseball’s oldest grading tools look a lot less useful.
For years, the Pythagorean record has been a favorite way to judge whether a team - and by extension its manager - has played above or below its true level. The formula compares runs scored and runs allowed to estimate what a club’s record should be. In the Astros’ case, that kind of lens has long been part of the conversation around how they’ve performed.
But this season has scrambled that familiar test.
The Astros are 75-75, while Pythagoras says they should be 70-80. On the surface, that sounds like the kind of gap that can be used to praise a manager for getting more out of his team than the math expects. But the deeper numbers muddy that picture fast.
Houston is 15-16 in one-run games, which looks fairly ordinary on its own. The bigger surprise is in blowouts.
The Astros are 13-26 in those games, a sharp reversal from what they’ve typically done during this run of dominance. Coming into the season, the club had been running at a .700 winning percentage in blowout games.
That kind of drop-off points to a team that has been punting more games than it used to.
The bullpen, at least on paper, should have helped in tight games. Josh Hader has not blown a save since returning, Bryan Abreu has been better since Hader came back, and Steven Okert and A.J.
Blubaugh give Houston a stronger relief group than most teams can offer. Even with that, the Astros’ one-run record has gotten worse in that stretch.
There are also factors that don’t sit neatly on Espada’s shoulders. Poor situational hitting has been an issue for a couple of seasons, and that kind of problem can drag down a team regardless of who is filling out the lineup card. Those numbers matter too, and they’ll be part of any final evaluation of the staff as a whole.
Still, the case against leaning too hard on Pythagoras is plain. It is easy to point to the Astros’ record and say Espada has kept them ahead of where they “should” be. But that old shortcut doesn’t tell the whole story here, and it may be an outdated way to judge this team.
The bigger picture is narrower than the raw record suggests. The Astros have not lost a game when leading after eight innings with Hader as closer, which makes the gap in one-run results feel harder to square.
The difference may only amount to a few games, but in a race this tight, a few games matter. A four-game lead with 12 games left would feel a lot different than sitting on just one.
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The catch is that the closing schedule should be manageable on paper, not necessarily in practice. The Astros have a run of games left against clubs with losing records, the sort of stretch that usually invites a clean finish, but this team has already shown a tendency to stumble against some of those same opponents. So the math still favors Houston, yet the margin for error is thin enough that one bad week could turn a division race into a much shakier final verdict. [Read more 🡒]