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2021 Houston Astros Thread


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27 minutes ago, Gourmand said:

The guys coming back off the 60 day IL (James, Pruitt, and possibly Baez) will create some tough 40 man roster decisions for Click and the guys in charge of player development.

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I think juggling the 40 man is definitely the biggest challenge, especially with respect to trades.  It would be nice if they could ship out a couple of members of the 40 man and one or two other players in exchange for Bleier and one of Detwiler and Garcia from the Marlins.  

The Astros just have so many guys on the 40 man that are hurt or are of questionable value moving forward.  Are guys like Abreu, Smith, James, Pruitt, and Stanek really going to help this team win games this season?  I still like Abreu's long-term outlook but he may not be ready yet.  James apparently has totally overhauled his mechanics this year so who knows what he'll do. Smith is old and the stuff doesn't seem there anymore but they owe him money and I doubt someone like James Click wants to eat it and release him.  Pruitt - who the fuck knows?  Stanek looks great one night and an abomination the next and overall has been pretty shitty.  Hartman, Garza, and Jones seem like filler that you can simply release and make it through waivers if need be.

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6 minutes ago, Gourmand said:

Mitch Einertson? He set the Appy rookie league hr record as an 18 yo back in 2004 with 24

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not the guy i was thinking of but we're digging up names that never even came close to sticking the mlb roster 

the guy im thinking about just tore it up and then fizzled out. lot  of hrs 

Edited by tx 3 putt
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24 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

who was that OF that tore up the minors awhile back, home run hitting machine ?

Are you thinking about the TTO high school kid with all the swing and miss? I think he was from Georgia maybe? Can't remember his name. Got it - Telvin Nash? 

*After looking at it, he didn't walk nearly as much as I thought of the top of my head.

Edited by IDIOTsavant
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15 minutes ago, Starfleet Command said:

Are guys like Abreu, Smith, James, Pruitt, and Stanek really going to help this team win games this season? 

I think so, yes.

 

11 minutes ago, tx 3 putt said:

id let james and abreu go. pruitt and emmanul are on thin ice 

Emanuel is on the 60 day IL so he's safe for the time being and not a factor in the 40-man decision. No way am I giving up on James or Abreu considering their power arms and stuff, I'd rather trust the Astros developmental gurus and Strom to keep working with them. Pruitt hasn't even pitched in an Astros uniform and is finally throwing rehab assignments, why would we even think about getting rid of him now?

The easiest decision I think would be to DFA Tyler Ivey because it sounds like he suffered a significant injury and his career could be in jeopardy. They could also either DFA Jairo Solis or transfer him to the 60 day IL but that would start his service time clock and that's not something they may want to do with a guy with his injury history. 

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People talk about hard decisions on the 40 man, but there really isn't.  Jones, Robles and a couple other hot garbage before you get to them.  It's not a big deal if you lose sub replacement JAG's, just b/c you know their name and they are your sub replacement JAGS.  Truly.  Not a big deal.  Almost zero upside in half a dozen of those names. 

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16 minutes ago, Wulaw Horn said:

Jones, Robles and a couple other hot garbage before you get to them.  It's not a big deal if you lose sub replacement JAG's, just b/c you know their name and they are your sub replacement JAGS.  Truly.  Not a big deal.  Almost zero upside in half a dozen of those names. 

this is just silly man. you're smarter than this. there are only four OF on the 40 and they're all on the active roster. Robel Garcia can play multiple defensive positions, has some pop in his bat, and is important injury insurance behind Aledmys Diaz. Taylor Jones can likewise play first base and maybe some OF if the Astros are desperate, and he too has hit skill. You don't just thoughtlessly jettison guys like that off the 40-man roster because they're not 1+ WAR players in a very limited sample size.

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6 minutes ago, Gourmand said:

this is just silly man. you're smarter than this. there are only four OF on the 40 and they're all on the active roster. Robel Garcia can play multiple defensive positions, has some pop in his bat, and is important injury insurance behind Aledmys Diaz. Taylor Jones can likewise play first base and maybe some OF if the Astros are desperate, and he too has hit skill. You don't just thoughtlessly jettison guys like that off the 40-man roster because they're not 1+ WAR players in a very limited sample size.

I said there are multiple JAG’s that can leave before you even get to those guys. Garcia has been bounced from 4 different orgs in 12 months. I know you strangely like him, but that’s the definition of a JAG. Jones would be a guy that probably gets picked up and probably amounts to nothing. He’s not a winning player. He’s a stop gap and that’s it- if it came down to it we’d get another stop gap guy to replace him. 
Literally the entire concept of WAR is you can get the guy off the street for nothing that you are comparing him too. This is pretty much definitional. 

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1 hour ago, Wulaw Horn said:

Garcia has been bounced from 4 different orgs in 12 months.

The flip side of that coin is that he's been claimed off waivers by four different teams so there's people in baseball who think he's worth a roster spot, including the Houston Astros. 

Keep in mind that we're talking about the 40-man and not necessarily the active roster. I don't mean to overstate the case for Robel Garcia so that you think I'm obsessed with him, I'm just very much in favor of being patient with the #26-#30 roster guys like Taylor Jones and Robel Garcia while we await the return of Bregman, Tucker, Aledmys, Yordan, etc.

Robel Garcia has had an interesting path to where he is now. He's been playing baseball since forever, got signed in 2010 as a 17-year-old by Cleveland and eventually found himself out of minor league ball by 2014 and eventually in Italy playing professionally. Some Cubs scout saw him in a game in 2018 in the AFL vs Team Italy against a highly regarded Reds pitching prospect, he made some good defensive plays and hit the ball hard enough that the scout signed him to a minor league contract even though he hadn't played ball in the minors in six years. 

in 2019 the Cubs sent him to AA and he had an .981 OPS over 22 games with 6 HR. They called him up to AAA Iowa and he had a .946 OPS in 76 games with 21 HR. 

