If Hunter Brown is out past June 1 then Houston probably needs to rebuild with a new manager and new pitching philosophy. Cant trade for an entire rotation when you have no money and no prospects.
Probably worth noting at this point that Yainer Diaz can be optioned to the minors. I don’t know how service time and arbitration work in that scenario, but he entered this season with 3.03 years of service so it’s possible that sending him down a few weeks would also secure an additional year of control. He is chasing and swinging and missing too much to be a viable major league hitter. Hes not striking out but making horrid contact quality.
I'm increasingly starting to feel this team is like the one following their 2005 WS run before Drayton sold. He tried to patch things together with bandaids clinging to the idea that they could still compete, when the best option was to tear it all down and start over. We have the best offense in baseball, but how long is that sustainable, and will it regress when the pitching finally get it's act together? And you have to start thinking if the teams arm issues (last season) are no longer a fluke but rather a trend. Maybe some fresh ideas and philosophies are what the team needs.
That team was old and many of the players were on the downsides of their careers. And they traded prospects to add bandaids which made it worse. This team is not old. They have a ton of young talent. They have a major on-going health problem on the pitching side and now have a performance problem on the pitching side. But they also have plenty of young talent that theoretically makes the team sustainable. Yordan, Pena, Paredes, Cam, Diaz (if he could re-learn to hit) plus wildcards like Loperfido and Cole make for a viable offense with veterans like Correa, Atuve, and Walker. Brown, Imai, Arrighetti, and Burrows should be a solid basis for a rotation alongside some veterans and fill-ins. The bullpen is young enough. The team has problems, but I don't think the post-2005 scenario is a good comparison. That team had no prospects and no up-and-coming players.
This team is a mixed bag. Altuve, Correa, Walker, McCullers, and Hader are “old”. Smith and Burrows are really the only “young” core players. Diaz, Pena, Meyers, Paredes, Imai, Javier, Brown, Abreu, and King are all in their prime ages. I have always assumed that Altuve’s decline would be the bellweather for when Houston needed to rebuild; for me it is really hard to justify rooting for a rebuild while Altuve is still playing at a high level. It is also hard to justify rebuilding when there is a player like Yordan to build around. So by those metrics Houston needs to keep pushing to compete. But trying to contend with bad contracts and a crummy farm is time tested to not work. So the Astros are in a grey area. Trading Tucker was a move trying to thread a needle. So is signing guys like Walker and Imai. Those are moves you make when you are too good to do a full rebuild but not good enough to acquire the very best players to help you contend. The season is still young and it’ll be another month at least before we can start to firm up opinions on what the Astros should do. But for now I doubt they’re gonna be better than 30% to make the playoffs by July so I’m thinking they should shop whoever is healthy/productive out of Pena, Paredes, Meyers, Imai, Okert, and Abreu to build their farm system back up and then be ready to spend some money to try and keep the ‘27 and ‘28 rosters competitive enough to bridge to the next wave.
I do not know how to quantify this ... but ... could the new ABS strike zone exposed the Astros pitching staff?
Isn't the fact that the division is so close and that no one is running away from the pack an argument that the Astros CAN, in fact, screw around for a bit? At least relative to the alternative where there was a dominant team in the division. As bad as things have gone, the Astros are still tied with the biggest threat to win the division.
Would a GM on the last year of his contract do this (throwing in the towel for the 2026 season) though?
If Crane tells Brown to rebuild, Brown will do it unless he wants to guarantee he will never be a GM ever again.
At this rate Houston will be deadline sellers. This would be my realistic best case outcome for that scenario: Trade Pena, Paredes, Meyers, Brown, Imai, and Abreu; hope to get 5 of the top 100 prospects in the league plus a handful of decent 2nd/3rd tier prospects. Between that haul, the 2026 draft, and the development of their existing prospects, they would likely have one of the top 5 farm systems in the league. Trade Yainer Diaz in the offseason. Use the rest of the offseason to retool. They’d have some money to spend after trading away those players. Hypothetical 2027 roster: RF Smith DH Alvarez 2B Altuve SS Correa LF Seiya Suzuki* 1B Walker 3B Alec Bohm* CF Loperfido C Jake Rogers* Bench: Matthews, Cole, Salazar, Allen SP: Kris Bubic*, Robbie Ray*, Burrows, Arrighetti, Pecko RP: Hader, King, Sousa, Ullola, Blubaugh, Weiss, Javier, Alexander None of those free agents would get anything longer than 3 years. The rotation would project very weak. This team would not project as a major contender. But the lineup is deep and it gives a fighting chance to make the playoffs as Houston plays out the remainder of the Altuve/Correa/Alvarez years and waits for the farm to start bearing the fruit to open a new window starting in 2029.
Blummer was taking about this during one of the broadcasts this weekend. I don't know all the details of the new system/zone but evidently it is percentage of something that makes up the zone. He was saying that he thinks the top of the zone percentage is too low (55% ?) and that it needs to be adjusted up a bit (57% ?). Thus making the zone bit taller. He thinks they got the lower percentage correct.
