
Snake Diggity
-
Posts
2923 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Downloads
Recruiting - 2020
2019-2020 Football Season
Football
Entertainment
Sports
News and Business
Cloak Room
Transfer Portal
Recruiting
Events
Posts posted by Snake Diggity
-
-
2 hours ago, Ichabod said:
We are getting Max Kepler and Nolan Arenado very soon.
Kepler and Verdugo are 2 cheap corner OF options that have good upside. Â I prefer Verdugo but both make sense if Houston spends all their other money on 1B or SP.
-
2 hours ago, Wulaw Horn said:
You think Framber is getting traded? Â
If you did an OF there it makes sense to call goldy and see if he wants to come home on a 1 year deal. Or a 1/1 with some vesting stuff. Smith to 3rd in 26 or 27 and Paredes to 1st. Personally Walker makes the most sense but if they wanted to sign Santander and then trade Framber for an above average OF and a prospect or 2 and did the Goldy deal I would be absolutely ecstatic.ÂI am not sure if Framber is getting traded, I’d probably put the odds at about 20%.  But regardless, there are too many OF better than Dubon, both internally and externally.  They’re not running those 3 guys out as their opening day OF unless there’s been an absolute epidemic of injuries.
-
0% chance the opening day OF is McCormick/Meyers/Dubon. Â Anyone who listens to anything Dana Brown says in an interview is a fool. Â Dude has proven that nothing he says should be taken seriously.
-
6
-
1
-
-
Major holes: 1B, RF
Minor holes: LF/CF, SP
~$30M in available payroll.  They can use that along with trading Framber and Pressly and go into 2025 with an extremely deep lineup, a much improved farm system, and a good pitching staff that carries a lot of upside/risk.  Let’s see how the rest of the offseason plays out.  Christian Walker might be in play if his market doesn’t develop.  Hell, Bregman might still be in play.
-
Decent trade. Â Not a home run but very good value for a rental, even if it was a borderline mvp caliber player.
Astros lost a net 4 wins in RF, gained a net 2 wins at 3B, gained half a win in pitching, and added ~$10M in available payroll. Â Thats the 2025 impact; a net loss of 1-2 wins, pending what they do with that $10M. Â
ÂFor 2026 as beyond, they added ~10 wins at 3B/1B and a couple wins in pitching.
Net net they just traded 1 2025 win for a dozen wins over the next 5 years.  Like homey said in Dances with Wolves, “good trade.”
-
2
-
2
-
-
Paredes and Smith to me is not enough. Â Needs to include Suzuki or Bellinger (with Cubs eating some $) or another good prospect.
-
1
-
-
47 minutes ago, Wulaw Horn said:
Calling Tucker a 4 win player sort of minimizes him- he’s more like a 6 war player based upon track record and where he’s at in the aging curve (dead ass prime) next year (if healthy- which he always has been absent freak occurrence last year) with probably a chance to have an mvp type season. Sucks for him that last year might have been his mvp type career season (almost 5 war while missing half the season) but he gapped to get hurt.Â
all that said- completely agree with your take.ÂMeh.  He was worth 4.2 fwar last season.  Whether he’s a 4 win player or a 5 win player, it doesn’t affect my point.
-
Astros currently have the 5th best projected roster in the league. Â 6th best offense, 9th best pitching staff. Â They are favored to win their division by 3 games. Â Their team is still very good. Â I think the vast majority of fans way underestimate how much impact the pitching injuries had. Â They had 7 SP on the IL at one point and still won their division. Â They also had the most negative impact player in the league in their lineup most days for a third of the season (Abreu).
The 2017 team won the goddam World Series with Mike fuckin Fiers leading the team in innings, Brad Peacock the #4 SP, and the corpse of Carlos Beltran getting 500 plate appearances.  The roster doesn’t have to be 2019-level to be a contender.
