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2021 Houston Astros Thread


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11 minutes ago, elfenix said:

Take some pride in your mowing, field crew

ac9c14c1d38deb67c5a01cff93bf0c14.jpg
 

Their head groundskeeper is considered the best on the business. He’s had the job since 1983, and been employed by the White Sox since 1967. He took over from his dad, who had the job from 1940-1983. His grandfather and uncle also worked as groundskeepers. 

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16 minutes ago, elfenix said:

Someone got the rule on that?

Base runners can not change order.  Dude in rundown crossed over third base, and switched  position with the runner behind him.  So the order swap caused dude on third to be out (with tag) and the original baserunner who owned third was tagged out because he was off the bag.  Thats what I got.

 

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What's the normal recovery time for a quad strain? Bregs sure as shit is taking his sweet time. 

I think Click needs to add another player to give the club a jolt, but I haven't decided if we need another bat or pitching. Tough to tell with some many guys coming back from injury and the hard deadline rapidly approaching on July 30th. 

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9 minutes ago, Chuckie Finster said:

 

 


“Showing interest in a trade” is a pretty meaningless statement, but anything to change the topic from today’s game.

 

As long as it doesn't cost us more than 1 of Garica, Framber, or Javier. But the Astros really need to look at another bat as well. Preferably one that can play CF.

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5 minutes ago, HtownHorn said:

As long as it doesn't cost us more than 1 of Garica, Framber, or Javier. But the Astros really need to look at another bat as well. Preferably one that can play CF.

Any of those guys is too much to give up for 2 months of Scherzer. And if you haven’t noticed, Straw has been very good for the last 2/3 of the season. 

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15 minutes ago, TonyTexas said:

Any of those guys is too much to give up for 2 months of Scherzer. And if you haven’t noticed, Straw has been very good for the last 2/3 of the season. 

2/3 is a stretch. He had a very hot June with a .380 BAbip.  The rest of the season, he has been shit to not quite shit.

June - 26 games, .330/.413/.432/.845, .380

All other months - 62 games, .237/.316/.290/.606, .298 BAbip

Currently riding a 1-16 streak, he's a guy that does well the entire lineup is hitting, but is a black hole when they are not. He's also a guy with no track record of performance, so he will most likely turn into his 62 game self (which also lines up with his career) as opposed to his June self. Even if you split the difference, you have a well below average regular. The Astros should be looking for upgrades.

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2 hours ago, HtownHorn said:

2/3 is a stretch. He had a very hot June with a .380 BAbip.  The rest of the season, he has been shit to not quite shit.

June - 26 games, .330/.413/.432/.845, .380

All other months - 62 games, .237/.316/.290/.606, .298 BAbip

Currently riding a 1-16 streak, he's a guy that does well the entire lineup is hitting, but is a black hole when they are not. He's also a guy with no track record of performance, so he will most likely turn into his 62 game self (which also lines up with his career) as opposed to his June self. Even if you split the difference, you have a well below average regular. The Astros should be looking for upgrades.

I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but there is a decent chance the org is looking at him as a 2/2.5-win CF that only makes about $500k and, thus, as a pretty good value. 

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7 minutes ago, Hank Chinaski said:

I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but there is a decent chance the org is looking at him as a 2/2.5-win CF that only makes about $500k and, thus, as a pretty good value. 

And that means nothing when he goes 1-21 in the playoffs. The Astros need to be thinking about October and not July.

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11 minutes ago, WBT said:

But I'd rather have Bregman than Rodon.  And a lot of the media was against Luhnow almost from day 1 but "screwing aiken" was one of many events that ratcheted it up.

True, I remembered that compensation pick after that post. Bregman easily made up for the Aiken flub.

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14 minutes ago, Gourmand said:

This makes me think Leon is a primary name involved in  trade discussions

It would have to be a pretty big trade to give away what I would say is our #1 prospect. MLB.com has Whitley higher but idk why. 

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In Double-A with the Corpus Christi Hooks, Leon has played only 58 innings in center field, as his large chunk of playing time has come at shortstop (301 innings). With a high-rated arm, the right-hander could work on consistency when making plays toward first base. Seven errors have been committed by Leon at shortstop giving him a .934 fielding percentage.

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27 minutes ago, Gourmand said:

Korey Lee is imo the Astros #1 prospect at this point

That's a fair argument. I just think Leon has more untapped potential to exceed what I think Lee could be. On the other side of that argument is that he could never reach it. 

