We can make some educated guess on what Crane wants based on why his last three GMs are not at the helm of the Astros anymore.

Win

Crane met with Astros beat reporters on Tuesday at Yankee Stadium to discuss Brown’s firing. Crane is anything but comfortable with gap, so his statements were brief and lacked detail. He said that he moved on from Brown because “I think we just needed a change. We weren’t where we wanted to be.”

Presumably where Crane wants to be is well above .500. The Astros are having their worst full season in 2026 in a dozen years, and if they make the playoffs—as they are favorites to do right now—it will be because of the anemic AL West this season—not the inherent quality of this team.

The Astros are .500 right now and have a negative run differential for the first time 2014. Crane has previously said that “As long as I am here, the window is always open.” While such a statement is an indication of Crane’s personal hubris, Crane’s frustration with the poor 2026 is shared by many fans.

Be Likable

But if winning was enough, James Click would still be the general manager. Instead, Crane ran off Click in the wake of a World Series victory. Reporting after the fact emphasized a “personality clash,” a “philosophical chasm” and “stylistic differences” between Click and Crane.

And since Crane is the owner, he gets to choose who runs baseball operations. Click’s departure suggests that compatibility with Crane mattered more than a championship parade.

Click’s tenure as GM looks a little bit worse today than it did in November 2022 because no young stars have developed from his draft picks or signings, and no club has yet hired him to run baseball operations again. Yet, the Astros have improved little, if at all, in player development over the Dana Brown era.

Don’t Scandalize Me

The architect of the Astros golden age was not Click or Brown,1 but Jeff Luhnow. Crane hired Luhnow when he first bought the franchise in Fall 2012 and Crane let Luhnow run the front office in as unrestricted a fashion as possible. Luhnow took the free hand to develop new innovations in things like using high-speed cameras in data analytics. It built a juggernaut by the late 2010s.

But Luhnow was brought down by the sign stealing scandal, fired by Crane after Rob Manfred released the details of his conclusions on “the banging scheme.” Luhnow (and AJ Hinch) were fired ostensibly for failure to control their clubhouse, but really because they could be fired because they did not have the protections that members of the players union have and because Alex Cora and Carlos Beltran had already moved on from Houston.

One inference some have made is that Crane felt blindsided by the sign-stealing scandal and felt he needed to have more knowledge of what was going on in his front office as a result. I feel this is often presented as a justification for Crane’s meddling in baseball decisions.2 Others have argued that Crane feels he did not get enough credit for the Astros rise in the 2010s and making baseball decisions feeds his own self-belief about his skills.

Which interpretation is correct is impossible to know from the outside. But it is difficult to miss the organizational shift that followed the scandal. The Astros of the 2010s delegated extraordinary authority to Jeff Luhnow. The Astros of the 2020s do not appear willing to grant that same autonomy to anyone.

The more revealing question is not who has left the Astros front office. It is who remains., and who holds influence on baseball decisions.

Get Along With Jim Crane

Crane’s media session on Tuesday gave little impression of what he thinks needs to change in the front office, other than that the record should improve. And that seems to mean that Jim Crane will cede little role in baseball decisions. And as Deesha Thosar of Fox Sports wrote in the wake of Brown’s dismissal, “There is arguably no MLB owner more involved in day-to-day decisions than Crane.”

I have made that point repeatedly here in this Substack since Click’s dismissal. Jim Crane is the most important baseball decision maker in this franchise, and that is different from how most MLB teams operate in the modern day. Most organizations let their top baseball executive make the baseball decisions, and I have argued Crane’s influence is suboptimal.

The next general manager needs to begin by incorporating Crane’s influence and power in his thinking about baseball decisions. And in the ideal world, Crane will realize that he does not need to supervise his best baseball decision maker. One would think Crane would have realized that years ago, but we are here instead.

Get Along with Jeff Bagwell

Speaking of the ideal world, that is a place where owners see one of their jobs is indulging the baseball “ideas” of old players who have never worked in a front office in conversations in suites and over a beer. In the Astros organization, the owner hires those guys to be key baseball decision makers.

The Astros announcement of Brown’s dismissal noted that for the time being, the front office duties “will be transitioned” to the team’s three assistant General Managers and “senior advisor Jeff Bagwell.” It went out of its way to mention Bagwell.

Undoubtedly, a number of fans are comforted by having the name of a great player along the list of anonymous front office guys. Those who know the history of modern baseball know that playing greatness is a poor predictor of front-office success, and that was true well before the Giants handed over their front office to Buster Posey because of his playing record.

Many teams have their greats around to be a sounding board or offer perspective and hang out with the players in Spring Training, but their influence is limited. Bagwell seems to have a large deal of influence. Of course, that influence only exists because Jim Crane wants him to have influence.

Expand Bagwell and Crane’s Narrow Vision

The concern for Astros fans is not just that Bagwell is essentially a dilettante when it comes to the large number of decisions that front offices have to make, but also that his views seem narrow. We got a flavor of this in November 2022 when Bagwell said “This game is played by humans, man. It’s not played by computers.”

We got another flavor of the narrowness of Bagwell’s knowledge of modern baseball this week when the Astros brought back Brent Strom as a pitching consultant. That choice, according to Chandler Rome of The Athletic “came at the behest of Hall of Fame first baseman Jeff Bagwell.

Was Strom the right hire? There is a good argument that he is, based on long track record as a pitching coach, including his work for the Astros from 2015 to 2021. Is Strom too old and the game has passed him by? His last two employers might agree. The Diamondbacks fired Strom as their pitching coach after the 2024 season and the Pirates fired him as their assistant pitching coach after 2025.

How did Bagwell assess Strom’s last several seasons? We don’t know for sure, but my best theory is that he did not. Instead, he knew Strom’s name, unlike other potential pitching consultants.3

This decision looks like many made by the Astros front office over the last four years—bringing back an old friend (c.f. Justin Verlander; Carlos Correa; Christian Vazquez). Whether Strom proves to be the right choice is almost beside the point. The decision reflects an organizational tendency to lean on trusted relationships and familiar personalities.

It also raises the question of whether the front office fully scanned all of their options or just fell back on what they knew. Those deals always felt less to me like they were engineered by Dana Brown, and more like they were engineered by Jim Crane.

Overall, the task for the next GM is difficult. He or she must win and win soon. But success on the field alone may not be enough. The next GM must also avoid the “stylistic differences” that undermined James Click and must operate comfortably in a structure where the owner remains deeply involved in baseball decisions.

The primary question is not whether the next hire can identify talent, run a draft, negotiate trades, or build a roster. That job is difficult enough. The primary question is whether that person can operate effectively in a system where the owner remains the franchise’s most influential baseball decision maker and where trusted advisers such as Jeff Bagwell hold substantial influence.

The Astros are not really searching for a General Manager. They are searching for someone willing and able to be General Manager under Jim Crane. Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Share

Leave a comment

More importantly, the Astros announcement was made by the one man above Click in Astros decision making—owner Jim Crane. I also described the move as “self centered.” I argued that the “real decision” that Crane made was not that “there is a better GM out than James Click.” Instead, the decision was that “there is no one better to run the Astros than Jim Crane.”

This morning, Jim Crane fired General Manager Dana Brown. One might think that in doing so, Crane fired Click’s replacement.

But Brown was never the most important figure in the Astros baseball operations department. The most important figure in Astros baseball operations today is the same person it was when James Click departed in November 2022: Jim Crane.

That is the most important fact about the Astros over the last four seasons. And that fact is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Declining Performance

The reasons to fire Dana Brown are easier to understand than the reasons for firing Click. The reasons given for firing Click involved what reporters called “stylistic differences,” a “personality clash” and a “philosophical chasm.” Apparently, Jim Crane did not like having James Click around. Which is odd, because I sure liked winning the World Series when Click was GM. But the big boss thought he knew better.

Unlike Click’s dismissal, there is a results-based argument for moving on from Brown. During Brown’s tenure, the Astros have won 90, 87, and 88 games and are currently on pace for 80 wins. That follows a six-season stretch from 2017 through 2022 in which the club averaged 102 victories per full season.

Some of the decline is natural regression from the nearly unprecedented highs of the golden age. Other parts of it come from the team’s inability to develop young stars in recent years. Some of the fault for that goes to Click—the best major leaguer from his three drafts in charge of the Astros is Joey Loperfido.

Nevertheless, improving the pipeline of young talent was one of the primary reasons Brown was hired. On that metric, the results remain limited. Astros players under the age of 25 have produced only 0.7 bWAR this season.

The specific decline of the Astros in the 2026 season is also more easily placed on Brown. The big project of the 2026-26 offseason was finding pitching. The front office acquired pitching options from a wide variety of sources. From mid-tier free agents (Tatsuya Imai) to trade acquisitions (Mike Burrows) to overseas reclamation projects (Ryan Weiss & Cody Bolton) to scrap heaps finds (Kai-Wei Teng and Nate Pearson), almost none have panned out. Only Peter Lambert, signed from overseas to a minor league contract and sent out on waivers at the end of Spring Training, has succeeded from this search.

While it is unclear how much say Brown had in signing Imai (and how much Crane pushed for it), the rest of the acquisitions fall at Brown’s feet.

The best defense of Brown for Brown’s sake is that he has done better in recent years in developing the team’s farm system. 2025 first round pick Xavier Neyens is promising as is Cuban free agent outfielder Kevin Alvarez. But both are still in A ball and realistically 2 years away from helping the major league Astros.

A Different Type of Front Office Stability

The other defenses of keeping Brown are not actual defense of Brown, but calls for stability for the sake of stability. By firing Brown, Crane will now have his 4th general manager in the last 6 calendar years. Good organizations prize stability and good baseball leaders understand the limitations of any small set of decisions on outcomes.

The strongest argument against the front-office stability critique is that the Astros have actually been remarkably stable at the top: the Astros baseball operations department is run by Jim Crane. That has been true for the entirety of Dana Brown’s tenure as General Manager.

Consider the evidence. Crane installed himself above Brown after Click left. Crane’s fingerprints appear on many of the organization’s most consequential decisions, including the Rafael Montero contract, the Jose Abreu signing, the acquisitions of Justin Verlander and Carlos Correa, the signing of Josh Hader, and this past winter’s pursuit of Tatsuya Imai.

Most notably, Crane reportedly vetoed a trade that would have sent Bryan Abreu to Minnesota for Trevor Larnach at this year’s trade deadline.2 In writing about the vetoed trade, I said “Instead of learning to trust his general managers, Crane has seen himself more and more as the essential man for the Astros, not just as owner, but also in baseball operations.”

That mirrors what I wrote when Crane fired Click: Crane “is now the indispensable man in the Astros baseball operations department….[and] seems to want to have his vision for player acquisition trump that of his general manager.”

My analysis of the Click decision was correct, as we have seen for the last four seasons.

Change Seems Unlikely

In discussing the vetoed Larnach for Abreu trade, I wrote “Jim Crane is a businessman and knows very well how to do the job of a CEO. But that is a different job than being a General Manager. He should let those who know baseball best make the baseball decisions.”

That echoes many statements I have made since Crane fired Click in 2022 and made it apparent how important his opinion was to baseball decisions. Crane’s choice has not worked out over the last 4 seasons, and the reasons for that are clear. Baseball decisions are not only difficult in the best of circumstances, but are even more difficult when your expertise is in a different field.

The hope for Astros fans is that Crane realizes the error of his ways as does so as soon as possible. That he does frankly what he did in the 2010s and hire the best baseball executive he can find and empower that person to make decisions.

But I am skeptical that he will do so. Crane has continued to meddle in the decisions of his baseball decision makers even as the results of that choice have continued to work out poorly. From my perspective, I will believe that Jim Crane is getting out of baseball decisions when I see evidence that Jim Crane is getting out of baseball decisions.

It is clear what the best path for the Astros is. But there is no reason to have confidence that Jim Crane will choose it.

Share

Leave a comment

Heading into this season, the Astros’ best candidate to become that next homegrown star was Cam Smith.

Smith certainly fits the “young” part of the equation. At 23 years old, he entered 2026 as one of the youngest regulars on the roster. He was a first-round pick in 2024, quickly climbed into Top 100 prospect rankings, and won the Astros’ Opening Day right field job in 2025 following a hot spring training. If any Astros player was poised to take a significant step forward this season, Smith seemed the most likely candidate.