A total rebuild like what was done in 2011-2014 is not possible these days because of rules changes and how other teams are run. Â Theres a draft lottery that makes it nigh impossible for a team to get 3 straight #1 picks. Â Almost every team manipulates their draft pool to try to get overslot signings in later rounds (the Astros were the first to really do it in 2012).
Houstons best bet is to try to win as much as they can while Altuve and Alvarez are still productive.  They are going to have to rely on Dana Brown to draft/scout/develop their way to contention after 2025.  But this offseason they are in a good spot.  Shopping Tucker and Framber is them following the market.  If they can trade away a 4 win player (with 1 year left) and release a 0.5 win player to add a 3 win player (with 4 years left), a 3 win player (with 2 years left), and an elite prospect, that’s a good move for both 2025 and beyond.  And that’s the kind of package the Astros should be demanding.  If Houston ends up trading Tucker for a middling package like Gil and Rice alone, that’s not a good move.  But if they get something like Suzuki, Paredes, and Shaw, that’s a home run move.
-
5
-
1
-
-
10 minutes ago, LCHorn said:
Oh yeah, of course.  The question is whether there’s a way to obtain discounted Wins taking older players and using them in unusual ways.  A more common variation of this would be moving a mediocre starter to closer where they can pump velocity better in short stints. Â
ÂWe haven’t really seen this tried much with position players, maybe because it doesn’t work, rosters are too short, etc.  If I was trying to dream up how it might look, however, I would start with someone who was a terrific athlete like Springer and/ or someone who can’t stay healthy like Brantley.  I don’t follow the Dodgers much but I think they attempted a variation of this idea with Justin Turner. Â
ÂI can’t recall the Baseball Prospectus writer whose dad was an orthopedic surgeon or something and he would write about injuries mostly, but they’ve been promoting the idea that health is the sixth tool for 20 years. Â
ÂÂ
Luhnow was saying toward the end of his tenure that injury prevention/recovery was going to be the next arena where teams found a competitive advantage.  Doesn’t look like it’s happened yet.  But I would imagine any team that could find a secret solution to having pitchers constantly throw heat and spin without tearing a UCL would be big winners.
-
50 minutes ago, Murfdogg21 said:
The Astros had the #3 to #7 highest payroll last year depending which site you look at, and are sitting in the top 10 for 2025 before resigning Bregman or whatever they end up doing. It's not like we have the A's, Rays, or Pirates ownership. They shipped prospects to get Verlander back in 2023 and to get Kikuchi last season, and haven't restocked the shelves. Crane burned himself with the Abreu and Montero contracts, but all of us were thinking Abreu was going to be crushing a lot of dingers to the Crawford boxes when he signed. It would be nice if Crane admitted he made a mistake and spent an extra $30m more than he planned to in 2025 to offset the dead money of those two contracts.
Mega contracts in baseball are never worth it. You'll get some good years and some bad years, but you'll be paying top dollar every year. By the end, it's just a money sink that really only NYY, NYM, and LAD seem to be able to afford.Â
Amen.
Crane was always going to have to raise payroll to accommodate the maturing roster along with make up for a near-decade of late draft picks and buyer deadlines, which all comes with winning.  So they were always likely going to have to run a top 10 payroll by now to remain a contender.  Then they got hit with the draft pick penalties for sign stealing, which back of the envelope was probably about a $100M hit.  Then they signed Montero and Abreu to dead-money deals and had McCullers die and Javier need major surgery, leaving $70M in dead money for 2025.  It’s up to Crane as to whether he wants to spend his way out of the hole he dug by his first GM getting caught and then the further hole he dug operating without a GM (and enduring some bad injury luck).  To do that he’d have to probably run a $275M payroll for the next 2-3 seasons to allow Brown to rebuild the farm.  It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, so likely the only way Houston remains a contender beyond 2025 is if Dana Brown is able to far outperform his resources via the farm system.
-
1
-
-
5 minutes ago, Muny_Tex said:
Am I correct that Correa is essentially 4 yrs / $134M at this point? Â
If so, I would way rather have that than 6+ years of Bregman overpaid and only one remaining year of Framber.
