Why are the Houston Astros hitting like a team of Jon Lesters?

The Houston Astros, as a team, had a 948 OPS in August. That means for an entire month, roughly, they were a team of nine Josh Donaldsons, all menacingly waggling their bats, terrifying each and every pitcher they faced.

For a full month, the entire lineup was an amorphous blob of MVP candidates. It’s helpful to think of it as an actual horror movie kind of blob: a gelatinous monster with 18 wildly flailing legs and 18 arms that consumed pitchers whole and spit out the hats. And it’s not like they were slouches in the other months, either; in a single seven-game stretch in July, they scored 73 runs, which is more than the Royals scored in the month of April.

This is the setup for the 2017 ALCS, in which the Astros can’t even hit like nine John Donaldsons. Oh, if they could only manage that sweet, sweet 608 OPS as a team, things might be different. Instead, they’re at .147/.234/.213 for the series, a line so bad that you can’t reasonably compare it to a single position player. The 447 OPS is right between what Clayton Kershaw and Jon Lester hit this season, after all.

The Astros have scored nine runs in five games, which is their lowest total in a five-game stretch this season by two runs, and it’s time to explain retroactively what in the world is going on with them. There are a lot of possible explanations.

It could be just one of those things, the baseball goblin running around the room and hiding the Astros’ car keys for no reason. Here’s a plot of all the pitches Masahiro Tanaka threw in Game 5, via Brooks Baseball:

He didn’t throw too many balls down the heart of the plate. But there were still hittable pitches, with the caveat being that the hitter had to be ready for them. With a slight change of approach from the batter, maybe that blue sucker right in the middle would have been a turquoise square instead of a blue one. Maybe some of those reds could have been turquoise, too. It’s not that Tanaka didn’t give the Astros pitches to hit; it’s that he gave them far fewer pitches to hit than a team wants. But there were still a few that got away because, ha ha, that’s baseball for ya.

But it feels hollow to use “just one of those things” as an excuse. There’s another team involved, you know. That would be the Yankees, who are pitching as well as they’ve pitched all season. So this is the other part of the equation: The other team is doing what they’re trying to do, and they’re doing it better than the other team.

Tanaka was absolutely painting the outside edge to left-handers in Game 5, and he was making hitters flail with his splitter, which isn’t a pitch that hitters are used to. He was outstanding. Sonny Gray was very good. CC Sabathia and Luis Severino all had fine starts.

So we’re up to a) just baseball being baseball and b) the Yankees starting pitchers getting hot at just the right time, not necessarily in that order.

The third leg of this table might be the most important, and this isn’t a novel thought, but the modern postseason series favors the super-bullpens. There are scheduled off days and a finish line in sight, which allows Joe Girardi to use Tommy Kahnle and Chad Green (who are a combined 9 IP, 0 ER in this series) for multiple innings at a time.

This isn’t something he can do against the Red Sox in August because there were five games in five days before that, and there might be five games in five days after that. The postseason is built for teams that are built for the postseason, and that currently means a hot bullpen is the most valuable currency. It might be speed one of these years, but in the post-Royals world, it’s relief.

This is all fairly obvious so far. The Yankees have executed, their mid-to-late inning blueprint is devastating, and the Astros sure haven’t gotten any fortunate bounces. That’s why they’re not scoring. Please email my editor about how much you enjoyed this piece.

Except it’s the fourth table leg that I can’t get out of my head. Up there, when I was referring to the seeming randomness of baseball, the tyranny of improper sequencing, I wrote:

But there were still hittable pitches, with the caveat being that the hitter had to be ready for them.

Which makes it all sound like a game of rock-paper-scissors. Pitcher throwing fastball beats hitter looking for curveball, et cetera. Except that’s way too oversimplified. If you’re seeing a dot in the middle of the strike zone, that doesn’t have to be a pitch that the pitcher screwed up on. It could have been a part of the pitch sequence he was trying to execute the whole time, a show-me pitch in a count when he knew the hitter was going to be something else.

The fourth part of what’s happened to the Astros — and this is a wild theory without a lot of tangible evidence, so salt away — has to do with the Yankees being so damned smart. The ability to focus their Manhattan Project of nerds on a single team for a week has to be absolutely devastating. Think about it: For 162 games, they’re worried about the Red Sox, the Rays, then the Blue Jays are coming into town and, what in the, the Reds are on the schedule?

They’re all spread out, with a broken fire hydrant of advance scouting shooting at them while the analytics team is working on the draft, the current roster, players at every level of the organization, maybe future free agents. They’re modeling the career of Didi Gregorius so they know how much money they’ll need to budget, they’re rebuilding Aaron Judge’s swing, they’re figuring out what’s wrong with Tanaka and how to fix him.

For the last week, they’ve been focused on how to beat the Astros. Here, you, come over here: I want you to drop everything you’re doing, and tell me how you get Marwin Gonzalez out.

You, figure out what kind of pitch sequencing gives George Springer trouble.

You, figure out how to hit Dallas Keuchel.

And so on, and so on, and this is how it’s always been since the beginning of time, but now there’s rivers of data and the processing power to harness it. When a team with the resources of the Yankees can sit and focus on one team in a best-of-seven series, it can seem like an unfair weaponization of knowledge, the kind that can turn a team of nine Josh Donaldsons into a team of nine Jon Lesters.

The Astros have smart people, too, and it’s not like they’re picking up a copy of their complimentary hotel USA Today for their research. It’s possible — probable? — that I’m overestimating the knowledge gap, here. But at the very least, the Yankees’ game plan has been a crucial component to the Astros’ struggles, and we’ve arrived at a solid, four-point explanation of why they’ve been so horrible:

And it will all be forgotten if the Astros win two games at home, so don’t dwell on it. But for five games, the best offensive team in baseball has looked like the worst offensive team in baseball. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more stories like this. Blame or praise the computers, lasers, and the people charged with making sense of it all, because they aren’t going away. There will be more what-happened-to-Team-X stories for postseasons to come.