BREAKING: Shocking Disaster in Houston Astros over Head coach’s Decision.
Life’s been good for the Houston Astros for an awful long time. Arguably American major pro sports’ first truly successful “tank” job, the club has been a dynasty by virtually any standard. They won a pair of World Series in 2017 and 2022, but that is only a secondary measure of their greatness. The piece de resistance – seven, count ‘em seven consecutive ALCS appearances. To do that you have to be good enough to withstand the 162-game grind for even straight seasons and then possess the lineup strength, pitching depth and all-around moxie to win multiple rounds of playoffs. These guys, even after potentially taking some “shortcuts” along the way, have got the goods.
Given their awful start – they lost 20 of their first 30 games to stand dead last in the AL West, behind even the moribund Oakland Athletics – they’re going to need to turn things around in a big way to keep their ALCS streak going.
Before we dig a little deeper into where they stand presently, let’s briefly discuss where they’ve come from. They averaged a mere 54 wins per season from 2011-13, and after the first of those three seasons Jeff Luhnow replaced Ed Wade as General Manager. The tank was on, as the club tore things down to the studs, gamed the amateur draft, and to their credit hit on a high percentage of the premium draft picks generated. Hello, Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman, George Springer, Kyle Tucker and others. By 2015, their sub-.500 days were over, save for a fluke 29-31 record in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when they still managed to reach the ALCS.
The Luhnow-led club broke new analytical ground, to be sure, but let’s not forget the scouting successes along the way. The previous regime had signed an undersized second baseman named Jose Altuve way back in 2007. Almost a decade later, after things had begun to turn around in earnest, they swung a minor trade for a raw 19-year-old slugger signed only a month-and-a-half earlier by the Dodgers. His name? Yordan Alvarez. Just a year before that they inked a couple of older, relatively inexpensive pitchers out of the Dominican Republic for pennies on the dollar. A couple of guys named Cristian Javier and Framber Valdez. Yup, this is about a whole lot more than analytics.
And while the Astros have had to make some difficult choices along the way, allowing former core pieces like Correa and Springer to depart via free agency, they have carried on. They didn’t miss a beat as they cycled from Luhnow to fellow numbers guy James Click in the GM chair, and then made a major philosophical shift in transitioning long-time scout Dana Brown into the role in January 2023. In the short term, it honestly didn’t matter who was sitting in that chair. But as time passes and big picture decisions have to be made, will the Astros remain at the top of the league?
The jury is obviously still out, but the early 2024 returns certainly haven’t looked good. Offensively, the main strugglers in the Astro lineup have been Bregman and 1B Jose Abreu. The latter was signed during the 2022-23 offseason, but BEFORE Brown was hired. You can’t pin this one on him. Honestly, I really liked this signing when it happened. Sure, he was aging, but his batted ball metrics looked good, he used the entire field and made plenty of contact for a power hitter. A Chris Davis-esque collapse didn’t appear to be in the cards.
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