The Path to Respectability: Houston Astros

by Jason Wojciechowski

They're cooked
Photo by Rik Panganiban

Midway through this self-assignment to figure out how each of the crummy MLB teams could be respectable and win 88 games, I've come to my hardest test: the Houston Astros. The Astros aren't a team with a ton of young talent that projection systems don't like but everyone thinks could be good in two years. (They're not the Royals, that is.) They're just a really bad team.

PECOTA sees the Astros having the worst offense in the National League, and it's not even close. Their .243 projected team True Average is nine points below the next contender, the Pirates. For context, if you had two players with those TAvs (you'd have two crap players, but that's an aside), over the course of a season (650 PAs), the Pirates' player would be worth 6.5 more runs than the Astros' guy. A team, of course, amasses a lot more than 650 PAs in a season.

On top of the offense, PECOTA sees the team allowing, through a combination of bad defense and weak pitching, more runs than anyone else in the National League. Including Colorado. Who play on the moon.

But hey! The team has a new owner who's hired a new, more progressive front office. So hope is rising. Is there any hope for this year? Let's get this team to 88 wins.

PECOTA and the BP depth charts have the team at 60-102 (another aside: it's astounding that a team can be projected to over 100 wins), so we need to find 28 wins. As always, I'll lop five wins off of that figure due to good run distribution luck, leaving me needing "only" 23 on the roster itself. Unlike with other teams, there's no picking and choosing here. I'm going to need help from every single player and position.

Fix My Team!: The Houston Astros

By The Common Man

On Monday, the Astros were officially eliminated from playoff contention. Twenty-one more teams are going to join them before the season finally winds down, so we thought it would be appropriate to look at the clubs that fell short of the postseason this year, and consider how to fix them for 2012. What should their plans be? What moves should they make? And who should they count on going forward? Since the Astros were kind enough to volunteer to go first, TCM will tackle them today but all three of us will be tackling the also-rans between now and the end of the season.


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There is no doubt that the Astros will continue to be bad in 2012. They are on pace to lose 109 games this year, and even with some improvement, a huge regression toward the mean and better luck (their Pythagorean W-L puts them on pace to lose just 100), they are not likely to crack the ninety loss barrier next year, especially after trading two (and potentially all three) of their best players before then.

That won’t win anything, so it’s best for the Astros to continue their slow rebuilding effort, adding young and inexpensive talent to the organization, and avoiding big moves. There is no one available in the offseason that’s worth the Astros breaking the bank over given what will likely be significant payroll restrictions in the near future and the natural desire of most elite free agents to play for a winner. There simply isn’t anyone in the mid-tier of free agents worth over-paying for a team this far out.

The Revenge of Glenn Davis

By The Common Man

This went so well the first time around that The Common Man decided to try it again.

Glenn Davis was a power-hitting first baseman, who starred for the Houston Astros in the late 1980s. In 1990, he suffered a strained ribcage and had a down year. He still wanted a multi-year extension, and Houston wouldn’t give it to him, given that they had Jeff Bagwell waiting in the wings. So they dealt him to Baltimore in what became one of the worst trades of all time. Because of a bad back, the Orioles got exactly 185 games out of Davis over three seasons, in which he hit .259/.332/.467, while paying him $10.5 million. That kind of production would still be a bust today.

The Astros, meanwhile, received Curt Schilling, Steve Finley, and Pete Harnisch in the deal, who would have 120.4 WAR between them ove the rest of their careers, to Davis’ 0.1 WAR.

Not that the Astros got much of that benefit, mind you. They only got 22.2 WAR from the trio and, frankly, got nothing for either Curt Schilling or Pete Harnisch. That said, the legacy of the Davis deal still remains in the Astros system. Consider Davis’ very incestuous family tree, which was so complicated it needed to be color-coded (red denotes the end of a line because a player was either released, waived, or became a free agent and there was no compensation):

3 Questions: Houston Astros

By The Common Mn

Boy, it's a bad week for the Astros and their fans.  First, Jeff Bagwell gets totally jobbed in the Hall of Fame voting, and now their in our crosshairs.  As always, you can find  complete list of the 3 Questions series, including your favorite team, here.

The Astros finally took a hint in 2010, and realized that they needed to tear the team down in order to build their franchise back up. Gone are longtime stars Roy Oswalt and Lance Berkman. And the team has refrained from making any long-term commitments that will cripple the team. Even the extension they handed out to Brett Myers is just two years and an option. So given the team is in a definite rebuilding mode, here are three related questions for the Astros.