Chicago called him up to the active roster later that season and he had a .775 OPS over 31 games with 5 HRs. 

Here's what Chicago said about him:

 

“I really didn’t think too much of it,” Zappin said. “I just liked that this kid swung the bat real well and made a nice defensive play. I thought I’d tell our guys, but I didn’t know if they’d do anything with it. I reached out and got an email back saying they’d do some work on him. Another one of our scouts in Arizona went out to go watch him two days after I’d seen him. I didn’t hear anything for a few days and then I got an email saying that we were going to make a run at the kid and try to sign him. It was kind of a surprise to me.”

“We saw an athletic guy running around, playing third, we had him playing the outfield a bit,” said Jason McLeod, the Cubs’ vice president of player development and amateur scouting. “With his age, there was no guarantee he’d make a team out of spring training. But he played well enough and he showed some pop that we wanted to send him to Double-A mainly because of his age.”

“It’s real pop,” McLeod said. “The exit velocity is there. There’s been some swing and miss too, but I think he’s got 17 home runs and a ton of base hits. It’s been pretty fun to watch.”

“He’s a really intriguing player,” Cubs president Theo Epstein said. “It is an incredible story. He hits the ball really, really hard form both sides of the plate. Gets it in the air a lot, especially left-handed, and he can get around on anybody’s fastball. Those are really good ingredients. It’ll be interesting to see how he does as the league adjusts to him a little bit and challenges him with heavier dose of breaking stuff. He’s got a chance to continue to make adjustments and continue to prove himself. He’s got some versatility to his game, certainly got some power to his game. It’s an intriguing fit for the club down the road.”

 

The thing that stands out the most to me as a negative with his limited at bats with the Astros is his barrel rate. He's not barreling the ball as well as he did with the Cubs but that's probably because pitchers have a book on him now. 

Regardless, we're talking about guys who aren't replacing any of our regular everyday players. These are 40 man spots and I'd rather have the Taylor Joneses and Robels available to step up in the event of another injury than risk losing them to waivers AND starting the service clock on another prospect not already on the 40-man roster. 

 

's 

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It’s going to be a tough game. Bassit is really pitching well. If you take away his 1st two starts of the year, he’s 9-0 in 15 starts with a 2.74 ERA. On the flip side , the one time we faced him this year was opening day and chased him after 5 1/3. 

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2 hours ago, Wulaw Horn said:

I said there are multiple JAG’s that can leave before you even get to those guys. Garcia has been bounced from 4 different orgs in 12 months. I know you strangely like him, but that’s the definition of a JAG. Jones would be a guy that probably gets picked up and probably amounts to nothing. He’s not a winning player. He’s a stop gap and that’s it- if it came down to it we’d get another stop gap guy to replace him. 
Literally the entire concept of WAR is you can get the guy off the street for nothing that you are comparing him too. This is pretty much definitional. 

He stinks but he's the only other guy on the 40 man they trust to play SS who's not hurt so he's not going anywhere.  After him you have De Goti who's probably even worse.

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6 minutes ago, Starfleet Command said:

He stinks but he's the only other guy on the 40 man they trust to play SS who's not hurt so he's not going anywhere.  After him you have De Goti who's probably even worse.

Sure. I get it. I'm not saying to get rid of him for the hell of it- he'd be about 5th or 6th on my list of guys to boot on the 40, but I wouldn't feel like any of them were difficult cuts.


Before him we had Jack Mayfield who was the guy we trusted to be on the 40 man roster at SS. Where is he now?  Out of baseball? Starting for someone else? I have no idea.  My point is fungible is fungible.

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1 minute ago, Wulaw Horn said:

Before him we had Jack Mayfield who was the guy we trusted to be on the 40 man roster at SS. Where is he now?  Out of baseball? Starting for someone else? I have no idea.  My point is fungible is fungible.

funny that you say that because iirc Robel Garcia was DFAd by the Mets in order to claim Jack Mayfield. He's now in the Angels system. 

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12 minutes ago, Wulaw Horn said:

 I'm not saying to get rid of him for the hell of it- he'd be about 5th or 6th on my list of guys to boot on the 40,

Ah i gotcha, was reading it as Robel Garcia and Jones as your first cuts off the 40 man. That makes sense.

Edited by Gourmand
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10 minutes ago, Gourmand said:

Ah i gotcha, was reading it as Robel Garcia and Jones as your first cuts off the 40 man. That makes sense.

Yes. What I’m saying is that any cut through those guys would t cause me any concern or be a “tough decision” not that they are on the top of the cut list. 

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Kimbrel is under club control through 2022. He would be insanely expensive in a trade. 
Yeah I don't know who's feeding Olney that but it's gotta be complete horseshit because they aren't looking to add 16mm to next year's payroll and give up prospects as well. More importantly though is the luxury tax this year and its effect on next year's compensatory draft picks in the event we make qualifying offers and lose any of Greinke, Correa, and Verlander. The second rd compensatory pick becomes a fourth rd pick instead if the Astros go over the luxury threshold again.




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11 minutes ago, Gourmand said:

More importantly though is the luxury tax this year and its effect on next year's compensatory draft picks in the event we make qualifying offers and lose any of Greinke, Correa, and Verlander.

While I 100% agree with your post, I’d like to point out that Greinke is not eligible for a Q.O. That can only happen once and Greinke got one from the Dodgers in 2015. 

Edited by TonyTexas
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8 minutes ago, TonyTexas said:

While I 100% agree with your post, I’d like to point out that Greinke is not eligible for a Q.O. That can only happen once and Greinke got one from the Dodgers in 2015. 

cool, didn't know that. verlander?

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