Who ever said umpires can’t decide a game?
Thank the ABS challenge system for tonight’s 6-4 Astros win. It turned what would have been a 4-1 loss in last year’s pre ABS system into a 6-4 Astros victory tonight.
It looked like a Twins blowout in the early going.
After a rare quality start in his last appearance, Mike Burrows’ old troubles were immediately apparent tonight. Two walks, a single, and a hit by pitch scored the Twins’ first run, and a two-run, two-out single by Ryan Kreidler gave the Twins a quick 3-0 lead before the Astros even got to bat.
As unlikely as it seemed, Burrows settled down for the next three innings. The Astros finally broke through big-time against Twins starter Joe Ryan in the fourth with consecutive one-out singles by Cam Smith, Taylor Trammell, and Yainer Diaz. With bases loaded and two outs, Jose Altuve walked on a 3-2 count. The pitch was originally called strike three, but Altuve’s challenge resulted in a ball-four walk, .6 inches off the plate.
Then Yordan Alvarez did this:
It was Alvarez’s league-leading 26th homer and his third grand salami of the year. It also tied him for first all-time as an Astro with seven slams total.
Burrows’ troubles returned in the fifth inning on an RBI double to Astros nemesis Josh Bell making the score 6-4 Stros. The fifth was Burrows’ last frame, who finished allowing six hits, two walks while striking ouit three.
The resurgent Astros bullpen had no problems with the Twins lineup. Enyal De Los Santos, Steven Okert, Bryan King and Josh Hader shut down the Twinkies with four perfect innings, preserving the 6-4 Astros win and bringing their record up to 43-45.
Going into this game Alvarez was 0 -16.. Tonight he was 3-4 with the game-winning four run homer.
The Astros go for their sixth straight series win tomorrow at Daikin. 7:10 CT.
Yordan is a very bad man. That is all
That was a good month of June.
Altuve should get fWAR and bWAR credit for his successful challenges
For a guy that said he wasn’t going to challenge much….. 15-21 correct or something???!!
So he might, at least on fangraphs. Fangraphs has a metric wB-Rvw which is “Total run value of batter initiated reviews”. I’m not sure if that’s integrated into their fwar or not.
It’s flawed though. As you can see, nobody has a negative wB-Rvw. It appears very simplistic. So it only considers the positive effect of having a strike overturned to a ball, and treats a ball staying as a ball as no effect. Except there definitely is a negative effect to challenging, being wrong, and losing one of your challenges. Either your teammates have to be super picky about what they can challenge thereon out, or it might cost them the opportunity to challenge when it really really matters later in the game. So getting a challenge wrong can indirectly cost your team runs. This doesn’t seem to factor that into their metric.
Also, obviously, it doesn’t factor in times when a batter could have challenged and didn’t. Like Walker’s missed opportunity to challenge on Monday. By this calculation, if you just never ever challenged, it would basically treat you like a wB-Rvw of 0, but in truth you might actually be costing your team runs by not challenging the blatantly wrong calls.
It’s all new, I’m sure Fangraphs or someway will figure out a better way to calculate the run value based on a player’s successful challenges, unsuccessful challenges, and missed opportunities to challenge, but it doesn’t look like its there yet.
Man, look at Isaac on that chart. 9 for 9. 💪
Flashback to “This game is turned upside down!”