Vegas Watch was able to find a listing of over/under bets on how many wins each team in Major League Baseball will come up with this season. Your Houston Astros? 73.5. There are a few teams below that, with the Royals and Mariners leading the group of sadness at 70 wins.
↵While the Astros collectively played over their heads according to the Pythagorean Theorem, winning 76 games rather than the 68 they would have won by their run totals, there would seem to be a lot of room for improvement on the team in the short-term. Brett Myers played over his head last year? Absolutely. But Carlos Lee? Not so much. This is a team that wasted something to the tune of 1000 at-bats on mediocrities like Humberto Quintero, Pedro Feliz, Tommy Manzella, and Geoff Blum last year. None of those players is currently slated for an everyday role, and a few of them aren't even guaranteed to be in the majors this year.
↵Would I go down and (hypothetically, if gambling were legal) bet the over on this? I wouldn't make it a priority or anything. The Astros are still pretty thin: any bad luck in health will hurt this team a lot more than it would most, especially considering the upper levels of the farm system are still shallow and Jeff Keppinger is likely to be traded as soon as he demonstrates that he is healthy enough to tie his own shoe.
↵But if I had to pick a side now, I'd slightly lean towards the over.
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