Playing GM is fun for fans. The idea of burning it to the ground to see your franchise emerge from the ashes is the stuff of fantasy sports and general sports lore. But, it doesn’t always go that way and those who understand baseball know that there is just as good a chance of the team struggling for years (decades even) as there is a fast, flashy rebound en route to another championship.
While we have enjoyed some of the best baseball of our lives in Houston over the last decade, there are reasons to believe a complete overhaul of an underperforming roster is the wrong move, in the near term and the future.
The AL sucks.
There are currently four teams over .500 in the American League a full third of the way through the season. Three of those teams are the Rays, the Guardians and the A’s (!!!). Even with all the much documented struggles for the Astros in April, they are 4.5 games back of the division lead, 3.5 games back of the Wild Card, and just two games back of both the Rangers (who they play this week) and the Mariners. This is May, not September. The Astros have over 100 games left on the schedule.
When you have some talent — the Astros do — and few if any of your competitors are running away with the division (or conference for that matter), it makes little sense to start over. There is way too much baseball to be played. A sweep of the Cubs this weekend and the Rangers swept by the Angels at the same time is a start.
The Astros will probably improve.
In addition to that sweep and the combined no hitter over the Rangers Monday night, the Astros are 8-4 in their last 12 games. Their pitching has stabilized (even Tatsuya Imai has looked better), in both the rotation and the bullpen, and they should get reinforcements soon. They already got Jeremy Peña and Jake Meyers back. Josh Hader and Hunter Brown are close, and Jose Altuve’s oblique injury may not be quite as bad as feared. By the All-Star break, players like Hayden Wesneski and Ronel Blanco could be making their way back as well.
It is not inconceivable to see this team get on a run in June as their health improves. They’ve done it multiple times before. Not sure why we would doubt them this time.
Their best players are in or near their prime.
When you sell off a bunch of players, the goal is to get younger, much younger. But, at the moment most of their best players are still pretty damn young. Peña, Yordan Alvarez, Brown, Spencer Arrighetti, Isaac Paredes, Yainer Diaz, Cam Smith, Jake Meyers…it’s a group all under 30 with others like Zach Cole and Brice Young and Zach Dezenzo and Joey Loperfido…and you get the idea.
Strategically, moving guys like Kyle Tucker made sense. Allowing older players like Alex Bregman to walk made sense. Unless you plan on trading everybody, the value the Astros would get back would very likely not come close to matching what they send away.
It’s not how Jim Crane does business.
Crane is famous for saying the window to a title is always open as long as he is running the team. We should believe him. He authored a huge turnaround when he bought the team, cutting payroll and scuffling through three brutal 100-loss seasons before competing and ultimately winning a pair of World Series titles. The chances he tries that again are slim if for no other reason than he understands just how difficult it is.
Nevermind the fact that he now has a LOT more invested. Having a few really bad seasons with payroll near the bottom of the league is fine when first outlay all that cash for a team, but now that he has a franchise to run along with a regional sports network, you don’t want to just toss that all away and watch Daikan Park go empty while the team attempts another rebuild. He has a lot more to lose this time around.
The lockout looms.
No one knows what is going to happen this offseason with the Collective Bargaining Agreement. There will almost certainly be a lockout, but how long it goes depends heavily on the owner’s resolve to shove a salary cap down the throats of the players. If they are willing to give up most or all of an entire season to do it, where baseball ends up at the end of that is anyone’s guess.
Right now feels more like a time to hold ’em rather than fold ’em given the incredible uncertainty of the looming offseason.