EDIT: He'd be a great 3B (has done it already for WBC), and it would probably prolong his prime / reduce injury risk
Yes, and Correa also has several vesting options that are very affordable.  His contract is not really a negative for any team with a little payroll flexibility.  I do think he has a NTC so that limits which teams he’d go to.  My guess is he will only go to a team that will play him at SS, which is why I think Houston would trade Pena if they got Correa, but all this is a pipe dream.
-
5 minutes ago, kevwun said:
Pena is cheap, they will keep him as long as they can.Â
My pipe dream is they move Pena to make room to get Correa back.
-
1
-
1
-
-
Astros everyday 2025 lineup likely to only return about half the players from 2024.  Bregman will sign with the Yankees, Tucker and at least one of Meyers/McCormick/Pena will be traded.  Singleton will be DFA or back in a bench role.  Now the other chips should fall in the next 48 hours. If Houston doesn’t make at least 2 very significant moves before end of day Friday it will appear very likely Dana Brown and the Astros were not proactive about the offseason and were caught off guard by the market and by Bregman signing elsewhere.
-
1
-
-
https://www.mlb.com/astros/news/first-full-2025-mlb-mock-draft?t=mlb-draft-coverage
ÂMLB.com’s first mock has Cunningham going 6th overall and Belyeu 14th.  I had no idea Belyeu was that highly rated. Â
-
Anecdotally the people I’ve seen who get on Ozempic and other drugs like it end up eating healthier because it eliminated cravings, which is the condition where most junk foods get eaten.  I do think there’s some big potential downsides to those drugs (mainly that they reduce people’s incentives to exercise), but I do think they could be a key part of addressing the obesity epidemic.
-
2
-
-
https://www.newsweek.com/birth-rate-population-timebomb-education-project-2025-1998690
“We need less education to avoid demographic collapse” is quite the platform.  Fuck me running.
-
4
-
-
1 hour ago, tx 3 putt said:
Â
might we have too much pitching ???
Â
My guy Dana Brown sure does love the word “ultimately”.
-
9 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:
Well then I guess we should just adopt the Republican platform. Oh they don’t have one?  I meant just lie to people and fear monger about immigrants and trans people and post birth abortions. Seriously, is your proposal to just support bullshit lies?  If not, where do you draw the line? Â
ÂI would rather go down fighting for what is right than kowtow to a bunch of fascist oligarchs who take advantage of dumbfucks that don’t understand how anything works. We should try and inform people of the truth in simple ways, I agree with that. But acquiescing to fascist lies is not the way to go. Winning be damned.Â
I understand where you’re coming from.  But if you won’t do what it takes to “take advantage of dumbfucks that don’t understand how anything works”, well, then you have already lost.
-
1
-
-
3 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:
What? Â No. This is childish and stupid.Â
Dismissing shit because it’s childish and stupid is how the Dems keep losing.
-
1
-
-
2 hours ago, TexasEd said:
I have not posted much since the election but I just I read through most of this and I think we're still missing the points, some are close but still not hitting the mark.Â
80% of the People don't care about policies, it's theatre. Who has the sound bites, how do they feel, and is there someone to blame. You reach these people with messaging and viral SM hits, saying the same thing or flooding the zone with everything at the same time and then making things feel better through policies that matter.
Economy and national security:
- Economy - This was baked before Harris was in the campaign. Biden fucked this up and thought the job was over on Jan 20, 2021. The message should have been this is Trump's inflation from the beginning. Blame it on poor handling of COVID. We knew it was coming but the Biden admin acted like everyone should know why it happened. There was no messaging and then all the stupid "I did this" Biden stickers were everywhere. No awareness. They missed out on messaging like making Child Tax credits permanent, paying for the infrastructure bill with corporate taxes and taxes on Billionaires - the ones that benefit the most should pay for the infrastructure.Â
- Border policy - Waited until the issue was lost to submit a bill to congress. Waited until 2024, the election year. Wow. See the Special rights bullet below for more. We're being dishonest if we say there is nothing Biden could have done in 2021, 22 or 23. He hung that issue around Harris' neck. It could have been a "controlled number of legal work visas to keep inflation down, we're doing background checks, and jailing/deporting criminals" message opportunity.