So how is he doing this year?

Corporate needs you to tell the difference between this season and this season.

There is very little difference between Smith’s 2025 and 2026 seasons.

By virtually every comprehensive offensive metric, Smith is the same hitter he was a year ago. His OPS has increased by only eight points, while his OPS+, wRC+, and wOBA are all essentially unchanged.

Young players are good candidates to improve from one season to the next, but these numbers show that has not happened yet for Smith.

One area of improvement in the table is in strikeout rate. Smith has reduced his K% from 27.8% to 24.6%. Unfortunately, much of that gain has been offset by a drop in his walk rate, which has fallen from 8.7% to 7.6%.

Is that improvement in strikeouts the result of a new approach at the plate?

Not really.

The figure below shows Smith’s swing decisions in his two major league seasons. His chase rate is unchanged. His overall swing rate is unchanged. His contact rate is nearly identical. Even his swinging-strike rate is effectively the same.

To borrow again from Pam Beesly: they’re the same picture

The one notable difference is Smith’s decline in Called Strike plus Whiff percentage (CSW%). The metric is often used to evaluate pitchers, where higher numbers indicate greater dominance. From the hitter’s perspective, however, lower is better. Smith’s CSW% has improved from 29.4% to 27.5%, suggesting pitchers are finding it slightly more difficult to control his plate appearances.

It’s a positive development, but not one that has meaningfully changed the results.

The conclusion from the first two tables is difficult to avoid: Cam Smith is having almost the same offensive season in 2026 that he had in 2025.

Green Shoots

While the top-line numbers look familiar, there are some underlying indicators that offer reasons for optimism.

Most notably, Smith is hitting for more power.

In general, Smith is hitting with more power in 2026 than he did in 2025. His slugging percentage is up from .358 to .393. Smith has essentially the same number of extra base hits this season as last, he has traded doubles (down from 21 to 15) for home runs (up from 9 to 17). Homers are of course better than doubles, and that has led to an increase in his isolated slugging1 from .122 in 2025 to .175 this season.

The biggest improvement has come in Smith’s ability to hit barrels.

Statcast defines barrels as batted balls with the ideal combination of exit velocity and launch angle. They are the type of contact most likely to produce extra-base hits and home runs. Smith recorded 21 barrels in 2025. He already has 35 this season.

As a result, his barrel rate has jumped from the 31st percentile among major leaguers last season to the 76th percentile in 2026.

More broadly, Smith is hitting the ball harder. His hard-hit rate has increased from 40.8% to 44.0%.

The challenge is that Smith still does not make consistently good contact.

Statcast’s “Squared Up Percentage” measures how often a hitter strikes the ball with the sweet spot of the bat. Elite contact hitters such as Luis Arraez, peak Jose Altuve, and Tony Gwynn have excelled in this area.2

Smith has squared up only 18.5% of the pitches he has swung at this season, the 14th-lowest mark among qualified hitters.

That doesn’t automatically prevent a player from becoming a productive hitter. Kyle Schwarber, Nick Kurtz, and Hunter Goodman all post similarly low rates. The difference is that those players compensate by generating elite power. Schwarber, for example, owns a career barrel rate of 17%.

This highlights the path forward for Smith.

He can become a better hitter by making quality contact more often, which would raise his batting average and on-base percentage. Or he can continue down his current path, leaning into his developing power and generating more barrels.

So far, the evidence suggests the latter. Smith’s barrel rate has improved dramatically, while his squared-up rate remains low.

Same As It Ever Was

I wrote this article in part because Cam Smith is having a hot month at the plate. The figure below shows that August 2026 is the highest OPS that Smith has recorded in his career.

Last June, Smith posted an .849 OPS, which prompted me to examine his first half-season in the majors and conclude that “the Cam Smith experiment is working” and that the Astros were benefiting from having him in the everyday lineup.

What followed was a prolonged slump.

After peaking in June 2025, Smith posted OPS marks of .564 and .446 in July and August before recovering somewhat in September. This season has followed a similar pattern. He was slightly above average in April, struggled in May, heated up in June, slumped badly in July, and has now exploded in August.

One of the section headings in last year’s article on Smith was “Raw Skills in Need of Refinement.” That was true in 2025. That the signs of Smith’s progress are real but small show that it is still true in 2026.

Leave a comment

Share

So who is defaulting on the AL West title? Our good friends, the Seattle Mariners.

Seattle entered the season as the consensus division favorite after taking the crown in 2025 and coming within a George Springer home run of the pennant. Instead, they have completely collapsed, stumbling to a 57–65 record. They are 12–22 since July 2, a spiral that featured a miserable six-game losing skid snapped only by yesterday’s 1–0 squeaker at Yankee Stadium.

With just 40 games remaining, the Mariners sit 5.0 games behind the Astros. While they are technically only 3.5 games back of the third Wild Card spot, they would have to leapfrog five teams to get there. The last six weeks have been a stunning implosion for a franchise that entered the year in its best organizational position in decades.

Today, I examine the biggest reason Houston sits atop the division: the Mariners and their disastrous 2026 campaign.

Mariners Pitching Still Doing Its Job

The Mariners remain fundamentally what they were in 2025: a pitching-first team. Seattle holds a 3.85 team ERA this season (9th best in MLB), virtually identical to the 3.87 ERA posted by the 2025 staff (13th best).

That strength remains rooted in the rotation. It has stayed remarkably durable—only six pitchers have started a game for Seattle all season—and anchored once again by Logan Gilbert’s steady consistency. While Bryan Woo has taken a step back and Luis Castillo had to be shipped out at the deadline to clear rotation space, leaps from Bryce Miller and Emerson Hancock have kept the starting five afloat.

A Lineup In Freefall

No, the fatal flaw in Seattle is at the plate.

In 2025, the Mariners slashed .244/.320/.420 for a 112 OPS+ (12% better than league average after adjusting for ballpark factors), ranking 5th in MLB. This season, they have plummeted to .228/.308/.375—good for a meager 96 OPS+ (23rd in baseball).

It is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to reach the postseason with an offense this anemic. So how did it get this bad?

The chart below breaks down the 2025 vs. 2026 OPS for five of Seattle’s regulars. Across the board, production has fallen off a table.

It’s Not all Cal Raleigh’s Fault, But A Lot of It Is

The chart makes one thing clear: this collapse isn’t entirely on Cal Raleigh, but an awful lot of it is.

In 2025, Raleigh turned in a historic campaign, blasting 60 home runs and leading the AL with 125 RBIs. He slashed .247/.359/.589 (.948 OPS) and was worth 9.1 fWAR—a season that would have earned him MVP honors in almost any year without a healthy Aaron Judge.

This season, Raleigh has been dreadful. He is slashing .159/.267/.297, tracking toward just 16 homers and an estimated 0.9 fWAR. That is roughly an eight-win drop-off from a single roster spot. Seattle won 90 games last year and is currently on pace for 76; Raleigh isn’t responsible for the entire 14-win decline, but he accounts for the bulk of it. Nobody expected a duplicate 60-homer season, but even his 2022–2024 baseline produced a .760 OPS and 30 homers per year.

The supporting cast hasn’t picked up the slack:

• Josh Naylor: After posting a 124 OPS+ over the past four seasons across Cleveland, San Diego, and Seattle, the Mariners inked him to a free-agent deal—only to get an off-year featuring a .702 OPS.

• Julio Rodríguez: While still an impactful contributor, J-Rod’s bat has slipped from a 126 OPS+ to a 114 OPS+. It’s not an outright collapse, but when the rest of the core is misfiring, that margin matters.

• Dominic Canzone: Still effective on the strong side of a platoon, but experiencing a noticeable dip from last year’s punch.

Randy Arozarena remains an isolated bright spot with a 139 wRC+, and second-year infielder Cole Young has grown into a league-average bat with plus defense at second base. But beyond that, positive contributors are few and far between.

It’s Getting Late Early

This extended slump has left the Mariners well behind the eight-ball: 8 games under .500 and 5.0 games back of Houston. Analytical models still give them a puncher’s chance because underlying metrics view Seattle as a better roster than its record indicates.

However, to borrow a classic line from former Astros bench coach Yogi Berra, “it’s getting late early.”

Even if the mediocre Astros merely play .500 ball (20–20) over their final 40 games, the Mariners would have to go 25–15 (.625) just to catch them. Seattle has not won 25 of 40 games at any point this season (topping out at 24–16 during their May peak).

If the Mariners lose this weekend’s series in Houston, the outlook becomes that much drearier for our friends in the Pacific Northwest.

Leave a comment

Share

Yet, it also will be defined just as much by a path that the team did not take—acquiring outfielder Trevor Larnach for Bryan Abreu. Reports indicate the Astros and Twins front offices were close to such a deal when Jim Crane vetoed it.

In many ways, the on-field effect of the nixed Abreu for Larnach trade is relatively modest. The front office was able to pivot to another left-handed hitting outfielder in Varsho and to sending out a different major league pitcher in Arrighetti. The off-field effects seem greater. They show further evidence of what we already know—Jim Crane is the most important voice in making baseball decisions for this franchise. Dana Brown may be Crane’s most important underling, but Brown does not have to power to make the decisions he and the rest of the baseball operations department think is best. Instead, they have to run them by Crane. Not as a courtesy, but for the actual decision.

I think such an arrangement is sub-optimal. Jim Crane has spent his life in business—building two air freight logistics companies into multimillion behemoths and then transferring the wealth he earned there into buying a baseball franchise. His profits and franchise value have escalated greatly in his nearly 15 years owning the Astros. Yet, he insists on making decisions outside of his area of expertise—in baseball decisions. These are decisions his top baseball man—Dana Brown—knows better how to make since Brown has spent his life trying to understand baseball.

I will sketch out what happened in the Abreu for Larnach trade that never happened and why having an owner who vetoes mid-level deals is not ideal for the baseball health of the Astros.

The Vetoed Deal

On August 1, MLB reporter Michael Merino reported that “In the 11th hour, Astros owner Jim Crane nixed a trade…that would send Bryan Abreu to the Twins for Trevor Larnach.” Subsequent reporting by Twins beat writers Bobby Nightengale of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Dan Hayes of The Athletic confirmed the scoop.

As a lefty hitting outfield with on base skills, Trevor Larnach seemed an obvious target for the Astros before the Twins emerged as a playoff contender on their own. But the Twins have a surplus of outfielders, both on the current roster and if their top prospect Walker Jenkins makes his MLB debut. From the Twins standpoint, their outfield surplus provided an opportunity to address a bullpen weakness, where someone named Yoendrys Gomez has become their closer this year.

For the Astros, a deal for Larnach would have addressed the multi-year gap in left field with a multi-year solution. Larnach is not a free agent until after the 2027 season. Larnach is slashing .281/.370/.449 this season, for a career best OPS of .819. Adding a plus hitting outfield would balance out the Astros heavily right-handed hitting lineup.

The vetoed trade is the opposite of Varsho for Arrighetti from a team control standpoint. Abreu will be a free agent after this season while Larnach will not get to choose his own team until after the 2027 season.

From an on-field standpoint, the pivot from Larnach for Abreu to Varsho for Arrighetti means an emphasis on defense over offense, as Varsho is an above average (if declining) defensive centerfielder and Larnach is struggling in the field this season. It means the rotation depth is thinned as opposed to the bullpen. And the front office certainly would have needed to backfill with a trade for another bullpen arm at the deadline. Instead, the front office will have to fill its hole in the outfield in the offseason.

Power and Baseball Decisions

The bigger issue to me with the vetoed trade are the off-field issues it creates. It is further evidence of Jim Crane meddling in the decisions of his front office. Owners can play a key role in baseball decisions, but that usually involves setting the budget for payroll, helping to woo big name free agents, and approving deals with huge public relations value.1 They should avoid deals about middle relievers and platoon outfielders. It is a level of meddling that is uncommon in the vast majority of MLB franchises, and present only in the handful of least efficient organizations.

And then there are the Astros, where meddling by Jim Crane has become common in the 2020s. The irony is that the Astros built themselves into a dynasty by Crane allowing Jeff Luhnow total power to reshape the organization and its player development system. The payoff was awesome as the team developed two homegrown cores that each powered a World Series winner.

