Dusty Days Off: Examination of forced days off for Astros players

One thing is for sure, this season has not gotten off to the start Houston Astros fan would have liked to see, especially without several star players over a few different stretches. One thing that many will try to weigh the impact of is the truncated spring training season and how to approach the regular season.

Manger Dusty Baker determined for his team that he will force players to take days off when he determines, to try and ‘save them’ from the early grind of the regular season and playing a full week schedule.

Fans and onlookers found his days off, however, to be strangely timed for some and absent for others, which begs the question, is there a method to the madness or is this just another Dusty-ism that has no basis in reality? Let’s take a look and see the impact so far.

Prior to Saturday’s game, the Astros sat at 6-7, while ranking 28th in MLB in team batting average at .200, tied for eighth in home runs with 14, 21st in RBI with 43, 26th in hits with 85 and 22nd in runs with 44.

So the looming questions for Astros top brass is, how do we get the bats going? I have one simple suggestion, if a player is hot don’t sit them out.

On the other side of the ball, Astros pitchers rank 15th in ERA at 3.54, eighth in quality starts with three and 17th in WHIP at 1.26. With those combined statistics, the majority of the blame for the slow start is in the hands of the Astros’ bats, which have yet to consistently produce, and if the Astros eliminated the starts of Jake Odorizzi, then they would easily  be in the top 10 for pitching across the league.