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. The team will be stuck in mediocrity purgatory for several years until Altuve retires, Yordan departs, and then it can finally bottom out.
Under 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.
And 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.