But instead of learning to trust his general managers, Crane has seen himself more and more as the essential man for the Astros, not just as owner, but also in baseball operations. He has compelled the team to go for it in 2026, primarily by making his General Manager and field Manager lame ducks, needing a playoff berth (and possibly a deep playoff run) to keep their jobs. That Brown is trading for his job makes Crane neutering him by vetoing his trade ideas even more galling. Brown does not even have the power to make modest deals to save his job.

While I am more negative than positive on the job that Dana Brown has done as General Manager, I firmly believe this: he is the person in the organization who knows best what baseball decisions the team should make. Jim Crane is a businessman and knows very well how to do the job of a CEO. But that is a different job than being a General Manager. He should let those who know baseball best make the baseball decisions.

Share

Leave a comment

Yet, despite the name value of the two players involved in the Astros-Blue Jays trade yesterday, it is a trade that will have only a modest impact on both teams.

From the Astros standpoint, they targeted a player who is likely to be a major league average centerfielder, trying to hold off the decline in his skills. The front office targeted centerfield because the Astros have received substandard performances there this season. They are covering a weakness by raising the team’s floor.

To get Varsho, the Astros gave up a pitcher they evaluate as AAA level right now. The Blue Jays wanted Arrighetti to provide help in the back of their rotation over the next few seasons. The Jays 2026 season has collapsed but the team will go for it next season. Thus, they were willing to trade a player who will be a free agent this offseason for a back of the rotation option for next season. In short, they are also raising their floor

These are both well-known names in baseball circles, as both players have established themselves as major leaguers. Yet despite that, I think the effects of this trade will be modest. It is hard to be excited for floor raising, even if that has some value.

An Average Center Fielder?

Daulton Varsho meets a clear need for the Astros at present—a left-handed hitting outfielder. Varsho is a defense first center fielder and will essentially serve as a replacement for Jake Meyers in that role.

Varsho has been a league average hitter over the course of his career, with a 98 wRC+.1 He is low batting average (career .229) with a league average walk rate (8.3% career). His value fluctuates primarily with his power. In 2025, Varsho had a power spike and had a .548 slugging percentage. This year, his power stroke has slumped (7 homers, .374 slugging percentage). The hope is that he can lift that up with the Astros, both figuratively and literally—his average launch angle has declined from 23.6 in 2025 to 14.1 this season. Overall, we should expect league average offense from Varsho, which would be an improvement on his current totals this season but also on the 76 wRC+ the Astros have received so far this season from centerfielders like Meyers, Brice Matthews, and Lucas Spence.

Since moving to the outfield (he began his career at a catcher!), Varsho has been an outstanding defender, recording double digit Fielding Run Value in each of his three full seasons in the outfield. The question with Varsho is that he may not be able to defend at that level anymore.

As the charts below show, Varsho has traditionally had sprint speeds over 28 feet per second. That usually placed him in the 80th percentile of major leaguers. This season, his sprint speed has declined to 27.3 feel per second; that’s the 49th percentile.

Varsho’s decline in sprint speed has produced a decline in his “jump” in the outfield. Statcast uses Jump to measure how much ground an outfielder covers in the first three seconds after a ball is hit compared to the average player. Varsho would cover 2 to 3 feet more than the average outfielder throughout most of his career, top 10 percentile in the majors for every season from 2022 through 2025. This season, Varsho is only covering 0.6 feet per second more than the average outfielder.

It is a worrying trend and will be a larger deal for the team that signs Varsho this offseason as a free agent. But Varsho still grades out as a positive on defense in centerfield, even if he is no longer elite.

An Established Back of the Rotation Option

The cost for Varsho is Spencer Arrighetti. At one level, the cost of Arrighetti is high. Arrighetti has established himself as a major league starter in his first three seasons. He has proved durable in 2024 and mostly so this season. Arrighetti is not a free agent until after the 2029 season. For a Blue Jays team that has disappointed in 2026, but is certain to go for it in 2027, one can see the appeal of Arrighetti, who can serve as a back-end starter for the Jays next season.

Yet Arrighetti has proven consistent in establishing himself as a major league starter—consistently a fourth or fifth starter. Arrighetti has a 4.66 career ERA and a 4.60 ERA in 17 starts this season. For his career, Arrighetti has walked 11.5% of the batters he has faced, and a career high 13.0% this season. Arrighetti showed promise as a strikeout pitcher in his rookie season. But his strikeout rate declined from 27.1% in 2024 to 22.5% this season.

At the heart of this trade seems to be an evaluation by the front office that Arrighetti is not one of the five best starting pitchers on this team right now. With Javier, Wesneski, and Blanco back from the IL, the coaching staff and front office determined they were better options than Arrighetti. Arrighetti seemed ticketed for Sugar Land when he returned from the IL. As such, he was deemed expendable for 2026.

The question about Arrighetti is about his value for 2027, 2028, and 2029. Again, the front office seems to have evaluated some of their prospects above Arrighetti for the future. Bryce Meyer who was promoted to Sugar Land yesterday seems to be at the top of that list, followed by Ethan Pecko, who has been a Space Cowboy all season.

Modest Return, Modest Risk

Arrighetti has definitely established a floor of a back-end rotation option. Such players have value and again, he fits in particular with the situation in Toronto. And in a game where pitching injuries are common, rotation depth in particular has big value.

But what is clear is that Arrighetti is not a player with a big upside. The Astros can lose this trade, but not in the way they lost the Christian Vasquez for Wilyer Abreu deal or the Francisco Liriano deal. In those trades, young players established themselves at much higher levels than expected. Arrighetti won’t do that, but if he improves a little, he can be a solid back-end rotation option, providing 1 to 2 WAR for the Jays over the next three seasons.

My bigger worry about this trade is the lack of upside from Varsho. If he is an average major league centerfielder, he will be an upgrade on what the Astros have gotten so far this season from the position. That may be crucial in holding off the Mariners and Rangers in a close AL West. But there are few scenarios where Varsho is a star for this team over the last two months of the season.

The 2026 Astros are better off today than they were over the weekend, but modestly so. I do not think the 2027 Astros are much worse off without Arrighetti, but the are scenarios where I’m wrong about that.

It is a surprisingly small deal even though it features two established major leaguers.

Share

Leave a comment

And it prompts an important question: what the hell, man? I thought we were doing poorly this season. Yes, yes, we were. Through May 12, the Astros were 16-27; that’s a 60-win pace. The tone of this season among Astros fans and Astros Substacks has tended to reflect the pessimism created by the poor play that led to the poor start to the season. The pitching was absolutely terrible, driven by a large number of injuries to the starting rotation.

Since May 12, the Astros have turned their record around. They have won 42 and lost only 28. That’s a .600 winning percentage and a 97-win pace. The team is currently on a 6-game win streak and 11 of their last 12.

What happened? I’ll try to explain it in this article.

Fortune Smiled on the Astros

You probably do not want to hear this if you are reading an Astros Substack, but the Astros have been playing in good fortune this season. The Astros have allowed 27 more runs than they have scored. Sabremetricians find that a team’s record should track these metrics and have developed a number of methods to figure out what a team’s record should be. By Pythagorean record, the Astros should have won 54 games, not the 58 they actually have. Base Runs record tags them for one fewer win at 53, while Third Order Wins also has them at 53. Their record should be a good bit worse, but instead the Astros have gotten lucky.

The good news is that the Astros have also turned around their run margin since bottoming out on May 12. They have scored 329 runs since then, 17 more than the 312 they have allowed. That they have a positive run differential since then is a good sign that there is real improvement with this team. But there is not as much as their should be. That run differential produces a Pythagorean record of 37-37, which is 5 games below the 42-28 record they actually have.

Again, this is good fortune.

The Bullpen Has Been Awesome

Usually, teams that exceed their expected record have a good record in one-run games. The Astros have a solid record there, at 11-8. But where the Astros really succeed is in winning 2-run games. They are 21-12 in such games this season and a remarkable 15-4 since May 13.

How do you win a bunch of close games? One answer is good fortune, which the Astros have had in ample amounts. But another is to have an excellent bullpen, which are crucial in the high leverage situations late in close games.

Since May 13, the Astros bullpen has been excellent. Astros relievers have an ERA of 2.82, second best in the majors during that time period. They have the 5th highest strikeout rate since then (25.4%) and the sixth lowest walk rate (8.4%). Put it together and their 17.0% K% minus BB% is second best in baseball. Can you do better than that. You can in Batting Average Against and in WHIP. The Astros are tops in the majors in both (.204 BA against; 1.08 WHIP).

The core of the bullpen has done very well, which you can see in the table below. Josh Hader has returned from the injured list and been excellent. Bryan Abreu has had his own personal turnaround since an awful start in April. Steven Okert has been excellent all season, and AJ Blubaugh has developed into an effective longman for the Astros.

Bryan King has declined due to a low strikeout rate. Enyel de los Santos has a high ERA, but his strikeout and walk rates indicate that ERA might come down in the near future.

Overall, the bullpen has turned into a big strength for this team.

Yordan

To repeat something you already know, Yordan Alvarez is really good at hitting baseballs.

Alvarez leads the American league in the three traditional Triple Crown categories of batting average (.330), home runs (35), and runs batted in (84). More importantly, he leads the AL in the sabermetric, or slash line, Triple Crown categories: batting average (.330), on base percentage (.442), and slugging percentage (.650). As a result, Alvarez also leads the AL in OPS; his 1.092 is .161 points higher than second place Willson Contreras.

Alvarez also leads the AL in a bunch of traditional counting stats: runs scored (77), hits (133), total bases (262), extra base hits (59), times on base (216), and intentional walks (22).

He also leads in a ton of sabremetric categories: Adjusted OPS+ (204), Runs Created (121), Adjusted Batting Runs (60), Adjusted Batting Wins (5.9, and Win Probability Added (5.70).

He is obviously carrying the offense. How much so? Baseball Reference calculates a Batting Runs, “representing the number of runs for which a batter is personally responsible through batting.” It is a total measure of a player’s offensive contribution, and is a component of calculating WAR.

Alvarez has 54 batting runs (tops in the majors of course, by 18 runs). The rest of the Astros have a combined -16 batting runs. Yordan Alavrez is single handedly making the Astros an above average offense.

Ever since his call-up in June 2019, we have dreamed of a Yordan season like this. One where he is both healthy and in form as a hitter. Because we Astros fans have always known he is the best hitter in the American League.1 This year, he is proving it.

Pena

While it seems like Yordan is doing it on his own some days, that is in part because the Astros have been missing their second-best player for a good part of the season. Jeremy Pena went on the IL twice, once on April 12 and again on June 30. In games without Pena on the active roster, the Astros are 5 games under .500 (19-24). With Pena active, the Astros are 8 games over .500 (39-31). Let’s keep Pena healthy.

The injuries have masked what is one of the best seasons in the majors, one deserving of MVP votes if Pena stays healthy through the rest of the season. At the center of Pena’s season is further offensive breakout. Pena has an .904 OPS. The figure below shows you Pena’s OPS per season. Pena had established a level right near league average in his first three seasons in the majors. Last year seemed like it would be his peak season at the plate with an .840 OPS, but he has exceeded that leap this season. Impressive.

Pena has gradually improved his plate skills over his career. His strikeout rate dipped below 19% since 2024, his 3rd season in the majors. His walk rate has risen above 6% since 2025. This year, his slugging has crested with a career high .208 isolated slugging. 2

Pena’s defense has slipped some this season, possibly due to injuries. He is -1 in Defensive Runs Saved, the only time he has been below 0 in his career. His baserunning remains an asset, worth 1.7 runs according to Fangraphs (second on the team behind Cam Smith).

Overall, Pena has 3.4 bWAR. That’s already 14th best in the AL. Pena has accomplished that total in 280 plate appearances. The players he is immediately behind on that list—Nick Kurtz and Randy Arozarena—have 434 and 450 plate appearances respectively. Pena is one of the best players in the AL and the team works so much better when he can pair with Alvarez at the top of the lineup.