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Spoiler

 

The perseverance of Luis Garcia: How Melvin Mora and a tireless scout helped the Astros starter get his chance

Jake Kaplan 3h agocomment-icon.png 2 save-icon.png

Before his 2021 breakout in the Houston Astros rotation, before he skipped both Double A and Triple A and started Game 5 of the 2020 ALCS, before he generated even minimal prospect buzz as a Single-A strikeout machine in 2019, Luis Garcia couldn’t get signed.

In 2017, the right-handed pitcher from Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela, was 20, a whopping four years older than the age at which players from his country are first eligible to sign. His velocity was on the upswing, but try telling that to scouts on the lookout for the next hard-throwing 14-year-old for a signing period two years in the future. An unsigned 18-year-old pitcher is considered old for the international market; Garcia was ancient.

It wasn’t as if Garcia was late to pick up the sport. He said he began playing baseball when he was 4 years old. As a kid, he played mostly third base and first base and even some catcher. He always pitched some, too, but it wasn’t until he was about 14 that he began to focus exclusively on pitching. At 16, that prime age for a professional contract and when the most touted Latin American prospects sign, he threw only 86-87 mph.

“Barely,” he said with a laugh on a recent day at Minute Maid Park.

Getting an opportunity to play professionally was always Garcia’s goal. But once a pitcher gets passed over as a 16-year-old, his odds drop dramatically. Undeterred, Garcia kept practicing and training. Little by little, he improved. By 18, his fastball sometimes hit 89-90 mph. In the next year or so, his velocity crept up to 91 and sometimes 92. At 20, he could dial it up to 93 and 94 on his good days.

Never, he said, did he consider giving up. What kept him going?

“Maybe I didn’t want to study,” he joked. “I’m not sure. I just kept practicing.”

Now a starting pitcher on the rise for one of the best teams in baseball, Garcia’s joyful disposition, at 24, might help explain how he persevered. Amid the daily grind, he always seems happy. For the longest time, it appeared as if he wouldn’t get his chance. But he just kept on pitching.

Eventually, Garcia’s trainer got him in front of a few scouts in his hometown, a port city of about 400,000 that acts as a gateway to southern Venezuela. The Red Sox, Dodgers and Nationals are the teams for which Garcia recalled throwing. None of the tryouts culminated in a contract.

So at 20, an age by which others would have given up, Garcia packed his bags and left Ciudad Bolívar for the first time. His destination was about a 12-hour drive to the northwest in Valencia, the third-largest city in Venezuela by population, where he sought greater exposure to major-league teams.

In the subsequent two months, Garcia’s life would change. How the late-blooming pitcher eventually got his opportunity and signed with Houston involves a former Baltimore Orioles star with a connection to the Astros’ past, a relentless and resourceful young scout and, above all, the resilience of a baseball-loving kid who just wanted to pitch.


Melvin Mora’s story is another of perseverance. He was with two organizations, the Astros and the Mets, before he made his name with the Orioles and blossomed into a two-time All-Star in his early 30s. By his retirement at 39 after the 2011 season, he had spent two decades as a professional baseball player.

In retirement, Mora has remained involved in the sport through his baseball academy in his native Valencia, Venezuela. At 49, the former Silver Slugger Award-winning third baseman will even still get into the batter’s box against many of his pitchers. But more importantly, he will get his players in front of scouts, and he’s more than willing to take them on even if others consider them to be too old. The age bias in the international market isn’t exactly logical, especially when it’s contrasted with the MLB Draft, from which teams routinely sign 21- and 22-year-olds. At 16, players aren’t yet even physically mature.

“I know that it’s difficult sometimes for Latin American pitchers to get signed at the age of 17, 18, 19,” Mora said. “But in my opinion, if you have the command, if you have everything, you need to be put in a scenario so an international scout can see you and they can give you the opportunity.”

In early 2017, Mora received a video from a former winter ball teammate of his named Carlos Mendoza, an ex-outfielder from Ciudad Bolívar who reached the majors with the Mets in 1997 and the Rockies in 2000. It showcased three brothers from a local family with whom Mendoza was friends. The oldest brother was already 20, but Mora liked his arm and delivery. Mora told Mendoza he would take him.

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Melvin Mora carved out a great career with the Orioles after originally signing with the Astros and also playing for the Mets. (Greg Fiume / Getty Images)

Garcia spent about two months at Mora’s academy in Valencia. In March, there was a showcase in the bullpen area at Estadio José Bernardo Pérez, the home to Magallanes, the oldest team in Venezuela. About 10 pitchers threw, and roughly seven teams were represented by an area scout, scouting supervisor or cross-checker.

