Friday Morning Hot Links

The Lima Time Time Bozoathon for Harvey Relief starts tonight at 7pm Central. We're trying to raise $10,000. We're now 13 hours away from the thing even starting at we're 13% of the way to our goal. Gonna be a bunch of great guests, gonna be a lot of fun, and we're gonna hopefully raise a ton of money. So tune in this evening, overnight, tomorrow morning, all day tomorrow, and tomorrow evening. We'll have an embedded player here.

*The White Sox are useless and the Indians won their 15th straight game. So the 86-53 Astros stayed at 14.5 games up on the idle Angels and 2.5 up on the Indians, who will never lose again.

*Off-day! Yesterday was the first of two days off in four days, as the Astros get Monday off between the A's series and the Angels series. By the time the Astros return home again on September 15 they'll have played 16 of their last 19 games on the road.

*World Series odds check! We haven't done this since the Astros acquired Verlander and Maybin, but let's see what the Simulations tell us:
-FanGraphs (100-62): 20.7% chance of winning the World Series
-FiveThirtyEight (100-62): 16% chance of winning the World Series
-Baseball Prospectus (100-62): 15% chance of winning the World Series

*Richard Justice: The Astros got better, and healthy, at just the right time.

*Jose Altuve has played a not-very-even-number 962 games. In those 962 games he has 1229 hits, a .317/.362/.453 slash line with 230 stolen bases. Also through 962 games:
Tony Gwynn: 1233 hits, .332/.389/.442, 201 stolen bases
Pete Rose: 1174 hits, .302/.361/.423, 47 stolen bases
Craig Biggio: 990 hits, .282/.365/.407, 172 stolen bases

*I swear I didn't read this before coming up with the Altuve vs. the World comparisons, but Ryan Spaeder wrote up a good piece on Altuve and his track to Cooperstown.

*The Tigers wanted Forrest Whitley for Verlander.

*While Tony DeFrancesco said, "It's time to see what else is out there," Hatin' ass Jon Heyman says, "The Astros could set the record for firings for a division winner."

*Jake Kaplan on Cameron Maybin's immediate impact and the adjustments he's made since coming to Houston.

*The Marlins will leave their roof partially open during Hurricane Irma (with a good reason).