Trade Deadline

This list of Astros assets if relatively modest. The team is of course benefitting as well from the Mariners collapse this season (check out Cal Raleigh’s numbers if you would like to feel schadenfreude). The starting pitching is wobbly and the back half of the lineup is dragging down Alvarez and Pena’s work at the top of the lineup.

But to quote Nuke LaLoosh, “I love winning, man…You hear what I’m saying. It’s better than losing.”

The Astros wining stretch has pushed their playoff odds up to 57.0% according to Fangraphs, and their odds of winning the division to 41.6%. Those odds are relatively low compared to the vibes right now, which is a good reminder that it is still a long season and there are 49 games left in the season.

But the winning stretch has done something—it is made it clear that the Astros should be buyers at the deadline. They will add a player or two today—most likely in the outfield and on the pitching staff. I’m not sure the good fortune in 2-run games or Pena’s power breakout will continue. Injuries can strike at any time—may they never.

But modest adds seem an appropriate way to consolidate the lead the team has staked itself to over the last two weeks.

Leave a comment

Share

On Sunday, General manager Dana Brown re-iterated what he has been saying all season, saying “We would anticipate that we’re going to be buyers.”

It’s not really Dana Brown’s choice to go for it. Jim Crane is the one who made that choice and did so over the offseason when he chose not to extend the contracts of Dana Brown and Joe Espada. The contracts for both men expire at the end of the season.

As a result, neither Brown nor Espada can think about what they think is in the long-term best interest of this franchise. Jim Crane has told them what he thinks is in the long-term best interests of the franchise—getting to the playoffs this season. Or else.

The Astros will be buyers over the next week. Should they be is another question. But it’s not one that Jim Crane wants to contemplate. Instead, Jim Crane thinks he’s Lloyd Christmas.

The Chances Are Modest

Lloyd Christmas didn’t get the girl in the end. But most leads do in Hollywood films. Of course, the chances of success are much better when a screenwriter determines the outcome.1 But in the off screen world, the odds do not go away just because a team’s owner or one of its fans want it to.

So what are the chances that the Astros reach the postseason? Fangraphs says they are at 27%. The Pecota projections at Baseball Prospectus are just a hair more pessimistic at 25%. One can find a variety of playoff odds posted across the internet for the Astros and they are basically the same—about a one-in-four chance of making the postseason.

The good news is that it is indeed possible to get to the playoffs. The odds are not terrible.

But it is useful to have some perspective on what those odds mean. The table below shows the playoff odds for the contenders in the American League this season. And it shows the Astros have the 10th best odds of reaching the AL playoffs, according to Fangraphs.2

The other thing that stands out to me about this chart are the two teams immediately ahead of the Astros on it. The Tigers have a worse record than the Astros, but they are a team whose record is worse than what it “should be”, the direct opposite of the Astros. Fangraphs assumes that the Tigers will play to their ability the rest of the season…and the Astros will as well.

The Twins have better odds than the Astros at present. While the Twins were written off by many since they sold at last year’s trade deadline, they still had the core of a decent team left. The Twins are nobody’s idea of a juggernaut though.

Both of those should give you an indication of the inherent quality of the Astros this season. They are less likely to make the playoffs than teams worse than them and teams no one think much of.

So You’re Saying There’s a Chance

It’s possible that the odds don’t matter to Jim Crane. It’s possible that rather than Lloyd Christmas, he thinks he’s Han Solo—never tell him the odds.

Crane has structured the Astros season so that it’s playoffs or else. He has done this directly, but by making that clear to his manager and general manager.

It’s why Dana Brown said this weekend on his weekly radio show, “I think the team that gets hot is going to be the team that takes the run [in the AL West]. We would anticipate that we’re going to be buyers.”

It is not a new stance from Brown, who in early June insisted that “I don’t think this team is a team that’s going to be sellers at the deadline.”

What was Brown’s rationale seven weeks ago? “The division is wide open, the postseason is wide open.” What’s was Brown’s rationale yesterday, “The division is wide open. The wild card is wide open. There’s some parity there. There’s a lot of teams bunched up.”

Dana Brown may deeply believe this, and of course, Brown always takes an optimistic tone in his public statements about his team. But the commitment to buying at the deadline is not fully his choice.

Jim Crane has made it clear that “We’re focused on making the postseason. That’s the end-all, be-all. We have to make the postseason.” That is actually a quote from Dana Brown before the All Star Break. But in reality, the attitude comes from Jim Crane.

I have talked a ton this season about the fact that Dana Brown and Joe Espada do not have contracts for next season. I have done that because it seems the most important strategic choice being made for the Astros this season. I have done it because it shows that Jim Crane is making the primary decisions for the Astros front office. And I have done it because since Dana Brown and Joe Espada are tasked with speaking to the media, I think most fans attribute the team’s decisions to them. I have tried to make this a useful corrective of that conventional wisdom.

I will try to focus more on what the front office does, especially at the trade deadline. That’s the tactical decision—who to get and who to give up. But the strategic decision—2026 or bust—has already been made. Come hell or high water.

Share

Leave a comment

I have long examined these lists as a baseball fan. It helps me not only examine who is good but also helps me to update my expectations for the second half of the season and beyond. It is hard to catch everything across an entire baseball season. Of course, as an Astros fan, I examine these updated lists for what they say about my favorite team.

Having read these lists as they have been updated across since the All-Star Game, they tell a clear story about where the Astros are and their near future: this team lacks young stars and that makes the future—both for this season and in the next couple of seasons—look ominous.

Trade Value

Each July for over a decade now, Fangraphs publishes its “Trade Value Series,” ranking the Top 50. Their criteria is “taking everything about each player into account, which ones would garner the highest trade offer, from any team.” That means contracts and team control matter, and this ranking thus prioritizes not only player quality, but player age.

I have written about this list before. In 2021, my headline was “The Fangraphs Trade Value List Shows the Astros Window is Not Closing.” The Astros had 5 players on the list that season, the most of any team in baseball.1 In 2024, I chose the headline “The Fangraphs Trade Value Lists Shows that the End of This Contention Window is Close.” Only 1 Astros made the list that season—Yordan Alvarez.

The good news is that two Astros made the list this season—Alvarez is 20th and Hunter Brown is 46th. The bad news is that those players are falling down the list because they are getting closer to free agency. And more importantly, no player seems likely to join the list next season.

The list includes a large number of honorable mentions, put there for a wide variety of reasons. Only 1 Astros—Cam Smith—makes that list. Smith is listed with a group of “Controllable Role Players” along with Masyn Winn (STL), Jacob Wilson (ATH), Wilyer Abreu (BOS), Xavier Edwards (MIA), and Miguel Vargas (CHW). Frankly, it is a list that flatters Smith, who has struggled at the plate this season.

Ben Clemens, who writes the series, says “they all look like solid all-around players who I’d be happy to have on my team but wouldn’t be devastated to miss out on.” That seems a fair description of this group.

In 2021, I wrote that “the appearance of five Astros on this list is a demonstration that…the Astros have also been able to integrate young players into the rotation and everyday lineup.” The dearth of Astros on the list in 2026 shows that the ability to create young starts has declined greatly. It is a big reason the team is below .500 at this point in the season for the first time since 2014.

Top Pitchers

Further evidence of the team’s current issues comes from Eno Sarris’s “Updated Starting Pitching Rankings,” published on Thursday. The aim for Sarris is to analyze pitchers for fantasy baseball purposes, but fantasy analysis of starting pitchers comes closest to measuring their actual quality than for any position. Sarris studies pitching closely, and has helped developed models of pitch quality (Stuff+), but also ERA prediction models based on pitch quality.

The rankings here for Astros starters are sobering. Hunter Brown is the highest ranked Astros starter, but is ranked only 36, between Reid Detmers and Cade Cavalli. That’s hardly the place for an ace, much less a pitcher who finished 3rd in the Cy Young voting last season. But Brown’s 2026 season has been marked by 2 months on the injury list, and an elevated walk rate (15.8%). One can see why Brown has descended in the rankings.

The issue is not just Brown, but the ranking of the other Astros starters. Sarris ranks Peter Lambert 83rd, Spencer Arrighetti 94th, and Tatsuya Imai at 109th. Neither Ronel Blanco nor Cristian Javier were listed among the 125 starters Sarris ranked. Those low ranks reflect the poor quality of starting pitching for the Astros this season—the only Astros who have started a game this season and have an ERA under 4.00 are Lambert and Steven Okert, who served as an opener for Ryan Weiss in May against the Dodgers.

The Astros front office feels compelled to buy at the deadline, but having such a poor quality of starting pitchers makes it hard to believe that is the right decision. The team needs better starting pitching than it has gotten so far this season to contend.

Prospect Rankings

While these lists have focused almost exclusively on current major league players,2 other updated lists focus on prospects. These lists are updated at midseason to reflect 1) those who have graduated to become major leaguers, 2) new prospects just taken in the MLB draft, and 3) updates play from current minor leaguers across the first three months of the season. With prospects being essential to deadline deals, having accurate prospect lists is quite useful at this time of the year.

Fans of struggling teams can look at these lists and see that help is on the way.3 Astros fans can look at these lists this year and think that maybe help will come some day.

The updated Top 50 from Baseball Prospectus has no Astros on it. Keith Law of The Athletic expands his list to 70, but even with the extra spots has no Astros on it. Fortunately, Fangraphs has an Astros on their Top 100 list. Kevin Alvarez is listed at 68. That’s the good news. The bad news: Fangraphs lists the ETA for each prospect. For Alvarez, an 18-year-old Cuban playing at Low-A Fayetteville, his ETA is 2030.

There is a little more optimism on MLB Pipeline’s continuously updated Top 100 prospect list. Alvarez is there, at 69. Plus his ETA there is listed as 2029. There is also a second Astro on this list. Xavier Neyens, who was the team’s first round draft pick in 2025 out of a high school in Washington, is listed at 86. Like Alvarez, he is his ETA is 2029, though he was recently promoted to Hi-A Asheville.

The prospect lists show the Astros do not have any top prospects right now, and the ones they do have are a long way away from Daiken Park. And put together with the trade value list and the starting pitching rankings, they show the biggest problem facing the Astros as a franchise right now—they lack young stars.

Young stars are the best value in baseball. Teams can hold their salary down while extracting high levels of value from them. The Astros have a star in Yordan Alvarez, and he’s essential to what success this team has had this season. But he is surrounded by older players falling off from their peaks (Jose Altuve, Christian Walker), and young players who have shown limited skills so far (Cam Smith, Brice Matthews).

The Astros succeeded in their Golden Age by developing a large number of young stars and then replacing the core of their first World Series winner (Springer, Correa, Keuchel, Bregman) with a second set of young stars (Alvarez, Tucker, Valdez, Javier). As that second set of young stars has aged and/or moved on, the Astros have not been able to replace them. It makes both the present and the future uninspiring.

Share

Leave a comment

There is one silver lining—the American League in general and the AL West in specific—is weak. Few teams have separated themselves. Which means that despite a 47-51 record, the Astros sit only 3 games out of the AL West lead and 1.5 games out of the wild card. They are still in the race.

For now.

Advanced statistics show that the Astros have won more games than they “should” so far in the 2026 season. More worrisome, the Red Sox—who have underperformed their expected record—are on a 9-game win streak and have caught the Astros in the standings. Taken together, these indicators point toward an Astros team likely to post a worse record in the second half and miss the playoffs.

Let’s walk through this argument.

Expected Records

The Astros’ 47–51 record paints them as a slightly below-.500 team. But sabermetric analysts have long argued that raw win–loss records obscure as much as they reveal. To get a clearer picture of a team’s true ability, they look at underlying performance—especially run differential.

Houston has scored 449 runs and allowed 496, a margin of –47. That’s the 23rd-best figure in MLB, and it aligns with other advanced metrics:

• 3rd Order Wins:1 24th

• Simple Rating System (SRS):2 25th

• BaseRuns Expected Record:3 26th

The methodological differences among these metrics aren’t the point—their agreement is. They all place the Astros among the bottom tier of teams this season.

In short: the Astros are not as good as their record suggests.

Actual Record

These “true record” measures are backward-looking, built on runs scored and allowed to date. Houston’s large run deficit is why their advanced metrics are so poor.