Showcase day started off inauspiciously for Garcia. On the way from the academy’s residence to the stadium, he looked down in front of his seat on the bus to realize his glove and cleats were gone. Somebody had stolen them.

But once he was on the mound, Garcia came out firing with a fastball at 94 mph, borrowed equipment be damned. In his bullpen session, he sat 92-94 mph with his fastball and flashed both a curveball and a changeup.

“I felt great that day,” Garcia said. “It was like ‘the day.'”


As a young Astros area scout assigned to central Venezuela, David Brito tried his best to be on top of all of the players in Valencia and its surrounding towns. So much so that he paid his younger brother, Victor, to go see players that he couldn’t and to film videos of the ones he liked. Brito trusted his brother’s eye. They grew up together on baseball fields in Venezuela, where their father, Enrique, has built a decades-long career as an accomplished scout and coach.

On that March 2017 day Garcia threw in Valencia, Brito was at the stadium because of a tip from Victor. And it wasn’t long before Brito recognized what his brother had seen. Brito recalls needing to see only five pitches out of the roughly 20-pitch bullpen session before he texted his boss.

“My gut feeling was this guy is ready (to be signed),” Brito said.

Brito filmed the bullpen session on his phone through the fence and sent it over to then-Astros international cross-checker Tom Shafer, who was at his home in the Chicago area. By 2017, these videos from scouts were pivotal to the team’s ability to scout in Venezuela. The political and economic turmoil in the country had made it unsafe for scouting directors and cross-checkers to travel to Venezuela to see players.

“Prior to that we had flown there and seen players, but the situation got really dangerous and we weren’t allowed to go anymore,” Shafer said. “Our only real lifeline was video. Once David or any of the other scouts in Venezuela would identify a player and send us a video, that was all we really had to go off of, and then just kind of like the vibe and the intonation that you get in a scout’s voice when he was really excited. And I could tell David was very excited about this kid, as was I once I saw the video.”

Then 28, Brito was still relatively new to scouting at the time. A former pitcher from the Valencia area who played a few years of rookie ball in the St. Louis Cardinals system, he joined the Astros as a scout ahead of the 2015 season. Before they assigned him to scout his home area, the Astros first had Brito cover the eastern part of the Dominican Republic. He was in his first month on the job when he stumbled upon the pitcher who would become his first signee, a passed-over 21-year-old left-hander with an impressive curveball named Framber Valdez.

“David’s like a maniacal worker,” said Shafer, who left the Astros two months after their August 2017 scout purge and joined the Seattle Mariners as an international cross-checker. Brito followed him shortly thereafter to be the Venezuela scouting supervisor. While Shafer left the Mariners after the 2018 season, Brito is now an international cross-checker for them. “He’s one of the hardest-working guys I was ever around, and he’s super passionate about what he does.”

The signing of Valdez for only $10,000 epitomized a market inefficiency the Astros exploited from about 2014 to 2017 under then-international scouting director Oz Ocampo: overlooked, older pitchers in the Dominican Republic and Venezuela whom they could sign for cheap to fill out their second Dominican Summer League roster. Most wouldn’t pan out. Many wouldn’t even make it out of rookie ball. But if even a few developed into prospects through the organization’s advanced minor-league pitcher development infrastructure, it would create a ton of value for the team.

When the Astros identified a player they liked who was ready to sign, the next step in the process was to arrange for them to participate in a tryout at their complex in the Dominican Republic, where they would get more eyes on him and put him in front of a TrackMan unit. After Garcia’s bullpen session in Valencia, Brito spoke to him briefly and called Mora. Plans for Garcia’s trip to the Dominican came together quickly. Brito, with a big assist from his brother, was in the right place at the right time.


For Mora, the Astros calling him with interest in Garcia was a full-circle moment. Though he is known for his time with the Orioles, Mora will always maintain a connection to the Astros because of Andres Reiner.

Reiner, who died in 2016, was a pioneer in the international scouting world. Because of him, the Astros in 1989 became the first team to establish a baseball academy in Venezuela. Mora was part of a famous wave of talent Reiner signed to the team in the 1990s, a group that included Johan Santana, Bobby Abreu, Carlos Guillén, Freddy García and Richard Hidalgo.

“Andres Reiner didn’t only teach us how to play baseball, how to develop, how to increase our performance. He taught us how to see the players,” Mora said. “That’s why we continue to do development. Bobby Abreu has an academy. Carlos Guillén has an academy. I have an academy and a couple other of those guys (from that era) have academies. That’s why we continue to give the opportunity to those kids. A lot of people, they don’t know what the big leagues are about. So we try to teach those guys.”