- Ukraine - Should have been hitting with the same 80s rhetoric about us vs the commies and freedom vs dictators and the here are our hand me downs we've outgrown. Most of us on Daily Texan board know this but all the average guy saw was 800 Million approved to send overseas. We won the cold war. Russia collapsed, why let them rebuild? Horrible PR
- Israel and Hamas - Wow, I got nothing.
Social Policies: I believe in people choosing their own way to be, live and identify the way they want. Most people like this (Except the religious zealots of all stripes) as long as the equality of others don't infringe on their rights or put them at a disadvantage. The perception of the majority of Americans is we've gone too far on accommodations into the special treatment zone and there is backlash against the gains on equality that groups have made. The policy needs to be equal rights not special treatment. When someone cuts you off in traffic, takes your parking spot or skips to the front of a line you get pissed. It's unfair, it's a biological and chemical reaction. Anytime you make things less fair you lose. Here are some examples:
-
The messaging of special rights for some is what people heard, not equal rights for all.Â
- Immigration: Special rights for undocumented immigrants when some people came here with visas and documentation. This is resentment from the legal group and you lose them. The natural reaction is I had to stand in line, why do those assholes get to cut?
- Trans athletes participating in gender assigned sports is perceived as special rights for a group to get an unfair advantage, not equality, just like saying some can take steroids but others can't. I have sympathy for trans people but you can't give them a biological and hormonal advantage over non-trans athletes
- This bled over into an overreaction on affirmative action and the DEI attacks. Everything became DEI and it got a bad name because it is perceived as a way to promote based on identity instead of merit. Sure organization benefit from diversity but diversity is not the end, diversity is a means to an end.
- Abortion - should have come to a decision on how long access should be available. Being vague on the topic hurt them. They went with the "Most people support access to abortion" and interpreted that as unfettered which opened them up to the full term abortion attack. Set a period of time, 16 weeks, 20 weeks, I don't know but I'm sure there is plenty of medical and public opinion data out there. Pick something reasonable and you shut down this attack. This was probably less impactful than some other issues but it took a chunk of voters out of the D column.
- Parental rights positions opening up the door to the moronic argument of my son came home from school a girl. You have to acknowledge parental rights. I don't care if it is birth control, hormone therapy or abortion. Those things are over the line for most parents to give up control over their children. I support access for minors with parental consent or consultation and that if the parent disagrees with what the child wants then it goes before a judge. We outlaw minors buying tobacco, alcohol, sex work and from other activities because they are not equipped to make those decisions until they are more developed. Why would we put life changing medical care in the category that they make a decision on their own. Create a support structure for the most vulnerable ones but start with parental rights as the first stop on the decision tree.
This is excellent and to me can be summarized as that Biden/Dems were both passive and stupid.  It’s too late to address the issue of Ukraine (should have been touted as akin to the German invasion of Poland) and the economy (should have been coined Trumpflation from the get).  But to translate into a way forward for all other topics:
1. Reverse the narrative on Border Security. Â Support the wall, support deportations of illegals.Â
Â2. Dismiss the narrative on trans issues.  Don’t bring up anything related to trans people, and when it comes up, immediately begin SHOUTING about wealth inequality and universal healthcare.
3. Define the narrative on abortion.  As you said, pick a reasonable period and define it and stand behind it.  And consistently loudly remind everyone that the other side’s period is zero weeks.
This board seems to be in total agreement (from both sides): ID politics is a loser.  The Dems’ winning issue (imho) is addressing wealth inequality.  They have to present that in an Entertaining way.  Character/integrity matters not.