The reason to consult these measures, though, is forward-looking. Over 162 games, teams tend to regress toward their underlying quality. Baseball never fully evens out—early wins stay on the ledger—but teams that overperform their true talent usually come back to earth.

For the Astros, that implies a worse second half than first. And for a team already below .500, that’s a problem.

The Wacky AL May Sort Itself Out

The AL’s weakness is obvious: only 5 teams currently sit above .500.

Part of the chaos stems from several strong teams posting worse records than their underlying performance. By run margin, the 4th-best team in the AL is the Red Sox (+27) and the 5th-best is the Tigers (+24). Yet both have spent most of the season buried by poor fortune.

The Tigers remain outside the playoff picture but within striking distance at 44–52, just 3.5 games out of the final wild card spot.

The Red Sox, however, have surged. Their 9-game win streak brought them to 46–48—half a game out of the wild card and, crucially, 1 game ahead of the Astros. If teams tend toward their true ability, Boston looks poised to play significantly better in the second half and make the playoffs. That improvement will come at the expense of several teams, especially Houston.

Frankly, the Tigers look more likely to make the playoffs than the Astros. They are simply a better team.

Trade Deadline Reality

Yesterday, the Astros traded Lance McCullers to the Brewers. I wrote that the trade gives the front office “more flexibility to acquire an outfielder (or two) at the trade deadline.”

Jim Crane, primarily by compelling Dana Brown and Joe Espada to work in the last year of their contracts, has structured the Astros front office to consider the 2026 season only. That mandate is clear: playoffs or else.

But the Astros’ underlying quality suggests they are not a playoff-caliber team.

That’s true even if you look at the excellent stretch the team is on since the season bottomed out on May 14. Since then, they have won 30 of 53 games, a 92-win pace. That’s good enough for the playoffs. Except in that stretch, they have only scored one more run than they have allowed, an 81-win pace. Not good enough for the playoffs.

The front office will make moves to try for the playoffs because Jim Crane demands it, and he has structured the organization so that no alternative path can be considered.

But there is little reason to think this will be a playoff team in 2026. The team’s “true” record makes that clear.

Share

Leave a comment

He stabilized a shaky rotation when called up as a 21-year-old in the pivotal 2015 season. His 24 straight curve balls to finish the 2017 ALCS Game 7 shutout of the Yankees made him beloved among Astros fans. And yes, we can watch it again.

McCullers was present for even more big moments, wriggling out of jams early in Game 7 of the 2017 World Series, going 6.2 scoreless against the White Sox in Game 1 of the 2021 playoffs, and throwing the first 6 of the 18-shutout innings in the Game 3 victory over the Mariners in 2022.

Lance McCullers helped announce the arrival of the golden era with his major league debut in 2015 and he was a member of each playoff team of that era. He’ll always be an Astros legend despite him being traded to the Brewers yesterday.

We can divide McCullers time in Houston into three eras, and I’ll examine each of those here.

The Kid

The Astros passed on Byron Buxton with the first pick in the 2012 draft and instead took Carlos Correa and signed him to an underslot contract. With the money they saved on Correa, the Astros took McCullers with their second pick and met his high bonus demands. Those choices absolutely worked out for the Astros.

McCullers rose through the minors quickly and reached the majors in May 2015 to a surprise contender. He slotted in between Dallas Keuchel and Collin McHugh to stabilize what otherwise a shaky rotation. McCullers was young and fun, and with he and Carlos Correa debuting and joining 2014 debutante George Springer, the 2015 team showed the promise of what was to come. Lance was excellent when he could pitch in 2016, and more pedestrian in 2017, and steady in 2018……until he got injured.

Overall, in his first 4 seasons with the Astros, McCullers had a 3.67 ERA in 80 starts. He faced injuries that kept him from throwing a full season in 2016, 2017, and 2018. But he made himself a legend in the post season. He allowed only 2 runs and 2 hit while striking out 7 in 6.1 innings in Game 4 of the 2015 ALDS. He threw those 24 straight curve balls in Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS and even drove in a run as a batter in Game 7 of the World Series.

He may not have dominated on the mound day in and day out, but he showed up in big moments.

The Near Ace

McCullers was injured a lot in the first period of career, but that ended with a big injury. McCullers injured his elbow ligament late in the 2018 season. He did not pitch the rest of the season but did return to throw out of the bullpen in that year’s playoffs. He apparently couldn’t injure it more.

McCullers then had Tommy John surgery after the ALCS and was out the entire 2019 season. He was able to return for 2020, and with a shortened season due to the pandemic, McCullers was able to pitch the entire season. That was helpful as injuries ravaged the rotation in 2020, but McCullers remained the team’s #2 starter behind Zach Greinke. In 2021, he ascended to the team’s ace, sporting a 3.16 ERA in 28 regular season starts. He earned the ace position in the playoffs and was excellent in his two starts against the White Sox, allowing only 2 runs in 10.2 innings. This was the peak in McCullers career and was essential on a team losing starting pitching to free agency (Gerrit Cole), injury (Justin Verlander), and again (Greinke).

It was a short peak, though. McCullers suffered an arm injury in his Game 4 start in the ALDS and was removed after 4 innings. He missed most of the 2022 season with that injury, returning only for 8 regular season starts at the end of the season. These went well, and McCullers kept the Mariners from scoring in his first postseason start. But he was hit around in Game 3 starts in both the ALCS and World Series.

The Ghost of Himself

And then he was hurt again, unable to pitch in Spring Training in 2023. He had flexor tendon surgery in June 2023, and that cost him the 2023 and 2024 seasons. When he returned midway through the 2025 season, McCullers was a ghost of his former self. In 94.2 innings over the past two seasons, McCullers has a 6.65 ERA and a 13.7% walk rate. The injuries sapped him and have made him a below replacement level pitcher (-1.8 bWAR).

This final era for McCullers has occurred on a big contract he signed with Jim Crane to keep him out of free agency. The five year contract kicked in during the 2022 season. Over the 5 seasons of the contract, McCullers has made only 29 starts. And basically none of them since the 18 inning game in Seattle have been effective ones.

Salary Dump

This makes it easy to understand why the Astros traded McCullers. He was a ghost of himself on the field itself but paid like the near-ace he once was. The front office preferred to clear up a spot on the 40-man roster for Bennett Sousa, Ronel Blanco, and Hayden Wesneski when they return from the IL. The trade also clears up about $2.5 million under the luxury tax threshold which gives them more flexibility to acquire an outfielder (or two) at the trade deadline.

The Brewers may well release McCullers because what they wanted in this deal was Colton Gordon, who gives them rotation depth as they fight through injuries and who can be molded into a better pitcher as they have done many times at this point. The Astros pitching lab has not been able to turn Gordon into an effective major leaguer, but the Brewers might.

The Astros get back Jadyn Fielder, who has good strike zone judgment, but seems unlikely to have enough other skills to make the majors. He was not hard for the Brewers to give up.

This trade is once again about the next move. One may question whether the Astros are good enough to actually contend for an AL Wild Card spot in the second half of the season. But Jim Crane has structured the Astros season so it’s playoffs or bust, so that’s not a question that Dana Brown has the luxury of asking. He needs to pull a rabbit out of his hat. Getting something for Lance McCullers (and Colton Gordon) makes that more possible.

That will all be forgotten sometime in the near future when Lance McCullers gets to put on an orange jacket on the field at Daiken Park. He’ll be surrounded that day by other members of the 2017 and 2022 World Series teams. And we’ll focus on the legendary moments he had as an Astro.

Share

Leave a comment

Jake Meyers has been the team’s first‑choice center fielder since 2023, having won back the job he first claimed in August 2021 when then–GM James Click traded Myles Straw to Cleveland. Meyers was coming off his best major‑league season in 2025, posting career highs in batting average and on‑base percentage.

Mike Burrows was a key offseason acquisition. The front office targeted him as a young rotation piece for 2026 and beyond. In an organization low on prospects, they sent out two of them—Jacob Melton and Anderson Brito—to acquire Burrows and fill the rotation hole created by Framber Valdez’s departure.

Over the last 4 days, both have been sent to AAA Sugar Land and removed from the active roster. The choice to demote both players reflects how the season is going for the Astros. The team is playing at a 96‑win pace since bottoming out at 17–28 on May 14. They now stand 2 games out of the division lead and 1 game out of a Wild Card slot in a weak American League. They have played themselves into relevance, increasing the value of each start and plate appearance.

But the demotions also illustrate why the team is still below .500 and below the expectations set by Jim Crane. Several players are not hitting or pitching to expected levels, and that is holding the team back.

Today, I’ll cover what has gone wrong for Meyers and Burrows and identify the parts of their game that have declined.

Jake Meyers Power Outage

This blog has tended to be pro–Jake Meyers. Early in his career, I viewed him as an everyday center fielder, and the choice to prefer him to Straw was a good one by Click. Meyers has always provided excellent center‑field defense and occasional power, making him an average major‑league player—someone who raises the floor more than the ceiling.

But the 2026 Meyers is a player whose flaws have overcome his assets. He has slashed .206/.264/.316 for a .580 OPS. Since returning from the IL in late May, Meyers has a BABIP (Batting Average on Balls In Play) of .227, which is quite low, and a sign of bad fortune.

The issue, though, isn’t batted balls finding fielders. It’s a decline in his hard‑hit rate: 28.0% this season, per Statcast. Meyers had hard‑hit rates above 36% in 4 of his 5 seasons. In 2025, he was in the 31st percentile; this season, he’s in the 13th.

That decline has driven down his expected batting average. His career xBA is .232; this season it’s .201, nearly identical to his actual .206.

Meyers has been valuable because he offers elite center‑field defense with occasional pop. He remains the team’s best defensive outfielder, but his inability to hit the ball hard removes the offensive value that once justified his glove‑first profile.

Age is the biggest factor here. Meyers is 30, and players tend to peak in their mid‑to‑late 20s. While I think we’ll see Meyers again at Daiken Park this season, my guess is that he will not be the first‑string center fielder again. The team is unlikely to offer him a contract this offseason.

A big factor for Meyers is age. He is 30 and baseball players tend to peak in their mid to late 20s. While I think we will see Meyers again at Daiken Park sometime again this season, my guess is that he will never be the first-string centerfielder for the Astros again. The team is not likely to offer him a contract this offseason.

A Declining Strikeout Rate for Burrows

In the lower minors, Mike Burrows struck out 26.2% of batters. In AAA, he maintained that rate at 26.0%. In 99 major‑league innings with the Pirates, his strikeout rate was 21.0%. This season with the Astros, he has struck out only 17.7%—10th lowest among the 63 qualified starters. His strikeout‑minus‑walk rate is 9.5%, 4th lowest among qualified starters.1

Most Astros fans would probably identify his issue as giving up hard contact. That makes sense, as Burrows has allowed 21 home runs, 3rd most in MLB.

But Statcast data shows he isn’t giving up harder contact. His barrel rate is down from 10.8% last season to 8.4% this year. His average exit velocity allowed is essentially unchanged (2025: 89.2 mph; 2026: 88.3 mph). His xwOBA on contact is down (2025: .389; 2026: .372).

The issue is not harder contact—it’s more contact. Because Burrows is striking out fewer hitters, more balls are being put in play. He has pitched essentially the same number of innings as last year yet has allowed 40 more batted balls. And since he gives up a hit on roughly a third of those, that’s a lot more hits and runs.

Burrows’s best strikeout pitches are his changeup and curveball. Unsurprisingly, his ability to get swing‑and‑miss on those pitches has declined. In 2025, he induced a whiff on 43% of his changeups; this season, that’s down 12 points. Last season, he got a whiff on 33% of his curveballs; in 2026, that’s down 9 points.

One issue is that he is throwing from a lower arm angle than in previous seasons. Chandler Rome of The Athletic wrote “throwing from a lower arm slot alters the movement of Burrows’ four-seam fastball.”

But the bigger effect seems to be on his strikeout pitches. In Rome’s article, pitching coach Josh Miller says, “I feel like his curveball has definitely shortened up some… A higher slot should be able to create more depth to the pitch.” A better fastball would also make the curveball more dangerous.