Maybe a week after the showcase in Valencia, Mora flew to the Dominican to attend Garcia’s tryout with the Astros, where Garcia pitched in a simulated game among other amateur players attempting to get signed. Garcia’s showing, in front of Shafer, Astros scouting supervisor Roman Ocumarez and complex pitching coach Rick Aponte, checked all of the boxes. Garcia threw strikes in the low 90s, showed a quick arm and had a feel for his secondary pitches. The TrackMan data they collected passed the test, too.

“The video had told me a lot, but you can get fooled on video a lot of times,” Shafer said. “I wanted to see if his arm was as quick in person as what I saw on the video. Because I remember when David sent me that video, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a quick arm’ and David’s saying, ‘I’ve seen this guy up to 95 miles an hour.’ So my thought process is, ‘Well, that guy doesn’t need to show much more — we totally trust David — (for us to know) that we can throw him in the (Dominican Summer League) right now at 20 and he can compete.”

After the tryout, Shafer and Mora struck a deal for a $20,000 signing bonus. The Astros waited until the start of the 2017-18 international signing period on July 2 to make Garcia’s signing official so that they could save $20,000 in overage taxes they would’ve paid for adding another player during the 2016-17 period, in which they blew through their bonus pool. Garcia made his pro debut in the Dominican Summer League later that July.

“When we got to July, I saw Melvin and he told me, ‘Man, you should see Luis,'” Shafer said. “And like a lot of agents say this. Like, ‘Boy, you guys got a steal,’ you know? And I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ He goes, ‘I’m serious.’ I think it’s because it’s Melvin Mora, the ex-big leaguer, it meant a lot more. He’s like, ‘Wait until you see this guy. He’s pitching at 95.’ … Right when he got going with the Astros, he was kind of like the buzz of the DR.”

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Luis Garcia on his signing day, July 2, 2017, in Venezuela. Area scout David Brito is standing directly to the right of him. (Courtesy of the Houston Astros)

After giving Garcia the exposure he needed to sign with the Astros, Mora took on one of the pitcher’s younger brothers, Heribert, and helped him sign at 18 with the Kansas City Royals for $35,000 in March 2018. Heribert, a 21-year-old righty with a striking resemblance to his older brother, is in rookie ball at the Royals’ spring training complex in Arizona.

Mora downplays his role in Garcia’s ascent. Garcia went through his academy so quickly that Mora didn’t even meet him in person for the first time until the tryout at the Astros’ complex in the Dominican. But if Mora didn’t invite him to Valencia, Garcia might’ve never gotten his chance.

“He did everything he needed to do so he can make it to the big leagues,” Mora said. “I only put him in the right place and the right position, and he did it all.”

As he would continue to do with the Astros after his September 2020 debut, Garcia rose quickly through Houston’s minor-league system after signing. He was stateside by 2018 and spent much of that first full professional year in Low A. He developed a slider and the following year he implemented the dance-step-like windup that he features now. By the end of his time in High A in 2019, his fastball velocity sat comfortably in the mid-90s, where it is today, and even touched the upper 90s. When he struggled to command his slider at the alternate training site last summer, the Astros suggested he try a cutter. He tinkered with his cutter grip earlier this season and the pitch took off.

Now Garcia has three legitimate breaking balls in a five-pitch arsenal, two more than when he trained all those years with his two younger brothers on the fields of Ciudad Bolívar. He’s been a revelation this season not only because of his cumulative statistics — he has a 3.06 ERA in his first 85 1/3 innings — but also because of his consistency. Considering his trajectory, it’s impossible not to wonder how many other potential late-blooming pitchers from Venezuela or other Latin American countries never got signed because of unremarkable velocity at 16.

“I’m so blessed that I got the opportunity,” Garcia said.

His path includes so many sliding doors moments. What if he didn’t have a family friend who once played winter ball with Mora? What if Brito’s brother hadn’t stumbled upon Garcia at a field in the Valencia area and tipped him off? If the Astros didn’t have a second Dominican Summer League team back then (they dropped back down to fielding only one DSL team in 2018) and signed half as many Latin American arms as they did, would they have even considered a pitcher of his profile?

But even more so than the advocates who helped him along the way, Garcia’s unlikely rise is about his resilience. The odds were stacked against him, and nobody could’ve blamed him if he gave up on his baseball dream during one of those years he toiled as an unsigned, older pitcher. Instead, Garcia kept pitching until the right people noticed. And for the Astros, he’s arrived right on time.

An article from The Athletic on Luis Garcia's signing and development for those interested.

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