The Greatest Astro/Phillie

The time is here. The lesser contenders have been dispatched (it seemed like it was gonna be the Mets’ year, didn’t it?) and we have our World Series matchup; the seemingly unstoppable Astros, who just keep pennanting and pennanting and are so far without a loss this postseason, and the scrappy Phillies, third in the NL East this year but hot at the right time.

And that brings us to our annual question: who was the greatest ever Astro/Phillie? Our methodology, as usual — pull up the top 200 career WARs for each team on Stathead (the best subscription on the Internet, if you like this kind of thing) and find the player who maximizes (WAR with Astros) times (WAR with Phillies.)

This year it’s not even close: Roy Oswalt, the Astros’ career leader in WAR from a pitcher. I’d forgotten that after most of a career in Houston, he went to Philadelphia halfway through 2010 and was terrific, helping the Phils get to the NLCS. He pitched just a year and a half in Philadelphia but that, combined with his record in Houston, is enough to give him the title by a long ways.

But if you really dislike the imbalance here, you can instead rank players by min(WAR with Astros, WAR with Phillies) and get a different greatest Astro/Phillie: Turk Farrell, who started and ended his career a Phillie with six years of Houston in between, usually good, never great. He was an all-star once as a Phillie and four times as an Astro, though two of those times were in 1962. Why were there two All-Star Games in 1962? No idea. Mysteries of baseball.

The greatest Astro/Brave(s)

The pennants have been decided, largely without my attention, because never in recent memory have four teams I less care for been vying for the title. The Dodgers and Red Sox are OK I guess but they just won. The Astros keep winning pennants and are holders of a recent world championship tainted by sign-stealing. And the Braves are a just-OK team that knocked out the Brewers. If they still had Kevin Gausman and Nick Markakis, I’d root for them anyway, but now? In fact, unless I’m forgetting somebody, there is no ex-Oriole playing on either side of the World Series this year. So much for that metric.

But the Series must go on, and with it, this annual feature: which player had the greatest combined contribution to the two teams that remain? I have to admit, I couldn’t think of a single player who played for both. (Has to do with growing up an AL fan when both of these teams were on the other side.) When I ran the numbers, there was a pretty close race for first, and here’s what’s cool — the two players, Denis Menke and Denny LeMaster, both came up with the (Milwaukee) Braves in 1962 and went to the Astros in the same trade in 1968! Menke was a shortstop, who had a couple of All-Star years in Houston but never fielded as well as he had for the Braves. He was later the hitting coach for the pennant-winning 1993 Phillies, and he died about 10 months ago in Florida. LeMaster was a starting pitcher for most of his time with both teams, never a star, always a reliable innings-eater.

And who was on the other side of the trade for these two great Astro-Braves? Chuck Harrison, who didn’t amount to much, and Sonny Jackson, who never really equalled his 49-steal age-21 rookie season, but who stuck around for 12 years playing kind-of-OK baseball, 7 years with the Braves following his 5 for Houston. He’s probably the player with the longest combined career for both this teams. And he went to Montgomery Blair High School in my home county of Montgomery County, Maryland. Maybe that’s the closest connection I can make between the Orioles and the 2021 World Series.

The greatest Astro/National

Jose Altuve has done what Jose Altuve does and so it’s World Series time again, the Astros back for the second time in three years, the Nationals there for their first time in infinity years, so we return to our annual exercise: who was the greatest Astro/National? (Last year: the greatest Red Sox / Dodger.) By which, just to have a good pool of players to work from, we mean Astro/National/Expo? This time the answer’s uncontroversial: it’s Rusty Staub. I think of Staub as a Met, because that’s what he was when I was a kid, and that’s who he played the most seasons for, but Staub came up with Houston and spent three years of his prime (and, much later, 38 games of his non-prime) in Montreal. I never knew this guy was so good! In 1969 he had a .426 on-base percentage and hit 29 home runs, a lot back then, and got one measly MVP vote.

Anyway, Staub put together 17.4 WAR in his three seasons in Montreal and 13.1 more in 6 years with the Astros. Good satisfyingly balanced answer this year.

If you restrict to players who played for the Nationals, not their Quebecois predecessors, the pickings are a lot slimmer. Looks like Justin Maxwell and Mark Melancon are the best bets. I guess I give the edge to Maxwell just because he played multiple seasons for each team.

The greatest Astro/Dodger

The World Series is here and so it’s time again to figure out which player in the history of baseball has had the most distinguished joint record of contributions to both teams in contention for the title.  (Last year:  Riggs Stephenson was the greatest Cub/Indian.)  Astros history just isn’t that long, so it’s a little surprising to find we come up with a really solid winner this year:  Jimmy Wynn, “The Toy Cannon,” a longtime Astro who moved to LA in 1974 and had arguably his best season, finishing 5th in MVP voting and leading the Dodgers to a pennant.  Real three-true-outcomes guy:  led the league in walks twice and strikeouts once, and was top-10 in the National League in home runs four times in the Astrodome.  Career total of 41.4 WAR for the Astros, and 12.3 for the Dodgers in just two years there.

As always, thanks to the indispensable Baseball Reference Play Index for making this search possible.

Other contenders:  Don Sutton is clearly tops among pitchers.  Sutton was the flip side of Wynn; he had just two seasons for Houston but they were pretty good.  Beyond that it’s slim pickings.  Jeff Kent put in some years for both teams.  So did Joe Ferguson.

Who are we rooting for?  On the “ex-Orioles on the WS Roster” I guess the Dodgers have the advantage, with Rich Hill and Justin Turner (I have to admit I have no memory of Turner playing for the Orioles at all, even though it wasn’t that long ago!  It was in 2009, a season I have few occasions to recall.)  But both these teams are stocked with players I just plain like:  Kershaw, Puig, Altuve, the great Carlos Beltran…

 

 

The 1979 Houston Astros hit only 49 home runs

49 home runs! That’s nuts. They hit more triples than home runs. Their home run leader was Jose Cruz, who hit 9. In September they went 20 straight games without hitting a home run, the longest such streak in modern baseball. And that was after they went 15 games without hitting a rome run in July!

Must have been a pretty bad team, right? But no! They won 89 games and finished second, just a game and a half behind the Reds. That 15 game homerless streak in July? They went 11-4 in those games.