The arm‑slot issue is a key one for Burrows to work on in the PCL. He is 26, has had major‑league success, and should be someone the Astros want in the rotation later this season and in 2027 and beyond. The hope is that the pitching lab in Sugar Land can help him regain the strikeout ability he needs to be effective. There is a major‑league pitcher in there, and the team needs to find him.

Share

Leave a comment

Quick Learner at Outfield Defense

Let’s start with the positives. For a guy drafted as an infielder, Matthews is an excellent defensive outfielder. You can see that in the Statcast metrics, where Matthews has produced 5 Outs Above Average—3 as an Outfielder and 2 while playing at second base. That’s the 92nd percentile of the major leagues.

Defensive metrics are tricky because they are not always consistent across different measures. But confirmation of Matthews excellent outfield defense is provided by the Defensive Runs Saved measure. Matthews is credited with 8 defensive runs saved in the outfield, the same as Cam Smith and Mauricio Dubon.1 And it is notable that Matthews has saved so many runs despite have the fewest number of outfield defensive innings of any of the top 15 in outfield DRS.

Why is Matthews a good defensive outfielder? Statcast measures three different aspects of getting to a fly ball—reaction, burst, and route. Reaction is the number of feet covered from in the first 1.5 seconds after a ball is hit; burst measures feet covered from 1.5 to 3.0 seconds. And route is the number of feet covered in first 3.0 seconds compared to a direct route to the ball. Statcast also combines all three together into a measure called jump.

By jump, Matthews is 26th best among the 143 major league outfielders measured by Statcast. But what makes Matthews unusual is that he has an above average rating in all three components of jump. He is 0.8 feet above average in reaction; 0.7 feet above average in burst; and 0.4 feet above average in route. Only 8 of the 25 players ahead of Matthews in jump are above average in all three categories.

Thus, it is pretty rare to combine quick reaction off the bat, the acceleration to get to a ball at full speed, and the efficiency to go directly where the ball is going. Matthews does all three of those things, Matthews has achieved all of that while learning the outfield at the major league level—he had only played 64 innings in the outfield combined across his minor league, winter ball, and college careers.

Matthews has quickly become an excellent defensive outfielder. And that produces real value. Baseball Reference credits him with 8 runs of fielding value, 8th best among major league outfielders.

Lack of Contact —> Lack of Offensive Value

But the value Matthews is creating with his glove is being taken away by his bat. Matthews is slashing .191/.244/.320 for a .564 OPS. He has a weighted Runs Created plus of 55; that metric scaled so 100 is average and 55 means Matthews is 45% worse at the plate the average offensive player this year in the majors. That’s obviously not very good.

What is the issue for Matthews on offense? His most important flaw is his strikeout rate. Matthews has struck out in 32.2% of all his plate appearances this season. That is the 16th worst in the majors among batters with 150 plate appearances this season. One can be a successful hitter when you strike out that much, but it puts a premium on other skills. But Matthews doesn’t excel at other offensive tasks. For example, among the 20 players with the highest strikeout rates in the majors, Matthews has the second lowest walk rate at 6.6%.

Why does Matthews have a high strikeout rate and a low walk rate? He does not make enough contact. Matthews swings and misses on 15.8% of his swings, well below the MLB average of 10.8%. He only makes contact on 64.8% of the pitches he sees, and has below average rates of contact on pitches both inside and outside the strike zone.

Pitchers have little to fear when Matthews has the bat in his hands because he is not that likely to make contact with the ball.

There is some modest good news in Matthews’ numbers. Over the course of his career, he has improved in his ability to make contact. The chart belows shows that his contact rate has gone up and his swinging strike rate has gone down over the course of his career. He’s getting better at putting the bat on the ball.

The bad news is that he still has a ways to go to get to league average—77% for contact and 11% for swinging strike rate.

Brice Matthews has quickly learned to become an excellent defensive outfielder. But his inability to make contact takes away most of the value he creates with his glove. He will need to make more contact to improve as a hitter. He’s made some of that improvement so far, but he needs to make a lot more to be an actually valuable player.

Share

Leave a comment

Since then, the Astros have stopped their early season freefall, going 25-16 in the 41 games since May 14. In a weak American League, that puts the Astros only one game out of the AL West lead and a half a game out of a wild card berth.

This isn’t quite the turnaround we saw in 2024 season when the Astros went from a 7-19 start to an easy division win. But the second quarter of the season has been distinctly different from the first.

The Astros issue in early part of the season was the pitching. On May 14, the Astros had a team ERA of 5.59. The printable sabermetric term for that ERA is godawful. Other terms came to my mind, as I’m sure came to yours.

If the Astros have turned around their season, it is because the pitching?

Fewer Runs Allowed

The short answer is “sort of.” The easiest way to see that the run prevention is improved is via the figure below. This is a 10 game moving average, which reduces day-by-day noise while still accounting for medium-term trends.

I added a horizontal line at 4.49, the league average. The Astros were terrible at run prevention early in the season, especially in the first few weeks of the season when the average peaked at over 7 runs per game. Then the run prevention got much better in the latter half of May before climbing back up in June, though nowhere near the catastrophic levels of April. There are a lot of bumps and wiggles to this figure, but it tells a story of improved pitching for the Astros.

How improved is it? The table below takes 5 key pitching stats and compares how the Astros did through the May 14 loss and after. It’s quite a difference.

The most obvious way to see the improvement is via ERA. The Astros were the worst pitching staff in the majors through May 14, allowing 5.59 earned runs per nine. They have dropped that to 3.86 since then.

Astros pitchers have dropped the batting average they allow. It was .260 through May 14 and is .215 since then. The reduction in hits shows up in WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched), which has gone from 1.58 to 1.18. In the early part of the season, these marks were in the bottom three of the league. Since then, they have moved all the way up to top 5.

There are more modest changes in the team’s strikeout and walk rates. Astros pitchers are walking 3.4% fewer batters since May 14. That’s a big improvement, but the fact that it has reduced their MLB rank only to 24th shows how high the walk rate was early in the season. The strikeout rate has improved modestly, going from 21.9% to 23.0%.

It is a striking improvement in run prevention, the most important job for a pitching staff. But the improvement primarily comes from something for which a pitcher has modest control—the number of base hits allowed—than from the things for which pitchers have greater control—strikeouts and walks.

How Strong is the Improvement?

These numbers raise a question. Was the pitching improvement illusory? Was it just the product of good fortune, as more balls that found holes in the first part of the season are now finding gloves in the second part? I examined some more advanced pitching metrics in the table below.

It paints a more complicated picture than in the first table.

BABIP, which stands for Batting Average on Balls in Play, measures the share of balls hit into the field of play (i.e. no strikeouts or home runs) that end up as a hit. Astros pitchers had the second worst BABIP through May 14 and the second best since then.

Sabrmetric analysis has traditionally regarded BABIP as a measure of fortune. When BABIP is high (the current league average is .287), it tends to come down in the future. When it is low, it tends to go up. It usually doesn’t work in the extremes we see with the Astros pitching staff this season, but it fits the pattern.

Another data point often used to measure pitching luck is Home Runs per Fly Ball %. High numbers tend to come down over time. We see that with the Astros, though the change is not as stark as the one we saw for BABIP. The Astros have moved from 29th in this measure to 14th since May 14; an improvement, but one to the middle.

I also looked at three different ERA estimators—xERA, FIP, and SIERA. I won’t get into the details of the differences between these three. What you need to know is that each tries to explain how well or poorly a team is pitching while removing the effects of good or bad fortune.

All three tell the same story. The Astros were among the worst pitching staffs in the majors in the first 45 games of the season. They may have had some bad luck due to a poor BABIP, but that only exacerbated the poor pitching the team received.

Since May 14, the pitching is better, but that improvement tends to be toward the middle of the pack. You can choose your own adventure if you want to say the Astros are in the front half of pitching staffs (xERA has them 9th best after May 14) or in the back half (FIP has them at 20th). But they are no longer among the worst staffs.

The issue is that these metrics are clear that the Astros are not among the best pitching staffs in baseball. The reason is simple. The Astros walk a lot of batters—something that has been consistent across the 2020s for the Astros. But they are only in mid-pack when it comes to strikeouts. The dominant Astros pitching staffs of the early part of this decade tended to be among the top teams in baseball at striking out batters.

Looking Forward

I started with the question of whether the Astros pitching staff had gotten better and if that was responsible for the team’s turnaround in the second half of the season. The simplest answer is yes. The team is allowing fewer runs per game and good way to win baseball games is to reduce the number of runs your team allows.

But it is clear that the team is pitching in some good fortune since the season bottomed out on May 14. Batted balls that tended to find outfield grass in the first quarter of the season are finding gloves in the second half of the season. That has been a big help.

Also helping is the reduction in walk rate. This Astros team is never likely to be in the top half of the league in walk rate, but the reduction in walks since May 14 has been key to the improved pitching performance. Unfortunately, it has not been joined by a big jump in strikeouts.

That leads to the question of where the pitching staff will go in the second half of the season. Thanks to a tepid American League, the Astros are in playoff contention even though they are right around .500. If the pitching staff regresses to what we saw in the first quarter of the season, then the team’s record is likely to regress as well.

That seems unlikely. The pitching staff is improved since the first quarter and is not likely to pitch with such bad fortune as they did then. The staff is healthier, with Hunter Brown and Josh Hader back from the IL, and better pitchers should help them avoid the lows of April.

But the ERA estimators and BABIP numbers indicate that this team has pitched in some good fortune over the second quarter of the season. That is also not likely to continue.

This pitching staff seems to be a mid-tier staff among major league teams in the 2026. The big remaining question seems to be if they can be toward the top of that mid-tier, or toward the bottom. If they stay toward the top—and I wouldn’t turn down some BABIP and HR/FB% fortune to get them there—they can make the playoffs. But that’s is of course a big if.

Leave a comment

Share

He has ticked down like Bryan Abreu, but Josh Hader is not that pitcher. Hader is throwing 92 mph on his fastball, down nearly three ticks from last season, coming off left bicep tendinitis that kept him on the 60‑day IL until June 2, pitching for a team hovering around .500 and desperately needing him back.

In ten appearances since his return: 0.90 ERA, 0.40 WHIP, 16 strikeouts against 2 walks, .115 xwOBA, 18.8% hard‑hit rate, 6.3% barrel rate. He’s currently tied for the longest scoreless appearance streak in the American League.

The velocity is down. The results are the best he’s looked in years. Those two things are connected, and not in the way you’d think.

Here’s what people get wrong about Hader’s fastball.

They look at the radar gun and conclude that’s the pitch. It never was. The pitch is the slider. Since 2018 it’s been one of the five or six best in baseball by whiff rate, Milwaukee, San Diego, Houston, across every change in velocity, mechanics, and pitch mix. The slider is the reason Hader is Josh Hader. The fastball is the reason the slider works.

What the four‑seamer does, what it has always done, is force a commitment. A hitter facing Hader has to decide early whether he’s protecting the elevated fastball or waiting on the slider. They can’t do both. The fastball doesn’t need to miss bats. It needs to be real enough that the hitter has already made the wrong choice before the slider leaves Hader’s hand.

At 95.5 mph, which is where the four‑seamer sat last season, the commitment problem was brutally simple: you either geared up for the heater or you were dead on it. Now at 92.9, it’s a different version of the same problem. A 92‑mph fastball from a left‑hander with Hader’s arm angle and extension isn’t a pitch major‑league hitters fear in a vacuum. But it’s still a pitch they have to account for, especially when the slider is going the other way from the same release point.

The extension matters more than it gets credit for. Hader releases the ball more than six feet in front of the rubber. That compresses the reaction window in a way that has nothing to do with velocity. The ball simply has less ground to cover, which means it arrives faster than the gun suggests. That doesn’t go away when the arm slows down. It’s structural.

So the three‑tick velocity drop costs Hader something real, margin for error on fastball location, without dismantling the core mechanism. At 95 mph he could leave the four‑seamer in the middle third and still create discomfort. At 92 mph he can’t. The pitch has to be placed, has to be up in the zone, has to be where the hitter’s swing path isn’t. The 16:2 K:BB tells you he’s doing exactly that. He’s ahead in counts, attacking with the slider, and using the fastball precisely enough to keep hitters honest. It’s harder than what he was doing with the better velocity, and he’s doing it better.