-
2
-
1
-
1 hour ago, LCHorn said:
I have a suspicion that Crane will allow Tucker and Alvarez to walk with temporary fill-ins that effectively ends the championship competitiveness of the team during the Altuve/Alvarez/cheap starters window. Â The team will be stuck in mediocrity purgatory for several years until Altuve retires, Yordan departs, and then it can finally bottom out. Â
ÂUnder Luhnow, you had guys like Elias and Megdal that would get on interviews with the baseball analytics community and they’d talk about this kind of thing-maybe it’s a little like fighting the baseball version of entropy but it’s secondary challenge to winning a championship (now that we know we can build it, can we keep it going forever).  As chatty as Brown is, there’s no concept of a plan they seem to promote besides Crane’s stated aversion to long-term payroll obligations. Â
ÂAnd maybe all of that will prove correct or sensible in time.  Without the benefit of that, it looks like Crane has internalized best practices that Luhnow 2019 might have supported but don’t make sense in 2025.
You might be right, we’ll have to see.  At this point it’s clear that Houston cannot remain competitive just by engaging in the free agent market.  If the window is going to stay open after 2025, it will be because the front office was able to generate core talent via the farm system.  One heartening fact is that of the 7 players on Houston’s roster who project for 3+ fwar, 6 of them were non-pedigreed prospects.  Diaz and Alvarez were acquired via trade in exchange for middling players.  Altuve and Valdez were non-bonus international signees.  Brown and Pena were Day 2 draft picks.  Tucker was the only player  who came into the system with a top prospect profile.  So if Houston can replicate those kinds of moves over the next 18 months, they’ll be just fine; keep an eye on Ronel Blanco and Zach Dezenzo this season.
Dana Brown is an awful interview.  He speaks in non-sequiters and seems to lack confidence.  That isn’t a guarantee he’s an incompetent GM; his background is in scouting, and if he does that job extremely well, he’ll be a great GM regardless of how cringey his interviews are.  The early returns on his drafts are good.
-
2
-
-
1 hour ago, Macklemore said:
Crane is not serious about winning if he lets Bergman walk. This team is done without him. It’s telling that Crane can’t sign a single American born player (other than Hader) to a long term deal and has only done so with guys from Venezuela and Costa Rica. He’s not willing to pay market rates and is not willing to have a payroll commensurate with being in one of the biggest media markets in this country.
Crane has maintained top 5 payrolls for several years. Â He spends money, just not on long term deals.
-
2
-
-
2 hours ago, tx 3 putt said:
Â
Dezenzo should eventually be a plus in LF with his speed and arm. Â I think he could be a sleeper ROY candidate this year.
-
It’s really hard to speculate on Houston’s moves with so much uncertainty on free agent and trade prices as well as uncertainty in Crane’s willingness to raise payroll.  I don’t want Crane giving Bregman $230M if he’s not going to continue to raise the roof each year.  Same, I don’t want him giving another 1B in his mid 30s a big contract.  If Crane’s not gonna pony up the money to make up for his shitty free agent signings (and make up for the fallout of losing all those draft picks for the sign stealing penalty) then Houston is best served plugging holes with upside plays.  Polanco is probably a decent risk at 3B.  If Bellinger wouldn’t be an attitude problem and not cost prospects (with Cubs eating some of the 2026 risk) he is a very very good fit for the roster.  I actually think Alex Verdugo could be a good fit for extending Houston’s lineup.  Depending on the trade market, guys like Burger, Baty, Lowe, and others could be good values.
Bottom line is that I think Houston could still field one of the 3 best teams in the AL even if they completely opt out of the top tiers of the free agent market.
-
1
-
24/25 Astros Offseason thread
in Baseball
Posted
Astros don’t seem to recognize the difference between bringing in a guy who is 32 and late in his prime (like McCann and Brantley) vs bringing in a guy 34+ who has already shown clear signs of decline (like Beltran and Abreu).