The injury history is where optimism has to slow down.

Last August, a left shoulder capsule sprain ended Hader’s season. This spring, left bicep tendinitis put him on the 60‑day IL. The Astros have framed those as separate injuries, different structures, different mechanisms, and anatomically that’s accurate. But they’re still the second and third times in two seasons that Hader’s left arm has interrupted his year, and he throws from a low three‑quarter slot that generates lateral stress on the shoulder complex in ways a more over‑the‑top delivery doesn’t.

The concern isn’t which specific injury comes back. It’s whether the accumulated mileage on that arm path is building toward something the individual diagnoses don’t reflect.

The Astros have managed this responsibly. No back‑to‑backs, careful ramp‑up through June, no multi‑inning stints. They know what they have: a 32‑year‑old on a five‑year, $95 million contract through 2028, currently tied for the longest scoreless streak in the AL, and they’re treating him accordingly. The appearance count will look modest at year’s end. That’s intentional.

What they need isn’t 60 outings. They need him functional in September and, if they find their way back into contention, in October. Hader in a best‑of‑five series, even at 92 mph, is a different conversation than the version of this team without him. The usage plan is built around getting there.

None of this would be interesting if the results were declining. They aren’t. The .115 xwOBA isn’t luck, the xwOBA accounts for exit velocity and launch angle, strips out defense, and tells you what the contact should have produced. At .115, Hader is suppressing quality contact at a rate that has almost nothing to do with sequencing breaks or a soft schedule. Hitters are genuinely not squaring him up.

The 6.3% barrel rate backs that up. Barrels, Statcast’s threshold for optimal EV/LA combinations, are the clearest signal of dangerous contact. Hader is allowing them on 6.3% of batted balls. League average for relievers is around 8. Elite is under 5. He’s not quite elite on that number, but he’s nowhere near the arm you’d project from a 32‑year‑old returning from two straight arm injuries throwing 92.

The velocity was easier to write about than the actual pitching. That’s probably why the velocity story has dominated the coverage — the tick down, visibly alongside Bryan Abreu, is a cleaner narrative, a visible number, a thing you can point to and say this is changing and this is what it means. But Hader’s contact data this year is an argument that the coverage has been measuring the wrong thing all along.

The pitch was always the slider. The fastball was always the setup. The setup requires less velocity than it used to, and he’s throwing it better than he has in years.

NO AI SLOP: If you would like to support my writing, everything goes towards medical bills from chemo: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/hughan

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Against the Blue Jays, the way he used it mattered more than the pitches themselves.

The clearest look at VanWey’s approach came in his matchup with Davis Schneider. Schneider is disciplined and comfortable hitting from behind in the count. He doesn’t chase much, and he forces pitchers to execute. VanWey didn’t try to beat him with something he doesn’t have. He opened with a 94 mph fastball at the top of the zone to establish timing. Then he changed the shape and speed twice with the sweeper — not to get a chase, but to move Schneider off the fastball and make him account for a different window. With that adjustment made, VanWey went back to the heater and got a routine fly ball.

It was a straightforward sequence, but it was built with intent. He understood what his pitches can do, and he didn’t ask them to do more.

That matters for a pitcher like VanWey. He’s not going to overpower lineups for long stretches. His path is narrower: throw strikes, change speeds, avoid the middle of the zone, and make hitters solve more than one problem in an at‑bat.

Toronto didn’t expand the zone much, which made the outing more useful to evaluate. The Blue Jays tried to push him into hitter’s counts and force the fastball into predictable spots. VanWey didn’t give them many of those opportunities. When he did fall behind, he stayed away from the middle of the plate and trusted the movement he has.

The takeaway should stay measured. One outing doesn’t change his long‑term projection. It doesn’t make him a leverage option, and it doesn’t erase the limitations of the arsenal.

But he stayed within himself. He avoided traffic. He made a disciplined lineup adjust to him instead of the other way around.

Oh Canada!

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

NO AI SLOP! If you would like to support my writing, everything goes towards medical bills https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/hughan

That is also what makes the exercise worth doing.

Peña is not a distressed asset. He is not a change‑of‑scenery candidate. He is not someone the Astros should move simply because the farm system needs help. He is a premium‑position major leaguer, still in his prime, still under club control, and currently playing like one of the few Astros position players capable of supporting both the present roster and the next one.

That is precisely why his trade value matters.

Through 175 plate appearances in 2026, Peña is hitting .283/.343/.453 with six home runs, five steals, a .796 OPS, and a Statcast profile that backs it up: .347 xwOBA, .298 xBA, .436 xSLG, a 16.0% strikeout rate, and 91st‑percentile sprint speed. He isn’t doing it by becoming a classic middle‑order slugger. He’s doing it by blending contact, athleticism, shortstop defense, and enough impact contact to make the total package extremely difficult to replace.

His last five completed games before the June 22 hamstring‑cramp exit sharpen the point:

From June 16–21, Peña went 8‑for‑21 with two doubles, three home runs, six RBI, three runs scored, and six strikeouts — a .381/.381/.905 line. Nobody should evaluate a player off five games, but those five games show the current version of Peña: still aggressive, still not walking much, but capable of real damage when swing decisions and contact quality align.

Zoom out to June and the shape holds. In 67 June at‑bats, Peña has hit .299/.373/.507 with three homers, five doubles, eight walks, 12 strikeouts, and an .881 OPS. The walk rate is still not elite. The chase rate remains a blemish. But the overall offensive package has moved far enough beyond “glove‑first shortstop” that the old Peña trade arguments no longer apply.

Peña is making $9.475 million in 2026 and remains arbitration‑eligible for 2027 before reaching free agency after that season. FanGraphs’ preseason‑style projection pegged him around 3.7 WAR over a full year. Using a conservative $9 million per win, that’s roughly $33 million in annual market value. Even with arbitration escalation, Peña is likely to provide meaningful surplus value if he remains a three‑to‑four‑win shortstop.

That is the actual trade question.

Not “should the Astros trade Jeremy Peña?”

The question is: What would another team have to pay for two postseason races of a prime‑aged shortstop who can plausibly produce seven to eight wins while earning far less than open‑market value?

The answer is not two interesting prospects and a lottery ticket. It must be a headliner.

The Baltimore Fit

Baltimore is the cleanest theoretical partner because the Orioles have what most teams do not: enough upper‑level and high‑end prospect depth to make an uncomfortable offer.

A real offer starts with Samuel Basallo.

This is not about the catching position, it is because the framework does not work without a top‑tier prospect carrying star‑level surplus value.

Basallo gives the theam kind of offensive ceiling its system lacks: a left‑handed power bat with middle‑of‑the‑order outcomes. If the Astros are going to trade a known major‑league shortstop, they cannot build the return around “depth.” They need probability and impact.

A realistic Baltimore ask would look something like:

• Samuel Basallo, C/1B — the centerpiece, a potential impact bat with enough ceiling to justify moving a major‑league regular.

• Vance Honeycutt, OF — a volatile but premium athlete whose defense and power/speed tools give him everyday upside if the hit tool stabilizes.

• A young arm from the next tier, not organizational filler, but a pitcher with enough stuff or proximity to project as part of Houston’s next competitive roster.

If that sounds aggressive, it should.

If Baltimore says no, that’s fine. The Astros are not required to trade Peña.

The point is that the Astros should not enter this conversation looking for a fair baseball trade. It should enter looking for a trade that feels painful for the other side.

Why the Astros Would Even Consider It

The Astros’ major‑league roster still has enough talent to matter, but the organization is no longer operating from the same depth advantage it once had. For most of the dynasty period, Houston could absorb losses because the next player was already coming.

Carlos Correa left. Peña arrived.
George Springer left. Kyle Tucker became a star.
Gerrit Cole left. Framber Valdez and the pitching pipeline kept the club competitive.

Trading Peña would be painful because it would create an immediate hole at shortstop. It might make the 2026 Astros worse. It might make the 2027 Astros worse.

But if the Astros believe their current roster is closer to “fringe contender” than “World Series favorite,” then converting two years of Peña into six or more years of multiple high‑end players is the type of move a disciplined front office has to consider.

The Injury Caveat

The June 22 exit matters, even if the suspect medical team called it mild. Peña left with a hamstring cramp after previously missing time with a Grade 1 strain in the same area earlier this season. The Astros described the latest issue as precautionary, but any acquiring team would care (note: a free lunch will be provided by Ben Verlander at some time this year).

It does not destroy his trade value but it does impact the time.

A Peña trade is easier to imagine if he is healthy for several weeks and the Statcast indicators remain intact. It is harder to imagine if the hamstring becomes a recurring availability question.

For a player whose value depends partly on defense, speed, and durability, lower‑body health is not a footnote.

It is part of the evaluation.

The Potential Verdict

Dana Brown should not be actively shopping Jeremy Peña but he should be listening.

Peña is exactly the kind of player contenders should want: a prime‑aged shortstop, above‑average overall contributor, affordable salary, postseason experience, and enough offensive growth to support a real everyday projection.

That is also why the Astros cannot treat him like a normal trade chip. If the offer is built around secondary prospects, hang up.

If the offer begins with a top‑10‑to‑20 overall prospect and continues from there, keep talking.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

NO AI SLOP: if you would like to support my writing, things are a little prickly right now and any support would be appreciated: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/hughan

It looked like what Astros baseball was supposed to look like this season.

And was a reminder of what the Astros have been missing so much of this season—their ace at the beginning of games and their closer at the end of it.

And it raised the question of what could be.

Chandler Rome of The Athletic summed up the attitude that surrounded Daiken Park last night: “Every frustrating stretch or feeling of doubt during his 67-game absence arrived with an underlying ultimatum: stay afloat until the ace known as “Diesel” returns, the final hope of fueling a turnaround.”

Can the Astros turn it around this season?

Has the Climb Already Begun

The good news is that the team is playing better over the last 5 weeks of the season. On May 12, the Astros lost 10-2 to Seattle, their 4th straight loss and 6th in 8 games. It put their record at 16-27, 11 games under .500.

Since then, the Astros have won 18 of the 32 games that they have played. You can see how the team bottomed out in the chart below, which comes from friend of the blog Greg Stoll’s website. The Astros were in particular boosted by winning 6 out of 7 games in road games in Chicago and Arlington. Even before Brown returned, the Astros were able to right the ship.

After the May 12 loss, the Astros had only an 8.1% chance of making the playoffs, according to Fangraphs. After the win on Tuesday night, the Astros are up to a 19.7% chance of making the playoffs. The Astros are not doing well this year, but few in the American League are. At the moment, only 5 American League teams have a winning record. Or to put it another way, if the season ended today, a team with a losing record would make the playoffs.

All of that means that the Astros do not have to win something like 90 games to reach the playoffs this year. The last AL Wildcard will possible win something like 85 games. Can the Astros get to 84 wins? To do that, they would have to win 50 of their final 86 games this season, which is a 94-win pace. Is that doable?

Health Essential for Pitching Staff

In order for the Astros as a team to play better over the last half of the season, individual players have to play better over the last half of the season.

As I have discussed recently, a big issue for the Astros this season has been injuries. The reason Brown and Hader’s performances in Tuesday’s game were such a big deal is that the Astros have not had them this season. The team has been missing its anchors at the top and the bottom of the pitching staff. The rest of the pitching staff has come up small in that time period. I guess the good news is that the team’s ERA is no longer the worst in baseball; it’s second worst.

The formula for the Astros to play better revolves around health. If the team can stay healthy and put their best players on the field, they can avoid giving starts to the likes of Ryan Weiss and Cody Bolton.

Can Young Hitters Take a Step Forward?

Offensively, a better Astros team needs a bounce back from Jose Altuve. Altuve is in a big slump at the plate this year, slashing .229/.307/.383 at the plate. If he could improve to what he did last year—.265/.329/.442—it would help the Astros squeeze out a couple of more wins.

Jake Meyers is another player hitting poorly this season. Meyers has a career OPS of .673, but has managed only a .607 OPS this season. The good news is that much of the issue for Meyers is a .244 Batting Average in Balls in Play, down from a career mark of .302. That’s dragging down Meyers’ batting average and the value he brings from his glove and occasional power.

Another player hitting below career norms is Yainer Diaz, who has a .610 OPS this season after a career mark or .750. Diaz’s improvement at the plate is needed because Christian Vasquez is slumping after a hot start to the season.

That gets to the key issue with the Astros offense. One can identify players who are below career norms and can be expected to improve, but one can also identify players who are above their career norms.

And the Astros most important hitter—Yordan Alvarez—is also ahead of his career norms. For his career, Alvarez has a .972 OPS. This season, he is nearly 100 points higher at 1.070. If Alvarez comes down to earth, he’ll still be one of the handful of best hitters in the game, but it will hurt the team’s offensive production significantly.

Thus, the biggest area for improvement for the Astros on offense is their young players who play in left and right field. The everyday right fielder is Cam Smith. One can see Smith’s obvious physical gifts, most primarily in how quickly this lifelong infielder has become one of the game’s best defensive corner outfielders. But at the plate, Smith has been consistently below average. His .666 OPS this season look an almost exact match for the .671 he had in 2025.

It’s a similar story for Brice Matthews and Joey Loperfido. Loperfido is the better hitter, but he still has a below average OPS at .688. Matthews has struggled as a major leaguer, with a .615 OPS.

None of these three players are a plus at the plate offensively. But they are the biggest candidates to do so over the second half of the season.

This makes sense. The biggest issue the Astros have faced as a franchise over the last 2 seasons is the failure of any young players to turn into star level players. The franchise has lost such players to free agency, but has not been able to replace them.

If they can do that in the second half of the 2026 season, they have a chance to return to where Astros teams went when they did bring up young stars from their minor league system—the playoffs.

But, we haven’t seen such offensive improvements so far from Smith, Matthews, and Loperfido. This team needs such improvement to make a run in the second half of the season. We’ll believe it when we see it.

Leave a comment

Share

A better description of Brown’s statement was that they were completely expected. It seems very unlikely that the Astros will choose to trade off some of their best players because the team is mired in 4^th place. But the reason for that isn’t because of a choice that Dana Brown has made as general manager. Instead, it is based on a decision made by Jim Crane.

Right before Opening Day, I wrote how Jim Crane has made 2026 an “or else” season for the team. Crane demands a playoff appearance for his team. And the best evidence of Crane’s perspective was the fact he chose not to give contract extensions to General Manager Dana Brown and Manager Joe Espada. The contracts for both expire at the end of the 2026 season.

Thus, it should not be surprising to anyone that Brown is signaling that he is focused on winning in 2026 over gaining value for future seasons. Brown—and Joe Espada—are working under the guidelines that Jim Crane has set for them: only 2026 matters.

Playoff Bound?

Before Monday’s game in Anaheim, Brown said “I just don’t see us being sellers right now.”

Brown also specifically addressed speculation that the team would trade Jeremy Pena or Yordan Alvarez, stars who reach free agency after the 2027 and 2028 season respectively. “We’ve had zero discussions about trading Peña or Alvarez internally. We’ve had zero conversations.

What was Brown’s rationale for not wanting to be a seller at the deadline? The chance to get to the playoffs.

“To be sellers, for me, it would be like we failed. So I don’t think this team is a team that’s going to be sellers at the deadline. I think we’re good enough…The division is wide open, the postseason is wide open. So, I don’t foresee us being sellers.”

Why not trade Pena and Alvarez? “Those are two pillars on this team that I feel like is playoff bound,”

Can the Astros get to the playoffs this season? Brown said they just need to get healthy. ““I just think it’s a matter of time for us to collectively play multiple games in a row with our best players — which I don’t think has happened.”

It is not surprising that Brown sounded an optimistic note about the 2026 Astros, despite the team being on a 72-win pace and 5 games out of a division lead. Brown is often quite optimistic in his public statements about his team—essentially cheering for speedy recoveries from injuries and accelerated development from young players.

But it is also not surprising that Brown is focused on winning in 2026 and eschewing the possibility of seeking value for future seasons. Brown is not guaranteed to be here in any future seasons because of the choice made by his boss, Jim Crane. It is likely that the only way that Brown can get future seasons as the Astros GM is if the 2026 team starts playing better baseball and gets to the playoffs.

Sure, Brown is the one making the public statement. But his statements are compelled by his boss. Jim Crane wants to win in 2026 and Brown is a good employee. He is doing what his boss wants.

Three Paths. Limited Options

Last month, Dave Schoenfeld of ESPN wrote that “the Astros will face some difficult choices at the trade deadline. The front office will have three options: stay the course, do a soft rebuild or tear it down to the studs.”

Schoenfeld explains the rationale for each of these three scenarios and how they would play out.

He says that a “full teardown” would make sense based on “the age of some of the key players and the state of the farm system… With 2026 looking like a lost season, and the uncertainty of the labor situation looming over the 2027 season, the best road to long-term success for the franchise might mean extracting maximum value” from players such as Alvarez, Pena, and Hunter Brown.

A soft rebuild “being with admitting the 2026 season is likely a lost cause -- too many injuries, too many holes on the pitching staff, an offense that suddenly looks thin… There needs to be a talent realignment, with a need to acquire some young players because of the state of the farm system.” In this scenario, the Astors would trade some key players, and Schoenfeld mentions Christian Walker, Josh Hader, and Isaac Paredes as possibilities.

The “stay the course” argument is “that the Astros have been snakebit the past two seasons” by injuries to Yordan Alvarez and Josh Hader in 2025, and Hunter Brown and Carlos Correa in 2026. Thus, Schoenfeld writes “maybe it’s one of those seasons. All of the players above are under contract beyond this season, so that’s why you stay the course and keep everyone for 2027.”

As Astros can and should read through those choices and see the plausible argument for each of them, regardless of which path each of us prefers. All three plans are reasonable path for Dana Brown to choose as he approaches this year’s trade deadline.

Yet, one is clearly closed off not because Dana Brown thinks it is the wrong choice, but because Jim Crane has all but eliminated the possibility. Dana Brown has said the Astros are not going to tear it all down. But that is not exactly a path that Brown could choose.

Based on Brown contract expiring at the end of the year, it’s also likely that the soft rebuild option is also out. One could imagine re-jiggering the team to work better in the second half of the season by, for example, trading Isaac Paredes for a starting left fielder, but those deals are difficult to make. It is easier to trade an established regular for a potential one. Dana Brown can’t bet on potential. It may only help his successor to succeed.

Jim Crane’s Decision

Crane’s choice is rooted in his belief that the team should have made the playoffs in 2025 and that extra pressure was apparently needed to get Brown and Espada to push their team to a playoff appearance this season.

Crane has said that “as long as I’m here, the window is open.” But the team’s window was open from 2015 through 2025 not because of Jim Crane’s Jim Crane-ness, but because the franchise has a steady stream of high-quality young players stepping up each season, often replacing in a nearly like-for-like fashion older expensive players who left in free agency.

The lack of quality young players is certainly a failing of Dana Brown. He could have drafted Kevin McGonigle, Rookie of the Year favorite for the Tigers or Thomas White, a top pitching prospect for the Marlins, both of whom went within 10 picks of Brice Matthews. Some of the blame for the weak farm system goes to James Click as well. In the 2022 first round, he chose Drew Gilbert over Sal Stewart of the Reds and Dylan Beavers of the Orioles, both of whom are establishing themselves as quality regulars. Gilbert at least got us half of Justin Verlander in 2023.

The front office is in a poor position right now because it can only focus on the 2026 season. Is that the best course for this franchise. You may think yes, or you may think no. Dana Brown told us this week he thinks the answer is yes. Of course, it’s not surprising he said that. It’s what Jim Crane thinks, and he’s the one making that decision for the franchise right now.

Leave a comment

Share

The good news about the Astros offense is that back in 2016, the Dodgers thought they needed Josh Fields to round out their bullpen as they pushed for the playoffs that season. In exchange—come on, you know who the Astros got in exchange. As Jules often writes on social media:

The bad news is that the offense as a whole is propped up heavily by Alvarez’s massive contributions this season. This isn’t a balanced, deep, multi-layered offensive juggernaut anymore. It’s a house of cards. Some others are making contributions—but the whole offense is propped up by Yordan Alvarez.

Let’s start by looking at the macro picture. If we look at the team’s overall metrics, the aggregate numbers paint a picture of an above average MLB offense:

The Astros are 11th in the majors in runs scored per game at 5.47. They probably should be a little higher in run scoring. The Astros are 6th highest in home runs and slugging, 7th in overall OPS, and 9th in team OPS+. These are all objectively good numbers in the context of 2026 baseball.1 The team does not walk as much as ideal (their 8.7% walk rate is 21st best in the majors), but they make up for that with big power; they are 7th in majors in isolated power at .165.2

But as I have framed this piece, all this good news about the offense is also met by some bad news. If you break down who is contributing to the team’s offense, one man stands out—Yordan Alvarez. As for everyone else…well, that’s a different story.

The Lone Titan and the Supporting Cast

The chart below shows the individual OPS+ for each prominent member of the Astros lineup this season. OPS+ takes OPS (On base Plus Slugging percentage), adjusts for park effects, and then normalizes the scale. 100 is exactly league average, and each unit above or below 100 is one percent better (or worse) than league average.

As a team, the Astros have a 104 OPS+, which means they are 4% better than league average. In the chart below, the dashed line shows that number.

Yordan Alvarez is sporting a mind-boggling 198 OPS+. He is effectively playing twice as well as a league-average major league hitter. The league average hitter is slashing .242/.319/.393. Alvarez is slashing .316/.428/.649. His batting average and slugging percentage are tops in the league, and he also leads the AL in home runs and OPS. He is lagging in on base percentage—he’s second in the AL behind Nick Kurtz of the A’s.

But if you look at the chart above, it shows that Alvarez is almost single-handedly pulling the Astros team average to the right (i.e. the good direction in this chart).

Alvarez is not full alone. Christian Walker has had a bounce back campaign, posting a 126 OPS+. He is also providing essential help to the lineup, and the inability of the front office to trade him this offseason for salary relief has actually paid off for the Astros.

Jeremy Pena has also been an offensive plus. He is slashing .298/.351/.433 for a 117 OPS+. Of course, that good news is tempered with bad news. Pena has been able to play in only 26 of the team’s 64 games this season due to injury.

But shockingly, only three Astros hitters are above the team’s average of 104 in OPS+.

The Drop-Off to the Underbelly

Most Astros hitters this season are clustered at or near league average.

Taylor Trammell (103) and Isaac Paredes (102) hover just above the league average mark. That’s a surprisingly good mark for Trammell (career OPS+ of 82) and a surprisingly poor mark for Paredes (career OPS+ of 114).

From there, it gets progressively worse:

• Christian Vázquez (95 OPS+): This is actually a surprisingly good number for Vazquez, who had a 60 OPS+ in his three seasons in Minnesota.

• Cam Smith (88 OPS+): A young player struggling to create value with his bat; he stays in the lineup for his glove.

• Jake Meyers (77 OPS+): This is Meyers’ worst offensive season since he lost his job and MLB roster spot in 2022.

• Yainer Díaz (67 OPS+): A shocking regression that has completely sapped the lineup of its expected catching depth.

• Brice Matthews (62 OPS+): Completely overmatched at this stage, offering almost no offensive utility.

In short, the Astros have a lot of unproductive at bats in the bottom half of the lineup every game. That’s when you can go to the kitchen to get another beer. You’ll also need a beer or four to watch these at bats.

A Yordan Dependent Offense

In the first 19 days of May, the Astros slumped offensively. They averaged 2.6 runs per game—less than half of their total across the entire season. Why did the team slump so much offensively? Well, during those 19 games, Yordan Alvarez slashed .209/.321/.373.

The Astros offense in 2026 is going as far as Yordan Alvarez can take them. When Alvarez slumped, so did the entire offense. When he is hot—like he has been for the periods outside of those 19 games in early May—he can prop up this entire offense.

Alvarez has been the best hitter in the American League in 2026. We are privileged to watch him hit.

But the overall Astros offense this season is dragged down by a set of hitters that lack overall depth. The team runs out four or five below average hitters in its lineup most nights. More depth is needed from the bottom half of the lineup.

But even without that, we get to watch Yordan Alvarez every night. And that’s pretty awesome.

Leave a comment

Share